Frank McKelvey's Ireland

Frank McKelvey (1895-1974), Road to Donegal, Oil on Board, 11.5  by 17 in., Private Collection

Frank McKelvey, On the Way to Muckish, Co. Donegal, c. 1940, Oil on Canvas, 20 by 23 in., Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland

Frank McKelvey, Donegal Landscape with Cottage, Oil on Canvas Board, 14 by 20 in., Private collection

Frank McKelvey, On the Road to Kilmacrennan (a Gypsy Caravan),  c. 1935-36, Oil on Canvas, 28 by 36 in., Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland

Frank McKelvey, Glenveagh Hills, County Donegal, 1929, Oil on Board, 11.5 by 16.5 in., Private Collection

The Painter

A painter friend of mine spent a week in Ireland before going on a painting trip to Brittany in September. She visited an old friend of hers, a transplanted American, who lives with her husband and their pet Collie in a tiny village in the picturesque countryside two hours from Dublin. About all this dot on the map has for amenities are a church, a bar/grocery store, and four cemeteries.

The husband plays the tin whistle in pubs and is a tour guide. He said groups of artists are the worst. They are always dropping their wet canvases on the ground or on the bus, and generally causing a fuss with all their equipment.

My friend said it rained constantly when she was there. But the photos she took of that unspoiled countryside, with a prominent mountain in the distance, indicate it would have been a real treat to do some landscape painting there.

Despite Ireland’s typically rainy weather, many beautiful landscapes have been painted by the natives. I just came across the work of Frank McKelvey (1895-1974), a leading figure in the so-called Irish School of the 1920s and ‘30s.

An art reviewer in 1925 wrote that McKelvey’s “views and conversation are as fresh and bright as his pictures. In his own words, ‘Painting is all great fun’, and to see him at work you quite believe him.”

McKelvey was a highly accomplished and critically acclaimed landscape painter. He also painted quite a few portraits of distinguished Irishmen, but those works are far less noteworthy than his landscapes.

Born in Belfast, the son of a painting contractor and decorator, he was a poster designer before attending the Belfast School of Art, where he won prizes for figure drawing in 1912 and 1914. By 1918 his work was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and in 1921 he was elected a member of the Belfast Art Society.

The young McKelvey became a full-time painter of landscapes and portraits around 1919, when he was just 24 years of age. His landscape paintings are typically of farm scenes in County Armagh, the North Coast, and later in County Donegal, all lovely places I’ve never visited and probably never will, since I barely leave my New York City apartment anymore. Going to New Jersey is like crossing the Atlantic Ocean for me.

In 1936, McKelvey had a one-man show where three of his landscapes were purchased as a wedding present for Queen Juliana of the Netherlands by Dutch people living in Ireland.

He was made a full member of the RHA in 1930 and was elected as one of the first academicians of the Ulster Academy of Arts when it was founded that same year. McKelvey continued exhibiting at the RHA every year for the next fifty-five years, showing from three to eight works each time, right up until he departed Ireland’s earthly paradise.

Among his many portraits, McKelvey also created 13 large-scale portrait drawings of American Presidents with Ulster lineage, which were presented to the Belfast Museum & Art Gallery in 1931.

His work can be seen in the Royal Collection at The Hague and in many places in Ireland, including the Crawford Gallery, Cork; Queen's University, Belfast; the Ulster Museum and the Masonic Hall in Dublin. In London the National Maritime Museum houses one of his paintings depicting an Aran Island currach (wooden-framed Irish boat stretched with animal hides).

McKelvey had just turned 79 when he died on June 30, 1974 in his native Belfast, after a lifetime of painting views of the towns and surrounding countryside he knew so well. Like many gifted oil painters, he didn’t have to travel very far to get where he was meant to go.


 

Frank McKelvey, Children on the Shore, Oil on Board, 15 by 20 in., Private Collection

Frank McKelvey, A Summer's Day, Oil on Board, 15 by 20 in., Private Collection

Brushstrokes

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Léon Delafosse, 1895, Oil on canvas, 39 3/4 by 23 7/16 in.,  Seattle Art Museum

Sidney E. Dickinson (1890-1980), Gentleman in a Brown Overcoat, Oil on Canvas

Sidney E. Dickinson (1890-1980), Portrait of Paul P. Juley, Oil on Canvas

The trouble with traditional figurative painting today is that most painters take their own photographs of their paintings.  It is cheap and easy to do, what with all the digital imaging gadgets now available.

