Housekeeping and Two Great Portraits

Rembrandt van Rijn, Herman Doomer, 1640, Oil on Wood, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Thomas Lawrence and Workshop, John Julius Angerstein, circa 1816, Oil on Canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

I just want to alert my faithful readers (that would be me and maybe a relative or two) that I have done some much needed housekeeping on this blog.  I had noticed that on other blogs about painting the images were larger and looked so much better.  So after following a couple of exasperating false leads, I learned that Google had the answers for me all along in its “Customize” feature for Blogger templates.  I made the sidebar width narrower so I could use extra-large images.  Then I got rid of that annoying black border that was appearing around my images.  Of course I should have been more attentive to such details in the first place, but I was impatient to finally get this self-indulgent blog of mine on the road.   Caption spacing still needs work.

But I hate to waste a post on such mundane matters, so I’ll tell you about  two of my favorite portraits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art:  Rembrandt’s portrait of Herman Doomer, and Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of John Julius Angerstein.

For 15 years I was a part-time “Information Specialist” at the museum’s Information Desk in the Great Hall.  That means I told visitors where the closest bathrooms were located and how they could get to the Roof Garden when it was open during the warmer months.  I worked Friday and Saturday evenings, so sometimes I had to tell important visitors how to get to the Trustee’s Dining Room for a celebratory dinner.  And the string quartet then on the Balcony Bar usually played what I called my favorite song, Jerome Kern’s “Look for the Silver Lining.”  I may be the least likely advocate ever for the tender, hopeful message of that wonderful old song.  Sometimes our evenings were enlivened when a kid on a school trip from Kentucky got lost in the building and was left behind when the bus took off, or someone had his wallet snatched and had absolutely no money to get back home.  On the honor system, Marty, our kind-hearted supervisor, usually came through with a couple of bucks for the subway.  It was mostly a lot of fun – the best part-time job I ever had.  And I had plenty of opportunities to view the two portraits.

I cannot tell you how many times I have stood in awe in front of Herman Doomer, studying the incredible mastery and mystery of the technique that had brought him to life right before my eyes.  I used to get so annoyed to see visitors rushing past Herman to look at Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer and one of his self-portraits in the same gallery.  Both those paintings are prime examples of his later exuberant, more painterly style favored by the art historians and critics. The works are justifiably famous.  In 1961, the Met paid $2.3 million to acquire “Aristotle,” at the time a record price for a painting.

I’m personally more attracted to his earlier portraits, which are so carefully crafted and solidly painted – you feel the actual weight of the skull -- that they defy attempts by many artists to paint portraits in a similar manner.  His technique is unfathomable.  His sensitivity to the expressive nuances of the human face was incredible.  The copyists at the Museum often tackle Herman Doomer because it’s such a perfect portrait to study.  But copying this Rembrandt to get a fair resemblance with your own method of paint handling misses the ineffable magic of the original.  Look a little closer at my good friend Herman Doomer, an ebony worker and maker of fine cabinets, whose son Lambert was Rembrandt’s pupil.  Rembrandt has captured Herman alive and breathing, his lips slightly parted, the barest hint of a smile activating the facial muscles, as if he is ready to respond with good humor to a comment the great Dutchman made while he was painting him.  The incredibly realistic modeling of the pleasant, crinkly age lines around the eyes, the capturing of all the subtle movement around the cheek and jawbone, and everything about this portrait defies all rationale understanding. There are no flaws.  None.  How did he do it?  It may be the most lifelike portrait ever painted.

But let me tell you that most of the great paintings of the past were not created with the goal of producing a flawless surface with no brush strokes in evidence, something many of today’s painters think is essential.   Drawing corrections and changes in concept had to be incorporated in pursuit of the visual truth.  The alterations were usually not “archival,” a contemporary concern that is contributing to the decline of expressiveness in the fine art of representational painting.  It has been said that there isn’t any painting in a museum that has not been restored at some point in its history, for better or worse.  The job for representational painters was to get the painting to look like the real thing, using any means at one’s disposal.  Damn the consequences, full speed ahead. 

