Sir Thomas Takes Advice

Thomas Lawrence, Elizabeth Jennings, 1799, Oil on Canvas, 50 by 40 in., Private Collection

Thomas Lawrence, The Calmady Children, 1823, Oil on Canvas, 30 7/8 x 30 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

Thomas Lawrence, Lady Maria Conyngham, 1824-25, Oil on Canvas, 36 ¼ by 28 ¼ in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

I may have mentioned this before, but I hate having people try to tell me how to paint or what to paint.  When I began painting in oils more than 30 years ago, I felt that at last I had found something in my life that I loved doing and had some control over, and I don’t want anybody else giving me advice on how to “improve” my paintings.  They are my creations and they are what they are, for better or for worse.  I think most painters feel as I do, even though we are not talented enough to produce masterpieces and will likely remain anonymous and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. 
 

If Sir Thomas Lawrence P.R.A. (1769-1830) had felt the same way about taking advice, you might not have heard of him either.  Sir Thomas is one of the greatest of all the many wonderful portrait painters working in the British Isles from the 17^th to the early 20^th Centuries, capturing on canvas the characteristic fair complexion of the natives, which takes the light so well, is lovely to look at and ideal for replicating in oil paint with copious amounts of white paint and touches of red and yellow ochre. 

Portrait painting became the preeminent art form in that once-mighty kingdom after Anthony Van Dyck settled in London in 1632.  Somebody once said Van Dyck showed the English portrait painters how to paint their countrymen.  Somebody also said that portraiture has been in decline ever since his death.  And somebody else likened the thought that Van Dyck might have retouched anything on a portrait head, after his rapid painting in one sitting into a tacky surface, to be rather like “spitting in church.”  One look at a Van Dyck portrait and you agree with them.

Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641), Cornelius Van der Geest, 1620, Oil on Panel, 37.5 by 32.5 cm, National Gallery, London

Lawrence succeeded Reynolds and Gainsborough in carrying on the tradition of portraiture in the grand manner established by Van Dyck.   He was something of a child prodigy with his gift for getting a likeness.  When he was around six years old he began helping his hapless innkeeper father pay the bills by either reciting poetry or drawing profile portraits.  As a young man, he learned how to handle oil paint with a brush better than most other painters of his day.  This enviable virtuosic facility, coupled with his god-given talent for capturing the spirit of life in his sitter’s faces, propelled Lawrence to fame as Europe’s premier portrait painter.  And if you love looking at outstanding portraiture, you have to smile when viewing Lawrence’s delightful depictions of animated young female faces.  His Royal Academy colleagues recognized his genius by electing him their President, succeeding Benjamin West.

But Lawrence was primarily self-taught, which is a fatal defect in lesser artists who aspire to paint from life in a traditional manner.  He skipped the cast drawings during his brief stay at the Royal Academy to concentrate on his commissioned portrait work.  Maybe that explains why I’ve always felt his full-length compositions and drawing of the sitter’s extremities do not match the quality of his “headshots.”  The voluminous, body-concealing fashions of the day were a great help to Sir Thomas and his fellow portrait painters because they could fill their large canvases decoratively and avoid grappling with uncompromising anatomical accuracy.

Perhaps this lack of academic training is the reason Lawrence apparently didn’t mind receiving critical advice when he was working on a major full-length portrait, unlike most painters today who bridle at the merest hint that their photographic confections might not be picture perfect. 

When painting his 1799 portrait of Elizabeth Jennings, for example, Lawrence, who was 30 years old at the time, took so much advice from his close friend Joseph Farington, a landscape painter and noted diarist, that he should have been ashamed of himself.  Farington did everything but paint the picture for him, it seems.  All the sordid details can be found in the catalog for Christie’s auction of British and Irish art in London on Nov. 11, 1999.  Christie’s transcribed Farington’s diary entry of March 17, 1799, in which he recounts all the advice he gave Lawrence regarding this portrait.  I found Farington’s account fascinating and somewhat surprising, considering the high regard I’ve always had for Sir Thomas.  I’ve done a tiny bit of cosmetic editing of Farington’s diary entry to make the sentences less choppy and a little easier to read.

Elizabeth Jennings was celebrated for her beauty, Christie’s tells us in its painstaking research into this portrait.  Farington said “the beautiful Miss Jennings” had no serious competition in London’s social whirl “during two or three seasons successively.”  He was eager to follow the progress of her portrait in Lawrence’s studio and discussed the portrait over breakfast with Lawrence when it was nearly complete.

Farington writes, “I told him that it was a picture of a higher order than any female portrait I had seen of his painting -- more sober and solid, and free from flickering lights.  The principal defect appeared to me to be that the arms did not appear to be of the same flesh as the face and neck, but too cold and purply, and that the light sash which was thrown round the waist and arms was too much of the same colour with that of the skin, the whole too pinky. He admitted readily the truth of the remark. I said there wanted an opposition -- a change of colour to give value to the flesh, and to produce richness. I mentioned that possibly a little blue might be of service if it could be introduced.  He received all I said very kindly, and declared that my opinion had at different times been of more use to him than that of any other person.  He asked me if I thought he should put into the Exhibition [Royal Academy] any whole lengths of ladies, I told him by no means, unless they are as well painted as that of Miss Jennings.”