But painters aren’t skilled enough photographers to eliminate the glare caused by obvious brushstrokes in their work.  Only a professional photographer can get rid of that glare perfectly, and who wants to pay big money to a pro when digital photography is so quick and easy, and pretty darn good at getting a fair representation of the color and values of the original work.

So to get around this glare problem, today’s painters just eliminate all obvious brushstrokes in their work. Backgrounds and figures are painted uniformly flat, often with a thin layer of paint barely staining their canvases or panels. 

Problem solved.  Photographs are glare-free.  Masterpieces are denied.  You can’t paint a masterpiece without obvious brushwork.   Brushstrokes equal passion and passion equals masterpieces.  That’s all there is to it.  And as has often been said, oil painting is really sculpture in low relief.

What about Bouguereau and his academic friends, what about Vermeer, what about all those other painters who created flawless surfaces in the old days with no obvious brushstrokes?  Well, just look closely at the surfaces of their paintings.  Those painters learned at an early age how to draw and paint simultaneously with a fully loaded brush.  They knew how to handle paint – how to build up form, how to use it transparently when necessary..  Today’s painters get a much later start on learning traditional painting techniques and never really connect with their medium in the same way.

  

Anybody can paint in very thin layers with a careful preliminary drawing to achieve photo-like copies of their subjects on canvas if they have the patience to work long hours on each painting.  The digital images of those paintings look great on a computer screen, but lifeless in person.  A substantial layer of oil paint is essential to bringing a canvas to life.  That’s all there is to it!  It’s the paint itself that is the life force.  How thick or how thin that paint layer has to be is up to the individual painter.  But it has to be more than a mere watercolor-like stain on the canvas.  Of course, most people who buy art don’t know the difference, so I suppose knowing how to really push the paint around is not worth a whole lot anymore.

I got to thinking about the subject of brushstrokes the other day when I saw the Sargent exhibit at the Met.  Another great show full of masterpieces that were obviously painted with great passion, because when you looked at any one of them in raking light you could sometimes barely see the image because of all the reflections on the surface of the paintings.

I had to laugh then at my own conflicted views on brushstrokes because only a day or so before, I was closely inspecting in raking light the background of a painting I was working on.  The prestretched canvas was only primed with two coats of acrylic gesso.  I was so annoyed because every little nub of the cheap cotton canvas was reflecting light.  So I mixed up a liquid batch of the background color and sludged it on wet in wet and then used a wide flat brush to smooth out the heavy layer of paint to eliminate any glare.  I got rid of most of the reflections.  What a disaster for the painting, though. 

It was my own fault for not giving the surface a couple more coats of acrylic gesso.  The old painters had the advantage of working on prestretched canvases primed with a lead ground by canvas preparers who did all that work for the artists in those days.  Think Sargent ever stretched and primed his own canvases?  Maybe early on, but certainly not later in life.

Sargent didn’t give a damn about glare!  He never had to photograph his own work!  What did he care about raking light creating glare on obvious brushstrokes?  All that mattered to him was getting a feeling of real life on canvas from his vantage point.  And that’s what he always did, whether you like the way he painted or not.  That’s because this shy man, who couldn’t speak in public and who didn’t like to teach painting because nobody listened to his advice anyway, was finally able to let loose with unbridled passion when he was painting.

My old friend Albert H. Wasserman and I were talking about brushstrokes the day after I saw the Sargent show.  Al is 94 years old, but still teaches two art classes a week, draws and paints a couple of days a week with members of The Art Students League and exhibits paintings at the Salmagundi Club and Allied Artists of America.

Al was a very good friend of Sidney Dickinson (1890-1980), a highly acclaimed mid-20^th Century portrait painter who worked in a style that was obviously inspired by Sargent’s brush work.  Dickinson taught at the League and Al subbed for him occasionally in the 1950s.

“Sidney’s paintings were so thick with brushstrokes that you couldn’t photograph them,” Al said. 

Arthur Brown, a guy who studied with Dickinson at the end of Sidney’s teaching career told me of the time Dickinson returned to his evening class after a few beers at Carneys, the Irish pub around the corner, and proceeded to demonstrate how to put a highlight on the forehead of Arthur’s portrait.painting.  With a big brush, Dickinson scooped up a load of white paint and slapped it on the canvas.  Nothing.  He tried it a couple more times.  Nothing.  By the time he finished, the highlight was drooping like a melting ice cream cone from the canvas.

So when Dickinson had to get his paintings photographed, Al said Sidney did what just about every other famous American painter of the time did – he took his paintings to Peter A. Juley and let him photograph them.

