Please Sir, May I Have Some More Photographs?

Painters used to be ashamed to use photographs in their work and tried hard to hide the evidence.  An old painter I knew told me he went with the rest of the Frank Reilly illustration class one day to pay a call on a former student now working as an illustrator.  When they rang the studio doorbell, the illustrator yelled out, “Just a minute,” and they could hear the commotion inside as the illustrator quickly hid his Balopticon and other photographic paraphernalia before opening the door.  The idea was that if you had mastered drawing, color and composition, you didn’t need an opaque projector to trace an image from a drawing or a photograph onto your canvas.  Those days are long gone.

There’s a very entertaining website called, “Artist and Studio,” where the guy in charge posts two or three new images every day of artists and their work, their studio environments and their models.  The archival photographs of artists and their studios are particularly interesting, although there do seem to be more images posted of Frida Kahlo than are seemly.  But what I can’t help noticing is that all the contemporary figurative work posted on this site is photographic in nature.  Just look at the hands they paint.  No painter in the history of painting was great at painting the knuckles on every finger.  So they didn’t.  Besides, they understood the obvious, that knuckles aren’t the most attractive part of the human anatomy, and add very little to the overall beauty of the painting.  A few masterful portrait painters, like Sir William Orpen, could draw everything so well that they accepted the challenge of painting hands, with knuckles and veins, and won.   That was yesterday, though, when painters could draw and paint quickly and accurately from life.  Today if you want to paint hands, you normally take a photograph.  Knuckles are no problem for a camera.  Do you think today’s young kids can draw and paint hands better than Sargent or Orpen?  No way.  But they seem to take great delight in copying every knuckle on every finger as recorded by the camera.  

Albrecht Durer’s famous pen and ink drawing of praying hands is about all you get of any note from the Old Masters.  And you can bet that he had a hard time drawing them so accurately from life.  

Beyond the knuckles, however, if the painting looks like a high-resolution photograph then it was copied from a photograph.  But it’s getting harder to tell now, because so many realist painters are painting pictures from life with all the accurate, trivial detail that only a camera wants to record, without establishing a strong focal point, and ignoring painterly concerns such as the atmospheric effect on values, color and spatial relationships.

So it’s impossible to write about contemporary realist painting without mentioning how much it has been influenced by photography, consciously or not.  Here’s the basic timeline from the 19^th Century on.

Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929)

Horses at the Water Trough, 1884

Degas Photograph and Painting, “After the Bath”

Oil on Canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art

First we have oil painters using photographs as mere reference to help them with some details they can’t paint from life, to paint posthumous portraits or to experiment with them just for their novelty.   Dagnan-Bouveret and Degas are often cited here, although  many other famous artists used them on rare occasions.  Even bravura painters like Sorolla are thought to have used photos in their work, but its been hard to pin the tail on their donkey.

Walter Sickert (1860-1942), Queen Victoria and

her Great Grandson, 1936

Then we have artists copying or freely interpreting photographs from newspapers or magazines for their “original art.”  Walter Sickert (1860-1942) is often cited here.  Sickert was an eccentric, cosmopolitan artist who influenced many 20th Century modernists with his varied non-traditional painting methods, including the use of grids on canvas to quickly work interpretively from drawings, prints and photographs.  Early on in his career he was a good friend of both Whistler and Degas, taking the latter's advice to work in the studio and avoid "the tyranny of nature."  He had a more than casual interest in the dark side of human behavior, so much so that in 2002, Patricia Cornwell, a crime novelist, identified him as Jack the Ripper in her book, "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed."  Her theory was good for a laugh at the time.

John Howard Sanden, President George W. Bush, 2012,
 The White House

Then we have oil painters copying photographs to create paintings such as official portraits, because the subjects can’t be bothered with the boring business of sitting (or standing) for the many hours necessary to do the job from life; and wildlife paintings, because it’s hard to get a duck in flight to hold the pose.  Any contemporary portrait painter or wildlife artist fits in here.  And who really knows how to draw a duck or a wildebeest well, anyway, other than Walt Disney artists.