Because the surface of most oil paintings is not perfectly even and because oil paint is a highly refractive medium, proper gallery or home lighting is crucial to our fullest enjoyment of them.  One afternoon I sauntered over to European Paintings to say hello to Herman.  But much to my surprise, I found he was looking terrible.  The darkness under the brim of his hat was picking up reflections from the ceiling spotlight and showed some crazing of that thickly painted passage.  This most assuredly did not go unnoticed by the curators and, to my great relief, the angle of lighting was adjusted properly the next time I visited him and he was again the perfect picture of health.

Rembrandt and Lawrence understood very well that oil paintings created indoors look best when viewed from the painter’s vantage point and when light strikes them at the proper angle.  Viewing a painting from the side is only fun for painters who like to see evidence of the paint handling as revealed on the reflective surface.  Don’t quote my quote, but I vaguely remember reading that Rembrandt told a patron interested in picky details not to look too closely at his paintings because “oil paint can be injurious to your health.”   And Sir Thomas used to visit the home of a client to determine the best place to hang his portrait.

Lawrence’s painting of John Julius Angerstein, a prominent financier and a founder of Lloyd's of London, is another masterful portrait, the finest one in the Museum representing the English school of portraiture.  I guess I should mention here the famous portrait from the Spanish school by Velazquez of his assistant Juan de Pareja.  But that painting has gone through several conservation facelifts since coming to the Museum in 1971 at a purchase price of over $5.5 million, at the time a record price for paintings sold at auction.  At this point, who knows what it looked like originally?

As was noted by someone once, by the by, it was Anthony Van Dyck, the brilliant Flemish painter, who taught the English painters how to paint portraits.  The Museum’s portrait of Angerstein is one of several autograph replicas of a portrait painted in 1816 and the Museum estimates its version was painted a few years later.  That doesn’t dim the luster of the execution.  It’s another living, breathing masterpiece of the type known as “a speaking likeness.”  The forthright gaze and the modeling of the forehead by the subtle blending of the radiating central light is fabulous paint handling.  Lawrence was a grandmaster of capturing subjects at their best.  His portraits of women are so beautiful and charming that you can’t help smiling when you view them.  I left the comfortable confines of New York City a couple of years ago to take the train to New Haven to view the  Lawrence retrospective at Yale.  I was in heaven for a couple of hours.  I stared for 20 minutes at his self-portrait, pleading with him to give me some guidance in this business of painting faces, which he excelled at.  Alas, he was not forthcoming.

Sir Thomas Lawrence, Self-Portrait, circa 1825

Venetian Beauties

Eugen von Blaas, The Catch of the Day, 1884, 39 x 50 7/8 in., Oil on Canvas

Eugen von Blaas (1843-1931) is a perfect example of an artist who was able to transform his no doubt ordinary looking models into visions of loveliness on canvas or panels.  Just about every auction exhibition of 19^th Century European paintings at Sotheby’s or Christie’s includes one or two of his highly refined paintings depicting beautiful young Venetian peasant women in classic poses either alone or flirting with handsome young men.  In his day, wealthy Americans and Europeans on the Grand Tour bought so many of his paintings that by 1881 he had become well-known as “the painter of Venetian beauties.”  His paintings of these “cheerful and self-assured” young women, as one reviewer described them, are a joy to behold.   

Let me state, as usual, the obvious.  Von Blaas could draw extremely well.  His sense of color was outstanding.  His women are arrayed in gorgeous costumes of harmonious pastel shades that add so much to the charm of his paintings.   His expert handling of the draperies contributes a great deal to making his delightful creations masterpieces of genre painting.  All the clothing worn by his models is perfectly and purposely arranged to enhance the beauty of the pose.  I wonder if he worked from life on the costumes while his models were posing.  Some models can hold difficult poses for long periods of time.   But in order to get the folds just right, he could have arranged the clothing on one of those cloth-covered, articulated mannequins commonly in use back in the day. But I don’t know.   

 

The treatment of folds in clothing can present a problem for many of us who paint from life.  If folds are painted too literally, without great discretion in selecting which ones to include, the human form underneath can easily be obscured.  Folds should complement the human form.  The old painters were skilled at painting folds that contributed to the understanding and beauty of the model’s form – an arm, a breast, a leg -- whether painted from life alla prima, as Sargent, Zorn and other bravura painters did, or over many sittings with the model from life, or from a mannequin, or from some imaginative concept for the draperies.  These painters eliminated some folds and emphasized others when necessary.  Painters who work only from photographs without extensive experience in painting from life tend to literally copy the photographic image, so they end up with flat folds and flat forms in their flat figure paintings.  