Al also went to Juley on occasion and tells an amazing story of how Juley managed to eliminate all glare from a painting’s surface in the black and white photographs he took.

Al said Juley took off his shoes, kept the lens of his Linhof large format camera open, and with a black velvet cloth in his hands he walked in stocking feet slowly from side to side of the painting, shadowing any glare he saw coming off the surface of the painting.   Now I don’t know how that could work, but it did.  And the world of art owes Juley and his son an enormous debt for figuring out a way to get flawless images of paintings and portraits of America’s greatest artists for almost 80 years.  He got rid of the brushstrokes for them.

The Peter A. Juley & Son Collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.,  holds 127,000 photographic black-and-white negatives documenting the work of 11,000 American artists. The firm served artists, galleries, museums, schools, and private collectors from 1896 to 1975. The Juley collection also contains 3,500 portraits of artists, including formal poses as well as candid shots that depict artists working in their studios, teaching classes, and serving as jurors for exhibitions.

So take it from Sargent.  Paint with passion and don’t worry about glare from obvious brushstrokes.  You’ll thank him for it.

On Depression and Sir William Orpen

Sir William Orpen (1878–1931), Self-Portrait, Leading the Life in the West, ca. 1910, Oil on Canvas,  40 1/8 by 33 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art 

William Orpen, Self-Portrait with Sowing New Seed, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 48 3/8 by 35 3/8 in., St. Louis (Missouri)  Art Museum

 

 

Portrait Photographs, National Portrait Gallery, London

William Orpen Sketches: Pleading with Sargent, Slugged by Yvonne Aubicq, Army Examination, Suffering from Blood Poisoning

William Orpen, Mrs.Evelyn St. George, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 85 by 47 in., Private Collection

James Sinton Sleator (1885–1950), Portrait of Sir William Orpen, 1916, Oil on Canvas, 38.11 by 36.14  in., Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland

Fats Waller (1904-1943), www.morethings.com

I read a story some years ago in a New York tabloid about a little kid from South Africa who was afflicted with progeria, that rare genetic disorder where kids age prematurely and die young.  At the age of 10, the poor kids who suffer from this disorder have stunted growth, look like 70 and really stand out in a crowd.  At the end of this article, the kid asks his mother why he looks so different from all the other kids.  His mother tries to comfort him by telling him that he is “special.”  But the little kid replies, “It’s not nice to be the only one.”

I cried my eyes out when I read that story, mostly for the little kid’s misery, but also for myself a little bit, too.  I’ve always felt that I was the only one in the crowd who was different.  Most introverts feel that way, I suppose.  But because your state of mind and corporeal identity are what matter most to you, everything is relative, and it’s hard to erase that feeling of being one of a kind and all alone in this world.

I developed a sense of deep melancholy early on that has lasted all my life.  I often think I should just throw myself in front of an oncoming subway train or bus, jump in the Hudson River, or turn on the gas jets some night – the usual things, I’m not very creative.

 

My preferred rite of departure would be to just lie down in a snow bank and go to sleep, like Per Hansa in Ole Rolvaag’s “Giants in the Earth,” a dismal novel about Norwegian pioneers in the Dakota Territory.  One winter Per goes to find help for his family, gets caught in a blizzard and freezes to death.  But New York City is not in prairie country and very seldom gets blizzards or snowstorms.  When it does, the snow banks don’t last long enough to serve as a proper burial ground.  Per’s lasted until the spring thaw.

I can’t seem to convince my tribe’s medicine men to certify me and load me down with happy pills to alleviate my transitory bouts of depression. And I always erase my darkest thoughts with the chilling introspection that I’ll die soon enough anyway.

I made it through grade school and high school without experiencing too many horribly embarrassing moments.  And those were usually the result of my own foolishness, an incurable disease if ever there was one.  There always seemed to be one or two other kids who were easier targets for the class jokers.  Besides, the wiseguys and practical jokers were quite scarce in my little farming community on the prairie in the middle of nowhere corn country.  Most of my classmates were farm kids who worked too hard to waste time figuring out how to humiliate each other.  Of course, you can’t avoid hearing things people say about you that sting a lot more than sticks and stones.  Are you listening up there, Ma?  And then in college and the army you really get to see yourself as others see you, and you are too mortified to seek a second opinion.  But life goes on and you find ways to cope with your neuroses, at least if you aren’t really as crazy as you think you are. Now I know that depression can be devastating and is no laughing matter for a lot of people, but that’s what works for me.