Lawrence subsequently asked his friend to drop by on the following Sunday to discuss finishing touches to the portrait, and there was still much about the work that troubled Farington.

“We then looked at his portrait of Miss Jennings now in its frame.  I saw that the light on the picture was too strong and we agreed that it would be best to glaze it into shade, and then by reflected lights only.  I went home and returned to him after a few hours and found the picture prodigiously benefitted by alteration.  He then tried pink and blue on the shoe.  Those colours did not answer.  I recommended yellow brown, which answered, and gave value to many other colours.  I told him the neck had the appearance of coarseness from a fat wheal in it, and did not seem to be the neck of that face.  He felt the observation immediately.  I then recommended to him to try the effect of a strong yellow colour about the right arm above the light, to pass round bracelet form.  He did and was delighted with it.  I then recommended to him to make the upper part of the sky of a more grey silvery colour -- at present it is of a tanny, leathery tint.  I left him making the alterations...”

Phew!  After a session of such potent advice, even coming from a close friend, I just might want to give up painting or shoot myself.  But the great Sir Thomas apparently did as he was told in every instance, according to Farington.  I'm surprised Farington didn't say anything about that rather awkward hand positioned at her waist.  This portrait was a rather early work by Lawrence, and I wonder if he needed, or was as eager, to accept so much painting advice later on in his career when he was piling up accolades for his work.

When the portrait of Miss Jennings was exhibited to great acclaim at the Royal Academy, Farington wrote that it “caused great alarm among the portrait painters…West said it made all the other portraits of women look like dowdies.”  Farington must have been very pleased at having played so large a role in the final product.

Now about that "shoe" Farington “coloured” for Lawrence.  You might notice that there are no shoes, or legs for that matter, in the painting of Miss Jennings auctioned off by Christie’s.  That’s because the new owner of the painting in 1912 had it reduced to its present size for some reason.  It’s easy to lop off disturbing parts of a painting, and often necessary for the emotional health of the painter or the owner of a painting.  Maybe Miss Jennings would still have at least her one shoe on if Lawrence had trusted his original instincts to paint it "pink and blue." Maybe the owner was just sick of looking at that “yellow brown shoe" suggested by Farington.  Maybe the full-length just didn’t fit over the new owner’s fireplace.  Whatever.  

Joseph Farington (1747-1821), Scotch Landscape, Watercolor, 20 ¾ by 33 ¾ in., Private Collection

Firmin-Girard’s Flower Market Painting

Marie-François Firmin-Girard (1838-1921), Le Quai aux Fleurs, 1875, oil on canvas,
39 1/2 by 57 in., Private Collection

Marie-Francois Firmin-Girard (1838-1921) really hit the posthumous jackpot the other day with one of his paintings, arguably his masterpiece.  Although I hadn’t paid much attention to his work before, it seems his paintings are very popular with art lovers who frequent the auctions of 19^th Century European paintings in New York City.

I went to Sotheby’s two Sundays ago with a friend to view the latest auction, and when we arrived by escalator at the 4^th floor exhibition gallery, the first painting we encountered was Firmin-Girard’s Le Quai aux Fleurs, a stunning, panoramic view of a bustling Parisian flower market.  The picture is painted with formidable academic precision throughout, but Firmin-Girard employs a subtle, stippled manner of applying the paint and keeps all the colors grayed down, which gives the work a softly harmonious look, much like an impressionistic painting.  The details of the background buildings, the perspective and other particulars of the scene are faithfully and accurately recorded, as we discovered by our very close inspection of the painting for about 15 minutes, give or take.   It’s a spectacularly gorgeous work of art, filled with a sense of light and air.

We weren’t the only ones who loved this painting, apparently.  Estimated to fetch $300,000 to $500,000 at auction, when the hammer came down on Friday, May 9, it had been sold for $3,021,000, a record price for a work by this artist.  A similar Firmin-Girard flower market painting, Autumn Market at Les Halles, was sold at Sotheby’s in 2011 for “only” $254,500, up from its estimated price of $80,000 to $120,000.  And at Christie’s on April 29, 2013, Firmin-Girard’s A Flower Seller on the Pont Royal, sold for $243,750, failing to reach its estimate range of $250,000 to $350,000.

It is obvious to me after looking at those last two paintings and a number of Firmin-Girard’s other works on the Internet that none of them approach the magnificent perfection of Le Quai aux Fleurs.  There is always something lacking in his other compositions, it seems to me.  I think the balance of elements and the color harmonies are not as satisfying in his other paintings.  And when he emphasizes the figure in other paintings, he’s just not as successful as many of his academic contemporaries.  Firmin-Girard had a thriving career from the outset, though, creating history paintings, genre scenes and landscapes.  But his many flower market scenes are his best work by far, in my opinion.