I assume that the clothing depicted in paintings of the 19^th and early 20^th Century must have been a lot more interesting to paint than the T-shirts and jeans today’s models wear to work.  Now an under-financed artist has to head off to Goodwill to get an ill-fitting old bridal dress or evening gown if he wants to paint a costumed model.  Most of our figurative painters who work photographically don’t seem to mind painting boring T-shirts and jeans, so folds aren’t much of a problem for them.

Von Blaas was born to Austrian parents in Albano, near Rome.  His father was the painter Karl von Blaas (1815-1894), who taught at the Academy of Rome and painted portraits, religious themes and frescoes.  The family moved to Vienna briefly and then to Venice when Karl became professor at the Academy of Venice.  Eugen became a professor at the Academy later on as well.  It was while Eugen was assisting his father on frescoes in Vienna from 1860 to 1872 that he learned how to paint figures so beautifully, according to Thomas Wassibauer, author of the 2005 catalogue raisonné on von Blaas.   Wasibauer writes that throughout his long career, Eugen von Blaas employed his father’s technique “of building up flesh colors with different glazes to produce beautiful and natural looking flesh colors giving a three-dimensional effect.”   The father adopted this technique from his study of Titian’s paintings.  That’s all I could find about his working method in my cursory search of the Internet.  The direct approach to painting practiced by Van Dyck, Thomas Lawrence, Sargent, Zorn, Sorolla, et al, produces even more lifelike flesh tones.  There’s no substitute for close examination of the actual flesh color in alla prima painting from life.  But glazing as apparently practiced by von Blaas and some other classical realists comes in a close second.

His New Hat, 1896, 16.1 x 12.4 in., Oil on Panel

Like von Blaas, a lot of good painters you read about from the past and the present were born into a family where one or both parents were themselves artists, an enormous advantage for the children who follow in their footsteps.  For those who don’t, I tend to believe it’s an enormous disadvantage, considering how hard it is for most painters to earn a good living from their art and how they are always preoccupied with painting, not parenting.  I’ve known quite a few painters whose kids wanted nothing to do with the art business.

In 1870, Von Blaas married Paolo Prina, a wealthy young woman, and they lived in Venice for most of the rest of their life.  His career really took off and they were able to enjoy the high life of Venetian society to the fullest.  The family settled permanently in a beautiful palazzo on the Zattere, a long waterfront promenade in Venice.

Von Blaas painted an intense self-portrait in 1898 that’s floating around the World Wide Web, and you would never guess from that one image of him that this was a painter who made a very good living painting charming pictures of beautiful young women.  That old saying about not judging a book by its cover sure applies here, in my opinion. 

Self-Portrait, 1898

I wanted to mention von Blaas in my previous post when I addressed the important advantages painters of the past had over today’s figurative painters in being able to transform the ordinary into a thing of beauty, but I couldn’t remember his name.   So many artists, so little time.  Von Blaas may not be a major figure in the history of art, perhaps because his success was confined within a fairly narrow thematic range.  Let’s be honest.  He cranked out his Venetian beauties on a fine art assembly line like any other successful painter who corners a niche market.  But his work is so skillfully crafted and so appealing that I’ll give him a pass without hesitation. 

Collectors throughout the world continue to seek out his paintings and are williing and able to pay good money for them.  His painting The Market Girl  from 1900 was sold at auction by Sotheby’s in New York in April 2008 for $735,400, and that ain’t hay, as they used to say.

Eugen von Blaas, The Market Girl, 1900, oil on panel, 43 x 24 1/4 in.

Summer Painting Doldrums

Edward Henry Potthast, At the Beach, 16.25 x 20 in., Private Collection

Well, it looks like I won’t be painting summer landscapes in Vermont or going to the Minnesota State Fair again this year for the umpteenth year in a row, so I guess I’ll just sit here in front of my laptop computer in the kitchen of my New York apartment and compose another little rant about the dismal state of representational painting in America today.

I just read an article in the August issue of American Art Review about Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927), whose paintings are on view in “Eternal Summer,” a current exhibit at the Cincinnati Art Museum through September 8.   Potthast created beautiful, joyous, light-filled Impressionist paintings, the most famous of them being summertime scenes of women and children at rest and play on beaches, which he created from life en plein air.