In my early 30s, I left the real world behind to study drawing and painting in an art school.  All of a sudden I was surrounded by lots of other people who seemed to be like me in many ways, perhaps also harboring some secret hurt that prevented us from living the “American Dream” in the suburbs, with a wife and kids, a two-car garage, a good-paying job, seasonal sightseeing vacations, skiing trips in the winter and barbecues on the backyard patio in the summer to break the monotony.  Isn’t that how it goes?

All of a sudden I had finally found something to occupy my time that was so much more important than spending years on an analyst’s couch trying to pump up my self-esteem. All of a sudden I was having downright fun for the first time in my life.  Thoughts of leading a normal life like most other people no longer consumed me.  Of course I have no idea how other people really live.  But I’ve heard rumors.

Painting religiously turned out to be the best therapy for all those times I was made to feel miserable by certain comments delivered by mean or insensitive people or by having to fulfill all those cringe-provoking social obligations along the way that I wasn’t clever enough to avoid, like Junior and Senior Prom Nights.  And that Sadie Hawkins Day dance.  Lord have mercy!

The great Irish painter William Orpen, whose God-given talent for capturing likenesses earned him a fortune, knew something about depression.  And like me, he was the youngest of four sons.  That’s not the most enviable rung on the family ladder, in my long-held and well-considered opinion.

Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, KBE, RA, RHA (27 November 1878 – 29 September 1931) was born in Stillorgan, County Dublin into an affluent Protestant family.  His father was a lawyer who wanted his youngest son to study law and enter the family firm.  But Sir William had a talent for drawing and his mother supported his desire to go to art school.  And mother always knows best, doesn’t she?

Orpen was small in stature, just over 5 feet tall, and self-conscious about his appearance his entire life.  He had a very miserable childhood, by his own account.

In a 1924 memoir, Orpen writes, “My general appearance, and especially my face, have always been a source of depression to me, even from my early days.  I remember once, by mistake, overhearing a conversation between my father and mother about my looks – why was it I was so ugly and the rest of the children so good looking … I remember creeping away and worrying a lot about the matter.  I began to think I was a black spot on the earth and when I met people on the country roads I always used to cross to the other side.”

Despite overhearing this devastating conversation, which precipitated his lifelong depression, Orpen is said to have doted on his mother until she passed away in 1912, leaving him disconsolate for a time. 

The art world of the early 20th Century didn’t care about Orpen’s depression.  It cared about his art.  He won all the honors and all the accolades and attracted all the cash anybody would ever want.  One reviewer called him “the last of the great society painters.”  By the start of World War One, Orpen was the most famous and commercially successful artist working in Britain.  John Singer Sargent, who was easing out of the portrait business at the time, promoted Orpen’s work, which was more daring than that of his rivals.  He often lit his figures from two sides, giving his portraits a luminous quality and a dramatic, almost cinematic look that is highly effective.  But it’s not a technique that is easy to master, as I have discovered.  It’s hard enough to paint a decent portrait using just one light source.

Orpen married Grace Knewstub in 1901, and the couple had three daughters. But it was an unhappy marriage, and despite his  self-loathing, Orpen was a determined heterosexual who manfully entered into affairs with many women, sometimes more than one at a time. The British website “Articles and Texticles” provides a pretty thorough account of Orpen’s intimate relationships.  He had affairs with many of his models. He kept a French mistress, the beautiful, feisty Yvonne Aubicq, an affair that provided enough plotlines for a novel.  Most importantly for his career, he had a celebrated affair with Mrs. Evelyn St George, the London-based eldest daughter of George F. Baker, a filthy rich American banker.

Eight years older than Orpen, Mrs. St George had grown tired of her husband and is said to have had numerous extramarital flings.  The humorous turn of phrase, “No sex please, we’re British,” hardly applied to these two.  (Yes, I know, one was Irish and the other American, but they were in London at the time.  Give me a break once in awhile.)  When the diminutive Orpen and Mrs. St George, who was over 6 feet tall, appeared in public, as they frequently did, they became known as “Jack and the beanstalk.”  They had a “lively and adventurous love affair,” according to one Irish newspaper account.  And Orpen was the father of Mrs. St. George’s youngest child, Vivien.

“Evelyn St George was undoubtedly the most important person in William Orpen's life,” wrote a reviewer in Dublin’s Irish Independent in 2001.  “She gave him happiness and she gave him love. She inspired him as an artist. She told him what a great painter should do, what sort of pictures he should paint, how he should view the world and how he should address it.”

