Apples

Apples and Copper Pot, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

Apples and Brass Artillery Shell Coffee Pot, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

Apples, Pears, Grapes and Brass Coffee Pot, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

It’s probably a good thing to eat apples regularly, but I never got into the habit.  A 94-year-old painter I know eats one just about every day for lunch, after he finishes his organic peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  With his trusty Swiss Army knife, he elegantly carves the apple into slices, offering one or more to any lunch companions.  Al still teaches two one-day-a-week painting classes, belongs to a couple of art clubs where he continues to exhibit his paintings, and draws and paints in open sessions offered to members of The Art Students League, where he studied 75 years ago.  No doubt it’s the apples that keep him going.

My usual lunch, ever since I started painting more than 30 years ago, consists of a slice of pizza and a carbonated, caffeinated beverage, often followed by a fat-laden, sugary snack and a cup of coffee.  Maybe that’s why I’m always exhausted, my stomach is upset and I have a sour disposition.  By the way, it’s impossible these days to get a good slice of pizza in my fashionable neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  All the good pizza parlors have been replaced by ritzy sushi bars, trattorias and patisseries.

Like Cezanne, I’ve painted a lot of pictures of apples.  Cezanne might have enjoyed eating apples as well as painting them.  But I doubt if he would have written a stupid blog post about it one way or the other.  But we have heard that he once boasted, “With an apple I will astonish Paris.”   About all I’ve ever done with apples is use them as props for my still life paintings, with absolutely no thought of astonishing anyone other than myself.  I usually throw the apples in the garbage after I have harvested a crop of paintings featuring them.  I’ve tried to be less profligate.  A few years ago I bought a juicer and used it for a little while to blend apples and carrots into very tasty smoothies.  But gulping down the thick drinks quickly to “retain all the vitamins” and then hurrying to clean the dozens of juicer parts was so bothersome that the device now sits gathering dust on a top shelf in my kitchen.

I just tended to another crop of apple paintings inspired by a four-pound bag of  “seconds” of varying shapes, sizes, colors and conditions I bought for $2 at the local farmer’s market a couple of weeks ago.  As usual, I very much enjoyed working on each of the five paintings illustrated here that I pulled out of the bag.  And as usual, I regret being unable to see the obvious drawing flaws while the paint is still wet.  Going back to correct them when the paint is dry is not at all enjoyable, but sometimes necessary to soothe my troubled soul, even though I end up losing the freshness of the initial paint handling and remain a troubled soul forever, at least with respect to the paintings.

I ran out of fresh stretched canvases in the size I wanted (16 by 20 inches), so a couple of the paintings are over old ones I scraped down a little to get rid of the heaviest ridges of dried paint.  I wish I had properly sanded and re-primed the surfaces with a quick-drying oil primer, but I was in a hurry to finish my latest apple cycle and didn’t want to switch gears from painting to priming.  Those apple paintings will probably self-destruct in less than 200 years.  At the very least, I expect a little pentimento revealing the head sketches I painted over.  Quel dommage!  

John Singer Sargent, William M. Chase, N. A., 1902, Oil on canvas, 62 1/2  by 41 3/8 in, Metropolitan Museum of Art

My favorite story about this particular oil painter’s curse appears in James Montgomery Flagg’s autobiography, “Roses and Buckshot.”  The story concerns the nearly full-length portrait of William Merritt Chase hanging in the Metropolitan Museum that Sargent dashed off in his London studio in 1902.  The amusingly acerbic Flagg considered Chase a stuffed shirt and a “silly little painter of fish” who couldn’t draw.  He wrote that Chase’s students collected $10,000 to pay Sargent to paint the portrait.  Sargent apparently didn’t have a fresh canvas either, so he turned an unfinished Wertheimer portrait upside down to paint the Chase portrait.  “Years passed, and in the crotch of Chase’s breeches gradually emerged a head of Wertheimer upside down,” Flagg wrote.  “This sort of thing can happen when you paint over a used canvas.  An expert has since touched it out, and happily for the world of art, Mr. Wertheimer no longer gazes upside down between William Chase’s legs.”  I believe the Met’s conservators are on the case and monitor it closely.  The paint surface does look pretty distressed in that area of the painting.  