Sotheby’s tells us that Firmin-Girard’s submission of Le Quai aux Fleurs to the Paris Salon of 1876 propelled him to international fame.  The painting was hung at a prominent spot at the entrance to the Salon and was so popular that police were required to control the throngs of onlookers.  It has been held in private collections ever since and presumably was last seen by the public in 1950 on loan to an exhibition called “So This is Paris” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

In a Sotheby’s blog called “European Discoveries,” Polly Sartori, head of Sotheby’s 19^th Century European Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture Department, writes a little about this painting, which was put up for auction this year from the collection of Charles S. Whitehouse (1921-2001), a career American Foreign Services Officer and U.S. Ambassador to Laos and Thailand in the 1970s.  “I have probably sold a total of twenty paintings by Firmin-Girard over the years, but nothing could compare to this picture,” she writes.  “We now know that Firmin-Girard’s Paris flower market was a star of the Paris Salon of 1876. Contemporary reviews recount that the painting was so popular that it was difficult to see because of the crowds standing in front of it, marvelling at the remarkable detail – elegantly dressed Parisians only rivalled by the variety of colourful flowers filling the vendor’s carts.  One of our favorite details is the marchand de coco, or the man with the tall apparatus on his back, which dispensed a cool drink of licorice and lemon flavoured water into the silver cups dangling from his waist.”

Firmin-Girard was just 16 when he began studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  He also studied in the workshops of Charles Gleyre, a Swiss academic painter whose students included Monet, Renoir and Whistler, and Jean-Leon Gerome, another of Gleyre’s students. He debuted at the Paris Salon in 1859 at the age of 21 with three paintings.  In 1864 his painting of a classical theme was purchased by Princesse Mathilde, said to be the single most influential collector in Paris at the time.  His success in fashionable French society was thus assured, they say.  In case you were wondering, as I was, Mathilde Laetitia Wilhelmine Bonaparte was a daughter of Napoleon's brother Jerome Bonaparte and his second wife, Catharina of Wurttemberg, daughter of King Frederick I of Wurttemberg.  There’s much more about the Princesse, and it’s a good story right there, if you are interested in royal machinations.  

From his studio in the Boulevard Clichy in Montmarte, Firmin-Girard produced a wide variety of subjects on commission for wealthy patrons, but his most popular subjects were elegant scenes from contemporary life. His paintings remain popular today, perhaps because they combine fine academic drawing and principles of composition with soft, imperceptibly textured surfaces that are so unlike the glossy, smooth surfaces of stalwart followers of the 19^th Century academic tradition like Bouguereau and Gerome. 

And everybody loves to closely examine paintings that contain finely executed details in abundance, especially when they are created by a skilled artist like Firmin-Girard and are not in the least photographic in appearance.  As the novelist and art critic Louis Enault wrote in 1878 in discussing Firmin-Girard and the British artist Frederick Goodall, the smallest details give their paintings “a character of extraordinary strength and truth."

Firmin-Girard, Autumn Market at Les Halles, oil on canvas, 32 3/4 by 46 in., Private Collection

Firmin-Girard, The Flower Seller on the Pont Royal with the Louvre Beyond, 1872, oil on canvas, 27½ x 37 in., Private Collection

 

Firmin-Girard, Market in Charlieu, oil on canvas, 28 1/2 by 40 in.,  Private Collection

Firmin-Girard, The Japanese Toilette, oil on canvas, Private Collection

Firmin-Girard, Ulysses and the Sirens, oil on panel, 3.3 by 4.6 in., Private Collection

Frederick Goodall R.A. (1822-1904), The Opium Bazaar, Cairo, 1863, oil on panel, 16 ¼ by 24 ¼ in., Private Collection

Frederick Goodall R.A., A New Light in the Hareem, 1884, Oil on Canvas, 48 by 84 in., Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England

 

On Hal Wolpoff's Passing

Harold Wolpoff, Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas,  23 x 35 in. framed, Dawson &Nye Auctioneers and Appraisers

Harold Wolpoff, A Marsh Landscape, Oil on Canvas, 28 x 32 in. Framed, The Boulder Art Gallery, Fitchburg, MA

Although I didn’t know him well, I’ve sometimes wondered what happened to Harold “Hal” Wolpoff.   I could be wrong, but I heard many years ago that he had been living in a trailer in Gloucester, MA, where he had settled to paint seascapes and village scenes like many other artists have done over the years.