Richard Estes, Ansonia, 1977, Whitney Museum of American Art

Then we have photo-realists using an airbrush or soft-hair brushes to copy photographs precisely, or “interpret” them ever so slightly, to make monumental paintings that look to the naked eye exactly like the photograph, down to the smooth emulsion surface.  Think Richard Estes here.

Chuck Close, “Phil,” 1969. Synthetic polymer on canvas, 108 × 84 in.

Whitney Museum of American Art

Then we have artists making photorealistic paintings of giant heads on canvas without actually copying the photograph, but by systematically applying tiny little brush marks grid by grid by grid by grid.  These marks are only revealed upon “Close” inspection.

Rackstraw Downes, "Sprowl Bros. Lumber Yard, Searsmont, ME", 1978-80
Oil on canvas, 20 7/8 x 43 3/8 in., Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Then we have artists going outdoors to copy a commonplace industrial landscape spread out in front of them, for several weeks worth of work, to create a modest-sized painting that ends up looking exactly like a photograph, until a 30-page essay is produced to prove that what you see is not, in fact, a photograph, but the illusion of a photograph with all kinds of artistic license behind the process, which makes it much more interesting than an actual photograph would have been, you see.  Think Rackstraw Downes.

Stephen Hannock, “The Oxbow: After Church, After Cole, Flooded,”

2000, Acrylic, alkyd and oil glazes with collage elements on

canvas, 96x144 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

At about the same time, we have artists using power sanders, collage elements and all sorts of reference material to create slick-surfaced monumental studio “paintings” that look exactly like giant digital photographs when hung on the requisite museum walls, but which reveal a lot of indecipherable scribbling of gibberish when you put your nose right up to them, and which are accompanied by a 30-page essay to prove that what you see was not, in fact, copied from a photograph, but was created with all kinds of serious artistic invention and hard work to give the illusion of a photograph or a movie still, you understand! That must be Stephen Hannock.

Well those are just some of the major players in the game.  Then we have thousands of other artists cheerfully working from photographs or computer images as a matter of course in all media and genres today to create “original art” in sizes that actually fit on a living room wall.  There is no shortage of photographic images to inspire creativity today, so we see plenty of paintings that have the whiff of photography or computer-generated imagery about them.

I wonder about those big photographic paintings that everybody raves about.  Is doing something really difficult and quirky on a monumental scale, with or without unusual painting tools, worth anything as a lasting work of art if the only goal is to give to it the convincing illusion of a photograph?  I certainly don’t think so.

Jeff Wall’s photograph “Men waiting,” 2006, Silver gelatine print

103 1/8 x 152 3/4 in., The Guardian, London,

© Jeff Wall / Courtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)

Besides, those giant photographic prints we now often see on museum walls look mighty impressive themselves. Working big is no longer an advantage for the representational painter.

By the way, does putting your nose near the surface of one of those massive photo-like paintings to see all the indecipherable little bits embedded there make it somehow a deeply moving emotional experience you will cherish for the rest of your life?  Would you like a reduction made of it so you can put it above your living room couch – or perhaps a little postcard as a souvenir of your visit to the museum?  I seriously doubt it.  Scale is everything for these guys.  But my opinion doesn’t matter, no it really doesn’t matter, matter, matter…because I just want to paint pretty little pictures from life, and I’m not even very good at that, in my own humble opinion, verified a thousand times over by my perspicacious ability to see how much better others have handled the same subject matter.

No, my opinion and that of a few other diehard traditionalists doesn’t matter.  The revolution has been won.  Art workers in the digital age have united.  They are determined to cast off the shackles of whimsical, intemperate Mother Nature once and for all.  Iris, hence away with the accursed, antiquated practice of wrestling with nature to paint pictures that actually look and feel like the real thing as seen through the lens of the human eye.  Such pictures tend to excite raw emotion in viewers and will not be allowed in the brave new world of high-definition, digitalized visual reality.  Let a decree go forth throughout the land that the only representational art that will be permitted is that which will look like a photograph, whether actually painted from a photograph, extracted from a fertile imagination, or created from life with no other purpose than rendering by hand an accurate snapshot of the subject, composed as if seen through a camera’s viewfinder, with no indication of nature’s depth and breadth beyond the borders of the canvas.   

