The Angel of Death and the Sculptor

The Milmore Memorial, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Writing the other day of the brilliant sculptor Karl Bitter, who was struck and killed by an automobile at the age of 47 when he was at the height of his creative powers, reminded me of a marble sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is largely ignored by visitors, but which I consider to be one of the most important pieces in the museum’s vast collection.   It is “The Milmore Memorial,” otherwise known as “The Angel of Death and the Sculptor,” which is now displayed prominently on a wall in the recently renovated American Wing Sculpture Courtyard.

I used to pass right by the sculpture myself without giving it much notice, partly because its previous location on the second floor balcony was not to its advantage.  But one day I gave it a good long look, then read the wall text, and I was moved to tears by the tender and poignant drama depicted with enormous skill and insight by Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), one of America’s greatest sculptors, who created The Lincoln Memorial in Washington and many other notable public monuments.  The Met’s sculpture is a replica of the original bronze statue installed in 1893 at the Forest Hills Cemetery, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.  The replica was completed in 1926 by the Piccirilli Brothers of New York, the marble carvers of choice for French and other sculptors.

The Met says the marble version, commissioned from French, who was also a Museum trustee, “required certain changes to accommodate the structural needs of the medium.”  I haven’t seen the bronze original, so I can’t tell you what those changes might have been.  I’m not certain how I would feel about the original in bronze, which is a bit brassy for my taste, with details often garishly highlighted.  Marble, on the other hand, is the stone of Michelangelo.  It is alive.  It breathes.  Figurative sculpture expertly carved out of marble conveys to me the impression of the purest, palest, softest human flesh imaginable.   It is the perfect material for the mood of this sculpture.  French showed the plaster model in Paris, where the sculpture was cast in bronze, and at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.  Those exhibitions sealed his reputation as one of the leading sculptors of the day.

Martin Milmore

 “The Milmore Memorial" is dedicated to two Irish immigrant brothers, the exceptional young sculptor Martin Milmore (1844-1883), and his older brother Joseph (1841–1886), a talented stonecutter who taught Martin how to carve.  Martin was a prodigious worker who had already completed a number of important public commissions when he died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 38, shortly before his 39^th birthday.  His greatest achievement was the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on Boston Common, which was dedicated in 1877.  French once described Milmore as “a picturesque figure, with long dark hair and large dark eyes…wearing a broad-brimmed soft black hat and a cloak.  His appearance was striking and he knew it.”

When Joseph died only a few years later, the family asked French, in accordance with Martin’s wishes, to create a memorial to honor the two brothers.  The statue that French produced was a masterpiece of Victorian sentiment that can’t help but move you to tears, especially, I think, if you have discovered that the creative way of life is the be all and end all of your own humble existence.

French depicts two standing figures in the memorial, a young sculptor and a winged messenger called The Angel of Death.  Martin Milmore is represented as a generic, handsome young sculptor.  The allegorical figure of Death is depicted, not in customary macabre fashion, but in the hooded and draped form of a beautiful woman. 

Martin and Joseph Milmore, “American Sphinx,” 1872,

 Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA

The sculptor is shown from the back, about to continue work with his mallet and chisel on a giant Sphinx similar to the one he and his brother actually completed some years earlier for the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  But the Angel of Death gently stays his hand with her own outstretched hand.  In her other hand she carries a bouquet of poppies, the symbol for eternal sleep.  The sculptor’s head is turned toward her with a superbly rendered, priceless expression of mild surprise and confusion on his handsome face, as if to ask, “Why are you interrupting me now?”  Death’s eyes are downcast.  Perhaps she is reluctant to answer his questioning gaze directly, but her countenance is gentle and calm.  She is the enduring and faithful mother of all, from cradle to grave, full of kindness and compassion.

