Spanish dancers make excellent subjects for paintings, especially if they’re enjoying success at the time. Carmen Dauset Moreno (1868-1910), popularly known as Carmencita or La Carmencita, was perfect for that role.

Born in Almería, Spain, she learned to dance in Malaga, dancing professionally there in the Cervantes Theatre in 1880. In a couple of years she was touring Spain, then went on to dance in Paris and Portugal. Her performance in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 impressed a theatrical agent, who invited her to visit the US – under his management, of course.

She first appeared on stage at Niblo’s Garden in New York on 17 August 1889, and the following year changed managers and moved to the 23rd Street Concert Hall. In 1895 she returned to Europe, touring in London and Paris, before dying at the age of only 42.

Both John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase set off in pursuit of her, in the hope of painting her in 1890. Sargent was commissioned to paint her by his patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, and was already working on studies in preparation when he came across Chase, who was looking for the right opportunity.

At this time, Chase had his Tenth Street studio, in which he had already been arranging theatrical spectacles for his patrons. Sargent wrote to Chase, suggesting that the studio would be an ideal venue for her to appear, allowing both artists to paint her there.

Sargent – and probably Chase as well – was already aware of Manet’s oil painting of Lola de Valence (1862), and perhaps his preparatory watercolour. Although now one of Manet’s less well-known paintings, it was celebrated at the time for conforming more to artistic norms, and had been accompanied by verse written by Baudelaire.

Sargent already had a track record of painting his Spanish Dancer (1880-81).

On the evening of 1 April 1890, Sargent, Chase, and Carmencita met in Chase’s Tenth Street studio; she danced for them, and they sketched.

On this occasion, Sargent opted for a more static pose, similar to that of Manet’s painting, in his La Carmencita (1890), with her hands at her hips, driving her bust out and her chin high, in assertive pride.

Chase shows her in the midst of her dance, dynamic, vivacious, and happy. Her fingers play castanets, and her sash is thrown away from her body with her movement.

There are two other significant portraits of Carmencita, painted rather later.

Fifteen years later, a decade after her dancing career went into decline, Sargent produced a completely different portrait, one of his best, in my opinion. Now his virtuoso brushstrokes capture her motion. His inspiration was no longer Manet, but Giovanni Boldini.

A mutual friend of Sargent and Chase was (James) Carroll Beckwith (1852-1917), who had been a pupil of Carolus Duran alongside Sargent in 1877. Although Beckwith missed the performance in Chase’s studio on 1 April 1890, he caught up with her when he was in Paris, probably, in 1907.

Beckwith’s Carmencita (1907) shows an older woman, no longer dancing, but holding a guitar. The swirl and flash of her youth have faded, and in three years she was dead.

Chase, Sargent, and Beckwith were contemporaries and good friends. Both Sargent and Beckwith painted Chase’s portrait, which perhaps reveal insights into Chase’s personality that we might otherwise miss.

Beckwith painted Chase in 1881-82, when Chase was in his early thirties. His patent leather shoes appear quite incongruous, and his left hand looks much older than his face.

Sargent shows Chase in his fifties, immaculately dressed, with a carnation in his button-hole, and the tools of his art in hand.

With the centenary of Chase’s death drawing close, they are fascinating images to bear in mind.

Reference

Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

There were many very talented and successful painters in the US during William Merritt Chase’s career. Among his friends and colleagues was James Carroll Beckwith (1852–1917): in his day as well-received and famous, but today almost unknown. Beckwith also – quite innocently – may have come close to being murdered.

Carroll Beckwith was born in Hannibal, Missouri, but brought up in Chicago, where he started his training at the Chicago Academy of Design in 1868. After the great fire of 1871, he transferred to the National Academy of Design in New York, then he studied in Paris from 1873-78.

In Paris, he studied drawing with Adolphe Yvon at the École des Beaux-Arts, and painting with Carolus Duran. There he met and befriended John Singer Sargent (also a pupil of Carolus Duran at the time), and the pair of them assisted their master with a ceiling mural in the Palais du Luxembourg in 1877.

He then returned to the US, where he was appointed a professor at the Art Students League in New York in 1878, and in 1881-2 he painted William Merritt Chase’s portrait.

Normandy Girl (c 1883) appears to have been painted during the harvest in Normandy, France, at a time when Beckwith was teaching in New York.

Although this painting appears to have the title of Greece (1887), it more likely shows a tree-lined street in the US.

Beckwith won awards at the Paris Salon, Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, 1890, and again in 1899.

Beckwith was best known for his many portraits. Although not his most famous, his Portrait of Mark Twain (1890) is of particular interest, as it shows the hugely popular American writer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), at a time when he was suffering serious financial troubles because of problems in his businesses.

His portraits of women often showed them sewing against a rural landscape background, as in his Lady Sewing (c 1893).

He returned to Paris in 1893 to paint murals for several months.

Nita (1897) apparently shows a woman named Nita Sewell.

Sylvan Toilette (1898) is a more highly-finished work which may have been intended as a gentle mythical image for exhibition.

By 1900, Beckwith was approaching his fifties, long-married, and if anything rather staid. This was almost certainly a good thing, when he painted this almost nude Portrait of Evelyn Nesbit (c 1901), whose loosely-wrapped kimono was just about to fall off altogether.

This shows one of the first ‘supermodels’ whose career was professionally promoted. Nesbit (1884-1967) started modelling for artists when she was only 14 years old. With her family in dire financial straits when they moved to Philadelphia in 1900, her mother contacted Beckwith and encouraged him to employ her as a model. At this time, Beckwith’s major patron was the wealthy John Jacob Astor (who later died in the Titanic), and Mrs Nesbit was clearly chasing his money.

Beckwith’s (nearly) nude portrait of the young woman, who was no older that 17 at the time and could have been as young as 14 (her mother had a strange flexibility with her year of birth), helped launch her modelling career. Frederick Stuart Church (no relative of the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church) also painted her skimpily clad, despite Nesbit’s mother claiming that she never allowed her daughter to pose “in the altogether”.

By 1905, her face had been on most of the popular magazines of the day, was in many adverts, and she had become one of Charles Dana Gibson’s ‘Gibson Girls’. She also worked as a chorus girl on Broadway from 1901, the year that she first met the acclaimed architect Stanford White. She later accused White of drugging and raping her, and following marriage, her husband, Harry Kendall Thaw, shot White dead during a stage show in the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden. Beckwith must have been grateful that the insanely jealous Thaw had never taken exception to this painting.

Portrait of Evelyn Nesbit (1901) may have been more the sort of painting that the model’s mother had in mind, but sweet though it is, it would hardly have launched her daughter’s career.

In 1907, he seems to have been in Europe, where he painted his late portrait of the Spanish dancer Carmencita (1907).

The black veil worn by the woman in his Lost in Thought (Phoebe at Onteora) (1908) implies that this resident of Onteora, in the Hudson Valley, New York State, had recently lost her husband.

Mother and Child (c 1910) is a delightful double portrait in an unusually crisp realist style for Beckwith.

The title of his New Hamburg Garden (c 1910) is another puzzle, as New Hamburg was most probably a rural township in Ontario, Canada, at the time, and Beckwith lived in Italy from 1910-14.

The Palace of the Popes and Pont d’Avignon (1911) shows the vast buildings of the Papal Palace in Avignon, France, one of the largest mediaeval Gothic structures in Europe. It was last used as a papal palace in 1370.

Deciphering the references in his richly colourful and symbolic L’Empereur (The Emperor) (1912) is also not easy. As he was in Italy then, the statue – which holds aloft the eagle of the Roman Empire – may be that of a Roman Emperor, although the initial N on its plinth more probably refers to Napoleon, whose army appears massing with its artillery in the clouds.

Betty Hazard (1914) was most probably painted on his return to the US in 1914, as war broke out in Europe.

Beckwith died suddenly in 1917, in New York City. Evelyn Nesbit had just started her short career as a silent movie actress. Harry Kendall Thaw, who had murdered Stanford White on 25 June 1906, was judged sane and released from custody in 1915.

References

Wikipedia on Carroll Beckwith.
Wikipedia on Evelyn Nesbit.

If you use any form of ad blocker, or even a tracker blocker such as Better 1.0, you will undoubtedly have discovered that many commercial sites refuse all connections unless you turn your blocker off. However, I had not come across sites which behaved maliciously in response to a block, until now.

I was researching an article on some of William Merritt Chase’s paintings yesterday, and in one Google search I was offered a link which looked very promising, to the page www[dot]painting-history[dot]com/columbus[dot]htm. I have deliberately stunted this so that you cannot inadvertently click to be transported to it.

I do not use an ad blocker – I am happy to tolerate ads which will return commercial sites the money that they need – but strongly object to trackers, so have Better installed as a Safari plugin, which stops sites from tracking my behaviour.

The intended page appeared, quickly greyed over with a forged claim (complete with a stolen Apple icon) that I was running an outdated version of Adobe Flash Player, and the offer to update it for me. At the top right, I was invited to skip the advertisement, which I duly clicked on. Instead of taking me back to the page that I wanted, that action downloaded a disk image file which, when mounted, contains a single item bearing Adobe’s (forged) Flash icon, named Installer.app.

Although Installer.app appears certain to be unwanted, crapware if not actually malware, checking it with WhatsYourSign (Objective-See) shows it to be validly signed with an Apple Developer ID of Gulchera Kuntcevich. This gives it a disconcerting air of authenticity, despite its tinge of Anglo-Saxon schoolboy humour.

I have not, of course, been daft enough to run this unwanted installer, but poking around inside it, it turns out to be a Fuzeware installer app which was put together using components dated 25 August 2016 – very recent indeed. It also contains a property list which refers to a Safari extension Poptotop.safariextz, which is almost certainly crapware at best (there is an old browser plugin of the same name, to which it may be related). As far as I can make out, this installer also downloads further components from a remote site.

A search in the VirusTotal database suggests that what I received may well be a new delivery of the old favourite adware/crapware Genieo.

Visiting the original page on other occasions has reproduced this malicious behaviour, sometimes even forcing an alert offering to transport me to another site which looks even more unwanted.

I have taken the opportunity to look at the source code for this and other pages on the original website, and was interested to discover that it uses Adcash to generate its income. There were no signs of other internal or external links which might be creating these misleading popovers and alerts which supplied me with unwanted crapware.

Adcash would appear to be in the forefront of developing an advertising product, named Adcash Anti-Adblock Solution, which it claims “is able to bypass adblockers 98% of the time”.

So I am left with three possibilities:

• Adware delivered me unwanted crapware.
• Adware misread my tracker blocker, and using its Anti-Adblock Solution, deliberately delivered me unwanted crapware.
• Some other unseen mechanism delivered me unwanted crapware.

Unwanted and potentially malicious software doesn’t only come from suspicious sites: even apparently innocent sites, in their quest for cash, are now prone to it. It also looks quite possible that advertisers are responding to ad and tracker blockers by foisting unwanted and forged software on them.

Finally, just because an app is validly signed does not mean to say that it is safe to run. The best way for crapware and malware to get past Gatekeeper is to present it with a valid signature, which may also convince the unsuspecting user.

Don’t you think that Apple should revoke Gulchera Kuntcevich’s signature in Gatekeeper?

Beware.

Robert Henri (1865–1929) was a colleague, friend, and rival of William Merritt Chase, and one of the most influential painters in America in the early twentieth century.

He was born Robert Henry Cozad, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father was a property developer, and soon moved the family to Nebraska, where they were inaugural residents in the new town of Cozad. However, his father became embroiled in a dispute over land, leading to Cozad Senior shooting the other man. Young Robert fled to Denver, Colorado, where he was joined by the rest of the family. He changed his name to Robert Earl Henri and posed as an adopted son. When he was eighteen, the family moved to New York City, and on to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he started to paint.

His formal training began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886. Two years later he went to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, but failed to gain entry to the École des Beaux-Arts. Before he left Europe in late 1891, he had also visited and painted in Brittany and Italy.

In the Woods (c 1890) shows the influence of Impressionism on his paintings of this period, while he was still in Paris.

Café du Dome (On the Boulevard Montparnasse) (1892) is an example of his early views of Paris.

Back in the US, Henri returned to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the following year started teaching at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.

Although this image of his Beach at Atlantic City (1893) is very small (it is the largest that I have been able to locate), this view shows how much his early style was influenced by French masters such as Manet and Monet.

In the mid-1890s, Henri moved away from the Impressionism which he had valued so much during his training, referring to it as the “new academicism”. He urged others to join him in seeking fresh and gritty subjects in contemporary American cities, so becoming a founder of the Ashcan School.

Friendship with the Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice introduced Henri to sketching en plein air on small panels or pochades, a technique which he used to make quick oil sketches in cities.

He was successful in having portraits accepted for the Paris Salon of 1896 and 1897. In 1897 he also had a solo show in Philadelphia, which attracted the attention of William Merritt Chase, who introduced him to the art world of New York, and invited him to teach at Chase’s own art school in New York.

His nocturne Night on Boardwalk (1898) shows how far his mature style had departed from his early Impressionism.