Accompanying the apples in two of my paintings is a brass coffee pot fashioned out of a World War One artillery shell.  I picked it up years ago at the famous weekend outdoor flea market that used to operate at Sixth Avenue and 26th Street.  Celebrities went there early in the morning to get the prime stuff before us late-risers made the scene.  The guy who sold the coffee pot to me said it came from the dining room of an ocean liner.  The initials UAL are inscribed on the coffee pot.  That’s one of those many historical details you come across that are interesting but seemingly impossible to research online.  There is a venerable Dutch shipping company that operates the Universal Africa Lines (UAL).  That seems a likely provenance for the coffee pot, but there’s no readily accessible indication that the cargo shipping outfit was around way back when and serving coffee to the crew from an old artillery shell.  If you think your coffee pot is heavy, try pouring a cup out of this brass monster, something I’ve never tried myself.  The servers on board the ship must have been recruited for their muscularity.

Apples and Pears in Wicker Basket, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

This painting of the apples in a wicker basket was my first in this series and a real disappointment.  I loved the arrangement, which could be considered sort of a vague reference to that famous still life painting of fruit by Caravaggio.  But it was rainy and cloudy on the two days I had set aside for painting it.  Consequently, the values and colors are muddied and unsuccessful.  What can you do?  I’ve tried adding artificial light on such days, but the mix of daylight and artificial light seemed so unnatural that I abandoned the practice.  And I won’t paint solely by artificial light, against the advice of such eminent authorities as the London-based painter Bernard Dunstan (1920 -).  Dunstan wrote a couple of excellent books on painting techniques, including a little one on still life painting in which he states he is indifferent to the type of light he paints under.  “One cannot always be waiting and putting off work because of the light; very little would get done at all at certain times of the year,” Dunstan wrote.  ‘If one intends to get a regular amount of work done, it is essential to come to terms with this problem.  Artificial light is at least steady and unchanging, and it can have a beauty of its own.” 

I emphatically don’t share Dunstan's enthusiasm for artificial light, but I agree that you can’t put off the work waiting for great daylight.  Although experience has taught me I’m being foolish, I stubbornly paint on with the idea that if you get the light effect right the painting will look good, no matter how dull the daylight is.  Painters of the past have proven that it can be done, so it’s not impossible, just improbable.  The subject matter has a great deal to do with the success or failure of such efforts, and objects whose great charm is their local color, like apples, are probably not the best choice for painting on a dull day.

Meanwhile, my mercifully unwaxed farmer’s market apples aren’t quite finished yet, so I might get another painting or two out of them before they get tossed in the garbage -- the apples, that is.  The fate of the paintings is yet to be determined.

 

Apples in Bowl, Oil on Canvas, 15 by 18 in.

The Blame Game

Milne Ramsay (1846-1915), Peaches and Wine, Oil on Canvas, 27 ¼ by 48 in., Gold Medal, 1907, American Art Society, Private Collection

Milne Ramsay, Still Life with Lobster, 1898, Oil on Canvas, 26 by 39 in., Detroit Institute of the Arts

Milne Ramsay, Apples and Cider, Oil on Canvas, 19 by 31 1/4 in., Private Collection

Ella G. Wise, Milne Ramsay in his Studio, circa 1888, Oil on Canvas, 27 by 36 in. There is a similar photograph of Ramsay in his studio that might have provided the impetus for this painting.  Little is known of Ms Wise, but she was probably one of his students.

I blame Milne Ramsay for all the troubles I’ve had as a painter over the years.  I’m joking, of course.  I wish it were that simple.