An essayist in the November 1917 issue of  “The Art World” wrote that “it would be difficult to find a piece of modern sculpture in any country that surpasses ‘Death and the Young Sculptor’ in beauty, majesty and tenderness…observe with what dignity and sweetness the ugly theme (of death) is treated.”   This writer ascribed a “Greek spirit” to French’s handling of the theme.  “We see gravestones of Greeks in which calmness and composure and an almost smiling acquiescence in fate are the notes.”

Edwin A Rockwell, writing earlier in the September 1910 issue of “The International Studio,” comments that  the winged messenger appears to be bringing “peace and rest” to the young sculptor.  “Mr. French has preached a tender sermon on the immortality of the soul. .. It must be added that there is a technical triumph in the simplified and ethereal blending of the forms and in the overshadowing mass of drapery that lends added solemnity.”

French and Martin Milmore had both studied with the renowned New England sculptor Thomas Ball.  I can only imagine how filled with emotion French must have been while working on the concept for this memorial to Milmore,  his friend and fellow sculptor.

This work has found a perfect home within the Museum, a short walk from the Egyptian wing, which houses the oldest objects in the Museum, flint-stone tools from the Paleolithic era, some 750,000 years ago.  In the 19^th Century Milmore Memorial, French shows the young sculptor carving a sphinx, the emblem of that ancient civilization.  The Museum’s vast holdings -- more than two million objects -- can be studied as a series of connections, from millennium to millennium and from continent to continent.  The unifying element is the undying creative spirit of the human race.  We instinctively suffer collective grief when an artistic genius with a bright creative spirit is called away too soon.  In the Milmore Memorial, even Death’s messenger bows her head.

A Home for Artists

Speaking of artists’ studios, I see that a New York City real estate firm is now asking $15.5 million, reduced from $20 million just a year ago, for Paul Trebilcock’s old penthouse studio apartment at 44 West 77^th Street in my fashionable Upper West Side neighborhood.  Trebilcock, a prolific portrait painter for many years, lived there with his wife, Amaylia, also a painter, and their two children from 1930 until his death in 1981 at the age of 79.  I suppose the kids grew up and left home before then.  I don’t know.

You might very well ask, “Trebilcock, who’s he?”  Apart from Sargent, Zorn, the great Boldini and a few others, the fame of a skilled portrait painter much admired during his lifetime seldom extends beyond the grave.  Trebilcock was born in Chicago, graduated from the University of Illinois, and studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago with the excellent portrait painter Leopold Seyffert, who himself  learned a lot about painting from his friend, the outstanding Basque painter Zuloaga.

Paul Trebilcock, 1926, www.louisgrell.com

Paul Trebilcock, "Matianita," The Art Institute of Chicago 

1932 Exhibit

Paul Trebilcock, “Arnold R. Rich,” 1958, chief pathologist

 at Johns Hopkins Hospital

Paul Trebilcock, FDR, Columbia U, www.argentaimages.com

Trebilcock’s work is said to be in many museums, and he painted portraits of a lot of famous people.  I’m sure these portraits still exist, but just not as digitalized images on the World Wide Web.  His most famous sitter was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, painted in the White House on a commission from Columbia University, where Roosevelt attended law school for two years before leaving in 1907 to practice law after already having passed the bar exam.  But for the life of me, all I could find on the Internet was an old B&W photo on the website of the fee-based Argenta Images.  And I’m not about to ride the subway up to Columbia to see if I can take my own photograph of the portrait.  I've had it!   
 

44 W. 77th Street, Photo by Richard Caplan for

 "The New York Daily News,"  Aug. 23, 2012

Trebilcock’s old studio apartment is located in The Studio Building, a 1909 Neo-Gothic structure 14 stories tall designed by architects Herbert Spencer Harde and R. Thomas Short and built expressly for artists.  It sits alongside the broad boulevard portion of West 77th Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West just across from the American Museum of Natural History.  Trebilcock's studio is the one above with the big windows.  There are 32 large units in the building, all with oversized and “articulated” windows that face the landscaped grounds of the Museum. Nearly all units have fireplaces, and many contain double height sunken salons.  One of the units is occupied by Aaron Shikler, now 91, who painted the iconic official portraits of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. 