Some of the finest plein air painters of the 20^th Century were headquartered in Gloucester and neighboring Rockport, two famous artists’ colonies on Cape Ann.  Their boldly painted, superbly designed and accurately drawn work stole the show at many auctions of American paintings in New York City, in my humble opinion.  Their paintings were usually hung side by side in a stunning demonstration of how terrific a sunlight effect on canvas can look when interpreted by painters who know what they are doing.   I haven’t seen such superb groupings in recent years.  Maybe collectors are actually holding on to these plein air masterpieces instead of trying to cash in on their “investments.”  Three of the finest painters were Emile Gruppe, Anthony Thieme and Aldro T. Hibbard, the greatest painter of snow I’ve ever seen.  Somebody said the snow other artists paint is just white paint, but Hibbard paints snow, or words to that effect.  Hibbard, who studied with Joaquim y Sorolla y Bastida, the greatest painter of sunlight effects the world has ever known, produced hundreds of beautifully designed and colored sunlit snow scenes.  It required a superhuman effort to create them directly from nature in sub-freezing temperatures.

Hal Wolpoff was not in their class, but I’m sure he thought otherwise.  Hal was one of many artists who passed through the Saturday members’ painting class I’ve attended at The Art Students League for the past 30-plus years.  He worked in pastels the few times he attended the class in the 1980s and really knew how to produce clouds of pastel dust with his bravura technique.  I still fondly recall his complimenting me on an oil painting sketch I had worked on one morning with some degree of success.  Hal wasn’t very free with praise for artists, so I was pleased to accept his compliment.  In an earlier blog post about another artist who was also somewhat amusingly self-centered, I recalled the time they both showed up at lunchtime in the League cafeteria and sat far apart so they had plenty of room to elaborate on their respective careers without risking a clash of personalities.

After a career in radio broadcasting, Hal decided to quit and become a painter – but not until he was in his early 40’s, I believe.  He studied portrait painting with Everett Raymond Kinstler, and maybe William Draper, at the League and soon sailed out on his own, with considerable confidence in his ability to make a living as an artist. 

I don’t have much information about Hal stored in my porous memory bank. I’ve forgotten most of the stories I heard from him and about him.  But if you have the November 1982 issue of American Artist magazine, you can get a pretty good impression of the man from one of those interviews that the artist and writer Charles Movalli produced frequently for that magazine in the 1970s and 80s. 

Some library website gives you a bit of a tease on that interview with Hal, but no more:  “The article features painter Harold Wolpoff.  His studio, over The Framery on School Street, and the orderliness of his palette are described. He explains his inability to paint by numbers as he finds color arbitrary, with the relationship of colors making color. He labels his "Self-Portrait with Felt Hat" as an impressionistic-expressionistic work and recalls the story behind the painting. He believes that there is no way to teach a person how to paint since a good artist only suggests things to open the eyes and the mind.”  I believe Hal won some award for that portrait, which I recall as being a wonderful job of painting.

I apparently tossed my copy of that issue of the magazine, so the interview wherein Hal “discusses how he captures his sitter’s character in his oils” is just a dim memory for me. “I'm a people painter,” he told Movalli.  “I don’t do the ‘standard’ portrait.’”  As I recall, Hal was not afraid to voice his candid opinions about art and other artists.

Hal gets another Internet mention in The New York Times on May 30, 1983 when he was doing the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit that Memorial Day weekend.  The show’s organizer had said the artists would be screened again by a jury for the Labor Day show.  “On lower Fifth Avenue, Harold Wolpoff of Maplewood, N.J., and his paintings were snug in a homemade shelter of chicken wire and plastic. He said the second screening would be fine with him ''as long as it's our peers - other artists, not just academics.''

Hal did the show for a few years, and I used to stop by his display and listen to him talk – and talk -- about his work and the art world.  I did the show one year myself, in 1982.  I put together a big folding screen in ramshackle fashion with laths, chicken wire and burlap to display my paintings, which I hung by drapery hooks.  What a lousy mess!  I somehow wheeled all the stuff by foot on a big, borrowed hand truck some 60 blocks from my Upper Westside apartment to the Village on opening day of the Spring and Fall shows and stored everything in rented space in a basement nearby, which had stairs so narrow and low that you could barely maneuver walking down them.  Now the outdoor shows all force you to have expensive, uniform aluminum display racks.  No more chicken wire.  And that’s a good thing. 

These outdoor art shows aren’t for city dwellers like me, without vans and companions to help with the heavy lifting.   I remember getting furious when one woman lured me in with praise for my work and then told me about “pentimento” she “noticed” in one of my paintings!  I got off easy, considering what some other exhibiting artists have heard from sidewalk kibitzers.  I hate selling paintings directly to the public.  I sold my first-prize painting for a crisp $100 bill on the first day of the Spring show and the buyer walked off with it so I didn’t even have it to display the following days of the show – just the ribbon, which was made better than the painting.  No, I wasn’t cut out to do outdoor art shows to pay the rent.

So the other day I was thinking of Hal and looked for him on the Internet.  There wasn’t much more than what I’ve discussed above about his painting career.  But I was surprised and saddened to come across something more telling about him.