Orpen’s frenzied extramarital activities were probably great fun at the time, but depression and all the sex destroyed him.  He became an alcoholic and died a lingering death from syphilis in 1931 at the age of 53, thus depriving the art world of maybe 20 more years of his dazzling portraiture.

At the outset of this disease it wasn’t given its name.  A doctor who examined him during his years as a WWI artist concluded that Orpen was suffering from “blood poisoning,” after other health workers had attributed his severe bouts of itching first to lice infestation and then to scabies.  He candidly describes suffering recurring bouts of this “blood poisoning” during the war years in “An Onlooker in France 1917-1919.”  This fascinating personal account of his painting activities and life during the war, with many black and white reproductions of his artwork, is available for reading online or downloading.  After the war, Orpen continued to paint outstanding commissioned portraits before falling ill and finally dying from this awful disease.

In a review of the exhibit, William Orpen, Sex, Politics and Death, at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2005,  Berendina “Bunny” Smedley writes, “…it seems fair to say that compared with politics and death, sex was a topic that appealed to Orpen. Probably he discovered it early at art school, and then effectively forgot it again in his grim last years, when, as syphilis took its toll, his relationships both with his wife and mistresses fell badly apart. Sex was there, often, in his pictures, sometimes very evidently so.

“Not for Orpen the icy academic nude, the female form as an exercise in mass and contour, [an] ironic art-historical allusion. Orpen really did love women, not as abstractions, either, but for all their physicality and flaws. And if it’s true, as suggested earlier, that his paintings of men were often better than his paintings of women, the reason may lie less in misogyny and objectivisation than in tact, kindness and the hope of an earthly reward for his efforts.

“There are paintings here that read like love-letters, albeit those of the most delightfully flippant, non-serious sort and they form one of the most attractive aspects of Orpen’s oeuvre.” 

What a brilliant and incredibly perceptive analysis of Orpen’s love for women and his paintings of them – whether depicted in the nude, in a washerwoman’s clothes, in a nun’s habit worn by his French mistress, or in the elegant, floor-length gowns worn by the tall, beautiful women he adored and chased after.  As Smedley described far more eloquently than I can, Orpen’s paintings are not flawless academic renderings or empty society portraits.  They are simply mesmerizing images of the opposite sex – nothing less and a whole lot more.

“It is my business in life to study faces,” Orpen once said.  “It is also my lot in doing my job to get to know automatically what is in the mind that is behind the face, and I do not hesitate to say that there is no such thing as real beauty of face without beauty of mind. And there is a lot of both kinds of beauty today.”

For someone as disgusted with his own appearance as he claimed to be, Orpen painted a surprising number of self-portraits in oil on canvas and drew countless cartoon images of himself on letters to his friends.  They were all exaggerations of his physical appearance and often savage caricatures.

Painting was Orpen’s salvation, women his fatal attraction and alcohol his escape mechanism. The excellent Irish painter Sean Keating, a friend and former studio assistant to Orpen, called him a "two bottles of whisky a day man"

In the midst of composing this blog post, I watched a YouTube video called “Fats Waller, the Very Best,” uploaded by a poster named Ugaccio.  Near the end of the video, Fats is on camera singing his big hit “Ain’t Misbehavin’ when an unidentified male voice comes on to speak about him.  The unseen commentator concludes with words that could just as easily have described Sir William Orpen:  “He lived in a fast lane…He dissipated a lot, drank a lot…Takes a toll after awhile…People with a whole lot of talent don’t usually live very long.  They’re here, they do their thing and get outta here.”

I don’t know if Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller was depressed.  I think he was too active for introspection during his brief life.  But he was a large man, with a very distinctive appearance.  He had a massive head, a massive girth and a massive appetite.  He was 6 ft. tall and weighed in at nearly 300 pounds.  He died of pneumonia in 1943 at the age of 39.  Sir William Orpen, called “Orps” by his friends, was an undersized man, very scrawny in his younger days.  He outlasted Fats by 13 years on this earthly paradise before leaving his noteworthy legacy to the world.

Hearth and home and the simple pleasures of life enjoyed by most so-called normal people were not meant for these two supremely talented artists.  They were too “special” for any of that humdrum sort of stuff.