Every time I go by this magnificent building on my way to The Metropolitan Museum of Art directly across Central park on Fifth Avenue, I say, “Boy, wouldn’t it be great to have a studio in that building.”

Leading this “news” item with Trebilcock was a bit of a tease, because the studio was actually built specifically for the renowned Vienna-born sculptor Karl Bitter.  To accommodate Bitter’s need to create giant sculptures, the developer gave him a work space measuring 27 by 45 feet, with a 24-foot ceiling and a huge, duplex-height wall of north-facing windows.  The Vienna-born sculptor was at the height of his career when he moved in.  He had fashioned monumental architectural works and public monuments everywhere and was leading the cause to create the famous Grand Army Plaza development at Fifth Avenue and 59^th Street in front of the Plaza Hotel.  He designed the "Pulitzer Fountain of Abundance" contributed by publisher Joseph Pulitzer and created the bronze statue of the Roman goddess Pomona, the goddess of abundance, which sits atop the fountain.

Karl Bitter, 1907 Photo

Karl Bitter, “Pulitzer Fountain of Abundance,” Grand Army Plaza

 Fifth Avenue and 59^th Street, Completed in 1916

Karl Bitter, Sculpture of Alexander Hamilton, Cleveland County 

Court House, 1914

The plaza development, which includes the golden equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was proposed by Bitter in 1898 and completed in 1916.   In the spring of the  previous year, in April, when Bitter was just 47 years old, he was struck and killed by an automobile upon leaving the old Metropolitan Opera House on West 40^th Street.   Here’s an account published in “The New York Times” on April 11th of that year:  “Mr. Bitter was in the prime of life and at the height of a useful and brilliant career.  He was an energetic man who felt perfectly able to take care of himself.  That is always a dangerous way to feel in Broadway, by the Opera House, at that time of night in the Opera season.  No man can be sure of taking care of himself on a street crowded with swift-moving vehicles…A passing taxicab masked a car on the far side of it; in saving his wife’s life, Mr. Bitter lost his own.”

Bitter was only able to enjoy his giant work space and living quarters for a few years in company with his wife and three children.  I assume the families of Bitter and Trebilcock occupied the space after the death of the paterfamilias, so the studio apartment has only had two other families in residence.  The current owners are serious art collectors, and they have taken maximum advantage of the huge space and view to host lavish parties with hundreds of guests. 

The former studio and now living room, Photo by Evan Joseph for

"The New York Daily News,"  Aug. 23, 2012

This former artist’s studio now offers the prospective buyer one of the most spectacular living rooms in the city, with a terrific view of the Natural History Museum and Central Park.  The great room also includes an 8-foot working stone fireplace built in the 17th-century on the Iberian Peninsula, and floor to ceiling Corinthian columns.   And here’s the really good news.  You don’t have to sleep on a cot in the corner.  The entire apartment has grown some over the years to 4,189 square feet, and includes three bedrooms, 2 ½ baths, a dining room, a den, a wine cellar and library, as well as assorted nooks and crannies.  I see that the current décor of the big room is not to the taste of the Internet “decorators,” who would love to fix it up “their way.”  So would I.

And wouldn’t this 1,215 square feet of floor space make for a great artist’s studio!

The ornate building itself was conceived by the developer Walter Russell as a follow up to his earlier artists’ studio buildings on West 67th Street, just off Central Park West.  That street has been designated The West 67^th Street Artists’ Colony Historic District.  Eight early 20^th Century buildings, including the Hotel Des Artistes, were all built to contain artists’ studios, and all have large two-story studio windows facing north.  I got to know several illustrators who worked in those buildings and frequented my hangout, The Art Students League.