I have no objection to photographs, per se.  I took some good ones myself before I started to paint 30 years ago, but I haven’t touched a drop since.  Look at it this way:  Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s (photographs and computer imagery) and render unto God that which is God’s (painting).   Maybe you don’t agree.  So all right, let’s just keep them “separate but equal.”  Don’t say I’m not willing to compromise!

How a Portrait Should Look

Glyn Warren Philpot, R.A. (1884-1937), Portrait of

 Ellen Borden Stevenson, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 in., Christie's, London

Without a doubt, this is how a commissioned oil portrait should look when painted from life.  What else can one conclude?  Just look at it.  The creamy, flawless flesh of youth is painted to perfection.  The expression is flattering, lively and lifelike, not emotionally dead as in all of today’s photographically rendered portraits that the public pays darn good money for.  The drawing is excellent and the details subordinate to the sitter’s lovely countenance.  The pale color theme is unobtrusive, soothing and exquisite.  Have you ever seen a portrait painted in the last 30 years that looked as good?  I didn’t think so. 

This portrait radiates all the bloom of life emanating from this beautiful young woman, and it is a look that no photograph could ever capture.  Where and why have we gone wrong!  Who wouldn’t want to try to paint such a lovely portrait for themselves today?  Is it simply that we lack the ability to paint this well?  Are we just not interested in capturing the emotional state of the sitter in front of us? Has the photograph rendered us incapable of appreciating natural beauty, the softness of real flesh, the curious, lively gaze of the sitter as the painter goes about his work, the mouth at its most seductive transition, the sparkle in the eye, the arched eyebrow that adds such playfulness and joy to the portrait.  What a nice painting! 

Glyn Warren Philpot, Self-Portrait

Glyn Warren Philpot, R.A. (1884-1937) was a highly accomplished, successful portrait painter in England in the 1920s and 30s who had studied painting at the Lambeth School of Art in London and at the Academie Julian in Paris under J.P. Laurens.  After travels to Spain, his portrait work reflected his love for the paintings of Velázquez.  In notes for the auction of this portrait in London on July 11, a Christie’s specialist writes, “Faced with the young American girl, Ellen Borden, clad in pale lemon trimmed with gauze, it was not surprising to find Philpot producing a modern 'infanta'.”   Philpot’s contemporaries considered him to be a masterful craftsman.  And critics celebrated his exceptional ability to capture the sitter’s personality, particularly in his informal portraiture.  This more formal portrait of Ellen Borden surely must have confirmed that attribute of his work.  Philpot also painted genre studies and religious, mythological and allegorical subjects, and was a sculptor, as well.   Apparently some of his later work was too sexually explicit for the public and he suffered financially as a result.

In Harold Speed’s outstanding 1924 treatise on the “science and practice” of oil painting, now titled “Oil Painting Techniques and Materials,” he lists some palettes of contemporary English painters, and here is the list of colors obtained from Philpot, right to left, with colors used occasionally in Italics: Light red, Indian red, Vermillion, White, Yellow ochre, Raw umber, Burnt umber, Ivory black, Cerulean blue, Cobalt, Terra vert, Burnt sienna.  He used copal varnish thinned with turpentine for his medium and for glazes.  And just to show how serious I am about this technical stuff, I even looked up the definition of “ultramarine ash,” which Philpot sometimes used for delicate grays.  Here is the 1913 definition, brought to you courtesy of the Internet: “Ultramarine ash is a pigment which is the residuum of lapis lazuli after the ultramarine has been extracted.  It was used by the old masters as a middle or neutral tint for flesh, skies, and draperies, being of a purer and tenderer gray than that produced by the mixture of more positive colors.”  But you probably already knew this.  Sounds something like Gamblin’s Torrit Grey, made of recycled pigment dust, although I’m sure nobody uses that color for anything other than to enter a painting in the manufacturer’s annual Torrit Grey competition!