After his marriage in 1898, Henri and his wife spent two years in Paris, where he concentrated on painting for the Salon. He was successful again, with two paintings accepted in 1899, one of which was bought by the French state for the Musée du Luxembourg. (One source claims that his Salon submissions were refused, although one painting was definitely bought for the public collection.)

Sudden Shower (1898/1902) was either completed just before or soon after that extended honeymoon in Europe.

On the Marne (1899) pays homage to Impressionism in showing some of its most important scenery, the river Marne, which was a popular motif for several of Cézanne’s paintings. This view is unusual in its elevation above the river, which perhaps signifies his determination to move on.

Following his return from Paris, in 1902 he started teaching at the New York School of Art; his more notable students there included Joseph Stella, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and George Bellows.

His Spain (1902) has a wonderfully dramatic sky, which confirms his great skill as a landscape painter far from the streets of New York.

Henri was particularly eloquent when painting views of New York City in harsh winter weather, as in his Snow in New York (1902). This was dated to 5 March 1902, and was most probably painted in front of the motif, in a single session, using the techniques he had learned from James Wilson Morrice.

Street Scene with Snow (c 1902) is a more developed view of the city in winter, here in a more residential district.

Landscape Sketch at Escorial (1906) appears to be a plein air pochade painted outside the city of Madrid, in the hills near the Escorial, home to many old master paintings.

In 1906, he was elected to the National Academy of Design, but walked off the jury for the following year’s exhibition, accusing other jurors of bias.

Laughing Child (1907) is one of several portraits which Henri painted of the children he met in cities and among the poorer classes wherever he went. This was one of his paintings which were exhibited at the show 8 American Painters, organised by Henri as a response to his problems with the jurors at the National Academy of Design. It was attended by over seven thousand visitors, and more than $4,000 worth of art was sold. This painting was bought by Mrs Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

Henri did not arrive at his The Blue Kimono (1909) through the Japonisme which had accompanied Impressionism, but with the rising numbers of Japanese who were becoming part of the rich cultural mix in contemporary American cities. It presents an obvious visual puzzle, though: the lower part of the woman’s kimono is not blue, but chocolate brown. I do not know if this was intentional, and represents the mud sprayed on from the streets in wet weather, or if this is the unintentional result of changing colour in a pigment.

In 1907, New York audiences were shocked by Richard Strauss’s opera Salome (1907), based on Oscar Wilde’s play. This inspired Henri to invite a Mademoiselle Voclexca to perform the notorious Dance of the Seven Veils in Henri’s studio, which he then interpreted into a series of paintings, including this Salome (1909). He had long been influenced by Rubens’ portrayals of the sensuous powers of women, particularly in his Marie de Medici cycle (1621-1625).

In 1910, he organised the Exhibition of Independent Artists, which was the first unjuried show in the US which did not award prizes, and was modelled after the Salon des Indépendants in France. Although it was well attended, on this occasion sales were poor.

Later in his career, Henri took his pochade gear out of the city more, particularly on the wild coast of Maine, where he painting his Marine – Break over Sunken Rock, Storm Sea (1911).

He exhibited five paintings at the (in)famous Armory Show in 1913, where he openly stated that he thought new European art would overshadow the non-representational American works shown there. This left Henri and remaining American realists in a difficult position, as successive waves of Modernism started to sweep through art, and representational painting fell from the avant garde.

In 1913, Henri rented Corrymore House, on Achill Island, on the west coast of Ireland, where he painted the local children and the superb skies, as in his West Coast of Ireland (1913). This is my favourite of all his paintings.

He started teaching at the Art Students League in New York in 1915, then the following year, as if to affirm his belief in the future of representational painting, he began travelling to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to paint its unique light and scenery.

The Reader in the Forest (1918) is one of his few pastels which is still accessible.

In the 1920s, he turned to studio models for a late series of nudes, one of the last of whom was the improbably-named Doris Trautman (1928). Later that year he became ill as the result of prostate cancer, and died in 1929.

References

Wikipedia.

One name crops up time after time in the biographies of American painters who were active in the late 1800s, someone who seems always to have been there, in company with, but never to stand on his own: Frank Duveneck (1848–1919). It turns out that, at the time, he was as celebrated as his friends, such as William Merritt Chase, but now seems to have lapsed into the unknown.

Frank Duveneck was born in Covington, Kentucky, to a German immigrant family, and was taught to paint by a local artist. In 1869, he travelled to Munich, Germany, where he studied at the Royal Academy under Wilhelm von Diez and Wilhelm Leibl.

His paintings were acclaimed when shown at the Boston Art Club in 1875, and he found himself becoming a popular teacher.

In 1876, Duveneck and Chase both painted a young boy, carefully posed with a parrot, in Chase’s Munich studio. Duveneck’s The Turkish Page is technically brilliant, and an exceedingly ambitious work for someone within seven years of starting their training. It was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York the following year, but had a mixed response. Viewers found its still life approach lost narrative, and were puzzled by the depiction of the child.

By the time that it was displayed at the Pennsylvania Academy in its 1893-4 exhibition, changing taste brought it acclaim, and it sold.

Chase’s version, below, was surprisingly different in many respects. I leave it to you to decide which you prefer. Either way, I think that it establishes Duveneck on a par with Chase in terms of art.

The Cobbler’s Apprentice (1877) was also painted in Munich, where it sold to the American Vice Consul. It eventually found its way into the collection of Charles Phelps Taft.

Soon, Duveneck’s style loosened, as shown in his very painterly Still Life with Watermelon (1878).

During the late 1870s and 1880s, Duveneck spent long periods in Germany and Italy. In 1878 he set up his school in the village of Polling, in Bavaria, where he taught mainly Americans, who became known as the ‘Duveneck Boys’. These included John Henry Twachtman, Julius Rolshoven, and John White Alexander. Among the many wonderful landscapes which he painted there is his Polling Landscape (1881), which is one of my favourites.

His Grand Canal in Venice (c 1883) was a study for his Water Carriers below, from his visits to Venice.

Duveneck was also a successful print-maker, as exemplified in his The Bridge of Sighs (1883).

Water Carriers, Venice (1884) is probably Duveneck’s finest painting of Venice, combining the view from his earlier study, with an intimate insight into the daily work of ordinary Venetians.

Some of his sketches from Venice are very progressive in their appearance, as with the vigorous brushwork of his Red Sail in the Harbor at Venice (c 1884).

Duveneck painted some masterly works showing country people in their working lives: his Girl with Rake (c 1884) mixes precision in the foreground with varying degrees of looseness behind.

Despite being dated two years later, the young woman in his Siesta (1886) looks and dresses suspiciously similarly to that in Girl with Rake, down to her sickle, cast aside from her sleeping body.

Duveneck had already met and taught the American Elizabeth Boott in Paris, when he made his way to Florence. Boott had been born in Boston but raised in the Villa Castellani (c 1887) there. This villa overlooks the square of Bellosguardo, which in turn overlooks Florence, and has achieved literary fame in two of Henry James’ novels, Portrait of a Lady in which it is Gilbert Osmond’s residence, and The Golden Bowl in which Adam and Maggie Verver were modelled on Elizabeth Boott and her father Francis, a classical composer. Duveneck married Elizabeth Boott in 1886, but she tragically died just two years later from pneumonia.

Duveneck returned to the US to live in Covington and teach at the Art Academy of Cincinnati until his death. Among his pupils there was Edward Charles Volkert, the cattle painter.

Among his portraits of this period is that of Maggie Wilson (1898).

He also painted some overtly Impressionist works, such as the brilliantly-lit That Summer Afternoon in My Garden (c 1900).

He spent his summers in and around Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he painted his Horizon at Gloucester (c 1905), which shows the port’s distinctive skyline from Eastern Point. In 1906, he was elected to the National Academy of Design as a full Academician.

The Yellow Pier Shed (c 1910) is another of his summer paintings of Gloucester’s harbour.

Curiously, in his final years he painted several views of Brace’s Rock (c 1916), off Eastern Point, Gloucester. Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865) had done the same shortly before his death.

Reference

Wikipedia.

During the 1700s, a new trade spread around Europe: the artists’ colourman. Although larger workshops had no trouble employing assistants to make fresh oil paint, stretch and prime canvases, and do all the other craft work required to support one or more active painters, smaller workshops and individuals struggled.

Platzer’s The Artist’s Studio (1740-59) shows an assistant using a muller, at the far right, to prepare fresh oil paint for the painters at work in this workshop.

Horemans the Younger’s In the Painter’s Workshop (before 1790) puts the assistant in the centre, although he seems to be distracted by his family.

The artists’ colourman may have been a skilled assistant in a big workshop, then realised that they could make a living from supplying stretched and primed canvases, prepared oil paints, and other materials to several smaller workshops, individuals (who might be wealthy amateurs, perhaps), and eventually even to larger workshops.

One problem which they had to solve was how to supply oil paints, which were messy and tended to dry. It had long been known that excluding air from drying oils prevented them from drying, and someone discovered that oil paint would remain fresh and contained when it filled a small bag, such as a pig’s bladder. By the late 1700s, artists’ colourmen throughout Europe were selling their oil paints in these bladders.

In Quadrone’s witty Every Opportunity is Good (1878), we are allowed a detailed look at the painter’s paraphernalia, which includes several paint bladders on the low table behind the easel, and one on the floor. Although this was painted well after the introduction of paint tubes (which I will cover in a subsequent article), bladders remained relatively cheap and popular quite late in the 1800s.

Paint bladders transformed oil painting, most of all because they made oil paint portable. No longer was the painter constrained to using oil paints in the studio, but they could take a lightweight easel, small panels or canvases, and some bladders of paint outdoors, and paint en plein air, with the landscape in front of them.

The paint supplied in these bladders was also more consistent: good artists’ colourmen made good, reliable, and consistent paints, so the painter could rely on a trusted supplier rather than having to train their own assistants. Of course there were poor paints supplied by bad colourmen, but the market soon sorted those out.

With the ‘enlightenment’ and colourmen, the 1700s should have seen improving quality and standards among those painting in oils. Sadly, that was not always the case: sometimes it was the more conscientious painter, who aspired to equal the Masters of the Renaissance, Rubens, van Dyck, and most of all Rembrandt, who almost literally came unstuck.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)

One of the most famous and prolific portrait painters, Reynolds had a conventional training in oil painting with Thomas Hudson (1701-1779), a successful portrait painter who used traditional and conservative methods with roots back to the late 1600s. This used layers, starting with dead colouring, the laying in of shadows and lights, then blending in transitions of shading and colour wet-on-wet. Highlights were then brought out, and shadows glazed, to produce a series of thin layers, and a smooth, finished paint surface.

Reynolds’ early stages are shown well in this abandoned portrait of Mrs Robinson (c 1784), where most of the paint layer is sufficiently thin as to allow the texture of the canvas to show through.

His portrait of Anne Seymour Damer (née Conway) (1773) shows this technique working well, with painterly highlights, and textures in the fabrics. That of flesh has aged well, with limited fine cracking visible.

Reynolds aspired to the greatness of the Masters, and in his quest to achieve that, he experimented, particularly after he visited Italy in 1749-52. Most of his canvases were supplied stretched and primed by colourmen, but Reynolds appears to have customised his paint composition very considerably, if he did not have it made to his own specifications.

Seeing that the works of Masters, such as Rembrandt, had passages with quite thick applications of paint, Reynolds also applied his paint thickly in appropriate passages. In order to make the paint viscous enough for that, he took to adding mediums which he felt resembled those used by the Masters. He seldom scraped back paint in order to correct or change his paintings, but applied more paint over the top of as many as ten previous layers, some of them quite viscous and thick.

Reynolds himself admitted that his The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle (1788) had “ten pictures under it, some better, some worse.”

His records of ‘experiments’ with paint are not given in sufficient detail to reproduce any of his materials, but contain references to the use of copaiba balsam (a controversial oleo-resin thickener which can inhibit drying), wax (which he was convinced was the secret of success of the Masters), and bitumen (which inhibits drying). His drying oils were linseed, walnut, and poppy seed, with the latter two mainly used for lighter-coloured paints. They were often heat-treated to pre-polymerise and thicken them.

But his greatest downfall, as far as the longevity of his paintings is concerned, was his excessive use of resins, including mastic, pine, and copal, as well as the oleo-resin copaiba balsam. Contemporaries recorded that some of his portraits cracked before they had even left the studio.

Reynolds also experimented with the most dangerous medium of all: Megilp. Known by a variety of similar names, he is the first British artist known to have referred to its use. Megilp is made by heating a drying oil with a lead drier (usually litharge), then adding substantial amounts of resin until it produces a thick paint of buttery consistency. Variants using different kinds of ‘black oil’ were even more likely to compromise the longevity and structural integrity of paintings. Reynolds seems to have been addicted to them.

His portrait of Lady Sunderland (1786) has survived rather better than many of his paintings.

But a more careful look at its background shows where paint, presumably diluted with turpentine to aid its rapid application, has run, although other parts of the same brushstroke still show the marks of the brush, indicating that the paint had also been thickened prior to dilution.

His Cupid Untying the Zone of Venus (1788) has catastrophic cracking indicating that surface layers of paint have detached from lower layers. In parts, those cracks have become filled with lighter paint which has risen up from a lower layer, which was drying more slowly than the more superficial layers. This detail also shows the wide variation in thickness of the paint layer: some passages are thin enough to allow the texture of the canvas to show through, while others are so thick that layers have separated.