The design at 44 West 77^th Street is a mix of traditional and high-ceiling “studio” apartments, with Bitter's studio being the largest.  In an exuberant review of that former workplace in the August 23, 2012 edition of “The New York Daily News,” Jason Sheftell wrote:  “In the day, light floods in. At night, the minarets of the museum appear like tops of lit temples in Marrakesh or Istanbul. With the exception of where kings and queens live, this might be the greatest salon of any city apartment in the world.  Adored by titans, infants and strong women with hearts of gold, it could be the greatest living room in the history of New York City.”

But wouldn’t it also make for a great artist’s studio again!

Studios and Storage

I love to look at photographs of artists’ studios in the art magazines and on the Internet.   Some of the studios are spectacular and others are not.  All are interesting.  The studios don’t look anything like mine, and I imagine most artists would thank their lucky stars that they don’t.  I’d prefer to see these studios in person, but I don’t get out of the house that much.

I’m still buzzing about the perfect urban studio I saw many years ago in Midtown Manhattan on the far west side in a neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen, which was a pretty seedy part of town then.  I painted from the model in that studio a couple of times with a few other artists in the early 1980s.  I wish I had photographs.  But I’ll do my best to recall some details of the place, which I believe was an old horse stable that had been taken over for use by artists.    

At the time, the entrance to the building was through a half-height, padlocked door that made you think of Alice entering “Wonderland,” which I later thought I had done.  An average-sized adult had to stoop to get through it.   The building was off a small inner courtyard, and you had to walk up a couple of flights of rickety stairs to get to the studio.  Once inside, the first thing you saw was a small, improvised kitchen and bathroom on the right, and a small sleeping loft on the left – all the creature comforts a painter really needs.  Beyond the kitchen was a little lounge area that was festooned with velvet drapes.

The occupant then was Leroy Van Horne, a tall, lanky, somewhat eccentric painter who often wore his waist-length black beard rolled up and pinned just below his chin.  Leroy worked for an “antiques” dealer on the Upper West Side, and he used to rapidly paint full-length portraits on those wonderful old dark green, fine cotton canvas window shades (once standard issue in NYC rental apartments), which he sold to customers who might have thought they had stumbled across an original Robert Henri and were counting their blessings and the profit at auction.   My friend Michelle, who also painted in this studio, recalls that Leroy always hid the hands behind the back or otherwise ignored them in his portraits because they were “hard to paint” and it would have slowed him down too much to include them.  One of the artists who had rented the studio previously was David Leffel, and Leroy had taken it over from some of David’s other friends, including the accomplished violinist and painter Phillip Parnes, whom you might have seen in the movie “I’m Not Rappaport,” playing his violin in Central Park, which he occasionally did in later years.  Phil’s only web presence is a listing for him as an “actor,” which he never was.  Being a lazy researcher, it frustrates me that Leroy and Phil, both excellent painters, have no online presence, not unlike a lot of my talented friends and acquaintances from the time I was starting my so-called painting career in the early 1980s, when the Internet was in its infancy.

John Singer Sargent in his Paris Studio, ca. 1885

Getting back on "house tour," when the velvet drapes of the lounge area were pulled open, the piece de resistance of the place was revealed in all its magnificence, a "starving artist's studio" straight out of the 19^th Century -- right down to the pot-bellied stove.  It was probably the size of Sargent’s elegant Paris studio, if not larger.  The unobstructed north light windows started about chest height, as I recall, and went all the way up to the 20-foot-plus ceilings.  The natural light was glorious.  The first time I went there, one of the artists sharing the studio space was painting a low tabletop still life with a couple of pots and one white onion against the far brick wall about 30 feet from the velvet-draped entrance.  That onion absolutely glowed like the finest diamond in the world.  The sight was so thrilling that I knew that the only light I ever wanted to paint in was natural light.  And I’ve pretty much kept that promise I made to myself on that day.  I must add, unfortunately, that the light I work under does not come close to the kind of natural light you can only get from such an expansive interior environment.  But at least it’s comfortably natural, the best light for seeing the true color and form of things.

Except for the pot-bellied stove providing heat in the winter, that old-fashioned studio was perfection itself to a late-blooming artist still harboring romantic notions about the life of a painter.