In a June 17, 2013 Letter to the Editor of the Ocala (FL) Star Banner, a reader remembers Hal touchingly in response to that newspaper’s Memorial Day tribute to veterans of the Armed Forces.  Ruth McIntyre of Silver Springs, FL, knew Hal for only a short time, but it was long enough for her to get a pretty good handle on the man. 

“I’d like to tell you about one such veteran I was honored to meet not too long ago,” Ms. McIntyre wrote.  “He lived alone and was a very private person. He refused to have a phone because his privacy might be invaded through it. He had very few friends for that same reason. And some said he was grouchy and rude. At nearly 90, I figure he had the right to be grouchy and rude if he wanted to. He’s been through enough to make him that way. He was not only a WWII veteran and proudly wore his “WWII Vet” hat saying so, but he was a world-renowned artist as well. 

“He had held one-man shows in galleries all over Europe and in the northeast United States. His paintings sold for many dollars because they were quite good. I had known Harold Wolpoff only three weeks when he was found near death in his humble home. He was taken to a local hospital where he eventually died, alone, just like he lived.

“My heart was so sad and the tears continued to fall because I saw nothing of his death in the Ocala Star-Banner — no death notice or funeral plans. Didn’t anybody at the hospital know who he was? Didn’t anybody know he was to be honored with a military burial service? Somehow it was made known who he was and he got the military burial he so justly deserved.

“Look him up on Google and read his story. We’ll all be old and possibly grumpy someday, but nobody I know deserved to be the way he was, dead and buried without any notice at all. May God rest his soul.” http://www.ocala.com/article/20130617/OPINION02/130619766

Thanks to Ms. McIntyre's sympathetic and moving letter of tribute, I now know what happened to Hal, and that he was himself right up until the end.  Sadly, however, you won’t find much about Hal’s artwork or art career on the Internet if you Google his name -- just a few images of paintings that were put up for auction over the years.  I’m sorry I couldn’t find the self-portrait that was reproduced in American Artist magazine, but I did find the self-portrait shown above. 

Hal was born in 1924 and died on May 6, 2013, just short of his 89^th birthday.  He was a technician for the Army Air Force in World War II and is buried at the Veterans Administration Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell.  I’ll bet some of the older painters up around Rockport and Gloucester could tell you some good stories about him.  Maybe they know how he chanced to relocate to Florida.  He was quite a character.  But he loved painting.  I know that much about Hal.

Just Another Marble Carver

Ugolino and His Sons, Marble, Modeled by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Carved by Victor Bernard, Metropolitan Museum of Art

I think it’s appropriate at this time to sing the praises of the marble carver Victor Bernard.  His presumed masterpiece, the magnificent, majestic, anguished depiction of Ugolino and His Sons, is currently the centerpiece of a breathtaking sculpture exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Ugolino is an incredible figural composition in marble, and for years in my former job as a part-time Information Desk lackey for the Met I effusively praised its remarkable qualities to visitors.  How, I wondered, could one man seamlessly carve such precise, intricate, anatomical detail for five intertwined figures from one block of marble without any discernible slip of the chisel?

Not much is known about Mr. Bernard, apparently.  But everybody knows this sculpture depicting Ugolino and His Sons from Dante’s Inferno.  The tyrant Ugolino is condemned to eternal punishment with his four sons and faces the agonizing choice of either starvation or cannibalism.   One reason nobody knows much about Bernard is all the credit for carving Ugolino is usually given to the wrong man!  I’ve long thought that this incredible masterpiece of marble carving was the work of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875), whose sculptures and related artwork are on view in a spectacular exhibit at the Met through May 26. 

Carpeaux is considered the greatest 19th Century sculptor before Rodin.  And while Carpeaux did all the critical studies and clay and plaster models for Ugolino and His Sons from 1960-61, the marble version was carved by Bernard from 1865-67.  Judging by this one incredible example, Bernard was an extraordinary marble carver.  He is briefly referenced in the catalog accompanying the current exhibition, “The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux,” co-authored by James David Draper, the Met’s curator for European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Edouard Papet, chief curator of sculpture at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.  There might be more information on Bernard buried in some archaic French publication in a massive PDF file that takes forever to download, but I’m not going to spend the rest of my life looking for it.  I did do a little Google research, but came up empty-handed.

The bronze version of Ugolino was placed in the Tuileries Garden in Paris in 1863.  In 1865, Stephane Derville, a Parisian marble carver, proposed creating a marble version.  “The carving in an off-white marble from Saint-Beat, a quarry in the Pyrenees that belonged to Derville, was to be executed by Victor Bernard, as stipulated by the contract that was drawn up in Paris on December 23, 1865,” Papet writes.  So there you have it, or as much as you are likely to have about it.  Bernard gets a brief mention on the Met’s own website in a description of its Ugolino:  “This marble version was executed by the practitioner Bernard under Carpeaux's supervision and completed in time for the Universal Exposition at Paris in 1867. The date inscribed on the marble [1860] refers to the original plaster model's completion.”  Derville’s family retained possession of the marble Ugolino until 1950.  The Met purchased it in 1967 from the Wildenstein Gallery.