Philpot’s list of colors won’t help us paint better, of course.  But can’t we try to connect emotionally with each subject, as he must have done, and not strive so hard to get a frozen, photographic likeness in our portrait work?  Shouldn’t we strive to let our sitters be recognized on canvas as the distinct, living and breathing individuals they are, rather than as exact replicas of a photograph?   But maybe we’re not so interested anymore in rendering soft, tender flesh in all its natural beauty.  We’re being taught to prefer the glossy, plastic flesh of dinosaurs, aliens, action heroes and supermodels nowadays. 

Figurative painters working from life in a traditional manner know that the sitter and the painter are in this together, and painting skill only takes you halfway up the mountain to a heavenly portrait like this one of Ellen Borden (1908-1972).  The daughter of a prominent Chicago family made wealthy through real estate investments and mining operations, she was educated at finishing schools and studied independently in England and Italy.  She was an excellent pianist and trained as a mezzo-soprano.  Her portrait was painted before she married a young lawyer named Adlai Stevenson in 1928, when she had not yet turned 20.  She divorced him in 1949.  Their marriage became strained as Stevenson rose within the ranks of the Democratic Party, culminating in his two unsuccessful bids for the Presidency, in 1952 and 1956.  Ellen apparently voted Republican.

Peony Hunting Season

Peonies in Bavarian Coffee Pot, 20x16

For a couple of years, beautiful peonies grown locally had been pretty much absent without leave in my neighborhood on the fashionable Upper West Side of Manhattan.  Too much frost, I’m told.  Of course, at the Korean markets you can get a common variety of peonies year round, as well as common varieties of a lot of other flowers, including sunflowers, of all things!  And the roses, ah yes, the roses -- two dozen for $10, and each bloom exactly the same shape and size.  Egad!  The peonies are no bargain -- $10 to $15 for a mere three blooms.  These flowers are grown in South America and don’t look very good when they get to New York City --  and even less so when the Koreans strip the stems of leaves and the blooms of petals that show the slightest signs of wear and tear.

This year, though, the locally grown peonies are gorgeous again!  The husband and wife team who sell bedding plants and cut flowers at the Farmer’s Market at 78^th and Columbus on Sundays are bringing in lots of the beautiful peonies I love to paint – whites and light to medium pinks in all shapes and sizes.  Each $2 stem has one big blossom and several buds, and plenty of beautiful leaves.  And they last a week or more in a vase.

Besides having extraordinary beauty, peonies are fun to paint.  They are large and lack the exacting detail of the rose, so you can freely pile the paint on with a big brush.  They are also the most exciting flower to paint because of their shape-shifting propensity.  It’s like chasing butterflies without a net when painting them.

Unlike most cut flowers, peonies look gorgeous at any stage of erosion, even when they are ready to shed their petals in a cascading snowfall of soft and tender color.  But they look their freshest at the market, so you want to make a painting initially of the four or five stems you have selected at 9 a.m., when the market opens.  You walk six blocks back to your 8^th floor apartment with the flowers and quickly choose one of your unexceptional vases, fill it with tap water from the kitchen sink, cut the stems at a diagonal and drop in your flowers.  Some stems have to be cut again to suit the arrangement. 

You put the vase on your upended model’s stand, which you now use for still life setups, since you’re not painting people much these days, select a 16x20 or 20x24 canvas and you are ready to start painting by 10 a.m.  Your palette of colors, including a couple of gray mixtures from a previous painting, was set ahead of time.  You move the stems around a little bit until you feel you have a fairly decent design, brush on a background tone with a lot of turps, and start painting wet into wet, after first wiping out the main shapes of the blossoms with a paper towel.  You have to start somewhere, so you pick the largest white bloom and start painting it – at first with a local color wash and then with thick, impulsive strokes of paint with a big flat or round bristle brush, cleaning up the edges with a smaller round or filbert brush filled with the background tone.   Now you move around as the spirit moves you to the other flowers with a thin wash of local color on each bloom before piling the paint on.