Balance, Light and Harmony with Theo

Theo van Rysselberghe, (1862-1926), Self Portrait, 1924, Oil on Canvas, 45.4 by 30.25 in., Private collection 

Theo, Portrait of Alice Sethe, 1888, Oil on Canvas, 194 by 96.5 in., Musée partemental du Prieuré, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

Theo, Madame Von Bodenhausen with her daughter Luli, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 46 by 37 1/8 in., Private Collection

Theo, Jeune femme en robe verte (Germaine Maréchal), Oil on Canvas, 32 1/8 by 23 7/8 in., 1893, Private Collection

Theo, La Vallee de la Sambre, 1890, Oil on Canvas, 21 1/8 by 26 1/4 in., Private Collection

Theo, Emile Verhaeren, 1915, Oil on Canvas, 30.3 by 36.2

in., Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Theo, Emile Verhaeren Writing, 1915, Oil on Canvas, 35.8 by 40 in., Private Collection

Theo, Standing Nude, 1919, Oil on Canvas , 39.4 by 25.8 in., Private Collection

Theo, Study of Female Nude

Etude de femme nue, 1913
Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 100 cm
Musée d'Orsay - See more at: http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/artists/Artists/pqrs/Rysselberghe/07-14.html#sthash.Ld4fZKFS.dpuf

, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 25.8 by 39.4 in., Musee d"Orsay

Theo, Swimmer Resting, 1922, Oil on Canvas, 36.2 by 43.7 in., Private Collection

Theo, A Reading in the Garden, 1902

: Theo,  Paul Signac (at the helm of the Olympia), 1896, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Theo, Still Life with Khaki, Roses and Mimosas, Oil on Canvas, 1911

I had already saved to my trusty laptop computer a few additional images of paintings created by Theo van Rysselberghe while researching my previous blog post, so why not give this outstanding Belgian Neo-Impressionist a little more air time, says I to myself. He painted so many beautiful pictures. His paintings usually display an exquisite harmony of soft, understated color. His subjects are usually bathed in a soothing light. And his drawing and design skills were exceptional. It seems as though he never made a bad painting.

So many great paintings of his are recorded on the Internet that it’s hard to stop when you start downloading. Let’s say you admire Theo’s very entertaining and beautifully crafted painting of his friend, the Belgian Symbolist poet and writer Emile Verhaeren, showing him with his head buried in his work, his superbly drawn hands artfully posed to characterize the task of writing. The design of the canvas is a masterpiece of balance, with related elements strategically placed to take the viewer on a casual cruise around the laboring poet’s domain. Then you follow another link and up pops a full-blown portrait of the striking Verhaeren at the same desk, now with his head out of the water. This one begs for attention as well. What a dilemma van Rysselberghe poses for the lover of fine painting. Rev up your search engines and see for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

Théo (Théophile) van Rysselberghe (1862-1926) worked expertly and comfortably in all genres and in several styles within the broad rubric of Realism, beginning with classical or academic work at the age of 18, moving on to Neo-Impressionism, then to Pointillism, the approach that earned him his lasting reputation in the world of art, and finally back to working realistically in an Impressionist manner.

Van Rysselberghe was born into an upper middle class family of architects in Ghent. He studied art at the Academy of Ghent and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In his formative Realist years, he spent four months in Morocco in 1882 to paint scenes from that exotic Orientalist culture. Between 1882 and 1888 he made three painting trips to Morocco. The public loved his Moroccan paintings.

In September 1883, van Rysselberghe went to Haarlem to study the light in the works of Frans Hals. “The accurate rendering of light would continue to occupy his mind” all his life, wrote an online biographer. By way of illustration, in 1918 he painted a picture of blossoming almond trees over a period of 15 consecutive days, returning to the scene at the same time each day to get the impression of light and atmosphere as close to nature as he could. The painting, Amandiers, à contre-jour (backlighting), was sold at auction by Bonhams on Feb. 4, 2014. While no doubt a fabulous painting viewed in person, its image doesn’t look great on my computer screen so I didn’t download it. Bonhams wrote that the painting of almond tree blossoms in the small village of Saint-Clair in southeastern France “proved to be the perfect setting, with the dappled sunlight filtering through the delicate blooms, to demonstrate his enduring interest in rendering light and colour.”

For some reason, van Rysselberghe had to write to Madame Lucien Pissarro to ask for permission to paint those almond trees. Maybe it was her property? It would be interesting to know why, but I’m way over budget already on this blog post. Van Rysselberghe wrote, “'I hope you would not withhold against me... if I ask for the permission to go to Saint-Clair around three o'clock, in order to have a session with my almond trees, which are finally blossoming, and for which I cannot bare to lose a day where the effect will not be more or less the same.”' The letter is quoted in Ronald Feltkamp’s 2003 catalogue raisonne on the artist.