The Met probably doesn’t want to make too much of the fact that its masterpiece was carved not by the great man himself but by a barely acknowledged skilled craftsman named Victor Bernard.  In fact, in promoting the Carpeaux exhibit of 150 sculptures, paintings, and drawings in nine galleries, the Met has this to say about Carpeaux:  “He strove for anatomical realism in all media, but especially in his marble sculptures and busts, which seem to capture flesh and blood in stone.”  Well, yes they do, to an incredible degree, despite not being carved personally by Carpeaux.   The soft, off-white beauty of the marble perfectly mimics the translucence of pulsating human flesh in a miraculous way.  I couldn’t believe the sense of  life emanating from those marbles.  I stared long and hard at several of the portrait busts, including the handsome marble likeness of one of the 19th Century’s greatest academic painters, Jean-Leon Gerome.

Jeon-Leon Gerome, Marble, Getty Museum

Carpeaux, who died of bladder cancer when he was only 48, was the son of a stone mason and himself a skilled carver in marble when he was young, but after nearly going blind from an infection caused by marble dust, he created his greatest works without actually carving another block of stone.

Having belatedly learned this startling news about the creation of the Met’s Ugolino, I was extremely disappointed, even a bit despondent, over the fact that Carpeaux himself had not carved what I have always considered to be the most impressive sculpture at the Met.   I was cruelly reminded that things we value in life are "seldom what they seem."

Making a clay or plaster model of Ugolino is one thing.  But carving a huge block of marble to reveal five intertwined figures to anatomical perfection always seemed one heck of a lot harder.  But what do I know about hard work.  I’m only an easel painter.  Painting an apple seems like hard work to me.  I couldn’t contemplate the seemingly insurmountable task of carving Ugolino and His Sons.  So I did a little Internet searching  and found that it’s not quite as hard as it looks, and farming out the work to apprentices or skilled stonemasons was common practice among most of the big name sculptors like Rodin, and dates all the way back to the ancient Greeks.  The self-hewn marbles of the incomparable Michelangelo, however, were on  Carpeaux’s mind for nearly every one of his own figural creations.

“With the introduction of the full-sized clay or plaster model in the Cinquecento [16th Century Italy], it had become more and more possible for the sculptor to leave the transfer from the model to stone to his apprentices,” wrote Chandler Rathfon Post, an associate professor of Greek and Fine Arts at Harvard, in his 1921 book, A History of European and American Sculpture.  “The gradual perfection of methods for such transfer, especially the invention of the pointing machine, entailed the unwelcome result that by the nineteenth century, masters had generally abandoned the practice of hewing their own statues and reliefs. Sculpture thus lost that life, warmth, and vivid impression of the artist's individuality which constitute so much of the appeal, for instance, in Michael Angelo [sic].”

In today’s digital world, stone carving can even be done by automated milling machines controlled by computer data.   Using this technology, a work in marble can be executed in about one-third the time of more traditional methods, I read somewhere.  But many of today’s sculptors still prefer to carve marble themselves and use the pointing device for accurate carving of the figure.  Here’s a link to a contemporary sculptor’s marble carving process and his thoughts on the use of surrogate carvers. http://www.jasonarkles.com/process/.

To be honest, I don’t know anything about these pointing devices for stone carving.  I’ve never been curious enough to look into them myself and have never seen how they work.   But having a skilled carver do the work for you seems to be a form of cheating, especially when the work is the one sculpture you are best known for.  After winning first place at the French Salon in 1863 for the bronze Ugolino, Carpeaux wrote to a friend, “The first step has been made: Everyone in Paris knows the name Carpeaux.”  

I wonder if Victor Bernard got due credit when Carpeaux received a first place gold medal for the marble Ugolino at the Universal Exposition in 1867?  But you know, whether he did or not, it probably wouldn’t have mattered to him.  He had steady work for a couple of years, probably got paid pretty well, and could take symbiotic pride in having worked closely with the celebrated sculptor.  I imagine the workers on Henry Ford’s first assembly line felt the same way about helping put together the Model T Ford.  There isn’t room for everybody at the top. 

Commendatore del Regno

Raffaello Sorbi (1844-1931), An Outdoor Osteria, 1892, Oil on Canvas, 19 by 31 1/2 in., Private Collection

Suppose you were as good at drawing and painting as Raffaelo Sorbi was in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  You might have been able to carve out a pretty good niche market for yourself, as he did.  Sorbi concentrated on painting small, highly detailed historical paintings of gentry and villagers playing games and relaxing together in harmony outside rustic restaurants in the sun-filled Tuscan countryside.  He was so successful and his works were so popular that he was awarded the country’s highest honor, Commendatore del Regno, or Order of the Crown of Italy.  The order has been suppressed by law since the Republic was founded in 1946.  But in Sorbi’s day, it was a very big deal. 