Edward Henry Potthast, A Holiday, 1915, Chicago Art Institute

Edward Henry Potthast, Blonde and Brunette, 1920s, 16 ¼ x 20 3/8 in., Private Collection

Edward Henry Potthast, Self-Portrait

Potthast grew up in Cincinnati, as did a few other great American painters, including John Henry Twachtman, Joseph Rodefer DeCamp and Robert Frederick Blum.   He began studying drawing at the age of 12 in his hometown and completed his art training in Antwerp, Munich and Paris in the late 19^th Century.  His beach scenes are reminiscent of the paintings of Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida in their joyful mood and brilliance of sunlight.  Because he had spent years learning how to draw from life, he was able to accurately compose his animated beachgoers on the spot.  More importantly, they exist in perfect harmony with their environment.  The pictures are a wonderful visual delight – things of beauty to behold.  It’s like an actual trip to an early 20^th Century beach when viewing Potthast’s paintings, not that I would know from first-hand experience, of course. 

Many of today’s painters also like to paint sunny outdoor pictures of women and little girls in old-fashioned white dresses as Sorolla and the American Impressionists did.  But now artists take photographs and paint their pictures from them, or paint their models patiently and photographically.  The result is there isn’t even the faintest breeze of real life in their paintings.   Today’s artists simply are not able to paint and draw from life as well as Potthast and his contemporaries did.   

We are living in a digital world completely unlike the world inhabited by the earlier painters.  So why do some of today’s painters labor over the same subject matter and turn out paintings that are merely superficial clichés of their antecedents.  I suppose it’s because those earlier paintings look so good and are easy to copy thematically.  And the public likes the copies, no matter how devoid of feeling they are.  We can’t forget that if a Realist painting looks like a photograph today, that’s plenty good enough for the art-buying public.

There is something comically absurd, though, about the determined effort by some of today’s painters to mimic Bouguereau, Bastien-Lepage and other late 19^th  and early 20th Century figurative painters in technique and subject matter.  Those earlier painters were in the going business of painting emotive pictures featuring beautiful young women, handsome young men, soulful peasants, careworn old folks and cute kids for an enthusiastic art-buying public.  Their studio and plein air paintings were important contributions to the development of the visual arts at the time. 
 

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus, 1879, 120 x 86 in., Musee d’Orsay

Jules Bastien Lepage, The Begger, 1880-1881,199 x 181 cm, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen

Jules Bastien-Lepage, Le Pere Jacques (The Wood Gatherer),196.85 x 181.61 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum

Some of today’s painters who specialize in backward-looking subject matter are pretty skillful at rendering, especially those practitioners of a flashy style of realism, which one of my instructors at the Art Students League playfully labeled “Windy City Brushwork.”  These painters put their young, innocent and slightly-built female models in outlandish voluminous dresses with billowing sleeves and skirts far too big for the girl within, apparently designed by the artist himself to look like some old-fashioned peasant costume of odd coloring, sit or stand their models in some rural setting, barn or woods, paint them photographically, and then load up the canvas with twigs and branches and roses and all sorts of debris so your eye doesn’t’ have a clue as to what to look for in the painting, other than the tediously skillful rendering of the individual components of the picture scattered all over the picture plane, be it a twig or the model’s artfully posed hand. The work looks like cover art for Romance novels, but without a narrative component. There’s a ready market for this, yes indeed.

 

But putting those painters and all the American West painter-historian-illustrators aside, representational painting in general is not such a hot ticket with the community at large.  There is a small segment of the art market that supports and encourages the production of retrograde paintings that superficially resemble the work of the earlier painters.  But why?  All that we are able to glean from most of these emotionless paintings is that the copyists have rendered to photographic perfection their average-looking models – warts, tattoos and all other fashionable contemporary embellishments -- posing gracelessly:

• In their faux 19^th Century settings of ramshackle sylvan forest or faux plus faux Roman vestibule
• Staring straight ahead without any facial expression as if for a police mug shot, or staring straight ahead in profile, while seated or standing in some sterile environment, with maybe some background graffiti painted photographically for art’s sake
• Unclothed and lying supine, prone or on one side – front or back view -- in an advanced stage of rigor mortis on a bed covered with a rumpled white sheet. 