After about an hour and a half you’ve pretty much finished the flowers and have indicated the position of the stems and leaves and given shape and some local color to the vase.  But by now the blooms have opened into new and interesting shapes that look just as beautiful as before.  You see that the interior shapes of the biggest white flower are even more interesting so you slap on more paint to catch the drift, as it were.  The same goes for all the other blooms.  You work like a maniac to shovel the coal onto the canvas to capture some semblance of their beauty.  The fabled “one stroke to describe a form” is a pipe dream for you.  Oh, the tragedy!  Eventually the highly personal you gives up and takes a lunch break.  After lunch you push the paint around for another hour or two until you feel you have captured some of the look of these beautiful flowers.  The next day you work on all the other elements of the picture, hoping to complete it by the end of this second session.

Against my better judgment, but because it is the subject of this blog entry, I am forced to attach the paintings I’ve done in the last two weeks of the peonies I "bagged" on two successive Sundays – four stems each time.  I would love to have done just one decent, well-composed painting, but the impulse to paint these flowers in all their “stations of the cross,” makes that difficult for me.   So I just toss in some “usual suspects” to fill in the blank spaces on the canvas once the bouquet is painted.  Pretty boring stuff, I admit.  But time, tide and flowers wait for no man.  Anyway, I go along with the old idea that you have to paint 20 pictures to get one good one.  That’s probably not a popular notion with many of today’s high-definition realist painters who work long and hard on each creation.

No. 1, 20x16

No. 2, 24x20

No. 3, 20x16

No. 4, 20x24, First Stage

No. 4, Final, Less Exciting, More Serious

No. 5, 20x16

No. 6, 16x12, last one for now

I’ll probably paint a couple more peony paintings before the season is over, hopefully one of them will be a good one.  And then I start looking forward to locally grown zinnias and sunflowers at the Farmer's market in late summer.  To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven, including the painting of flowers.  It’s bizarre to paint pictures of those immigrant peonies when the snow is falling in December.  Go ahead and have your fun, I won’t be joining in.

Just Another Yoke

Among the rare, distinct pleasures for a low-income artist living in Manhattan are the free auction exhibits of 19^th Century and American Art held a couple of times a year by Sotheby’s and Christie’s.  You can always find a few great paintings that you will never see again once they revert back to private ownership.  And it’s fun to come across excellent work by artists who never quite make it to the Big Leagues.  I have seen many of these exhibits in the past 30 years and have acquired hundreds of used auction catalogs as well.

I recently had the pleasure of viewing the latest American Art exhibit at Christie’s and saw some terrific landscape paintings.  In particular, I lingered over paintings by Daniel Garber, Edgar Payne, Oscar Berninghaus, Granville Redmond, Maurice Braun, Julian Onderdonk, John Leslie Breck, Edward Redfield and Willard Metcalf.

Daniel Garber (1880-1958), Over the Hill, 1917, 30x25

Edgar Alwin Payne (1883-1947), High Sierra, Big Pine Canyon

Edward Willis Redfield, (1869-1965), Hillside and Valley, Point Pleasant, 28x32 1/4

Granville Redmond (1871-1935), Snow Cap Spring, 1927, 20x24

John Leslie Breck (1860-1899), At Annisquam, 1894, 18x22

Julian Onderdonk (1882-1922), Blue Bonnets at Twilight, 1918, 22x40

Maurice Braun (1877-1941), Evening Light

Oscar Berninghaus (1874-1952), A Field in Taos, 18x24

Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858-1925), May Pastoral, 1907, 36x39

What strikes me about all these painters is they found their own way to interpret the beauty of nature.  They did not attempt to copy somebody else’s stylistic approach, which seems to be the standard procedure for today’s artists working in all genres who aren’t copying photographs.  These earlier painters were obviously influenced by the color theories occasioned by the Impressionist work of Monet and other French painters.  But the Americans retained the form of the natural world in a way the average picture lover could appreciate without having to see the paintings encased in expensive Louis XV frames.  The result was the production of some of the most beautiful landscape paintings you have ever seen. 

