James Ward (1769–1859) started work on his second huge painting, The Triumph of the Duke of Wellington, as soon as his preliminary study had been accepted by the British Institution, in 1816. From the outset, he did not intend it to be an ordinary history painting, but wanted to tackle the moral issues, including the benefits of peace.

The work involved considerable commitment. As it occupied so much of his time, and he was unable to undertake many other commissions, his income fell. At the same time, he incurred significant costs: he had a special roller-easel built to accommodate the custom canvas, and had to purchase paint in much larger quantity. But the British Institution was not generous in its payment of advances, so he had to cut his household expenditure to cope.

In the autumn of 1817, he was starting to have doubts about the painting. Then later that year, Emma, his favourite daughter, died, and his wife fell ill, eventually dying in the autumn of 1819.

He did manage some commissioned work during this period, including the delightful Portrait of Dash, a Favourite Spaniel, the Property of Lady Frances Vane-Tempest (1819). The unusually vague background to this painting bears some similarity to his Gordale Scar, perhaps. The dog’s owner was the nineteen year-old Marchioness of Londonderry, and the great-grandmother of Sir Winston Churchill.

By 1820, he had to undertake other work to maintain his income. He was fortunate with two prominent paintings, The Deer Stealer, commissioned by the previously-reliable Theophilus Levett, and his portrait of Dr. Syntax, a Bay Racehorse, Standing in a Coastal Landscape, an Estuary Beyond (1820). Once again, the landscape is as good as the subject of the painting, and may contain a visual pun, as it shows a bay too.

Doctor Syntax (1811-38) was owned by Ralph Riddell, and raced only in northern England, where he was one of the most successful racehorses of all time. His portrait was painted twice by John Frederick Herring, Senior, and Ward’s turn came in 1820, when the horse won all four of his recorded races.

Ward’s money and luck had run out. He looked for a studio in which to make final alterations to The Triumph of the Duke of Wellington, but could not afford much. Theophilus Levett lent him £500, but died later in 1820. The painting itself was greatly delayed, awaiting Wellington himself to sit and model for it, allowing completion in 1821. Initial praise from the British Institution was quickly replaced by critical condemnation. The painting was given to the Chelsea Hospital, which eventually returned it to his family, who had it cut up. Ward’s last payment came in 1822, leaving him £700 out of pocket for the whole project.

Battered and bruised, Ward continued to paint a steady stream of equestrian portraits, farm animals, and countryside views. He also holds the unusual distinction of having painted the horses of both Wellington (Copenhagen) and Napoleon (Marengo). The Day’s Sport (1826) is one of his finest paintings of field sports, although to most of us today the grisly corpses at the right are a shock.

Its composition has some interesting nuances, such as the scaled echo of the central hunter by the smaller figure to the left, and the dog just by him. The effect of the snow frosted onto the bare trees brings delicate detail, and the glimpse of the rich sky at the left adds serenity. To me the puzzle is how the two girls at the right could possibly be wearing short-sleeved dresses without coats.

Ward’s oil sketches continued to be exciting explorations of the effects of light, such as his Cattle at a Pool at Sunrise (1827).

In 1827, Ward married his second wife, Charlotte Fritche.

From quite early in his career, Ward painted occasional works showing scenes from classical mythology. Venus Rising from her Couch (1828) is thought to have been his first nude, is slightly marred by the oddly globular form of her left buttock, and is a narrative oddity.

This painting has been claimed to show Leda and the swan, the very popular story in which Zeus metamorphoses into a swan in order to impregnate Leda with Pollux, who with his mortal twin Castor formed the Dioskouri. Although there is no bar to there being additional swans present at the time, paintings of this myth generally show Leda and a single swan in almost erotic combination.

The alternative title given here refers instead to Venus, to whom swans (and doves, seen at the left) were certainly sacred. Ward was no scholar of the classics, but it seems more likely that this is intended to be Venus rather than Leda.

Diana at the Bath (1830) is an even more daring nude, an even flimsier narrative, but considerably more accomplished (and free of anatomical glitches). Diana’s bow and arrows, her unusual hair decoration, and a rather unsuitable dog, are confirmation.

Ward then went into semi-retirement in a cottage in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, where he spent his remaining years.

Ward’s earlier finished painting of a boa constrictor may have been lost, but later paintings of a white horse confronting a huge and menacing boa constrictor (or ‘Liboya Serpent’) have survived. The Moment (1831) is probably the best of these, perhaps something more expected of the likes of Delacroix. Its sketchy background is unusual in Ward’s animal paintings.

The Midday Meal (c 1835) is another superbly loose and colourful oil sketch, with references to some of George Morland’s paintings.