I am in awe of all those 19th Century genre painters from Italy, France, Germany, Spain and other European nations.  When I first started going to the auction exhibitions of 19th Century European paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the 1980s, there were literally hundreds of small genre paintings on display, each of them carefully designed and accurately drawn and painted, with lively color and brushwork, and with loads of atmosphere to boot.  It wore me out after paying close attention to the first 20 or so, and I was relieved to go to the rooms housing the work of artists who painted on canvases big enough to see some detail without putting your nose to the surface. The exquisite details these genre artists were able to paint on a very small scale is truly amazing.  What remarkable control of the medium and the brush they had.  Starting their training as kids, they drew accurately with a loaded brush.  Most of us today fill in careful drawings with thin paint or simply push the paint around until the detail looks almost as good as a photograph.

I came across the painting reproduced above in a 1988 Sotheby’s London auction catalog I added to my huge collection a few years ago.  What a perfect example of genre painting it is.  Sorbi has covered his small canvas, only 19 by 31½ in., with eye-catching detail from north to south and from east to west, leading the viewer on a relaxing, casual stroll through his vivacious and charming 18th Century mise en scene.  The placement of the central figures and the little bits at the corners and edges of the canvas make for a very pleasant visual entertainment.  The balance of all the elements in this painting is outstanding.

Little did I know Sorbi had done dozens of similar paintings with a dependable cast of characters that he used interchangeably for these outdoor café scenes, most featuring an attractive waitress standing in a prominent location, with the action swirling all around.  Sorbi’s romantically nostalgic paintings depicting good times in the beautiful Tuscan countryside of 18th Century Italy are said to have appealed to the 19th Century Italian reunification wish for all social classes to live in harmony.  Sorbi made a very good living selling his work through important picture dealers in Paris, London, Munich and Berlin.

The brilliant, sun-dappled effects in Sorbi’s paintings indicate his affinity for the Macchiaioli plein air movement that developed in his native Tuscany in the mid-19th century as an antidote to the studio paintings of the academics.  The Macchiaioli artists focused their attention on nature by recording the effects of light, shadow and atmosphere in their paintings, while often commenting on current socio-political topics.

Sorbi was born in Florence in 1844 and died there in 1931.  He studied design and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he was heavily influenced by Antonio Ciseri (1821-1891), a painter of portraits and historical subjects.  Before turning to depictions of an idyllic 18th Century rural Italy, he painted a number of classical subjects inspired by Pompeii, the ruins of which were a popular stop on the Grand Tour.

Pompeian Scene, 1879, Oil on Canvas, 14 3/8 x 16 11/32 in., Private Collection

The Huntsmen´s Lunch, 1922, oil on canvas 23½ x 39¼ in., private collection

A Game of Morra, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 23.9 x 31.5 in., Private Collection

A Sunlit Osteria, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 24 x 34.1 in., Private Collection

Stopping for a Drink, 1888, Oil on Canvas, 20 x 18 1/4 in., Private Collection

 

The Chess Players,1886, Oil on Canvas, 20½ x 28¼ in., Private Collection

A Game of Leapfrog, 1887, Oil on Canvas, 16.1 x 29.1 in., Private Collection

Feeding the Ducks and Turkeys, 1924, Oil on Canvas, 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 in., Private Collection

 

Marie Egner's Notebooks

Marie Egner, Self-Portrait, 1878

I had a part-time job for a couple of years typing correspondence and financial reports for a money management firm in midtown whose clients included some well-known figures in the entertainment industry.  Like all the part-time jobs I was able to land over the years, it enabled me to preserve my professional standing as a world-class starving artist.

Working only 15 to 20 hours a week, I was able to paint mornings in my west/northwest-facing home studio, when the daylight is the most consistent, and sketch the figure at the nearby Art Students League in the late afternoon life drawing class, which is free for members.

The job was pretty painless and sometimes enjoyable.  I remember listening to my boss, the firm’s lead lawyer, counseling in a friendly, fatherly tone a tall, beautiful, 18-year-old fashion model, newly arrived from South Africa and with money to burn.  He urged her to economize by taking the subway instead of taxis to and from assignments.   Very good advice, I thought to myself. 

I don’t like to name drop, of course, but the clients included a performer who made a fortune singing a beer commercial, a famous magician duo, a writer who created an infamous fictional serial killer, and assorted heirs to show business fortunes.  Money has never interested me much, so I paid little attention to their assets when I typed their financial reports.

So why is this little part-time job of mine, working for a firm that epitomizes the pursuit of mammon, insinuating itself into this ostensibly art-related blog?  Well, it’s because it led in April of 1986 to my discovery of the greatest story of all the great stories I’ve eagerly devoured about painters living the artist’s life with all the breath that’s in them.