Willard Metcalf, The Green Canopy, 1908, 29x26

I remember being amazed by a Metcalf painting I saw in a gallery a few years ago that really increased my already great admiration for the painter.  He had chosen to paint a woodland interior scene that seemed an impossible subject to paint.  But he did an incredibly masterful job of it in his own way.  I don’t know how he did it.  I only know that I was awed by the fact that he had pulled it off.  Carlson’s book on landscape painting isn’t going to help you one bit.  You have to figure it out for yourself.

Vincent Van Gogh expounded on this idea brilliantly in a passionate letter to his brother Theo on Sept. 3, 1882 regarding a recent landscape painting:

“Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground — yet that ground is very dark — in addition red, yellow, brown ochre, black, terra sienna, bistre, and the result is a red-brown that varies from bistre to deep wine-red and to pale, blond reddish. Then there are also mosses and an edge of fresh grass that catches the light and sparkles brightly and is very difficult to get. There at last you have a sketch which — whatever may be said about it — I maintain has some meaning, says something.

While making it I said to myself: let me not leave before there’s something of an autumn evening in it, something mysterious, something with seriousness in it.  However, because this effect doesn’t last, I had to paint quickly. The figures were done with a few vigorous strokes with a firm brush — in one go. I was struck by how firmly the slender trunks stood in the ground — I began them using a brush, but because of the ground, which was already impasted, one brushstroke simply disappeared. Then I squeezed roots and trunks into it from the tube, and modelled them a little with the brush. Yes, now they stand in it — shoot up out of it — stand firmly rooted in it.

In a sense I’m glad that I’ve never learned how to paint. Probably then I would have learned to ignore effects like this. Now I say, no, that’s exactly what I want — if it’s not possible then it’s not possible — I want to try it even though I don’t know how it’s supposed to be done. I don’t know myself how I paint.”

Oh, Vincent, how your words resonate with me!  This is one great artist that posterity definitely was right about.  It’s high time for today’s landscape painters to throw over the yoke of instruction from workshops, DVDs, YouTube videos, Internet blogs and books, and paint with their hearts, not just their heads, which are filled with all the rules and regulations they had no part in formulating.  Maybe you won’t become another Van Gogh, but at least you will have learned how to think about painting on your own.  And if you are luckier than him, you may even sell a few paintings.

Romance in Art

Not many of us will come to know “The Romance of an Art Career” as did Joseph Cummings Chase (1878-1965), who wrote the book on it in 1928.  Chase was an indefatigable, multifaceted artist who was quite a schmoozer in his day, hobnobbing with scads of personages in the fields of politics, entertainment and finance in the early years of the 20^th Century.

He began his career as a teenager sketching portraits at political conventions for a newspaper, and then worked as an illustrator for magazines and book publishers.  He taught art and design in colleges and wrote and lectured about it at every opportunity, it seems.  He also created the concept of dramatic retail window displays for fashionable stores like Saks Fifth Avenue.   But above all, Chase was a prominent and prolific portrait painter and sketcher, with a gift for getting a likeness, who estimated he had already painted or sketched about 6,000 portraits at the time “Romance” was published.  

Joseph Cummings Chase, “Henry Morgenthau,” 

Oil on artist board, 1918, National Portrait Gallery

In Chase’s art world, there are no long-haired, lank-limbed aesthetes consulting their muses for inspiration.  Uh-uh!  You have to work like you are on some artistic chain gang from Dante’s “Inferno,” with no relief in sight.  Chase wrote that he had, on several occasions, painted three oil portraits in one day, each of them from a three-hour sitting.  And the last one he painted, at the point of total exhaustion, usually turned out to be the best one, which he could only ascertain on the morning after.  That’s not the half of it.