Here are some treatments of the fine art nude from the old days that obviously were not painted photographically, not even that beautifully drawn and colored Zorn standing figure, which depicts a flesh and blood human being with a mind at work as the artist goes about his task of painting her to perfection. 

Giovanni Boldini(1842-1931), Reclining Nude, 65 x 74 cm, Private Collection

Anders Zorn, Fjorton år tror jag visst att jag var

1916, 70.9 x39.4 in.

Anders Zorn, In Werner’s Rowboat, 1917, Private Collection

Henri Lebasque (1865-1937), Reclining Nude

Leo Putz (1869-1940)  Lisl on a Sofa

Zinaida Serebriakova, (1884-1967), Reclining Nude, 1930

Do we really want to see allegedly fine art oil paintings that are nothing more than photographic renditions of our unattractive next-door neighbors, with or without their clothes, just sitting, standing or lying there like some department store mannequin and exhibiting in extremis all the ridiculous foreshortening assessments made by the lens of a camera?  We see enough digital images of ordinary people in ordinary poses already.   We deserve figurative paintings that are just a tad more artistic, don’t you think?

The 19^th Century painters had plenty of average-looking models to work from, as well, but they weren’t average looking on canvas.  They were transformed into appealing archetypes to suit the emotional theme of the painting.  The transformation was significant in the case of Bouguereau, whose Italian models, especially the children, couldn’t possibly hold still long enough for him to paint them from life with such perfection.  He did many preparatory sketches from his live models, which he then incorporated into the graceful poses that adorn his canvases.  Bouguereau’s poses were often adapted from classical sculpture, but he alone was responsible for the incomparable beauty of the flesh and exquisite drawing of the figure, from head to toe, that we see in his skillfully composed paintings.

The transformation was less obvious in the work of Bastien-Lepage and his plein-air followers, as well as all the other Realists who painted the figure from life.  These painters stayed very close to the physical reality of their models, but subtly enhanced or subdued details in keeping with the overall composition and emotional message of their paintings.  That was the difference.  Their figures were as one with their surroundings.  Today the figures often are just pasted against some nondescript background or artificial stage setting.  Not one Las Maninas among them.

Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 125.2 x 108.7 in.

1656, The Prado, Madrid

Many of today’s painters seem to think their work is done when they faithfully copy their expressionless, average-looking models on canvas.  What happened to the desire of painters to integrate their models into real works of harmonious beauty that express on canvas the emotion that caused the painter to create the picture in the first place?  The 19^th Century painters had great drawing and painting skills and routinely adjusted the salient features of their models and their poses on canvas in keeping with the overall theme and design of their pictures.  I can’t do this myself, so I’m a little ashamed to be pointing out this lack in today’s painters who rely solely on photographic accuracy to market their pictures.

If you don’t study drawing at an early age, chances are you aren’t going to be able to improve on the features and proportions of your average looking model when painting alla prima.  So you copy photographs or slave away from the live model, putting in every unimportant photographic detail that today’s art buying public has come to expect from its artists. 

The Minnesota State Fair runs from August 22 to September 2 at the fairgrounds in St. Paul.  Wish I could be there.  This contemporary art world of passionless photographic painting is getting me down.  The last year I went to the fair an old Vaudevillian named Peg Leg Bates was the star attraction, tap dancing up a storm.  During intermission, the carnival barker announced door prizes to ticket holders. “There’s another winner,” he would shout from the stage in the darkened tent auditorium.  Heads swiveled to see the lucky winners, but you never ever saw one.   You can learn a lot about life at a State Fair.

See Something, Say Something

John Singer Sargent, Miss Helen Dunham, 1892

48.5 by 37.5 in., Private Collection

Sir William Orpen, Early Morning, Yvonne Aubicq, 1922

36 by 34 in., Private Collection, Melbourne, Australia

During the mid-1980s, at a time when I was passionately attuned to painting’s siren call, I went to The Metropolitan Museum of Art with a friend a few Sunday afternoons to look at the European and American paintings.  But I grew increasingly annoyed with his company and stopped going to the museum with him altogether because he was constantly pointing out how “badly” certain things like hands were painted in many of the Renaissance masterpieces on display.  I’ve always felt such observations were pointless because painting in those days was not under the evil influence of photography, which has conditioned the public to expect figurative art to look photographic.   When painting was king of the visual arts, the public was conditioned to seeing varying stylistic interpretations of the human form as the art developed from Giotto to the 19^th Century.  I can enjoy the craftsmanship exhibited in paintings done in the various periods of art history without subjecting it to contemporary standards for drawing and painting the natural world.  