Some 30 years before he painted those almond blossoms, the young van Rysselberghe became fascinated by the newest tendencies in European art and embraced the theories of the Neo-Impressionists. He fell under the spell of Pointillism when he saw Georges Seurat's large-scale work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886), at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886.

After meeting and becoming friends with Seurat, Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, van Rysselberghe began to put those small dots of color on his own canvases. Van Rysselberghe was a better painter than the other Pointillists and a terrific portrait artist as well, which seems impossible using such disciplined brushwork. He remained faithful to his own realistic interpretation of nature through all his stylistic adventures, gradually abandoning the Pointillist technique after Seurat’s death in 1891. Despite their friendship, Signac often criticized him, thinking that Theo was only interested in commercial success when he began adapting the broadened brushstrokes of Impressionism, ostensibly to appeal to a greater public.

Theo had fully embraced Pointillism by 1889, according to his biographers. But a year earlier, at the age of 26, he painted one of the most remarkable paintings ever, a 16-foot-tall portrait of a model, using nothing but small dots of color to complete the work. I couldn’t believe the size of this painting when I asked my Internet confidant to convert centimeters to inches. I had to double-check the online conversion to see if it was correct. What a time-consuming task that must have been! I mean creating the painting, of course, not the conversion from centimeters to inches, although I was put out to have to interrupt my research to consult with my steadfast online confidant a second time.

This giant portrait of Alice Sèthe, in blue and gold, became the turning point in van Rysselberghe’s life. He went on to create scads of normal-sized portraits, figures, landscapes and still lifes in the Pointillist technique. Among his portraits were several of his wife, Marie Monnom, whom he had married in 1889, and many of their daughter Elisabeth. The Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff painted a famous portrait of Marie in 1887 that is now in the Musee d’Orsay. She was the daughter of an avant-garde Belgian publisher, Veuve Monnom (the Widow Monnom). The Widow Monnom knew many artists and writers and is described as one of many little-known female modernists in the late 19th Century.

Around the time of his marriage to Marie, Theo van Rysselberghe had a meeting with Theo Van Gogh in Paris, which led to Vincent Van Gogh’s sale of The Red Vineyard to the Belgian painter Anna Boch from an exhibition in Brussels, the only confirmed sale of one of Vincent’s paintings during his lifetime. Anna Boch participated in the Neo-Impressionist movement and was influenced by van Rysselberghe. Boch held one of the most important collections of Impressionist paintings of its time and promoted many young artists, including van Gogh, whom she admired for his talent and who was a friend of her brother Eugène Boch. Her collection was sold after her death with the stipulation that the money be used to pay for the retirement of her poor artist friends. What a lovely gesture and what a good heart she must have had. Van Rysselberghe painted an excellent three-quarter-length standing portrait of her in 1893 that is now in the Michele & Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts.

After abandoning Pointillism, from about 1910 on, van Rysselberghe worked in an Impressionist manner directly from nature.  He experimented occasionally with more vibrant color combinations in some of his paintings. He also added the painting of nude female models to his dessert menu – a pleasant diversion for many celebrated male artists of yore in their mature years. And why not? Nothing is more thrilling than capturing the essence of youthful flesh on canvas, which he accomplished to perfection.

When his Pointillist years were nearing their end, Theo took a bike tour of the Mediterranean coast between Hyères and Monaco with his friend Henri Cross. Theo found an interesting spot in Saint-Clair, where his brother, the architect Octave van Rysselberghe, and Cross already resided. Octave built a residence for him there in 1911 and Theo retired to the Côte d'Azur and became more and more detached from the Brussels art scene. He died in Saint-Clair on December 14, 1926 and was buried in the cemetery of nearby Lavandou, next to the grave of Henri Cross.

Many of Van Rysselberghe’s paintings that were so enthusiastically acquired by private collectors in his lifetime have ended up on the auction block, including one of the first paintings of his that won my heart, his enchanting portrait of Madame Von Bodenhausen with her daughter Luli, which he painted in 1910. One of Madame’s children was cut out of this portrait for some reason that eluded me in my Internet research. Sotheby’s writes that Luli grew up to be a great beauty and star, using the stage name Luli Deste after she moved to Hollywood. She starred in a number of movies, including Thunder in the City with Edward G. Robinson in 1937. I haven’t seen the movie. I’m sure Sotheby’s is right and I have no desire to look further into Luli’s Hollywood career. Painting pictures is more than enough cinema for me these days. At any rate, this gorgeous painting of mother and child sold at Sotheby's London on Feb. 4 of this year for a mere $28,436, after failing to sell at a previous auction.