Ward’s landscape of Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire (1840) follows the traditional approach shown by Constable in his Wivenhoe Park of 1816, and by this time was looking old and hackneyed, although it is still a beautiful painting.

An Overshot Mill in Wales (Aberdulais) (1847) is an impressive painting for someone in their late seventies, and earned its place in the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 1847. However by this time, Ward was no match for Turner.

In 1855, James Ward suffered what was almost certainly a stroke, which paralysed one side, and stopped him from painting. He died in late 1859, having recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday. Despite his late start at painting, he had been exhibiting at the Royal Academy over a period of 63 years, in which he had shown a total of nearly 300 paintings there.

I hope that these three articles have shown that Ward’s work was a bridge between the more traditional style of John Constable, and the more radical work of JMW Turner. His most innovative years were during Turner’s early career, when several of his paintings anticipated developments much later in the century. His oil sketches in particular are wonderfully radical, and several could easily be considered to be Impressions from fifty years later. And his horses were more than a match for those of Stubbs.

His most important paintings, including Gordale Scar, are major and influential works which merit inclusion in any sound history of European painting between 1800 and 1900. Yet they are almost invariably omitted.

References

Wikipedia.

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

In the first article in this series, I started importing the HTML and images from my series on the history of oil painting, to assemble them into hypertext to be accessed from Storyspace Reader. In this article, I will progress to composing the images and text within the linked writing spaces which make up the spine of the hypertext.

If you want to visit earlier tutorials to remind yourself how to use features of Storyspace, you’ll find links to all my other tutorials on Storyspace in this index.

Those writing spaces which make up the spine will each use the Milestone prototype, which is intended to contain the text and images for each milestone event in the history, and has $StartDate and $EndDate as key attributes, so that it will appear on the timeline.

I have separated out the paintings (with their captions) used to illustrate each of the milestones so that I can use them with several different writing spaces. For example, this image shows what is probably the earliest oil painting in Europe; not only will it need to appear in the relevant milestone in the spine, but it will need to be included in a more detailed account of early oil painting materials and techniques.

This large version, with a maximum dimension of 1024 pixels, is just over 250 KB in size. If I keep embedding it in different writing spaces, it will steadily increase the size of the Storyspace document, which is inefficient. I want just a single copy there, and one of its smaller version, which has a maximum dimension of 512 pixels and only takes up 77 KB. These are not large files, but I have a lot of them, so eliminating duplication is important.

There are several ways of avoiding such duplication in Storyspace. I could fetch the images from online storage here, perhaps, which works fine when readers have a web connection, but lets them down when they don’t. I could put all the images in a single folder, perhaps somewhere in /Library/Application Support, and open them in Preview. But to implement that in a friendly way, I would need to provide a proper installer, and I’d like to make the document file complete in itself, if possible.

I have also already mentioned the importance of showing the images in the context provided by the text, so I need to use code expressions for text substitution.

I use the most basic of these, ^include(), to call in the smaller image in its appropriate context. Because I am storing all the images (within writing spaces) in the Gallery container, I have to refer to them using the ‘path’ beginning /Gallery. For best style, I should really put the entire path in quotation marks, as
^include("/Gallery/Tingelstad Altar Frontal")
However, as this expression has only the one variable passed to it, and that is enclosed within parentheses, there is no scope for confusion. There is, though, scope for error if you do use quotation marks: they must be plain marks such as “” and not the ‘pretty’ typographic version of “” which are so often substituted when you press the normal key. To enforce plain quotes, you need to press Control-Shift-” rather than just Shift-“.

The moment that we switch from Edit to Read mode, that expression brings in the image and caption from the small painting writing space, showing the Tingelstad painting.

When you switch back to Edit mode, the included content is replaced by the ^include() expression again.

The other expression for text substitution which I will use here is stretchtext, using ^stretch(). I have recently looked in detail at stretchtext, and this is an almost perfect example of its use, to open the large version of the image. The expression here is fairly simple,
^stretch("Large image of the Tingelstad Altar Frontal","/Gallery/Tingelstad Large")
to use best style by putting both the anchor and the path in quotes.

As with ^include(), when in Edit mode all you see is the expression.

Switch to Read mode, and the anchor text appears, distinguished in blue. The reader will thus initially see this writing space with just its small captioned image, and the anchor below that.

Only when they click/tap on the blue anchor text, in Read mode, is the large image (and caption) fetched from the referenced writing space.

The use of ^include() and ^stretch() expressions ensures that the images are displayed in the original context. The reader only needs to scroll through that content to be able to read the text and refer to the image, and vice versa. They do not need to juggle windows, tabbed views, or go back and fore through the writing spaces.