Renoir must have felt the same way.  He was admiring an Old Master painting at the Louvre one day when a fellow painter pointed out some detail that was rather poorly executed, just as my friend used to do.  Renoir was taken aback that someone would comment critically on such an insignificant detail in such a great work of art.  “Who would have ever thought of such a thing,” he said, or words to that effect.

The Boston painter William McGregor Paxton, who apparently had a keen analytical mind for painting, felt a little differently.  His biographer and former student, R. H. Ives Gammell, takes note of a 1921 letter written by Paxton to a student traveling in Europe.  Paxton wrote, “Don’t let the old masters overawe you, and don’t get cheeky with them either.  Most of them had something or they wouldn’t be Old Masters.  Look at them as you would look at your friends’ work; find the faults and praise the qualities.  There is no reason for a different standard of criticism than the one you use for your contemporaries.  You may lose some pleasure by finding how the wires are pulled, but think of the pleasure you can give others if you can learn how it’s done.”  In that same letter, Paxton states that “the artist’s task is to create emotion rather than to be moved.  No doubt one who has never felt emotion is incapable of communicating it to others, but most of us have felt it, and few of us can pass it on.”

So much for my simple-minded, inarticulate enthusiasms about the paintings I love.  Well, I do study the way the subject was rendered and the paint was handled to achieve certain effects, but for the most part I just revel in the wonder of it all like any art lover would.   

I personally have a special affection for the opposing views of Renoir, whose life story was so engagingly portrayed in the biography written by his son Jean Renoir, the celebrated film director.  It was the first artist’s biography I had ever read and made a lasting impression on me.  The son recalls many of Renoir’s opinions about painting, including his belief that a true work of art must first be “indescribable” and second “inimitable.”  Renoir advised painters to “Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.”

From my lowly vantage point, I believe that flawless craftsmanship by itself throughout every square inch of a canvas, without such “extras” as exquisite color or exceptional design, can actually decrease the chances that one’s painting will convey emotion.  There has to be some mystery to engage the viewer emotionally.  A lot of artists hold that view.   “Regularity, order, desire for perfection destroy art,” said Renoir.  “Irregularity is the basis of all art.”

Some painters still make a conscious decision to emphasize certain details around the center of interest in their paintings and downplay or suggest subordinate details, believing that is the best way to convey on canvas some of the emotion that drew them to paint their subjects in the first place.  Many painters from past generations worked in this manner.   

When painting alla prima and with great feeling, unconscious paint handling curiosities can sneak into a picture.  They can readily be overlooked or ignored by viewers because the paintings are so powerfully executed and visually exciting overall.    For example, we sometimes see subliminal images in the work of bravura painters like John Singer Sargent when they rapidly paint clouds, seascapes, landscape debris and the folds in draperies, for example.  I think a lot of painters are too conscious of such hidden images and tend to rework into placidity an otherwise exciting passage of alla prima painting because the folds clearly resembled the two eyes and a nose of a human face.  I know that’s something I have been too conscious of in my paintings.

But what if one of your favorite artists creates a painting that contains some detail that just bugs you no end, regardless of whether it was the result of an accident or put there on purpose.  Can the presumed flaw be ignored in light of all the great work in the rest of the painting?  

I had no problem coming to terms with one odd, but obviously intended detail in Sargent’s gorgeous painting from 1892 of Miss Helen Dunham.  When I was admiring it at the big Sargent exhibit at the Whitney Museum some years ago, a stranger standing next to me commented, “Did you notice the way Sargent painted the nostril?”   I hadn’t noticed before, but it was painted in an obvious rectangular shape, a perfect parallelogram, actually, with no serious effort by Sargent to modify its edges.