Milne’s certainly not responsible for all my many art-related problems, no indeed.  Some are caused by the lousy west/northwest daylight I’m forced to paint under in my substandard apartment studio in dreary Manhattan to preserve my legendary reputation as a stickler for painting under natural light exclusively.  Well, almost exclusively.  But Milne did entice me to take the wrong fork in the road in my formative years as a painter.

After two years of great fun painting models in art school eons ago, the money ran out and I was compelled to figure out how and what to paint for myself.  I took to painting portraits of fruits and vegetables, carefully selected from the fancy grocery store across the street.  I thought this practice would be the easiest and most-sensible course to follow to become a certifiable (1st and 2nd definitions) professional artist.  I would throw in some pots and pans and fabrics to accompany the produce, because everybody else had done the same thing in the past.  So that’s what I did, and do, mostly, to this day.

When I first learned, with far more difficulty than I had anticipated, how to paint an apple or a peach to the point where someone other than myself could say, “It looks like a photograph,” or, “It looks so real you want to eat it,” I was quite pleased and greatly relieved. 

Not long after that epiphany, I picked up a little catalog at the Strand Bookstore for an exhibition of the work of Milne Ramsay (1846-1915), an American painter of still lifes and landscapes.  It was easy to see that he could paint his apples, peaches, brass pots, porcelains, lace tablecloths, wine bottles, and everything else for that matter, far better than I could, with excellent drawing and textural distinctions, along with lots of atmosphere.  I’ve seen a few of his paintings in the galleries and they are wonderful. 

But that wasn’t the enduring problem he created for me.  The problem was the way he composed his still life paintings.   Heck, all he ever did was distribute his apples and peaches and decorative brass and copper pots on a cloth-covered tabletop in a low-relief zig-zag pattern right across the picture plane from one edge of the canvas to the other.  What could be simpler?  Following his attractive example, that’s about all I’ve ever done myself.  How boring is that?  He turned me into a boring still life painter without my having ever attained the same level of skill at rendering that he had attained or having ever acquired the same de rigueur 19th Century artist trappings that graced his impressive studio.

Just look at Milne above, relaxing in a swell armchair, taking his ease, and contemplating his latest landscape masterpiece in that grand studio of his.  I wanted a studio like that.  I wanted all the requisite trappings – rich oriental rugs, big brass and copper pots, Asian porcelains.  This studio in Philadelphia, one of the many studios Ramsay occupied over the years, was compared favorably with the well-documented, elaborately appointed studio in New York City of William Merritt Chase.  I wanted the painter’s life that Milne Ramsey had then.

After seeing his beautiful paintings, I couldn’t be bothered with all the talk of the Golden Mean and all those complicated, segmented diagrams showing how the Old Masters achieved their masterful compositions.  I’m not painting decorations for the Sistine Chapel for God’s sake.  I’m painting pretty little pictures of apples and peaches for modest parlor walls.

Besides, we’re inundated with movies, television, animated films, computer games, videos and still photographs – most of them artfully composed.   Everybody in  the world today knows what makes a pretty decent composition.  All we have to do is look through the LCD screens of our digital cameras, move the camera around a little bit until the scene before us looks real nice, and shoot.  The next thing you know, we are winning awards for our amateur snapshots.  That’s the story of composition for most of us today.  As a still life painter, I simply move things around until the setup looks good.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt if you position an apple or a peach, preferably cut in half, or, better still, an orange slice, in the Golden Mean now and then, just to be safe

Milne Ramsey was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 16, 1846, one of six sons and two daughters of Alexander Ramsey and his wife, Anna Eliza Milne, whose surname became his first name, as you can plainly see.  Not easy to name eight kids, I suppose.    His father was a prosperous cotton merchant before the Civil War, during which he lost his prosperity and after which he set up a family-run notary public and collections business in Philadelphia. 

The young Milne served nine months in the Pennsylvania militia during the Civil War.  After his release, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and had a studio in Philadelphia for a short time before shipping off to Paris in 1868, where he studied for five years in the atelier of Leon Bonnat (1833-1922), a very successful academic painter of portraits and historical religious themes.