In this case, I want the reader to be able to see both the smaller and large images simultaneously, in context, when they wish. In other circumstances, you might want the reader to choose whether to view only smaller images or larger ones. You could then use the ^if() … ^else … ^endif expression in conjuction with a boolean User attribute. Indeed another ingenious and flexible solution might be to combine that with stretchtext, in
^if($ShowLarge) ^stretch("Large image of the Tingelstad Altar Frontal", "/Gallery/Tingelstad Large") ^else ^include("/Gallery/Tingelstad Altar Frontal") ^endif

When the User attribute $ShowLarge is true, the stretchtext will appear, requiring the reader to click on the blue anchor text to reveal the large image; otherwise, when that attribute is false, the smaller image will be substituted without the stretchtext feature. This gives you an idea of how flexible these code expressions can be for building content.

The reader’s progress through these milestones is intended to be linear, with time, so I have added the next milestone, Layers and Glazes, and you here see it with the included text and stretchtext both brought in, and the milestones linked together using plain links. At this stage, there are no text links to take you away from the spine along limbs which go into each milestone in more detail: those will come later.

So far, I have been working in the Map view, and with the content of writing spaces, and have not even looked at the Timeline view. Now that I have three milestone and two paintings in place, I will take a moment to look at how it is shaping up in the Timeline. Before doing so, I need to focus the Timeline on the period in which I am interested, so that it captures the milestones better.

To do that, I open the Inspector, select the document tab, and set two Events attributes to the start and end of the Timeline window: I set $TimelineStart to 01/01/1000, and $TimelineEnd to 01/01/2010.

When I then switch to a Timeline view, I can see the milestones and individual paintings shown correctly. For next to no effort at all, Storyspace is happily plotting my content on that Timeline.

My next task is to complete the spine of milestones, and then look at how best to incorporate additional detail, including Vasari’s account, and other linked narratives.

Happy hypertexting!

In the late 1800s, for a short period, a new method of painting in oils became prominent: that of the Divisionists and Neo-Impressionists. Instead of applying layers of paint, or working alla prima, they pursued specific optical effects by placing vast numbers of small dots, strokes, or tiles of high chroma oil paint on their grounds.

Paul Signac’s marks ranged from tiny dots up to quite bold tiles; at the time that he painted his Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles (1905-6), as the detail below shows, his patches of colour were small rectangular tiles.

This was novel, and soon passed. Many oil painters continued to work in classical layered, alla prima, or a free mixture of techniques. These are best illustrated by the work of three of the most technically-skilled painters at the start of the twentieth century: John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla, and Anders Zorn.

John Singer Sargent was classically-trained, and his brilliant paint-handling shown most appropriately in his An Artist in His Studio (1904). This also makes the point that artists like Sargent were now able to paint quite substantial works in the confines of a small bedroom, something impossible in the past. I doubt that his work was as well-appreciated by the housekeeper, though.

Sargent’s Gassed (1919) shows him in more formal style, with one of the major paintings to result from the First World War, when as a War Artist he sketched mainly in watercolour.

Joaquín Sorolla can only be described as a vigorous painter, who was very quick and physically active in handling brush and paint. This is shown well in his aptly-titled Capturing the Moment (1906), which interestingly centres on the rise of photography.

Anders Zorn’s I Werners Eka (In Werner’s Rowing Boat) (1917) is a more finished work, which shows his distinctive style (and most popular genre).

In stark contrast were the Modernists, who worked their way through increasing levels of abstraction, until they painted colour fields, or poured and dripped paints of different types onto large canvases. Most cared as little for any rules or techniques of painting in oils as they did for representing any semblance of reality. Oil paints were mixed with water-based media, commercial paints of different types, and anything that they fancied. The end results are already causing considerable problems of conservation, as might readily have been predicted from centuries of experience.

The strangest thing about the twentieth century is that those changes in painting occurred at exactly the time that we started to gain real insights into how oil paints work, particularly how they ‘dry’, and how the paint layer can fail. This growing understanding relied on the advances in chemistry, particularly of polymers, and the needs of the much bigger commercial paint industry.

For much of the century, oil paints remained the standard for much non-artistic painting, particularly in buildings and construction. But advances in polymer chemistry brought a new type of paint which relied on a different drying mechanism: alkyds. For although slow drying is one of the great benefits to painting in oils, it is also one of its greatest problems. What painters have been seeking for centuries is some means of control over the rate of drying.