Similar loss of structural integrity has afflicted his The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle (1788), in its thickly-painted passages.

Other parts of that painting appear to be in need of extensive conservation work to restore details which have become largely unintelligible because of problems in the paint layer.

Sadly, Reynolds was not the first, and by no means the last, painter to compromise their oil paintings, from their desire to emulate the Masters. There were also many more who were tempted to use Megilp and its variants, in the forlorn hope that it would improve their paintings.

Reference

Gent A (2015) Reynolds, Paint and Painting: a Technical Analysis, in Joshua Reynolds, Experiments in Paint, eds. L Davis & M Hallett, The Wallace Collection & Paul Holberton. ISBN 978 0 9007 8575 7.

Having recently posted this article about Edward Charles Volkert (1871-1935), America’s cattle painter, I mentioned that I had been intending to write about one of the best British painters who specialised in rural scenes and farm animals: George Morland (1763–1804).

Morland was probably one of the most talented painters in the UK during the 1700s, had one of the most eventful lives, and sadly died in tragic circumstances. I am surprised that no one has yet used his life as the basis for historical fiction.

He was born in London, into an established family of painters. He was taught to draw at an early age, and when he was only ten he exhibited chalk drawings at the Royal Academy, which had been established five years earlier. He copied Dutch and Flemish masters, and Sir Joshua Reynolds gave him permission to copy his paintings. When he was only seventeen, his paintings were being engraved, and proved a commercial success.

He left home in 1784 or 1785, and developed a lifestyle of intensive and highly productive painting, combined with heavy drinking, which brought many of his friends to despair. He first lived in the house of a picture dealer, who proved a harder task-master than his father.

Over this period, the British climate was unusually harsh, with many winters in which the snow was deep and prolonged, even in the south of the country, something he shows well in his early Winter Landscape with Figures (c 1785).

In the summer of 1785, he escaped from the clutches of the picture dealer, and painted portraits in Margate, where he fell in love with a maid. He visited St Omer in France briefly. He then returned to London the following year, lodging in Kensal Green, where he made friends with William Ward, a famous engraver. In 1786, Morland married Ward’s sister, and just a month later, Ward married Morland’s sister. Unfortunately the two couples decided to live together in Marylebone, London, which only worked for three months.

Morland moved around various lodging houses in London, painting intensively, then spending the proceeds on drink. He was particularly fond of rural if not rustic scenes, and visited the Isle of Wight on several occasions from late 1789, to paint the dramatic forms of its coastline.

A Party Angling (1789) is one a series of paintings which he made, showing the country sporting pursuits of the gentry of the day. Several of these featured African slaves, and he took a bold stance in support of the abolition of the slave trade.

Guinea pigs had been introduced as exotic pets in Europe in about 1575, and still had considerable novelty value when Morland was painting. His Selling Guinea Pigs (c 1789) was very successful as a print, with 500 copies selling within just a few weeks. In his early career, he painted many works showing children and their lifestyles, which tailed off as he developed his mature style and market.

St. James’s Park (1788-90) shows a military family together in what is now a central London park, but which was in Morland’s day quite rural, even with the cow being milked at the left. The bright red cheeks may be symbolic reflections of alcohol consumption: several of Morland’s earlier paintings were quite moralising.

The Soldier’s Return (c 1790) was one of an extended series of paintings which took the themes of military separation, desertion, and loyalty, at a time when Britain had been at war off and on for a very long period.

Partridge Shooting (c 1790) is another example of his paintings of sporting pursuits of the country gentry, in which he makes the obvious contrast with the poor farmhouse behind.

In 1790, he was invited by the Prince of Wales to paint him “a room of pictures”, but declined the invitation, and ceased accepting private commissions altogether. At this time, he was observed to be capable of painting one of his smaller canvases in just two and a half hours, and then to sell that work for ten guineas (£10.50).

In 1790-91, he painted several larger works, of which at least one was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1791. The Old Water Mill (1790) is one of his finest landscapes, and one of his few paintings featuring sheep, which appear to have been the only farm animal for which he did not have deep affection.

Before a Thunderstorm (1791) is another of these larger canvases, showing well the rising wind and threatening sky just before a summer storm strikes.

Morland appears not to have travelled much beyond London and the south coast of England, but did paint several views of more rugged countryside beyond, including his Rocky Landscape with Two Men on a Horse (1791).

Old Horses with a Dog in a Stable (c 1791) is one of several classic stable scenes. In this, the white horse is shown with great empathy for a working animal now wasted, and soon destined for the knacker’s yard.

Foxhunting in Hilly Country (1792) is another in his series of country sporting pursuits, where he shows his greater empathy with the animals than the riders.

By 1792, over a hundred of his paintings had been turned into engravings, which proved extremely popular and lucrative, although mainly for the publishers. In addition to drinking excessively, he lived a lavish life, at one time allegedly keeping eight horses at the nearby inn. His debts began to mount, and he had to keep moving address to try to keep ahead of them.

His painting of Guinea Pigs (1792), as with those that he made of rabbits, are probably the finest depictions of these species by any artist.

His dealers were happy to buy and remove his paintings before they were even dry. Once in the hand of some of the less scrupulous dealers, it was common for several copies to be made, and sold as originals.

I have not been able to locate usable images of his paintings of cattle, apart from his exceptional undated Four Studies of Heads of Cattle.

Of farm animals, he appears to have had strongest feelings for pigs. In Front of the Sty (1793) shows what is probably a Gloucester Old Spot or related breed, a sow asleep with three of her well-grown piglets.

Study of Pigs (date not known) uses a similar composition, and perhaps breed, with highly perceptive detail. The trunk of the tree in the background appears to bear ‘lungwort’ lichen of the species Lobaria pulmonaria, which is now extinct through the south and east of the UK, but was then commonplace, for example.

The Ratcatchers (1793) shows a couple of itinerant workers with the dogs they used to catch vermin such as rats, the man on the left holding up one of their successful catches.

Setters (1798-99) demonstrates Morland’s skills at painting dog portraits, with this fine pair of English Setters. These are gundogs, with ‘soft’ mouths which do not damage the game they retrieve.

In 1798, he lived in Hackney, and his quiet and secluded habits, and overheard discussions about printing plates, aroused local suspicion that he might be forging bank notes. His rooms were searched, and the mistake was realised, for which he was given £21 in compensation.

In the spring of 1799, Morland and his sick wife spent some time living in their doctor’s cottage in Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. This was a time of heightened national security, and there was great fear of a French invasion. Unfortunately, locals suspected Morland of being a French spy, and when he was observed sketching Yarmouth Castle, he was arrested. When brought before the magistrates in Newport, he was discharged under the instruction that he was to make no more drawings or paintings while he remained on the Island – something which he ignored.

When he returned to London at the end of 1799, Morland’s debts finally caught up with him. He was arrested, and would have been thrown into debtors’ prison, but was allowed to remain in supervised lodgings. Although he continued to paint at a ferocious pace, he gradually succumbed to his excessive drinking. When he was released from confinement in 1802, as an insolvent, his health was in decline, and he probably suffered a stroke which made it impossible for him to hold his palette.

He was arrested again in 1804, for debts, and died shortly afterwards, a broken man, aged only 41. It is estimated that he painted more than 4,000 oil paintings during his life, and made more than a thousand drawings. Among them were two paintings which served the cause of the abolition of the slave trade.

References

Wikipedia.

Gilbey W & Cuming ED (1907) George Morland, His Life and Works, A & C Black. Available from the Internet Archive.

Having written about Edward Charles Volkert and George Morland and their paintings of farm animals, I cannot but cover the great Constant Troyon (1810–1865) in this article.

He was born in Sèvres, into a family who were inevitably associated with the major porcelain manufacturer there. He started as an apprentice painter in the factory, but wanted to use his skills for larger-scale paintings. By about 1831, he had left the factory, and was painting landscapes on his travels through France. He became a pupil of Camille Roqueplan, who introduced him to the members of the Barbizon School.

It is often stated that Troyon’s early works were indifferent, but I beg to disagree. The few works which are now accessible, such as his View at La Ferté-Saint-Aubin, near Orléans (1837), include some wonderful landscapes, which appear influenced by John Constable, who died in the year that Troyon painted this.

His Farmhouse in Normandy (before 1845) is an unusually wide-angled view from low down, which appears quite original.

Although not dated, his Anglers could easily have shown a moment in Constable’s rural Suffolk.

In 1846, Troyon travelled to the Netherlands, where he saw the cattle paintings of Paulus Potter, and studied the works of the Dutch Masters. As a result, his subject matter and style changed, and he concentrated on painting farm animals in landscapes. These quickly became very successful, and he was awarded a total of five medals for his paintings shown in the Paris Salon, and the Legion of Honour.

His undated A Farmer in his Cart shows a common form of transport at the time, and his journey from landscape to country animals.

He not only painted farm animals in the fields, but followed them to market too, as in his undated A Sheep Market in Normandy. Pissarro also took to painting scenes of country markets, although none was as thoroughly agricultural as this.

Surely the most outstanding of his early paintings must be his The Approaching Storm (1849). Set on a Constablesque river, two anglers appear to be readying themselves for the torrential rain which is heading in their direction, while others still wander in the last patch of sunshine on the far bank.

Troyon appears to have been particularly successful when painting into the light, or contre jour, as in his wonderful Cattle Drinking (1851). This shows the banks of the Touques River in Normandy, which he frequented in the 1850s, sometimes with Eugène Boudin, who was a great influence on Claude Monet and Impressionism. After Troyon’s death, this painting was still held in high regard: it was even included in an exhibition of the ‘hundred best masterpieces’ at the Georges Petit galleries in Paris, in 1883.

Troyon also loved to paint coastal scenes, and the combination of the Normandy coast and cattle, on a sunny day, brought his Repose (date not known).

Given just a few trees and cattle in a field, Troyon painted popular works such as Cows in the Field (c 1852).

His later paintings include a wide range of domestic animals, including these Running Dogs (1853) and geese, as well as horses, cattle, and sheep.

Painting into the light again, he captures the steamy breath of Oxen Going to Work (1855).

With his commercial success, Troyon bought a house at Villers, where he later painted his Coast near Villers (c 1859). With a rainstorm on its way, a couple who have been collecting seaweed into the panniers on one of their ponies set off to return, while hunters erect their fowling nets to catch birds.

Of all his paintings, though, it is his On the Way to Market (1859) which epitomises Troyon best for me. Its melee of sheep, cattle, dog, donkey and horse are outlined by the brilliant sunlight, which combines with the breath of the animals and the dust kicked up by their hooves to create a remarkable shallow-focus effect. This must surely have been inspiration for some of Pissarro’s much later, and equally brilliant, paintings.

Reference

Wikipedia.

… Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
(William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5, scene 5.)

Several of the painters of the Dutch Golden Age lived to a ripe old age, but one died tragically young: the brilliant Paulus Potter (1625–1654) who is most famous for his landscapes featuring farm animals.

He was born in Enkhuizen, a busy port in the north of the Netherlands, but moved to Leiden and then Amsterdam when still a child. His father was a painter, and he learned and worked in the family workshop.

He painted his God Appearing to Abraham at Sichem (1642) in the middle of his apprenticeship, making it one of his earliest surviving works. The human figures at the left have some odd proportions which indicate his inexperience, but the most striking feature is the magnificent pair of cows stealing the centre. How these cattle came to dominate this painting is a mystery: it is as if he was told to paint the Biblical motif, but lacked interest and decided to liven it up according to his desires.

Once he had completed his apprenticeship, he moved to Delft, where he became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke (the painters’ guild) in 1646.

Peasant Family with Animals (1646) appears to be another example of a hijacked motif, of a peasant family, with a curiously grotesque young daughter, their cottage, and some wizened trees. Potter has added to that a fairly extensive repertoire of farm animals, including two cows (one being milked), a calf, and sundry sheep, lambs, and a goat, almost in the fashion of a farm animal sampler.

His Figures with Horses by a Stable (1647) starts to show his mature compositional approach. The farmer and his wife, who is feeding a child at her breast, still have a slight awkwardness about them, but the horses, chickens, dog, and distant cattle are finely-painted, as is the magnificent tree in the centre. His sky contains several birds, another feature which remained fairly consistent in his mature works.

He completed his development in his Driving the Cattle to Pasture in the Morning (1647) with a superb dawn sky, providing the warm backlighting to the cattle and barren trees. The farmer’s child has grown, but still appears to feed at the breast, as was common at the time. At the far left a pair of pigs are shown in repose.

Probably his first masterpiece, which continued to be ranked alongside Rembrandt’s finest for the next couple of centuries, is The Bull (also widely known as The Young Bull) (1647), which is nearly life-sized, and almost hyperreal in its surface details. Originally intended just to be a portrait of the central bull, Potter enlarged the canvas to accommodate (from the left) a ram, lamb, ewe, herdsman, cow, and above them a bird of prey, possibly a buzzard. Beyond them are more cattle in the meadows, which recede to the church of Rijswijk, which is between Delft and The Hague.

There are also many fine details, such as the frog in the foreground, the textured bark and its lichen on the tree, and several flies on the cattle.