  

Milne was active in the American expatriate art community in Paris and frequently exhibited academic figure paintings, still lifes and landscapes during the 10 years he lived in The City of Light.  He was one of the founders of the Society of American Artists in Paris, which at one point had 40 members.  Milne won considerable success in Paris with his academic work, but most of those paintings haven’t been located.  He also painted and dated small plein air landscape studies to record his travels in and around the Normandy and Brittany countryside.  Back in America, he continued to produce small plein air sketches of American scenes, many of them thickly painted with slashing brush strokes on cigar box tops.  Ramsay’s paintings often show up at auction.  On its website, The Smithsonian American Art Museum lists 163 titles of works by Ramsey obtained from galleries or auction houses.

The Milne Ramsay exhibition catalog I picked up was published in conjunction with a major exhibit of 81 of his works at The Chapellier Galleries in New York City in 1974.  The stated purpose of the exhibit was to revive interest in this prolific artist, who was much-celebrated during his lifetime.  I suppose the gallery also hoped to sell a few of the works it had corralled.  The catalog includes an interesting essay on the artist’s life and work written by William H. Gerdts, an American art historian and the author of more than 25 books on American art.

Near the end of the essay, Gerdts notes that Ramsay “seems to have gradually withdrawn from art activity in Philadelphia as time began to pass him by and new artistic trends developed.”  Ramsay didn’t exhibit his work as much, although he continued to paint still lifes and spent more time working on his landscapes.

 

During his peripatetic painting career, Ramsay had many addresses, both in Europe and America.  On one of his return visits to Philadelphia from Europe, around 1870, he got married and had two kids before the heartbreak of divorce.  One of the kids, Charles Frederic Ramsay, also became a painter and was one of the first artists of the famous art colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania. 

Milne married again, at the age of 46, to a woman lawyer and painting student of his who was 17 years younger.  They had five kids.

  

At various times,  Ramsay had studios in Philadelphia, New York City, Atlantic City and Bronxville, New York, where he built a house and studio.  The family moved back to Philadelphia in 1900.  His last studio was in the Baker Building, a center of artistic activities in that city.  One of his neighbors on the 4th floor was his friend Prosper Senat (1852 - 1925), who was known for his watercolor landscapes.  Senat's widow remembers Ramsay asking her husband for "a tube of daylight."  Gerdts believes this friendship was one reason why Ramsay turned increasingly to watercolors in his later years. 

The Chapellier catalog illustrates a number of Ramsay’s small, impressionistic, plein air landscapes, painted in oil on panels measuring approximately 5 by 7 inches, which were usually painted on the New Jersey coast or in the marshlands.  The paintings seem to be filled with the brilliant light of high noon.  The staging area for these paintings must have been the Shelburne Hotel in Atlantic City, an opulent seaside resort that his wife had inherited.

Gerdts writes, “Ramsay’s late landscapes are poetic evocations of a little explored region, while his late still lifes continued a 19th century tradition of which he was one of the most proficient practitioners, but by his death in 1915, he was virtually forgotten.”  That gallery exhibit 40 years ago doesn’t seem to have done much to revive Ramsay’s reputation among the general public.

A lot of painters I’ve read about who achieve great commercial success and win a lot of awards for painting traditional figurative work, still lifes or landscapes early on become disillusioned when the trendy art market passes them by.  Some just get worn out or bored from creating the same paintings over and over and switch to a completely different art form – even go abstract.  Quelle horreur!  Some give up painting altogether

. 

Most of us traditional realists needn’t worry about getting bored or worn out, at least for those reasons.  We don’t get much notice for our work, except from our friends and relatives.  As for me, I’m still greatly surprised, excited and relieved every time I paint a decent-looking apple or peach.  I can’t blame Milne Ramsay for that!