Curious.  But it isn’t something you would notice at a normal viewing distance, so I can still enjoy the overall beauty of this portrait.  Sargent was gaining in confidence and skill as the world’s premier portrait artist by the early 1890s and probably decided to boldly paint the shape of the nostril exactly as it first struck him, perhaps in keeping with his belief that a successful portrait was a bit of a caricature anyway.  Certainly a trivial matter.

The William Orpen painting of his French mistress Yvonne Aubicq, with whom he had a 10-year relationship, is a different story.  When I first saw the reproduction of “Early Morning,” I was blown away.  Here was the most compelling painting of a nude I have ever seen.  This was no Bouguereau nymph posing sweetly with cherubs and a water jug.  This was no Boucher or Fragonard beauty all fleshly dimpled and coyly seductive.  This was no “Naked Maja” posing forthrightly for Goya on a settee.  This was, in fact, a painting of a nude unlike any ever painted in the history of painting.  This was the real deal -- an honest-to-goodness attractive naked woman in an entirely believable life situation with all the accessories deployed to perfection as she has her morning coffee after a night of whatever. “Early Morning” is an incredible tour de force of naturalistic painting. 

The painting was included in a 2005 exhibit of Orpen’s paintings at The Imperial War Museum in London titled “William Orpen: Politics, Sex and Death.”  Bunny Smedly, a Cambridge-educated historian, posted an essay about the exhibit on a British scholarly website called The Social Affairs Unit on March 7, 2005.  She really “got it right” with her insightful comments regarding this painting.  Here’s a sample of her fervent “adults only” review of this picture: 

“Yvonne Aubicq -- still young, still with a tiny bit of lovely puppy-fat and delightfully rosy skin -- naked in bed, a robe thrown away somewhere, those letters disregarded…her little breasts painted by someone who understood their weight and orientation at more than a technical level, the centrifugal nature of the composition ever and again drawing this nude back from being a studio confection toward being what it is, which is a painting of a naked girl, legs folded, viewed from above, finished with her breakfast, ready for sex?  It’s a description of lust, pure and simple…if Orpen had been able to claim any stylistic descendants, this painting would be reckoned a masterpiece.  As he can’t, it’s a freak.  It doesn’t fit anywhere…it may quite possibly be Orpen’s greatest painting.” 

Oh, was I ever thunderstruck by this painting and Ms. Smedley’s keen understanding of it.  Then when I calmed down I noticed some minor aberration in the painting that is just an insane anomaly.  I can’t figure it out.  What the heck is that thing protruding behind and above her right elbow that I have pointed to in the detail of the painting?

I asked my good friend Michelle Golias, an excellent painter who is better at analyzing paintings than I am, to take a look at the painting and give me her objective assessment about this apparent blemish.  She suggested that Yvonne might have had a midriff bulge which Orpen put in and then decided he would take out later by painting the background cloth over it, but missed going back to it, as he might have been painting all over the canvas continually, rather than finishing one section at a time.  That's possible.

But for gosh sakes, upon my obsessive close examination of the reproduction of the painting, that passage looks like the tip of a breast in profile, painted with soft edges that clearly separate it from the flesh behind it.  Michelle agreed it looks a little like that.  Whatever was this great painter thinking of to allow this mysterious projectile to disturb the contour of her figure?  Did he turn an old canvas around and paint the current picture over another nude painting?  How is it possible he didn’t see this “whatever it may be,” considering how closely he observed all the other elements in the picture, like the beautifully painted silver coffeepot?  Did he think removing it would destroy the freshness of the paint handling?  Was it some inside joke between himself and his fiery mistress that he left for all to ponder over?  Would the mystery be solved if I saw the original painting?  Orpen, what’s going on?

It’s the kind of curious, inexplicable blemish that can really disturb one’s appreciation of an otherwise fantastic painting.  How I wish it wasn’t there.

Jane Peterson, Painter

When I first saw Jane Peterson’s paintings, I immediately fell in love with them.  I soon learned why her work appealed to me.  Her unique Post-Impressionist style was derived from direct study or association with many of the leading bravura and avant-garde painters in the early years of the 20^th Century – painters that I also love, including Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, who had the most profound influence on her work.  She traveled to Madrid in the summer of 1909 to work with the great Spanish Impressionist.  He urged her to paint with brilliant color, and she eagerly accepted his advice.  In 1910, again at Sorolla’s encouragement, Peterson went by herself on a painting expedition to Egypt and Algiers, a daring move for a woman painter traveling alone.  In December of that year she firmly established her reputation as a major American Post-Impressionist with a large solo exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Before studying with Sorolla, she had studied with Frank Brangwyn in London and Jacques-Emile Blanche in Paris, both exceptional bravura painters themselves.  Peterson’s friends and colleagues included Maurice Prendergast, who painted many of the same subjects she painted early on, John Singer Sargent and Childe Hassam.