A Husbandman with His Herd (1648) is a variation on a similar theme, this time with a lifelike cow-pat in the centre foreground.

In 1649, Potter moved to The Hague, where he married, and worked until 1652. His wife’s family were well-connected and provided entry to the upper class. At this time, he apparently painted a work showing a cow pissing, which was bought (with glee) by Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, one of the royal court.

His Two Pigs in a Sty (1649) shows two quite hairy pigs at rest inside. Many of the older breeds of pig were more hairy than modern varieties, and Potter has painted their coats very realistically, as well as skilfully lighting the face of the sow sat on her haunches.

Two Horses near a Gate in the Meadow (1649) shows that Potter still had some room for improvement in his equine works: the head of the horse in the centre shows some slightly peculiar proportions.

The Bear Hunt (1649) is another very large canvas, showing a swarthy man armed with a scimitar, his hounds, and some other people, attacking two Eurasian brown bears. Although the bear had become extinct, through hunting, in the British Isles by about 1000 CE, it was still not uncommon in the Netherlands in Potter’s day. His first-hand knowledge of the animal appears limited, though, as their body proportions are quite different to those shown here.

Orpheus and Animals (1650) is one of Potter’s most unusual paintings, showing a wide range of different animal species, some of which were not well-known then, and one of which (the unicorn) did not even exist. Those shown include a Bactrian camel (two humps), donkey, cattle, ox, wild pig, sheep, dog, goat, rabbit, lions, dromedary (one hump), horse, elephant, snake, deer, unicorn, lizard, wolf, and monkey.

In 1652, Potter moved to Amsterdam.

Cattle in the Meadow (1652) develops the effects of light together with the early autumn season almost to the point of being impressionist in its use of colour. In addition to the cattle, the painting is enhanced with a sow and her piglets in the right foreground, and exuberant lichen growth on the split treetrunk by them.

Resting Herd (1652) shows another variation of his standard composition for cattle.

His Cows Grazing at a Farm (1653) was one of his last paintings, and apart from its meticulous detail, its rich lighting effects might be more typical of Corot two hundred years later, perhaps.

In 1654, when still in Amsterdam, he died from tuberculosis, aged only 28. In his tragically brief career, he had painted over a hundred oil paintings, most of which survive today. His faithful depictions of farm animals set the standard for art for the next couple of centuries, and were inspiration to Constant Troyon and others who painted animals.

Reference

Wikipedia.

With artists’ colourmen supplying growing ranges of ready-made oil paints in bladders, it was relatively straightforward for landscape painters like John Constable (1776-1837) to go out in front of the motif and paint en plein air in oils. Neither were artists like Constable reliant on the support of a team of craftsmen in their own workshops, as they could buy canvases stretched and primed, ready to paint with those prepared paints.

It is a tribute to the skills of the colourmen, and those of the painter, that so many oil sketches survive today, despite in many cases being painted on ephemeral materials such as paper and cardboard.

But it was Constable’s rival, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), who was the more technically innovative. Trained in classical techniques of oil painting at the Royal Academy Schools in London, one of the benefits brought by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Turner’s oil paintings should have been constructed to last longer than Rembrandt’s.

In the autumn of 2014, when London hosted a unique coincidence of exhibitions of the late works of both Rembrandt and Turner (at the National Gallery and Tate Britain, respectively), it was easy to make comparison between the condition of their paintings. In general, Rembrandt’s more experimental works appear in good condition although now approaching four hundred years old, and are often much better than the more troubled paint layers on Turner’s canvases, which are two hundred years younger.

Unlike Constable, who sketched largely in oils, Turner was probably the most accomplished watercolourist of the century (possibly of all time), and appeared quite happy to paint the great majority of his plein air sketches using non-oil media. He was extremely innovative in both oils and watercolours, always keen to push the bounds of technique in pursuit of his art.

For example, Turner’s Seapiece with fishing boats off a wooden pier, a gale coming in (date not known, possibly c 1801) has extensive use of sgraffito, which may have been made using a knife, brush handle, or even his fingernails.

For the duration of Turner’s career until 1829, his father worked as his studio assistant, stretching and priming his canvases in particular. Thereafter, following his father’s death, Turner had to rely on the primed panels and canvases which he could purchase from colourmen. His techniques also became increasingly radical, and some of his choices of materials were not as wise as they could have been. As a result, rising proportions of his paintings have suffered problems.

As with many of Turner’s paintings, his Story of Apollo and Daphne (1837) has extensive use of paint based on drying oil and lead white. This was not in some misguided attempt to recreate the appearance of old Masters (unlike Reynolds), but in Turner’s remarkable exploration of the combination of colour contrasts and texture. Although not readily visible here, they also brought rapid changes during drying, and commonly serious problems with cracking, even when applied to wood panels, as here.

The techniques, their success and failure are shown well in one of Turner’s most famous paintings on canvas, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up (1839).

Turner applied high chroma paint quite thickly on top of already thick and layered paint. Although this produces breathtaking effects, as shown in this detail, it will result in problems with cracking unless those superficial layers dry more slowly than layers underneath, a phenomenon embodied in the ‘fat over lean’ rule. Here they have clearly not done so, and that has resulted in patchy areas of cracking.

Some areas are worse affected, with apparent wrinkling probably resulting from the slumping of impasto, and undried paint exuding. Here this is most probably the result of Turner’s use of bitumen or asphalt, which inhibits the oxidative ‘drying’ of linseed oil, and commonly leads to problems in the paint layer. Sadly bitumen was a popular pigment in the 1800s, although its adverse effects were well known.

Turner’s The Rape of Proserpine (1839), another work on canvas, also has its problems. Here Turner worked freely, mixing layers of low to medium impasto with thinner glazes and scumbles, particularly in the sky. Although cracking has occurred, this has not resulted in significant loss of the paint layer.

Problems in the foreground, and middleground, are rather worse, where it is thought that bitumen has been used. Cracks here have widened, and become filled with paint which has risen from deeper layers.

Some of these changes had taken many years to become manifest, but Turner and his contemporaries were well aware of the problems in some of his paintings. In the case of The Opening of the Wallhalla, 1842 (1843), which was painted on mahogany, Ruskin reported that it had “cracked before it had been eight days in the Academy Rooms”, although this overall view shows little evidence of that damage.

Hellen and Townsend attribute this to Turner’s extensive use of Megilp, here a product sold by his colourman containing leaded drying oil and mastic varnish. Used sparingly and with great caution, such medium modifiers do not necessarily cause serious ill-effects. But Turner has used Megilp to excess, to produce a soft impasto used in the foreground figures, in particular. These have resulted in wide and shallow drying cracks, as the surface has dried quickly and shrunk over trapped layers of liquid paint.

Turner’s Approach to Venice (1844) was painted with very thin transparent glazes over thick white impasto, which creates a distinctive flickering effect in highlights.

Despite Turner’s efforts to get the white impasto to dry more quickly, the glazes dried first, and cracked as they became stressed over the white which was still wet. This has not been helped by the later conservation process of lining, which places an additional layer on the back of the canvas to help the support do its job.

Turner’s The Visit to the Tomb (1850) is one of four canvases which he completed not long before his death, forming a series telling the story from Virgil’s Aeneid of Dido and Aeneas in Carthage. Three of these are known today, all in the Turner Bequest at the Tate Gallery, where their conservation is an ongoing task.

Turner apparently worked on these together, as a group, first sketching in thin warm and cool layers appropriate to each work’s theme. Over those, various thick and thin layers were applied, often containing beeswax as a thickener, medium modifiers such as Megilp and its variants, siccatives, and some mastic resins. Sadly their startling appearance when first exhibited did not last long, and has changed a great deal since.

Turner’s devotion to visual effect has unfortunately compromised his oil paintings in respect one of the most compelling reason for using oil paint in the first place: its longevity. Ironically, many of his watercolours have survived the years rather better.

JMW Turner was also one of the first painters to make use of the latest pigments, including chrome yellow, which he purchased in tubes rather than bladders. It was John Goffe Rand who patented what he termed “metal rolls for paint” in 1841. At first, these were seen not so much as a means of increasing the portability of oil paints, but for their cleanliness and lack of odour.

Adoption among professional painters at the time was patchy: these new tubes were expensive, and required filling equipment which many of the existing colourmen did not see was necessary. Oil paint continued to be sold in bladders for several decades afterwards, although newer pigments offered by the larger and more innovative colourmen often only came in tubes. Slightly later, some colourmen utilised another recent invention by John Landis Mason in 1858, the screw-top jar, although those never proved as popular.

By now the old craft-dominated workshops were becoming increasingly rare, replaced by the studio, as shown in John Ferguson Weir’s An Artist’s Studio (1864).

Wooden ‘pochade’ boxes which had been used by painters who worked en plein air could now contain a dozen tubes of oil paint, rather than bladders, as Carl Reichert shows in his witty Der Malerstreit (The Painters’ Dispute) (1903).

They could also be coupled with a lightweight portable easel and canvas-carrier, as in Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s L.A. Ring Paints with Aasum Smedje (1893).

Outdoor painting was inevitably direct, or alla prima; there was no time for painting in layers, other than a thin underdrawing perhaps. Its enthusiastic adoption by the Impressionists led to the next change in technique: the displacement of traditional layers by alla prima, as epitomised in Claude Monet’s Le bateau atelier (The Studio Boat) (1876).

References:

Callen A (2015) The Work of Art. Plein Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France, Reaktion Books. ISBN 978 1 78023 3555 0.
Clarke M (2015) Precursors of Plein Air Painting, pp 59-80 in Greub S (ed) Monet. Lost in Translation, Hirmer. ISBN 978 3 7774 2428 6.
Hellen R & Townsend JH (2014) Materials, Technique and Condition in Turner’s Later Paintings, in Brown DB, Concannon A & Smiles S (eds) Late Turner, Painting Set Free, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 145 1.

You may know William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) as one of the American Impressionists, and as one of the most influential teachers of his time, but did you know that he made two history paintings?

After his initial training in Indianapolis and New York, Chase decided that he needed to go to Europe to complete his training. He decided against the many distractions of Paris, opting instead for the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he knew that he would work harder and get greater benefit. His teachers there were Karl von Piloty (1826-1886), an eminent history painter and head of the Academy, and Alexander von Wagner (1838-1919), a former pupil of Piloty and the Professor of History Painting until 1910.

Chase studied and painted at the academy from 1874 to 1878, in his final years there being commissioned by von Piloty to paint portraits of his family, and being offered a teaching position there, which he declined in order to return to New York. In spite of his sustained efforts to avoid history painting, in 1876 he ran out of excuses, and had to do so.

The best of Chase’s surviving paintings from his days in Munich are in two series: one centred around Renaissance court figures, often with a pink cockatoo, the other a series of wonderfully painterly portraits of young working boys.

“Keying Up” – The Court Jester (1875) won Chase a prize at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, and The Turkish Page (Unexpected Intrusion) (1876) caused a sensation when it was shown in New York in 1877.

The King’s Jester (1875) seems not to have enjoyed quite the same success, but is an exceptional work for a student, even one of Chase’s experience.

The Apprentice (Boy with Apple) (1876) is an example of his insights into the roguish young men of the time.

He also painted some landscapes, including View near Polling (1876) with its powerful clouds. This was painted close to the village in which his companion Frank Duveneck was to open a painting school in 1878.

But despite these best efforts, in 1876 he finally succumbed to the need to paint history. We do not know whether the theme was his choice – I suspect that it was set for him by the academy jury who were to assess it – but it turned out to be one appropriate for an American: Christopher Columbus before the Council of Salamanca.

The Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus (1450/1-1506) is generally accepted as the first non-Viking European to reach the ‘New World’ of the Americas, when he set foot in the Bahamas in October 1492. His voyage from the Castilian Canary Islands had taken just over two months, but it had taken him seven years to be able to set sail.

Columbus sought sponsorship from the monarchs of Portugal, England, and Spain, but it wasn’t until April 1492 that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain finally gave him the support that he needed.

Paintings showing Columbus undergoing this protracted ordeal usually focus on his various audiences with the monarchs, here Leutze’s Columbus Before the Queen (1843), which Chase may have seen. Amazingly, Leutze painted at least six different treatments of this motif.

The Mexican painter Juan Cordero had also painted his Christopher Columbus at the Court of the Catholic Monarchs (1850).

There were two other key events in Columbus’ campaign: his presentation before the Council of Salamanca in the winter of 1486/7, and that to the monks of the Friary of La Rábida in the winter of 1491/2, shown in Eduardo Cano de la Peña’s Christopher Columbus in the Monastery of La Rábida (1856).

The University of Salamanca is one of the oldest in the world, having been granted a royal charter in 1218, just nine years after the foundation of the University of Cambridge in England. Columbus faced his toughest audience when he was called to present his proposals to the academics of the Council of Salamanca, at the Dominican Monastery of Saint Stephen.

Chase’s first oil sketch, version A of Christopher Columbus before the Council of Salamanca (1876), was awarded first place by the jury. But Professor von Piloty was not so easily pleased: Chase had not followed convention and put Columbus in the centre, so he was told to paint version B (below).