Milne Ramsay, Still Life with Roses, Bowl, and Oriental Urn, 1887, Oil on Canvas, 23 by 36 in., Private Collection

Milne Ramsay, Flowers on a Table, 1873, Oil on canvas laid down on masonite, 36 by 29 in., Private Collection

Milne Ramsay, Apples, Ming Plate and Earthenware Pitcher, Oil on Canvas, 18 by 24 in., Private Collection

Milne Ramsay, Brandy and Peaches, Oil on Canvas, 32 by 25 ½ in., Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Baby, It's Cold Outside, Oil on Linen, 20 by 16 in., Private Collection

Blue and White Lilacs, Oil on Canvas, 20 by 24 in., https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobertHoldenFineArt

Childhood Friends, Oil on Linen, 20 by 24 in., Private Collection

I got to thinking about teddy bears again the other day when a still life painting of lilacs I put up for sale on my Etsy shop was added to the “Etsy Treasury” of a woman living in the Ukraine who sells handmade teddy bears and other stuffed animals on her “Bears Land” shop.  The miniature stuffed animals are handmade by her and her husband and are really adorable: https://www.etsy.com/shop/manina1507

I think most people love teddy bears, having been introduced at an early age to one or more of these loyal and selfless companions, who can comfort you in a way no human can when you are feeling down and out and very much unloved.  I’ve painted pictures of a couple of them over the years, including the one shown above.   This teddy lives in the Long Island home of the retired supervisor of the phone room at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I worked on Thursdays during my 15 years of part-time enjoyment with the museum’s Visitor Services Department.  The phone room is the Met’s first line of defense against the multitude of commoners who aren’t tuned in to the world of fine art and discover “undoubted Rembrandts” when cleaning out their attics or want to have a show of their paintings at the Museum and demand to speak with a curator.  

The phone room supervisor, Peggy B., had a collection of teddy bears, and offered to loan me this favorite of hers so I could make a painting of it for my own pleasure.  So one day, maybe a dozen or more years ago, she brought the teddy in with her on the LIRR and let me hang onto it for a few days.  I decided this teddy girl would make a nice portrait study, so I gave her a good bit of attention for a couple of sittings while trying my best to replicate her essential fuzziness on canvas.  She’s seated on a scrap of cardboard and the background is a paint-smeared, 24x30 in. piece of Masonite that I still use as a base for still lifes on occasion.   I turned the board around a bit until I liked the paint shapes, which seemed to resemble a snowy woodland setting, at least in my mind’s eye.  A little while later I sent the finished painting off to the Connecticut gallery that was handling my still life paintings at the time.  To my surprise, I was told that a teddy bear collector bought her right away.  I think it was the fastest sale of any painting I showed at the gallery.

Now the right thing to do would have been to split the proceeds with Peggy, I suppose.  Isn’t that what all painters do when they borrow expensive collectibles from their friends or antique dealers and sell the resulting paintings for a fortune?  I’m not in that class of art profiteers myself, however, and Peggy seemed to be satisfied with the teddy bear image on the Christmas card I sent out that year.

When I was getting started in this painting business some 30 years ago, I did several commissions for a collector who is a native of a small town in a mountainous region of northern Italy, where the family still maintains a commercial apple orchard.  He is a lover of very traditional oil paintings, and a toy collector as well.  He commissioned me to paint portraits of some family members and pictures of some of the toys he had collected.  One time in the early 1980s he asked me to do a group portrait of four stuffed animals that had been crafted by his mother when he was a child.  I don’t think I got the best composition for this group portrait, but it was a lot of fun to work on, and something of a privilege to paint this assemblage of quaintly amusing stuffed animals, which obviously had great sentimental value for the collector.

“Mr. Holden, you should paint toys,” he used to say to me.  But alas, I had no toys of my own to paint and it was a lot easier to arrange an assemblage of fruits or vegetables from the grocery store across the street.  You can’t spend a lot of time trying to put together things you know will sell when the morning daylight’s a-wasting.  That’s a far more precious commodity in New York City than any Ming vase you might see in the window of a schmancy neighborhood antiques store.