In a chapter sarcastically titled, “The Artist Works When He Feels Like It,” he describes several instances of extreme deadline pressures he and others have had to work under.  His biggest challenge was a commission in 1927 to paint nine oil portraits in five days of the principal cast members of a new Broadway musical, “Golden Dawn,” for the lobby of the newly constructed Hammerstein Theater, which is now the “Ed Sullivan Theater,” where the David Letterman show is taped.  The musical, produced by Arthur Hammerstein, son of Oscar Hammerstein I, had been out of town in Philadelphia, so Chase painted three cast members there on a Friday and Saturday in their tiny backstage dressing rooms.  Back in New York he had to set up painting paraphernalia in three different locations to paint the rest of the cast.   He just managed to get all the portraits framed and hung in the lobby an hour before the Wednesday evening premiere, which he sat through in his sweaty work attire at the command of Hammerstein.  As a prelude to describing this incredible feat, Chase said he almost had to turn down the job because he had been working “19 or 20 hours a day” for three weeks on a 55-foot long mural that had to be finished on the day he would start this new assignment.   

All this talk of hard work might have been a subtle hint to dissuade young people from entering the profession, since he believed the art schools were already filled to overflowing with untalented students who were looking for an easy route to success.   They only enrolled at their mothers’ urging because the kids weren’t fit to do anything else.  Chase wrote that thousands of art students “will never surmount the early obstacles, and only hundreds of them will find a better than average living in this art game." 

So he proceeds to offer some practical career advice for beginning artists in a chapter titled “What Is This Art Game?”  He lists the various career options in the following order:  design, illustration, advertising art, landscape painting, and portrait painting.  Chase was big on the attributes of decorative design in paintings, textiles, costumes, labels, posters and such, and wrote a textbook on the subject that was published in 1915 when he was an instructor at the City College of New York and at the Cooper Union College for Women.

Ernest Blumenschein, “Sangre de Cristo Mountains, 1925

Chase has some valuable comments on color in a chapter titled “Why All This Confusion About Color?”  He begins with an interesting anecdote about the time he was painting alongside the wonderful Taos painter Ernest Blumenschein at the Académie Julian in Paris.  Blumenschein was returning to the school to refresh his skills upon deciding to leave the illustration field “to be a real painter.”  His painting was proceeding rapidly, but “Blumy,” was cursing and groaning.  “The dreadful thing about it is that I have been working in black and white so long I can’t paint in color,” he told Chase.  “I have been exaggerating the dark and light so long, for the purposes of reproduction, that I just can’t see anything any other way.”  But Chase said Blumy persisted, “and the rich, clean color of his canvases has long since become notable.”

Chase was an advocate of the simple red-yellow-blue palette to mix any colors you want, and his choices were rose-madder, lemon-yellow and French ultramarine light.  He writes that white with a tint of lemon-yellow is lighter than white paint because white paint reflects only fifty to sixty percent of the light that strikes it, while a tint of lemon yellow reflects seventy-one percent.  And he explains why green is the only color that will darken the shadows and folds in a red dress without changing the quality of the red to something other than red.  Chase discusses a few other color matters and wonders “why these things were never told me by my instructors in art school in New York, in Philadelphia and in Paris.  He said art school instructors teach many things to be grateful for, but speak usually in generalities concerning “feeling, atmosphere and beauty,” and make few “statements of fact.”  I wish that Chase, himself, who was dean of the Hunter College Art Department in the 1930s, had been a little more precise about that red and green business.  It’s hard to get those deeper red accents to look great, in my experience, anyway, and I paint very few pictures that feature a strong red, other than the occasional tomato

Joseph Cummings Chase, Ruth Draper, Actress

Chase didn’t appreciate the public’s attitude about artists, summarizing it in this manner:  “The artist, then, is a person who seldom does a day’s work, who can always be picked out because of his effeminate build and his queer tie, and who is just the slave of the successful advertising mogul.  But no!  In reality the artist who has earned a reputation and has arrived is one who has acquired the habit of hard work, whose union hours are ten or twelve, or even more.   There are many whose last vacation was so many years ago that it is entirely forgotten.”