It is worth noting that Cano de la Peña had placed Columbus centrally, as had Leutze. Cordero, in deference to the monarch, had placed the King in the centre, with Columbus and the Queen on either side. Chase had tackled a similar problem to that posed by the Judgement of Solomon, and had devised a composition which put Columbus in profile, rather than facing away from the viewer.

We should be grateful that Chase understandably abandoned history painting and returned to the US, to paint landscapes and portraits.

Reference

Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

Many of the great American painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spent quite long periods in Europe, both training and developing their art. A few spent longer, in fact most of their careers – like Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874–1939).

He was born in Owosso, a small town in central Michigan, but moved to Florida, where his father started a brick factory in Jacksonville. His interest in becoming a painter was kindled when he visited the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, which coincided with his completion of High School.

Frieseke then started as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, before he moved to New York in 1895. In 1897, he resumed his studies at the Art Students League, and started work as an illustrator. However, that did not prosper, so the following year he travelled to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian under Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens. He also spent some time studying under Whistler.

Initially, he mainly painted in watercolour, but while in Paris he learned to use oils. In the summer of 1898, he visited the artists’ colonies at Katwijk and Laren in the Netherlands.

His early watercolour of Paris, Pont Neuf with Barges (c 1898-99) is fairly typical of his surviving work from this period, with its narrow tonal range and emphasis on drawing rather than colour.

After 1900, though, he concentrated on oil painting, and used higher chroma, as seen in his The Blue Bowl (1901). I am unsure whether the fine patterning in this image results from an optical moiré effect in its processing, or reflects texture in the original.

Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, France (1902) is another landscape from this early phase, when his style was perhaps closest of that of the Nabis.

Before the Mirror (Nude) (1903) is one of his earliest promising nudes, although his colours are still muted and lighting quite even. Frieseke’s devotion to painting nudes was an important factor in his decision to remain in France: during his occasional visits to his home town, he enjoyed shocking “good Church people” with his nudes, but would clearly have found it impossible to work there.

In the summer of 1905, he visited Giverny, where an art colony had formed around Monet’s house and garden. Later that year he married Sadie (Sarah Anne) O’Bryan. Although he was now so close to Monet, his paintings showed little influence from Impressionism, as in his Afternoon at the Beach (1905-6).

The following year, the Friesekes stayed through the summer in the house next door to Monet, which had previously been occupied by Theodore Robinson. They returned to their Paris apartment for the winter, and maintained this pattern until 1919. Frederick Frieseke also kept a studio on the River Epte nearby, which he tended to use for his outdoor figurative paintings. His wife Sadie often modelled for him, but not in the almost obsessive way that Pierre Bonnard was to paint his wife later.

Although Monet was his neighbour for half the year, Frieseke neither developed a close friendship with him, nor was he influenced by him. Frieseke considered that Renoir was a more major influence, as can be seen in his figurative works.

After 1905, his style changed, and he started to concentrate on different effects of sunlight and shade on both clothed and nude women. These were often seen in very textured or patterned surroundings, as in his Grey Day on the River (Two Ladies in a Boat) (c 1908). This appears to have been painted from his studio on the River Epte.

His indoor nudes, such as Nude Seated at Her Dressing Table (1909), at first lacked the delicate textures of those he painted outdoors, sometimes appearing more sculptural or even pneumatic. Seventeen of his paintings were shown in the Venice Biennale that year.

He then entered a prolific phase, in which every figurative painting was on a perfect summer’s day, with diaphanous fabrics and soft beauty, as in his Afternoon – Yellow Room (1910), and Sunbath (1908/1918), below.

Even his non-figurative paintings, like The House in Giverny (c 1912), burst into brilliant colours applied in short strokes and dabs.

He also experimented with effects on patterns on figure and ground, as in his Lady in a Garden (c 1912), whose striped gown appears to have grown from the dense plants around her feet.

Many of his paintings made in his studio on the River Epte explored the effects of dappled sunlight and shadows, seen in his Summer (1914). This was one of his entries in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, held in San Francisco in 1915, which brought him the Grand Prize there. Nude in Dappled Sunlight (1915), below, is another good example.

Back indoors, in the evening, his informal portraits, like Girl in Blue Arranging Flowers (1915), also came into bloom, as did The Robe (1915), below.

After the end of the First World War, Frieseke’s style changed again, as if the summer was finally over. This coincided with his move, with his wife and their young daughter, to a rural farmstead inland of Deauville in Normandy, in 1920. In his Seated Nude (1920), the light is more suffuse, and the chroma turned down.

In 1920, he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, which is very unusual for someone who is not French.

By the mid-twenties, his flickering brushstrokes had fused and become smoother too, and the model in his Portrait of a Woman with Cactus (1930) might be wondering where that earlier brilliance had gone. He also returned to painting watercolours.

Some passages in his Girl Sewing (The Chinese Robe) (1931) appear more hurried and peremptory, and its mood has lapsed into a daze instead of his previous dazzle. He visited Nice in the winter, and in the early 1930s toured Switzerland. He died in Normandy on 24 August 1939, just a week before Hitler invaded Poland, and the Second World War broke out.

References

Wikipedia.
Rising Dove site.

By the middle of the 1800s, oil painting was finally changing. Although there were still those who painted in layers, painstakingly in the studio, according to traditional techniques, many now took their oil paints outdoors, carrying it in cheaper bladders or the new and more costly tubes, and painted alla prima – direct, all in one.

What was even more remarkable was that the alla prima sketches and studies which were painted outdoors started to become accepted as works of art. Whereas Valenciennes had hidden away his superb oil sketches of the Roman campagna as a private reference, Corot, Delacroix, then the Impressionists exhibited them, and even got customers to buy them. The snag was that all your paintings had to look as if they were painted quickly, even those which had required several months work in the studio before they looked right.

Monet’s Flowering Plum Trees (1879), for example, has a very complex structure in its paint layer, as seen from the surface in the detail below. Some marks have been added wet-in-wet, but many wet-on-dry, demonstrating that it must have been worked on over a period of weeks or months.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence is in his Grainstack series, which he worked on for several months as a co-ordinated group.

Monet’s Meules, fin de l’été (Haystacks, end of Summer) (1891) is one example of that series, whose detail (below) shows paint added on top of dry impasto layers in a very complex fashion.

The use of resins and medium modifiers such as Megilp, which had caused the paintings of Reynolds, Turner, and others so much trouble, was anathema to the Impressionists. Most relied on the paints sold in bladders then tubes by artists’ colourmen, from whom they bought their canvases too. True plein air paintings, completed in just one or two sessions in front of the motif, seldom ran the risk of quicker-drying oil paint being applied over slower-drying oil-rich layers.

Other collective preferences also helped: many Impressionists disliked the idea of black paint, so asphalt/bitumen was seldom used. Even varnishing was frowned upon, although many of their works have been varnished rather later. As they were not trying to emulate the Old Masters, but paint the Impressionist way, there were few temptations to be led astray, in pursuit of ‘secret’ recipes which might threaten their paintings.

Not every Impressionist painting has survived well (so far) though. Sadly, several of the newer pigments have undergone visible colour changes, and some of the Impressionists were not as mindful of permanence of colour as they could or should have been.

Occasional paintings, such as Monet’s Valley of the Creuse (Gray Day) (1889), from that earlier series, have suffered more structural problems in their paint layers, which may be the result of poor batches of paint, or even defective priming of their canvases. The cracking seen in the detail below is unusually bad, particularly for a painting which is little more than a century old.

There was one unusual practice which was employed by Degas and some of his contemporaries, although most only seem to have tried it in a few paintings: what they termed peinture à l’essence.

Tubed oil paints, particularly certain colours, can be a bit oily, and it seems that Degas and others experimented with reducing the amount of oil in their paints. Squeezing paint out of the tube onto blotting paper or rag and removing excess oil should not cause any problems, but peinture à l’essence took that to an extreme, in blotting out as much oil as possible, and restoring viscosity and flow by adding turpentine.

Degas’ Danseuse dans sa loge (Dancer in her Dressing Room) (c 1879) is one of his experimental paintings which uses both pastel and peinture à l’essence applied to canvas. The detail view below shows how thinly he applied his paint to the ground, although it is impossible to judge from that how well it is adhering.

Oil paint has been so successful and its paint layers so robust because the pigment is sealed in a protective layer of polymerised oil. Pastels adhere far more tenuously, with precious little to bind them to the ground. Removing the drying oil and adding essentially unbound pigment will inevitably result in a very fragile painting.

Degas’ Women Combing Their Hair (c 1875-6) is painted in oils, possibly peinture à l’essence, on paper, which again is far from ideal if you want a painting to last.

Among the other painters who seem to have used peinture à l’essence are Gauguin, in his Vue de la Plage de Bellangenay (View Of The Beach At Bellangenay) (1889), and Toulouse-Lautrec, in his Danseuse assise aux Bas de roses (Dancer sat at the foot of Roses) (1890) shown below, which follows Degas in combining it with pastels.

On the other side of the English Channel, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had also been trying to innovate with oil paints. In their quest to rediscover the brilliance of much earlier works, including frescos, and with the support of Mrs Merrifield’s translation of Cennino Cennini’s fourteenth century Il Libro dell’Arte, these painters tried to create brilliant white grounds. They considered these to be essential in ‘reflecting back’ the light transmitted through the paint layer, and making its carefully layered coloured glazes appear more brilliant.

Around 1850-51, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais started to paint critical passages directly onto white grounds consisting of lead and/or zinc white whilst those grounds were still wet.

William Holman Hunt’s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1851) is claimed to have used areas of ‘wet white ground’, although this has not yet been confirmed by analysis of the paint layer. The detail shown below could not be a greater contrast with the paintings of twenty years later in France.

Close examination shows drying cracks in several passages, particularly the right thigh of Proteus (on the right here). The highlight on that thigh is now too bright, and it appears to have been painted using dry pigment mixed into oil paint with the brush, leaving a very granular paint layer.

Ford Madox Brown does appear to have used ‘wet white grounds’ in his Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (1852-6), but Brown found the technical challenge of painting over the still-wet ground was too great.

Some of the Pre-Raphaelites also used copal in their paints and varnishes, although none seems to have used much Megilp, despite its popularity in British painting in the nineteenth century. To date – and their paintings are still relatively young – few seem to have suffered any problems with cracking or threats to their structural integrity, but only time will tell whether their white grounds are quietly turning into soap (by saponification, instead of the normal process of ‘drying’ by polymerisation).

The late nineteenth century saw oil paint manufacture transformed from a small-scale craft to an industrial process, supported by technical developments of industrial chemists.

Tubed paints were augmented by additives, to promote their flow and handling, and achieve a more consistent buttery feel. Together with the introduction of important synthetic pigments, and machine manufacture including even mechanical grinding of pigments, they provided artists with more reliable supplies, allowing the painter greater scope in technique.

References

Brettell RR (2000) Impression, Painting Quickly in France 1860-1890, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08447 4.
Callen A (1987, 2006) Les Peintres Impressionnistes et Leur Technique, French tr of English original, Art & Images. ISBN 978 2 9139 5207 2.
Callen A (2015) The Work of Art, Plein-air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-century France, Reaktion Books. ISBN 978 1 7802 3355 0.
House J (2004) Impressionism: Paint and Politics, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 10240 2.
Schaefer I, von Saint-George C & Lewerentz K (2008) Painting Light, The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists, Skira. ISBN 978 88 6130 609 7.
Townsend JH, Ridge J & Hackney S (2004) Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 8543 7498 1.

No accounts of the painting of animals, nor of French painting in the nineteenth century, can omit one of the most famous animalières of all, and one of the leading women painters, Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899).

Born as Marie-Rosalie Bonheur in Bordeaux, her father and uncles were established painters and sculptors, and believed in the education of girls alongside boys. The family moved to Paris when she was a child, and she quickly showed herself to be enthusiastic in drawing. Her childhood was tumultuous, though, because of her disruptive behaviour and resulting expulsions from schools. She started an apprenticeship as a seamstress, but at the age of twelve her father finally had to accept that she could only train as a painter.

She proved a precocious student, starting to copy paintings in the Louvre when she was only fourteen, where she first encountered the animal paintings of Paulus Potter, and others. She dissected animals and studied their anatomy at the National Veterinary Institute in Paris, to train further for her chosen specialty of painting animals. She had her first work accepted for the Salon in 1841, before she was even twenty: it showed two rabbits, and in 1845 she was awarded a third-class medal.

She also started making sculptures in the early 1840s, with some fine bronzes of sheep dating from 1842, and cattle from 1846, for example.

Ploughing in Nevers (1849) was her first major success, a government commission and exhibited in the Salon that year. Ploughing was one of her favourite themes of her early career. Faithful depiction of the teams of oxen is demanding on anatomical knowledge, and here incorporates fine landscape with rich colours and textures. Ploughing is also one of the most fundamental agricultural tasks, with extensive symbolism, including the combined teamwork of the ploughman and animals.

A Herdsman with his Flock (1852) gave her the opportunity to show a wider range of animals typical of a small farm, to explore the wonderful dappled light, and to paint an open woodland setting.

In her Ploughing Scene (1854), the animals are less dominant, and she strikes a balance in favour of the landscape as a whole, with its vertiginous haystacks, and the land itself.