Jane Peterson about 1928

Peterson, born Jennie Christine Peterson in Elgin, Illinois in 1876, began her career as a public school art teacher after studies at Pratt Institute with Arthur Wesley Dow and The Art Students League with Frank Vincent DuMond.  But she found teaching in public schools a bit dull, and in the summer of 1907 she made her first trip to Europe in the company of Henry Snell, one of her teachers at Pratt, and his artist wife.  When the couple returned to America, Peterson stayed behind.   This strong, independent woman seemed to meet everybody she wanted to in the art world and travel anywhere she liked to paint on her own -- Brittany, Venice, Egypt, Turkey, you name it, she was game -- from 1908 to 1925, the most adventurous years of her long career.

In Paris, Peterson stayed in Montparnasse, the district that attracted artists from all over the world because studios were plentiful and cheap.  She lived right around the corner from Gertrude Stein’s salon and was a regular at the gatherings hosted by Gertrude and her brother Leo, whose other guests included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain and many other important modern artists and art lovers.  For many years, Peterson made annual summer trips to Europe, except during the years of America’s involvement in World War I.  In America she painted at the popular artists’ colonies of Gloucester, Massachusetts; Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard; and Ogunquit, Maine.  She worked in oils, gouache and watercolor.  The fast-drying medium of gouache allowed her to quickly experiment with broad strokes of color when working en plein air. Between 1913 and 1919, Peterson was a watercolor instructor at the Art Students League.   During World War I, she painted war-oriented subjects for the benefit of Liberty Loans and the American Red Cross.  

 

Her routine changed abruptly in 1925 when she married Moritz Bernard Philipp, a prominent corporate attorney 25 years her senior.  She divided her time between their townhouse at 1007 Fifth Avenue, across the street from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Rocky Hill, Philipp’s summer retreat in Ipswich, Massachusetts.  A sixth floor was added to the Fifth Avenue townhouse for her use as a studio.  She began cultivating flowers, and for the rest of her career she concentrated on painting brightly colored floral still lifes in direct attacks on canvas with bold brushwork.

 

Turkish Garden from Tiffany Estate

She had always loved painting flowers and flower gardens.  In 1911, she had accepted Louis Comfort Tiffany’s invitation to paint his magnificent gardens at Laurelton Hall, Oyster Bay, New York.  She spent several months painting there, and went on painting excursions with him, as well.  I imagine that this opportunity came about because of her studies with Sorolla, who painted Tiffany’s portrait in those gardens that same year.

Regarding her feelings for the flowers she loved to paint, Peterson wrote in the September 1922 issue of “The Garden Magazine” that flowers “scintillate the prismatic hues of the rainbow; they harmonize the pastel shades of the night; they are all that is delicate; all that is lurid, brilliant, bizarre. They are living things with personality and refinement, with delicacy of form and structure, with variety of size and shape, with rhythm and charm of arrangement, with grace and dignity of bearing.”  That’s quite a mouthful, but as a painter who loves the challenge of painting ephemeral cut flowers myself, I understand her passion.

At Rocky Hill, Peterson completed many floral, beach, and pier scenes. After her husband’s death in 1929, Peterson resumed her studies and travels abroad. In 1939 she married her second husband, James S. McCarthy, a prominent New Haven physician. They separated within a year, and then divorced.  Peterson's hands became crippled with arthritis in the mid-1950s and she painted much less frequently.  She spent the last five years of her life with her niece in Kansas, who took care of her until she died on August 14, 1965, at the age of 88.   Here are some of the paintings she created in her prime:

Paris Carousel, 1908

Luxembourg Gardens, 1908

Paris Flower Market

Biskra, North Africa

Self-Portrait

Spring Bouquet, 1912, 40 1/16 x 30 in., PA Academy of Fine Art

Detail