The Austrian Institute was just around the corner from my employer’s offices, and I stopped by around noontime one day to view an exhibit of paintings created by an artist I had never heard of before, an Austrian Impressionist named Marie Egner (1850-1940).

Marie Egner was a terrific painter -- a single woman who courageously traversed the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th Century, producing landscapes in watercolor, gouache and oils with equal facility.  On many of her painting excursions she was accompanied by one or more of her painting teachers and compatriots.  Later on in her career, she specialized in creating lush floral still lifes, which were a particular hit with collectors, including Austrian royalty. 

Here’s some biographical information about Ms. Egner from an Internet website.  If you are like me, it lists a lot of painters you’ve probably never heard of before.  The 19th Century was loaded with real painters, not part-time typists:

From 1867 to 1872, Marie Egner was a disciple of Hermann von Königsbrunn in Graz.  From 1872 to 1874, Carl Jungheim was her teacher at the Academy of Düsseldorf. There she met Hugo Darnaut who was to become a life-long friend. In 1881 she was admitted to the circle of painters around Emil-Jakob Schindler, who was her teacher until 1888. Together with Schindler's disciples Carl Moll and Olga Wisinger-Florian, Egner stayed several summers at Schindler's property Schloss Plankenberg. The artists worked together in a very intensive and fruitful way. Schindler plays an important part in the woman's artistic as well as private life.

In 1882, her painting "Lombardische Dorfstraße" was shown in the Vienna Künstlerhaus. She also exhibited at the Royal Academy in London (1888), at the Berliner Kunstausstellung (1898) and at the world exposition in Paris (1900). From 1887 on she was in charge of a painting school in England. She was a member of the Austrian Association of Women Artists. http://www.austrian-paintings.at/marie-egner-en/

What struck me the most about this wonderful painter, though, was not her artwork, good as it is, but the fact that this outwardly reserved woman jotted down her deepest and most passionate thoughts about art, music and politics in notebook diaries she secretly kept for 70 years, ending in indecipherable scribbles when she was nearly blind only a couple of years before her death at the age of 90.

 

When I started studying painting on a serious level – already in my 30s, I got hit pretty hard by the sense that this was what I should have been doing with my life all along.  I jotted down a few ardent observations about my new life in a little memo pad for about two months, and that was the end of that.  What Ms. Egner managed to do for so many years is simply incredible.

She eloquently expressed her deepest feelings in the unfettered privacy of a secret garden that she needed to cultivate all by herself and on her own terms.  I know from my own dreamy life experience that Ms. Egner’s notebook diaries satisfied so completely that basic human desire to be honest and true in the only place that really matters ultimately – our own cloistered minds.  As someone whose public pronouncements are ill-formed and completely ignored by those around me, I can so easily identify with the Emily Dickinsons and the Marie Egners of the world.

In a booklet prepared for that Austrian Institute exhibit, Martin Suppan, author of the artist’s monograph, notes that Ms. Egner refers in one of her diaries to her teacher von Konigsbrunn as an “antiquated dusty relic,” who turned her into a “nature fanatic.”   She calls Carl Jungheim “Charley” and writes that she does not want to become a “Charley-like-working-machine.”  As for Schindler, she was very attracted to him for his “imagination, playfulness – balancing above the abyss” and for his “drastic poetic talent.” She credits Schindler’s praise and criticism with providing the “passionate stimulus” lacking thus far in her work.   In London she meets the Glasgow-born watercolorist Robert Weir Allan, who influenced her to change from her “petty Viennese way of coloring to a lively, smooth technique.”

Martin Suppan writes that Ms. Egner “knows very well to tell the difference between creative expression and stylish fashion.”  She severely criticizes one of her young colleagues who “showed me her studies and this very talented girl also makes this nonsense with red specks and green, red-yellow-trimmed trees.  She claims to see it that way – she should really see her ophthalmologist – it is never true – nothing but affectation and sensationalism.”

Ms. Egner begins her last legible diary entry, at the age of 87, with the words, “Whence, whither, wherefore…should be written on tombstones.”  Mr. Suppan observes, “These last questions were posed before her final blindness.  Soon afterwards, her writing becomes illegible; the lines are running into each other.”

In one of her late diary entries, Ms. Egner crafted the most heartfelt affirmation I have ever come across for why the greatest and the least of us still bother to continue painting from nature in this digital age.

After viewing her works in a Viennese exhibit in 1935, Marie Egner, 85 years old, plagued with cataracts and sometimes in despair, wrote:  “When I worked on these paintings I really lived and was happy, sometimes high up in the skies like lovers, sometimes mortally grieved.  I happened to live through plenty, indeed plenty of genuine things in my life.”

Although many of us are forced to temporarily sling hash, usher for theaters and concert halls, drive taxis, bartend, work in construction or type financial reports, we understand you very well, Ms. Egner, we’ve been there ourselves on the same roller coaster ride for a few glorious, fleeting moments.