The Horse Fair (1852-55) is now probably her most famous painting, and was a great success when first exhibited in London in 1854. The market is set in Paris – perhaps a surprising location today, but still with very rural areas at the time. The line of trees marks the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, and in the distance is the distinctive dome of La Salpêtrière.

By 1855, Bonheur had achieved international fame, and was even more celebrated in the UK than in her native France. She travelled to Scotland, meeting Queen Victoria during her travels; the Queen (who was a keen amateur watercolourist and loved animal paintings) already admired Bonheur’s work. When in Scotland she sketched and made studies for several paintings which she completed over the following years. Her British dealer had many of her paintings engraved by Charles George Lewis (1808-1880), one of the best engravers at the time.

Although dominated by the mules themselves, her Spanish Muleteers Crossing the Pyrenees (1857) incorporates one of her most spectacular landscapes, some of which were painted in collaboration with her father. Mules like these were at the time an important means of trade over the Pyrenees, via traditional routes over passes which had been used by animals and humans for millenia.

The Highland Shepherd (1859) is one of the finished paintings resulting from her 1855 visit to Scotland. At the time, the Highland Clearances had entered their final phases, and the sheep being driven here were probably the sole occupants of much of the landscape behind them. Earlier towns and villages had been emptied, their occupants evicted by largely absentee landlords, over the previous two centuries.

In 1860, Bonheur bought the Château of By, in the village of Thomery, near Barbizon, the spiritual home of the Barbizon School. She apparently kept various domestic and more exotic animals there, some of which she painted.

A Ghillie and Two Shetland Ponies in a Misty Landscape (1861) was another of the finished paintings which she made from her visit to Scotland.

Bonheur also painted some fine watercolours, including her Deer in the Forest of Fontainebleau (1862), set not far from her home.

In 1865 she was admitted to the Legion of Honour.

The Wounded Eagle (c 1870) was not her first painting of a bird: one of her earliest oil paintings, probably from around 1842, shows four pigeons. However, birds of prey were perhaps more appropriate for her later career.

Her later paintings, such as Oxen Ploughing (1875), became slightly looser in brushwork, particularly in vegetation and the background landscape, in response to the influence of Impressionism.

Her Weaning the Calves (1879) is set in a glorious summer Alpine or Pyrenean landscape, with a dry stone herdsman’s hut at the left. Herdsmen in those mountainous areas lived away from their families, in the mountain grazing lands, for the summer season, with their herds and flocks – the transhumance, a separation which is still remembered by the older populations there.

Bonheur had a preference for powerful animals, oxen with their brute strength, and lions, as in her The King Watches (1887), another outstanding watercolour.

Colonel William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) (1889) shows this famous showman, who toured Europe with his Wild West Exhibition. This reached Paris in 1889, and Bonheur visited the showground to sketch the American species and breeds there. She invited Cody to her château, where she painted this portrait of him.

Deer and Faun in a Wood (1893) shows the fauna of the woodland near her home, using captive models.

She died in the Château of By, Thomery, France, on 25 May 1899.

References

Wikipedia.

Luez P ed. (2016) Rosa Bonheur at sa Famille, Trois Générations d’Artistes, RMN. ISBN 978 2 7118 6336 5. (In French.)

Recent debate about prohibition of ‘burkinis’ and other dress in France has elicited discussion of Marianne, the legendary figure shown in Delacroix’s famous painting Liberty Leading the People (1830). This drew me to look at paintings which have been said to personify nations.

In most cases, figures personifying a nation have been drawn from, or committed to, sculpture, rather than paintings. A few countries, though, have paintings which are generally taken to represent the ‘spirit of the nation’. Here is a small selection of those which are accessible.

Brazil

The Efígie da República symbolises the Republic of Brazil (and sometimes that of Portugal too). She seems to have been borrowed in part from Marianne, only now dressed in red and green. She was adopted in Portugal after the revolution on 5 October 1910, but has fallen into disuse since the late twentieth century.

Finland

Another maiden, this time of more Nordic appearance, represents the Finnish nation. Here she is coming under attack by the double-headed eagle representing the Russian Empire, which is trying to destroy the maiden’s book of law. This painting quickly became an image of protest against the process of russification which was happening around 1900, and as a print played its part in the building of the Finnish nation for independence.

France

Marianne, as the personification of the French nation, is most recognisably expressed in Delacroix’s famous Liberty Leading the People (1830), where she represents the liberty achieved by the July Revolution of 1830.

But she was not intended to be the one and only such image. Within a month of the proclamation of the French Republic on 24 February 1848, a competition was launched to produce the “painted face of the Republic”. Honoré Daumier entered this oil sketch, which came eleventh out of more than 700 entries, but was never worked up into a more finished painting.

Based on an earlier sketch of his from about 1844 entitled Charity or Caritas, the goddess of clemency, it shows a mother nursing children and holding the French tricolour flag. In this, she sums up the ideal of a strong republic, in her fertility, serenity, and glory, as a development of Delacroix’s Marianne.

Germany

The traditional figure, most strongly associated with the revolutions of 1848, was Germania. She was normally shown wearing armour, her breastplate bearing the eagle symbolic of the German empire, and sometimes with the black, red, and gold tricolour of the liberal-nationalists.

In his earlier, pre-revolutionary painting, Johann Overbeck makes Germania (left) a close and intimate friend of Italia (right), although most of Germania’s traditional attributes have been suppressed.

Greece

Another of Delacroix’s history paintings provides the best personification of Greece, where she walks on the rubble remaining from the third siege of Missolonghi from 1825-6. This was a desperate attempt by the Greeks to withstand the attacks of the Ottomans. After a year of siege, the Greeks had little option but to try to release their women and children from the city, leaving the men to defend the empty city to the last. Only a thousand made it to safety, the remainder being slaughtered or sold into slavery.

However, the appalling butchery practised by the Turkish forces, who displayed three thousand severed heads on the city walls, brought widespread support for the Greek cause. Britain, France, and Russia intervened, and the Greeks eventually regained their independence. Delacroix’s painting played a significant part in the cause.

Ireland

The Irish mythological figure of Ériu – in modern Irish, Éire – more widely known as Erin, was the matron goddess of Ireland, representing sovereignty, with her sisters Banba and Fódla. Here she is shown with her attribute of the Irish harp, and the colour green. I am not sure why she is chained to this rock, though.

Italy

The usual national personification of Italy is Italia Turrita, characterised by her mural crown ‘with towers’ to represent urban history, and holding a bunch of corn ears, as a symbol of fertility and agriculture. Her origins are very old, dating back to the Roman Emperor Trajan in around 115 CE. Hayez has here been liberal in his interpretation, adding a crucifix and a book, and encouraging interesting speculation as to the intention of his allegory.

Malta

This spectacular painted ceiling in Valletta shows Melita, who is seen with the flag of the Order of Saint John, which was based on Malta at one time. She has been the basis of several postage stamps issued by Malta.

Poland

In the eighteenth century, the Polish nation was often personified by Polonia, here being brutally trampled on in the suppression of the November Uprising of 1831. This theme was revisited in paintings by Jacek Malczewski.

This is Malczewski’s incisive political commentary on the career of Aleksander Ignacy Jan-Kanty Wielopolski (1803-1877), head of Poland’s civil administration under the Russian Empire. Wielopolski was sent to London to try to obtain the assistance of the British government during the 1831 November Uprising in Poland, then wrote a controversial letter responding to the Galician massacres in 1845, and tried to stop the growing Polish national movement in 1863. However, in forcing the conscription of young Polish men into the Russian Army, he provoked the January Uprising of 1863, which forced him to flee into exile in Dresden. Wielopolski is shown with the young Polonia at the left, and the old and traditional Polonia at the right.

Portugal

In addition to its use of the Republic (see Brazil, above), Portugal draws on its legendary King Sebastian I, who brought further expansion of the Portuguese Empire. His companion greyhound symbolises the empire.

Serbia

The Kosovo Maiden is a central figure in Serbian epic poetry. She is searching the battlefield after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 for her fiancé, and finds his companion dying. She learns from him that her fiancé is already dead, but she continues to aid the wounded and dying. She is thus a symbol of womanly compassion and charity.

United Kingdom

The most enduring personification is Britannia, who has been painted by several artists. My choice of those is the less well-known fresco commissioned of William Dyce by Queen Victoria, for the Queen and Prince Albert’s new and luxurious holiday palace of Osborne House, at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

Neptune stands astride his three white seahorses, holding their reins in his right hand, and passing his crown with the left. The crown is just about to be transferred by Mercury (with wings on his cap) to the gold-covered figure of Britannia, who holds a ceremonial silver trident in her right hand.

Neptune is supported by his entourage in the sea, including the statutory brace of nudes and conch-blowers. At the right, Britannia’s entourage is more serious in intent, and includes the lion of England, and figures representing industry, trade, and navigation.

United States of America

The most popular personification is, of course, the Statue of Liberty, showing the Roman goddess of liberty, and a monument to American independence given by the French nation. Its unveiling and dedication on 28 October 1886 is recorded well in Edward Moran’s painting.

Among the other personifications is that of Columbia, representing America, and is here aided by technology to bring the ‘light’ of the east to the dark west, as the settlers drive Native Americans and bison into obscurity.

Wales

This nationalistic allegory was shown at Caernarfon Castle in 1911, during the investiture there of the Prince of Wales. It shows the personification of the Welsh nation, a young woman, emerging from the jaws of a sea dragon, in a birth analogous to that of Venus.

Europe

Finally, Europe is not a nation by any means, and the goddess Europa is no personification of the European Union, I hope. She is best known for her abduction and rape by Zeus, who assumed the form of a white bull. Once transformed into the bull, Zeus mixed in with Europa’s family herd. When Europa and her friends were gathering flowers, she saw the bull, stroked it, and got astride it. Zeus seized the opportunity, ran to the sea, then swam across to Crete with Europa on his back. Although Europa ended up as the first Queen of Crete, and the father of King Minos, this is not a personification which the European Union would choose, I am sure.

The studio is personal to the artist. Freed from the earlier need for a full supporting workshop with craftspeople, canvas manufacture, and paint preparation, from the eighteenth century the studio often became an intimate extension of the artist’s persona. For William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), it was also one of his most frequent motifs.

His first proper studio was probably that shared with James W Pattison in St. Louis, from 1870. When he went to Europe in 1872, he seems to have established a studio in Munich by 1876, and started collecting furniture and curios with which to fill it.

When Chase and his friend Frank Duveneck made their Turkish Page paintings in 1876, they did so in Chase’s studio. Chase even recorded the event in his Duveneck Painting the Turkish Page (1876), which ensured that he had not only painted his own version of this motif, but had also painted Duveneck’s.

Soon after his return to New York, he rented the main gallery in the Tenth Street Studio Building, at 51 West Tenth Street, Greenwich Village, New York City. For the next seventeen years (1878-1895) this was to be his place of work, public image, extended persona, private stage, personal gallery, and the motif for at least a dozen of his paintings.

The building, designed by William Morris Hunt, had been completed in 1857, was demolished in 1956, and was one of the first in America to be designed specifically for visual artists. Notable previous occupants include Winslow Homer, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt. When Chase moved in, the building was owned by John Taylor Johnston, later the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This photograph, taken in 1895, the year that it closed, shows Chase in his Tenth Street Studio. On its walls hang his copies of Old Masters, as well as his own original paintings. At the left, the large landscape painting on display is one of his Shinnecock works.

Painted just the year after he moved in, his Studio Interior (c 1879) is one of his few paintings of his studios which does not include a figure, but shows off his ornately carved wooden chest, a copy of an Old Master, and some of his more exotic props. Chase was quick to recognise the promotional value of his studio: as it grew steadily more exotic, and more populated with his own work, he encouraged the press to write about it, to promote his image as a successful artist.

By the following year, his The Tenth Street Studio (1880) shows one of his portraiture clients, engaged in discussion with a painter who could be Chase, but recedes into the shadows. At the woman’s feet is an elegant dog, and she is surrounded by intriguing and tasteful objects.

Tenth Street Studio (c 1880-81 and c 1910) appears to be another promotional oil sketch aimed to bring in commissions, as a couple examine works for sale, and an assistant sits working at a table on the left.

In his Studio Interior (c 1882), another fashionably dressed young woman is glancing through a huge bound collation of Chase’s work, sat by an even grander carved wooden sideboard, decorated with almost outlandish objects including a model ship, a lute, and sundry objets d’art.

His The Inner Studio, Tenth Street (1882) takes us deeper into his artistic persona, where one of his students is hard at work.

Connoisseur – The Studio Corner (c 1883) marks an interesting change in these works. The figures now start to become a larger and more prominent part of the painting, as if these are now made as part of his preparations for the coming portrait. The walls are also more decorated with evidence of his fashionable Japonisme: a glistening fan, and printed silk.

Chase sketched some of these in pastels, such as In The Studio (Virginia Gerson) (c 1884), suggesting that this informal portrait was intended for his own reference. Chase appears to have painted at least two portraits of Virginia Gerson, who became his sister-in-law when he married in 1887. These were in 1880 and 1895, when she was approximately 16 and 31 years old, I believe, but if this painting is correctly dated, it was made when she was twenty.