Meanwhile van Rysselberghe’s Pointillist portrait of a rather glum-looking Germaine Maréchal, titled Jeune femme en Robe Verte, which he painted in 1893, had sold for $1,223,108 just five years earlier, on Feb. 2, 2010 at Christie’s London. Did Theo’s stock decline so rapidly in the art world in just five years? Or did Christie’s simply have a better salesman on the case? Maybe it’s because the portrait of Germaine is such a perfect example of his Pointillist phase. Maybe it’s because one of Madame’s children was lopped off in that portrait. As usual, I’m clueless. It’s easy to put a price on a painting, but it’s impossible to know for certain what it's worth in the marketplace.  I know that for certain.

Theo and Marguerite

Theo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926), Marguerite van Mons (1876-1919), 1886, Oil on Canvas, 35.2 by 27.8 in., Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium

Marguerite van Mons, Detail

Camille van Mons, 1886, Oil on Canvas, 35 by 27.5 in., Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover, Germany

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a place and at a time when you could concentrate all your efforts on painting a memorable picture full of pure and transcendent human emotion without worrying about achieving photographic “accuracy” from the get-go? Such a place was Brussels, Belgium.  The year was 1886.  The month was June.

That’s where and that’s when the brilliantly gifted Belgian painter Theo van Rysselberghe, only 23 years old at the time, painted his remarkable portrait of Marguerite van Mons, who was 10 years old when she stood for the artist at her home in front of a huge double door painted a lovely pastel blue and embellished with gilt moldings.

Marguerite is dressed simply in the type of long-sleeved black costume that would be a delight to paint. It’s quite thrilling, actually, when you finally get to the point in your painting when you are ready to boldly accent all that black with a deeper shade of black, as with the wide belt in this case.  The only other accent is the silver bracelet gleaming on her wrist as she grasps the handle of the door –a fascinating idea for a pose.  Had she expressed a normal child’s desire not to be painted at all and therefore was depicted by the artist as someone anxious to leave? 

The gilt ornamentation on the door is painted exquisitely by the young painter, with enough detail to be convincing, but not too much to detract from his sensitive portrayal of the elfin Marguerite.  Theo’s treatment of Marguerite’s expressive face, with that slightly open mouth and dreamy, thought-provoking gaze, can seem so incomplete to all contemporary painters who choose to rattle the chains of photographic realism.  But it’s perfect.  

Conveying human emotion on canvas goes far beyond the known world of technical rendering to an uncharted realm of deep concentration shared by the painter and the sitter for only a few brief hours.  But the resulting portrait has the potential to carry on this fleeting encounter through the ages -- a testament to life eternal.  Painting is truly a gift from heaven.

Theo also painted a superb portrait of Marguerite’s older sister, Camille, although he placed her in a conventional pose and created a naturalistic portrait.  The result is far less intriguing.  For whatever reason, Marguerite’s personality and demeanor must have suggested a more daring and provocative treatment for her portrait. Theo dedicated his captivating portrait of Marguerite to Emile van Mons, the father of the two girls.  Van Mons, a lawyer and renowned patron of the arts, was a good friend of the precocious painter. 

Now let’s take a minute to discuss Marguerite’s extended arm.  I can just imagine a less sophisticated parent loudly complain, “But, monsieur, you have made the arm far too long!”  Because the portrait in toto is so mesmerizing, this is not something that the average person would even notice, unless you stare at it like an idiot and try to take measurements off the computer screen to see if it is indeed so.  Who would do a dumb thing like that, I wonder.  And after reconsidering my review of this painting in the cool light of the morning after, I am beginning to see several little "imperfections" in the portrait of Marguerite -- the kind of petty details involving measuring that drive me crazy in my own work.  Painters of the past often got by with anatomical murder to produce their masterpieces.  Try it today and they will shoot you at sunrise.

A fascistic demand for photographic “accuracy” permeates the traditional art world today, dear friends, and that’s the main reason nobody paints a really memorable portrait anymore.  You can’t make the arm too long or give summary treatment to the likeness these days.  And if you realize you have done so in moments of passionate painting and are compelled to correct your "mistakes," you can kiss your masterpiece goodbye!

But what’s that you say, “That was then and this is now?”  Of course, you’re right.  I was being judgmental again.  I apologize.