“Romance” is full of interesting anecdotes and observations about the art of portrait painting as it was practiced in his day.  No photographs, please.  A photograph “gives only one impression of the subject.  A portrait may give many, hence the possibility of revealing much more of the person.”  And only one of 12 photographs may produce a good likeness, he says.  An oil portrait painted from life over an extended period allows the painter to observe and capture the “characteristics and personal attributes” of the sitter that set him apart from his fellows.  He agreed with Sargent that a little bit of a caricature of certain features makes for a better likeness than a photograph or slavish photographic rendering.  I couldn’t agree more.  I used to draw at the League sketch classes years ago alongside a very good caricature artist.  One day after finishing a 20-minute sketch of the model he proclaimed, “That’s the way he really looks.”   I thought so, too.

In Chase’s view, getting a likeness is a gift that few students in art schools possess, and “among artists in general, there are not many whose batting average in this respect of getting likenesses is over .300.”  He could be talking about today’s “practicing” portrait artists and students when he states:  “If portraits were just a matter of photographic exactness, the only requirement would be an ability to draw accurately; but accuracy of drawing is at best a matter of mathematics, which might produce a work very much akin to a death mask, and bear as little resemblance.” 

His affinity for capturing a likeness came in handy during World War I when, under the most trying of circumstances, he painted 142 portraits of soldiers and senior commanders, including Sergeant York, General Pershing and Marshal Foch.  He painted military figures from World War II and Korea, as well.  Some of the other prominent personalities he painted during his long career included Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Will Rogers, Theodore Roosevelt, Al Smith, Rin Tin Tin and the tennis star Helen Wills, who wanted to pursue an art career herself and asked him a lot of questions about the business.  Many of his portraits appeared as illustrations in two other books he wrote, “My Friends Look Better Than Ever” (1950) and “Face Value” (1962).  A number of his portrait sketches are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

Chase chatted comfortably with his important sitters while painting them, and lived to write about those chats.  He tells of bantering one day with William Jennings Bryan, who was pestering him to do his portrait.  It was in the spring of 1920 and Chase was scheduled to do a portrait of then Senator Harding in Washington.  Bryan, whom Chase had sketched at several Democratic National Conventions, came up to the table where Chase was with friends and said, “Hello, Chase, what are you doing here,”  “I came down to make a painting of the next President of the United States,” Chase replied.  “When do you want me to pose for it?” said Bryan.   Everybody laughed, including Chase, who replied, “Not this time.”  “Why not?”   “Well, said Chase, “I think the trouble may have something to do with your politics.  What are you now, anyhow?”  The good-natured banter went on a bit longer and Bryan finally got Chase to agree to paint his portrait, which was commenced at 7 a.m. sharp in Chase’s hotel room the very next morning.

Chase, who was born at Kents Hill, Maine and resided in Milwaukee from 1955 until his death in 1965, studied art at Pratt Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before studying under Jean Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian. 

He seems to have loved talking and writing about painting almost as much as he loved painting.  His books have already been mentioned, and several articles written by him are referenced on the Internet.  I came across an old newspaper clipping from The St. Petersburg Times dated December 13, 1928, which I have attached here in an effort to flesh out his career.  It’s an interesting flashback to a far different world, and worth a read.  At the end of the article, mention is made of the Jack Shilkret Orchestra, a terrific novelty ensemble in the Roaring 20’s.   Here’s a link to an entertaining YouTube video featuring one of their big hit records:  http://youtu.be/afVmUHmAUDI

Joseph Cummings Chase, “Red Cross Nurse,1922,OSAntiques

Despite all the work he produced in his lifetime, I couldn’t find many images on the Internet that would give a fair assessment of his long and successful painting career.  I did find an image of a painting of a WWI Red Cross nurse that is pretty good.  It’s for sale on the art marketing website Etsy for $1,200.

Pardon me for thinking this way, but perhaps we would know a bit more about Chase today if he had used a little less perspiration and a little more inspiration to produce his paintings.   But what the heck, he was much celebrated during his lifetime, greatly in demand for the very accomplished portraits he loved to paint, and far too busy to worry about posterity.  

This Anglo-Saxon artist did concede, a bit grudgingly, I feel,  the role of emotion in the creation of art.  He wrote that artists can "enjoy" and "be happier than other people" at the risk of encountering "the dark side of the picture... But no art worker with the soul of an artist ever wishes that he had chosen another career.”