In the Studio (c 1884) is less of a quick impromptu study, more detailed and finished, the model now looking directly at the painter and viewer. It still retains its informality, though, with papers and a pink hat discarded on the lush carpet. Behind the subject is another of Chase’s carved wooden chests, on top of which is an East Asian figure.

His unfinished sketch of The Tenth Street Studio (c 1884-1915) has Chase sat at a table, perhaps with his wife, and a large dog.

In 1890, the Tenth Street Studio hosted La Carmencita, a popular Spanish dancer then touring in New York, who performed there on the evening of 1 April, in front of John Singer Sargent and Chase while they sketched her for later portraits, as detailed here. With the artists was Sargent’s patron, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924), a leading patron, collector, and philanthropist.

By the time that he painted In the Studio (c 1892), he seems to have had a harpsichord (or similar) installed, and the walls papered. But they form a backdrop for what is foremost a wonderfully loose and informal portrait.

In the Studio (c 1892-3) is another superb pastel study showing a corner of the Tenth Street Studio, as an informal portrait.

A Corner of My Studio (c 1895) is a more formal and finished record of Chase’s studio in its final year. Although it seems familiar, I think this is the first painting in which this particular carved chest has appeared, and it matches that shown in the photograph above. Through the curtained doorway, we see in the distance one of Chase’s students painting diligently. This is not a portrait of a person, but of the studio once again.

In 1892, Chase moved into the family’s new home in Shinnecock, Long Island, with its own studio, which he used during the summers when he was living and teaching there at the plein air painting school.

His pastel Shinnecock Studio Interior (1892) shows a very different world, in which his children now play a major part, and the dark furnishings of Tenth Street have made way for light and space.

Did You Speak to Me? (c 1897) appears to be another painting of the studio at Shinnecock, with his oldest daughter, Alice Dieudonnée Chase, then aged 10.

By about 1900, when he painted Alice in the Shinnecock Studio, its walls have been papered, and furniture and bric-à-brac moved in from Tenth Street. His wife Alice (née Gerson) has turned her face away, as if to deny him the portrait, in deference to the fabric of the studio.

In 1908, Chase established his Tiffany Building studio at 333 Fourth Avenue, New York City, which remained his main studio until his death.

The only painting which I have been able to find of his last studio returns to their role, as his Self Portrait in 4th Avenue Studio (1915-16). This may be unfinished too, as his large canvas contains only rough scribbled brushstrokes, which is peculiar for a self-portrait, and the painting becomes very pale and sketchy at the right.

William Merritt Chase died in 1916, a century ago. Forty years later, the Tenth Street Studio was demolished to make way for apartments.

Over more then 35 years of painting views of his studio, Chase made them promotional, informal portraits, records of his family, and milestones in his career. He may have been one of the first to do so, but he was by no means the last.

Reference

Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

So far, this series has concentrated entirely on oil painting in Europe, and until about 1800, the vast majority of fine art works painted using oil paints were confined to Europe. During the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of artists around the world were turning to oil paints for their work.

I have traced the long history of European-style painting and the introduction of oils to Japan in another series here. In short, interest in oil painting led to a kernel of leading painters going to train in Europe. They brought back the materials and techniques which they had learned, and then became the teachers in Japan.

This article focuses on developments in America, which were to become so important with the advent of Modernism in the twentieth century.

As in Europe during the nineteenth century, this period saw an unprecedented emphasis being placed on the intent of the artist, sometimes to the neglect of the craft. Although Europe had long since abandoned the exclusivity of the Guilds of Saint Luke, which had served to protect and preserve the crafts involved in oil painting, the great majority of painters in Europe were taught by older, more experienced painters, who instilled in the next generation the skills and procedures which had developed over the centuries. Significant departure from the tradition were, therefore, unusual, even among the rebellious Impressionists.

America was different. It was geographically isolated: although some American painters were able to study in established academies in Europe, for many that was simply not possible. There was also a growing sense of national identity, of freedom, exploration, and innovation, which encouraged some painters to develop their own ideas, driven by their artistic intent, rather than any craft tradition.

Many American artists – like William Merritt Chase (whose centenary we are celebrating) and his colleagues, for instance – obtained their first instruction in the craft and art of oil painting in reputable, established schools in North America, before spending several years in Europe improving their skills further. By and large, they worked with established materials, and used proven techniques which have resulted in many thousands of superb and durable paintings in which they developed their art.

Sometimes, American students found their access to European teaching was limited, and their most accessible teachers were not, perhaps, the most appropriate. Thomas Couture (1815-1879) set up his own academy in opposition to the established École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; while gaining admission to the latter was an impossible attainment for almost all American students, many were able to obtain teaching from Couture. His techniques were somewhat eccentric, and many students found them hard to follow. Elizabeth Boott (who was to marry Frank Duveneck) felt that “a strict adherence to the Couture method was impossible to all but Couture himself”.

Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919) was a contemporary of Chase and Duveneck who had dropped out of medical studies, and became a largely self-taught artist. His paintings were considered to be both highly individual and very innovative at the time, but so was his technique. He was reported to apply thin layers of paint to start with, and leave them until part dry. He then flattened them with a palette knife, and wiped wispy forms from them, before leaving them to dry more fully.

He repeated applications of layers in this way, but when the surface became gummy or over-glazed, he would scrape it using a pumice stone (the coarse bone from a cuttlefish). Varnish became mixed in with his layers, and conservators now find them impossible to clean because of the danger of structural damage to the paint layer.

Above the Clouds (c 1875-78) is a small oil painting of his on canvas, which has probably undergone significant tonal change. As shown in the detail below, its surface has some gaping cracks and many other irregularities, at least some of which appear unintentional.

Pool in the Adirondacks (c 1875-78) is of similar size, and shows various surface defects including fine and gaping cracks (see detail below).

Some of his later paintings, such as his Moonlight (c 1885-90), very slightly larger in size, are suffering worse, with extensive areas of cracking and other problems in the paint layer (detail below).

Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) was another contemporary who studied in New York at the National Academy of Design during the early 1870s, and travelled to Europe four times, although when there he did not apparently undergo any training as such. He was also a close and longstanding friend of Julian Alden Weir, who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme and was conservative in his technique.

Ryder apparently became obsessed with creating unique optical effects in his oil paintings, in the course of which he abandoned the discipline of craft. He interlayered oil, resin, wax, non-drying oils, and protein-rich materials in his paint layers. Even in his lifetime many suffered disastrous cracking, which he claimed that he did not mind.

Few of his paintings are either structurally stable or readable any more, and the best record of the artist’s intent is now old monochrome photographs taken of them before their deterioration became as bad.

The Waste of Waters is Their Field (c 1883) is a small oil painting which is almost completely lost now, with much of the detail merged into a dark brown mess as its superficial layers have faded, and the deeper layers darkened. The detail below shows that its entire paint layer is dissected by cracks, many of them gaping and oozing lighter wet paint from below.

Details can still be made out in his tiny Resurrection (1885), although even this has changed and cracked severely. Many of the cracks are wide and filled with paint which has risen up from lower layers.

Macbeth and the Witches (c 1895-1915) has also become impossible to read, with its almost universal darkening and dense cracking across its paint layer.

Both Blakelock and Ryder were deemed important painters whose works were much admired during their lifetimes. Collectors invested heavily in their paintings, and one of Blakelock’s set the record for the highest price paid for the work of a living American painter, in 1916. Tragically those collections which gathered examples of their work are now left with paintings which are nothing like they were originally, whose recovery is technically impossible.

Far from making painters more wary of the dangers of flawed practices, the rise of Modernist art in the twentieth century led to an unparalleled period of experimentation with materials which has left many more conservation problems. Investors and speculators have seemingly been undeterred from spending ever-increasing sums on paintings whose future looks brief, bleak, and profitable only to the conservation industry.

This is despite the fact that in the twentieth century, we started at last to understand how oil paint ‘dries’, and the many complex dynamic processes which take place inside the paint layer. And it brought new materials which, used wisely, could make oil painting even more capable and durable.

Reference

Wikipedia on Blakelock.
Wikipedia on Ryder.

Mayer L & Myers G (2013) American Painters on Technique: 1860-1945, Getty. ISBN 978 1 6060 6135 0.

John Constable (1776-1837) and JMW Turner (1775-1851) are now generally recognised as being the major figures in British painting in the first half of the 1800s. At the time, critics would have added at least a third major figure, who was as popular, innovative, and far more versatile: James Ward (1769–1859). Although slightly older that Constable and Turner, all his significant works were painted after 1800, and the short-lived tragic genius George Morland – Ward’s brother-in-law – died in 1804.

Like Turner, James Ward was born of a relatively poor family in London. His father was a cider and fruit merchant, who unfortunately fell victim to excessive cider consumption, leaving his mother destitute. His older brother managed a good education and became a leading engraver, but James was put to work filling bottles of cider, then washing bottles, rather than being sent to school. He started his apprenticeship as an engraver with the leading engraver of the day, John Raphael Smith, in 1781 or 1782, just as brother William was completing his apprenticeship.

When he was an apprentice, his talent for drawing became apparent, and James was producing plates in his own name from 1784. At around that time, he first came into contact with George Morland, who at that time was at the height of success and relatively free of debts and drink. Morland married Anne Ward (James’s sister) in July 1786, and a month later William Ward married Maria, Morland’s sister.

Although the joint household of the Morlands and Wards lasted only three months, William and James Ward remained good friends with George Morland, and this enabled James Ward to start to learn to paint in oils. In 1791, when his apprenticeship as an engraver completed, Ward wanted to become Morland’s pupil, but the irascible Morland refused. Ward continued to teach himself, largely by copying Morland’s paintings and other works which came in for him to engrave. By 1793, Ward had sold some of his more original paintings of rustic scenes, and made engravings from them, which he published.

In about 1793, he had his first four paintings accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy, and his paintings and engravings were earning him a good income. Soon after that, Morland fell out with him, something which Ward came to value as Morland’s debts and problems mounted. Ward himself had periods when the stress of life seemed to overcome him: in 1794, with the outbreak of war with France, he lost a lucrative market for his prints. However, he fell in love with Emma (or possibly Mary Ann!) Ward (who was unrelated), and married her in early December.

Ward’s early paintings were greatly influenced by Morland, and showed farm animals, such as his A Border Leicester Ewe (1795-1800), and rustic scenes. This particular breed, which today at least has rather larger ears, was developed in Northumberland, England, in 1767, so was a recent introduction when Ward painted this ewe. This painting was probably part of an uncompleted commission to travel around the whole of Britain documenting its farm breeds for the Agricultural Society, which he undertook from 1800. His paintings were to be engraved and published by Josiah Boydell, but the project foundered in 1805-7.

The Reapers (1800) has similar influence, showing the landowner and his wife, who have ridden out to inspect progress with the harvest. Behind them, Ward’s landscapes soon became much more than mere backdrops to his figures and animals, with careful play of the light from his subtle sky, on the fields, hills, and distant village.

Though his early finished paintings may have lacked originality, he produced some superb oil sketches from early on, which bear comparison with those of Constable. A Harvest Scene with Workers Loading Hay on to a Farm Wagon (c 1800) was painted on a small panel, using high chroma colours, particularly in the foreground.

Gloucestershire Old Spot (1800-1805) takes one of Morland’s favourite farm animal subjects, this ancient but now threatened breed, and plants its enormous bulk into another of Ward’s delightful rustic landscapes.

Ryelands Sheep, the King’s Ram, the King’s Ewe and Lord Somerville’s Wether (1801-1807) shows faithfully one of the oldest breeds of British sheep, which originated with the monks of Leominster, Herefordshire, in the 1300s. Their name is derived from their being grazed on rye pastures. Although Ward returned to farm animals as his subjects, this marks the end of his early period of painting influenced by Morland.

Ward’s outstanding Man Struggling with a Boa Constrictor (c 1803) was a relatively large and late oil study for a painting which was apparently rejected by the Royal Academy in 1803, Liboya Serpent Seizing its Prey, which has been lost. It is probably his best figure painting, showing careful study of anatomy: although Ward never attended the Royal Academy Schools, unlike Turner, in 1801 he enrolled in an anatomy course by dissection in London. Ward had applied to the Royal Academy Schools in 1797, but was unsuccessful; Turner had started his studies there in 1789.

He continued to sketch landscape views in oils, among which one of his most outstanding is his panoramic Landscape near Swansea, South Wales (c 1805), squeezed onto a small panel. The extensive smoke rising from the distant valley was from the heavy industries based on coal and iron which had been spreading through the previously rural areas of South Wales.

Unlike Constable’s affluent paintings of Suffolk, Ward was not shy of showing the increasing dereliction in the troubled countryside at the time. His An Overshot Mill (1802-1807) shows a watermill using the combination of water and gravity to power the grinding of corn. Its fabric is in dire need of repairs, and the thatchers have already made a start on its roof.

Landscape with Cottages (1802-1827) is more idyllic, but still has the frankness of an oil sketch, under its richly coloured sky.

At a time when Turner’s oils were still quite conventional, Ward experimented more with light, as in his unusual Cattle-Piece, ? Marylebone Park (1807). This is also of interest in that it is believed to be set in what was then a large hunting park on the northern edge of London, whose modern relic is Regent’s Park.