Some 20 years later, I was fortunate to pay a short visit to another perfect studio in an entirely different setting.  This one sits in nearly total isolation in picturesque “Cornwall Hollow” in the Northwestern Connecticut woods near the Massachusetts border.  The large, perfectly proportioned studio is a former Baptist church that was built in 1844.  Right across the country road from the church there is a cemetery with graves of the deceased dating back to the Revolutionary War.  When the sun goes down it is totally black outside, with only the sound of crickets and coyotes to disturb your sleep, I imagine.

The studio, with a small attached building on one side for living quarters, is owned and occupied by Curt Hanson, an outstanding landscape painter with ties to the Boston School of painting through study with R.H. Ives Gammell.  Hanson paints serene, faithful, tonalist landscapes of New England and Thailand, where this devout Buddhist now spends part of the year.  Many of his New England landscapes are all-season views of the “hollow,” which he can see perfectly from the large windows of the studio.  The historic building, named “Cornubia Hall” by the previous owner, is pictured and described on his website: www.curthansonpaintings.com. 

I still dream about studios like these, but reality interferes.  I believe I will be stuck in my rent-stabilized home studio till the end of days.   It’s not such a bad studio for painting pictures from life of modest scale, no bigger than 24 by 30.  But the pictures keep piling up year after year, and I’m running out of storage space in my 12 by 18 foot monastery.  I’m not keen on paying an exorbitant monthly rent on a cubicle in a storage warehouse to stockpile the paintings I keep making at a rate far exceeding my rate for selling them.  And I hate the job of taking canvases off their stretchers and rolling them up or storing them flat.  I’ve already got about 150 20x16 inch portrait sketches from members’ painting sessions Saturday mornings at The Art Students League affixed flat to plywood boards.  I could just close my eyes and toss them all in the garbage, I suppose.  I already toss plenty of rejects on a regular basis as it is.  But I’m a sentimental hoarder of too many of these paintings.  So what to do?

I assume this is a problem almost all artists have, but the pictures of artists’ studios that I like to look at seem never to include a clear view of what their studio storage facilities are like.  There are more than enough art instruction books, and all the authors are happy to tell you, in some detail, in close, repetitious harmony, how to clean your brushes, choose your colors and mediums and painting surfaces, and show you all the stages of a painting, along with a lot of other serious tips for making better paintings.  But they never say anything useful about where they put all their paintings before they are shipped to some high-end gallery.  I wanna see a few pictures of storage racks, not just paintings!  I’ve seen plenty of them already.

Well, actually, at least one artist did have some valuable advice on the subject of storage.  The English painter Bertram Nicholls (1883-1974) had a neat storage rack built along one long wall of his studio at a convenient height so it could store frames and canvases and double as a work bench.  Nicholls described it as “a large shelf about a yard wide…supported on a double series of inch by inch uprights four to five inches apart.” His storage solution is similar to the racks used at many of the art schools and galleries.  He included a photo of it in his 1938 book “Painting in Oils,” which was part of the practical “How to do it” series published in London by The Studio Limited.  Nicholls thought of everything in this fascinating little book.

So I’m paying a young sculptor/carpenter to design and build another wooden storage rack to fit into some unused space about 9 feet long above a rack similar to the one Nicholls wrote about that I had someone build for me a few years ago.  I already have a couple of those industrial, metal shelving units covering the opposite long wall of my studio and have just added two more smaller units.  This new wooden storage contraption will be designed to accommodate my current use of the countertop for, among other things, a place to dry my wet paintings parked diagonally against the wall.

Here are some pictures of the studio as it looks now, with brushes and other stuff shoved into my 6 by 14 foot painting area next to the window to make way for the carpentry project. You might find the images amusing.

Will be lowering Shelves for more Canvas Storage

 New Wooden Rack built on platform will leave some needed wall space 

Opposite long wall covered with metal storage units

Two new metal units just added

Painting area near window now storing supplies

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.