Even when he was painting portraits of dogs, Ward could not resist setting them in fine landscapes complete with brilliant seagulls, as shown in his Rough-Coated Collie (1809). This dog appears to be a shorter-haired precursor to the modern Rough Collie, which originated in the 1800s, perhaps with a cross with a Borzoi or Russian Wolfhound.

Ward’s Heath Ewe and Lambs (1810) is unusual for its indoor setting, and the difficulty in recognising the breed, which appears to be a horned heath variety, which were probably confined to Germany at the time. It is also hard to know whether to read anything into the red cloak wrapped around the wooden beam at the top left.

The Straw Yard (1810) is a wonderfully loose sketch in which Ward brings together the dereliction in the countryside, and a menagerie of farm animals, including horses, two donkeys, chickens, and many pigs and piglets.

Although it is often claimed that Ward shook off Morland’s influence only to succumb to that of Rubens, I think that his paintings from 1803 show his own distinctive style, which was probably more the result of his love for Dutch landscapes than of Rubens.

By 1810, although his career had had its ups and downs, he was an Associate of the Royal Academy (elected in 1807 or 1808), and was cultivating a group of patrons. The next article will show examples of his mature commissions, including his most famous painting of Gordale Scar.

References

Wikipedia.

Beckett O (1995) The Life and Work of James Ward, the Forgotten Genius, Book Guild. ISBN 978 0 8633 2948 7.

By 1810, James Ward (1769-1859) had established himself as a painter of repute, an Associate of the Royal Academy, and had patrons on whom he could rely. He had had to sacrifice his career as an engraver, although he still retained those skills, of course.

His paintings covered a wide range of genres. His original specialities of farm animals and rustic scenes were reliable and steady sellers, and he was showing considerable talent at landscapes, but had yet to produce any major, pure landscape work. He had shown competence in portraits, and classical myths. Although not intended for the public eye, his oil sketches were superb, well ahead of his time, and he had innovated in the portrayal of light.

An Unknown Woman (1811) is an honest and skilful portrait of a woman of advancing years, with an unusual and quite ancient feature: a cameo or ‘picture in a picture’ landscape seen through the window on the right, a common feature of Renaissance and earlier portraits. That landscape has the painterly style and light effects of his oil sketches, and may have been the first time that his public got a glimpse of that.

His figure sketches, in oils, were also quite marvellous. These Studies of Jacky Turner and the Reverend Charles Hope’s Gardener (1800-1815) are rich in character, and hardly the sort of work which Constable or Turner could have approached.

To put Ward’s paintings in their historical context, Constable’s Wivenhoe Park was completed in 1816, and his Hay Wain in 1821; Turner was starting his journey into the more radical, with paintings like Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812), but he only painted his very traditional Crossing the Brook in 1815.

Ward also drew a great deal, and painted many watercolour sketches. As these are largely undated, it is hard to know where to put them into his works, so I will show some examples here.

Seashore and Cliffs, with a Horse and Cart and a Beached Boat on Shore is a small, bright watercolour sketch which makes good use of the texture in the paper; in that it appears almost modern.

His Mountainous Landscape is a tiny gathering of brown washes and gestural marks which convey the impression of the landscape with amazing economy.

Ward was also far advanced in exploring the effects of point of view: Looking Upwards from Devil’s Bridge, Cardiganshire, Wales is a larger and more carefully rendered sketch in watercolor and gouache which is supremely vertiginous. This was long before pioneer photographers started to capture this type of image with their lenses.

Waterfall, North Wales is less vertiginous but more practical with its colour washes, in which the yellow of the original greens has sadly faded to leave them looking very blue.

Ward still preferred to make oil sketches when he could. In about 1811, the year that Ward was finally elected a full member of the Royal Academy, and in which he showed eight paintings at its annual exhibition, he received his first commission for a major landscape work, for Lord Ribblesdale. His Sketch for ‘Gordale Scar’ (1811) is one of several made in preparation.

Lord Ribblesdale’s son and heir, Thomas Lister, invited Ward to stay at Gisburn Park, the family seat in West Yorkshire, commissioning him to paint one of his horses. Lister also attempted to persuade Ward to help him improve his own amateur painting, but Ward fended him off by quoting the prodigious sum of five hundred guineas for two months tuition.

Gordale Scar is a huge limestone ravine in the wild country of North Yorkshire, through which a stream, Gordale Beck, flows. Ward sketched the Scar, which the critic and collector Sir George Beaumont (a friend of Constable as well as Ward) had declared was unpaintable. On the strength of those sketches, Lord Ribblesdale commissioned Ward to paint a large canvas to hang in the new dining room which he planned for his house at Gisburn.

The finished Gordale Scar, or A View of Gordale, in the Manor of East Malham in Craven, Yorkshire, the Property of Lord Ribblesdale in its extended title, (1812–15) is a vast canvas more than 3 x 4 metres in size: Ward’s ultimate expression of the Burkean sublime. This not only approached the impression of awe instilled by the original location, but gave Ward the opportunity to include his most extensive collection of animals.

There are around thirty head of cattle, including the white prize bull in the right foreground, two herds of deer including a pair of stags fighting, and the occasional sheep or goat.

Despite Ward’s frequent claims that, unlike Turner, he painted true to nature, his final painting shows a view which does not actually exist, with a collection of animals (the deer, in particular) which could not have been present. It was first shown at the British Institution in 1814, where reactions were mixed, then at the Royal Academy the following year, following which it was rolled up and delivered to its owner. Once stretched out again, it proved too large to display where it had been intended.

Another major commission of this period was View in Tabley Park, or Tabley Lake and Tower (1813–18), for its owner, Sir John Fleming Leicester; the Palladian-style house near Knutsford in Cheshire, England, had originally been built for Sir Peter Byrne Leicester in 1761-69. This patron already had a view of the lake and tower painted by JMW Turner, but Ward damned that work with his faint praise, claiming that it took ‘poetic liberties as to the Picturesque’, something which Ward felt that he would avoid by painting the truth. This was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1814.

Although dominated by its distinctive dusk colours and light, Ward once again manages to show off his skills in painting cattle, with another fine white bull swishing its tail at the viewer. Technically, Ward’s claim of truth may be justified, and this is another successful and atmospheric landscape.

Leicester had bought his first painting from Ward in around 1806, and clearly became a good patron to the artist.

Ward still painted some farm animals, such as his Portraits of two extraordinary oxen, the property of the Earl of Powis (1814), but at this time his best commissions were for equine portraits, for the country gentry.

John Levett Hunting at Wychnor, Staffordshire (Theophilus Levett and a Favorite Hunter) (1814-1818) looks too good a landscape to be just an equestrian portrait. The Reverend Theophilus Levett seems to have bought his first painting from Ward in 1809, followed by a commissioned family portrait in 1811. This commissioned painting was probably completed in 1817, and most probably shows Captain John Levett, the oldest son, on his hunting horse, with the local hunt in the background.

At this time, Ward was hard at work on his next major and huge painting, The Triumph of the Duke of Wellington. This was commissioned by the British Institution, as its response to Wellington’s victory at Waterloo in 1815. The Institution put this out to competition, and Ward’s preliminary study – itself around 1 by 2 metres – had been selected for the premium of one thousand guineas, and exhibited in 1816. I will complete this chapter in Ward’s career in the next and final article.

References

Wikipedia.

Beckett O (1995) The Life and Work of James Ward, the Forgotten Genius, Book Guild. ISBN 978 0 8633 2948 7.

No matter how much work you put into them, blogs are inevitably ephemeral, and it is a brave blogger who tries to build complex structure into them. Having just completed writing a series of articles on the history of oil painting, I realise that there is no particularly useful account available elsewhere (please correct me if I am wrong) – a void which is worth trying to fill.

Like most histories, this contains many threads, which interlink in complex ways. There are quite different readings available: Vasari, in his book describing the lives of artists, made many statements which assemble into what is the closest that we have to a contemporary account. But research since has shown that his account has many errors, and needs to be carefully interpreted. Others since Vasari have made bold claims about the materials and techniques used by Old Masters, which have subsequently been refuted by physical and chemical analysis of their paintings, but which explain some of the materials and techniques used by later artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds.

This series of articles follows my project of turning the linear series of articles published here using WordPress, into what I intend to be a full-blown hypertext to be read using the new Storyspace Reader.

I compose my blog articles in Red Sweater’s MarsEdit, although I only use it to manage the HTML content. So my starting assets are the HTML source for all thirteen articles in the series, together with JPEG images of the paintings used to illustrate them.

MarsEdit is a wonderful environment for blogging, and has its own media management even though I choose not to use it. But it is not particularly helpful when it comes to exporting your content to anything else. Its only real feature to support that is to open that article using the text/HTML editor of your choice: in my case, the all-powerful BBEdit.

So my first task was to select each of the thirteen articles in turn, open them as HTML source in BBEdit, then save them from there into my working folder. It’s quick and simple, but I don’t understand why MarsEdit cannot export articles directly as HTML files.

Although it is technically HTML, my WordPress article source usually contains very little markup. Rather than waste time stripping out that markup, I decided to leave it where it was. This means that I will have to remove it when I paste it into writing spaces, but least I will then know which phrases to set in Italics, for example.

I prepare images with captions, which are embedded in the article source, and a good size and quality JPEG which is normally larger than 1000 x 1000 pixels, and compressed at 80% quality. In previous articles I have explored several ways to use those images in Storyspace hypertext, including putting those same images, unaltered, into a single folder and opening them from Storyspace using Preview. That is easy to do in Storyspace, but it also takes those images out of context. For this sort of history, context is all-important, so I want to keep my images in writing spaces.

Doing so comes at a cost: the hypertext document is going to be quite large, so I need to optimise image size and use. Most, perhaps all, of the images will be used in more than one place, so rather than embed two copies of the image, I want to use more efficient means. I also don’t want to overburden the reader with large images where smaller ones will work as well.

So I decided to have each image embedded in two writing spaces, one at a maximum dimension of 512 pixels, the other at 1024 pixels. They should enable acceptable quality and detail, but a fair compromise on the space required. I use GraphicConverter for this type of quick image processing, as it is far more efficient than more elaborate image editors.

Working with an assortment of free-to-use images (mainly the vast and invaluable Wikimedia Commons), one of the most important steps is to ensure that they are all set to a common resolution, for which I arbitrarily use the old display standard of 72 dpi. When I download them, they range from 10 to 300 dpi, although that normally makes no difference when rendered by a web browser. If you don’t set all the resolutions to a common value, you can find that embedded images, added by drag-and-drop from the Finder into a writing space, vary widely in size.

The other task is, of course, to generate the two sets of images scaled at different sizes, and kept in separate folders.

I now have all the ingredients I require to start building my hypertext in Storyspace, although later I’ll be adding others such as translated sections from Vasari, for example. If you are unsure as to how to perform any of the steps which I mention here, you’ll find links to all my other tutorials on Storyspace in this index (which opens in a new tab, so that you don’t lose your place here).

As is traditional, I am going to start building this hypertext backwards, using the last article in the series (13, to appear here next week) as the spine, as it puts together the historical narrative that is (my version of) the history of painting in oils.

Before I add any writing spaces to make up that spine, I define some prototypes – which will inevitably evolve during the project – which I can use for my first writing spaces. I am going to try to be well-behaved and follow good style as much as possible, so I first create a writing space to act as a container for those prototypes, named Prototypes (with a capital P, which is the convention used in Tinderbox). I also follow Mark Anderson’s wise counsel, and make the $OnAdd attribute a key for the Prototypes container, adding the script
$IsPrototype=true
This ensures that, should I forget to make a writing space a prototype before I add it to that container, that $OnAdd script will automatically make it so.

The three prototypes which I want to start off with are for smaller images of paintings, large ones, and milestones in history. Each will have two key attributes: $StartDate and $EndDate, which are essential if they are going to appear on a timeline. I make those key attributes by clicking on the + tool at the top right, and selecting each in the Events attributes as shown.

I make each of these a prototype, using the Inspector, change their colours, and by clicking in the top right-hand corner of each tile, I give them an appropriate badge. As you can see from the breadcrumb bar above, these prototypes are all safely tucked away in the Prototypes container.

I am now ready to try out those prototypes, and add my first writing spaces to the document. The initial milestone, matching my article, only contains text, so I create it, name it Drying Oils, enter the dates covered, and copy and paste the text from my article.

Sadly, because the dates in this hypertext are all long in the past, I cannot use the natty new calendar tool for entering dates, but just type them in as previously.

My next milestone requires a painting, so I create first its smaller image version, using the PaintingSmall prototype, and drag and drop the image into that, followed by its caption.

All the paintings are to be put in another container named Gallery, which will later serve as a browsable gallery of those images, as well as keeping them out of the way of the main structural writing spaces. Here is the PaintingLarge version of that same image, with a similar but slightly smaller caption at its foot. I have also linked the small and large versions together, using a text link from the smaller image, so that the reader can click on that image to be presented with the larger image; the link back to the smaller is a normal link for simplicity. I will revisit this later in the series.

In the next article I will look at ways of using those images in the milestones which form the spine of the hypertext.

Happy hypertexting!