This could be achieved by pre-polymerising the drying oil used as binder, and by siccatives added to it. But pre-polymerisation brought increased viscosity which often had to be countered by adding a solvent such as turpentine, and siccatives such as lead oxide (litharge) are highly toxic and can cause problems in the paint layer.

Rather than alkyds replacing traditional oil paints, as some had expected, they have proved most versatile and popular as additives. When a painter is sketching in an underdrawing, it is not uncommon for that to include added alkyd medium, so that it becomes dry enough to paint over within minutes or hours (for a thin film in warm conditions). Others have found alkyd additives valuable in traditional layered glazes, where they can shorten drying time to just a couple of days, before the next layer can be applied.

Alkyd paints are now well understood, and are proving themselves capable of producing a reliable and robust paint layer. Unfortunately technical understanding by painters is much less reliable, and it is likely that many paintings which use alkyd additives will suffer early cracking and relatively rapid mechnical failure.

This is because of a long-known and reliable rule of thumb, based on the principle of applying fat over lean.

From long before van Eyck, painters in oils have understood that the most stable and robust paint layers are constructed by ensuring that the deeper layers dry first. In the absence of siccatives and similar modifiers, paint which is rich in drying oil dries more slowly than paint which has a minimum of drying oil: hence the phrase fat over lean, to ensure that the lowest layers dry before the surface. When the surface layers dry and harden with deeper layers still liquid, those surface layers will be subject to mechanical stress as that deeper paint dries, causing cracking.

Because alkyd additives are often referred to as a medium, and that is mistakenly assumed to mean ‘fat’ rather than ‘lean’ (even though alkyd resin is not a drying oil of any kind), many have assumed that it is safe to apply thin, alkyd-modified glaze layers over deeper layers without any additive.

Another complication has been the more recent introduction of oil paints which can be cleaned up using water rather than organic solvents such as turpentine or mineral spirits. With rising concerns over the toxicity of those solvents (turpentine is particularly irritant and potentially toxic), and their environmental problems, many painters have switched to using what have quite incorrectly been described as water-soluble oil paints.

These are in fact another benefit brought from the huge chemical industry, and demand for commercial paints, and are actually water-miscible. They consist of a supension of fine particles of oil paint, still with their drying oil included. Carefully packaged with a series of additives such as surfactants – detergents, as they are more commonly known – these are extremely convenient in use. They are also as yet unproven over the timescales that we currently expect of fine art paintings.

Water-miscible oil paints give the illusion that, thanks to modern chemistry, oil and water do mix. Deepening understanding of oil paints among conservation experts and the array of scientists who now support them has raised a new issue in oil painting technique: the threat of soap formation in the paint layer.

The triglycerides which make up drying oils will only polymerise into a robust paint layer in the right conditions – they require oxygen, for example – and very slowly. They can also, given different conditions, saponify, that is turn into soap, which has none of the physical properties required for a paint layer to last many centuries.

Conservators have discovered that some apparently well-constructed paint layers in oil paintings can saponify to such an extent that they drop off the ground in large sheets, resulting in total loss of the painting. In other cases, deeper saponified layers can remain liquid, and ooze from holes and cracks which open in dry surface layers.

Among the chemical factors which makes saponification more likely than polymerisation is the presence of water, particularly with additives which are now commonly used as surfactants. Soaps appear more common in oil paintings which have been made over acrylic grounds, another widespread modern practice, and with varnishes which can exclude the oxygen needed for polymerisation.

We clearly still have much to learn about oil paint, painting with oils, and how to make paintings which will last as long as those of Rembrandt and van Eyck.

I will close this penultimate article in this series with an example of technical accomplishment in oils, which I think is also brilliant art in the long tradition which I have been summarising.

Reference

Fat over lean – on this blog.

Ellen Altfest’s painting is included by kind permission of White Cube and MK Gallery and is © Ellen Altfest / White Cube.

Some of the best paintings of the Masters are those of intimate family moments, such as Rubens’ Two Sleeping Children (c 1612-13). William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) made many informal sketches of his family and other children, which are among his most candid and insightful works – and the subject of this article.

Long before he had his own, Chase demonstrated his skill in depicting young children in his wonderful pastel Child with Prints (c 1880-1884). Caught rummaging through a folder of prints in his Tenth Street Studio is the young child of a friend or model: the sort of amusing incident that happens to many of us. The toddler’s studious face, as they sit holding papers in front of them, immediately dispels any upset at the chaos that surrounds them.

Chase first met his wife, Alice Bremond Gerson (1866-1927), in 1879 when she was only thirteen, and still known as Posey. He married her on 8 February 1886, although some sources claim it was 1887, when she was nineteen and he was thirty-six. His very loose Portrait of Mrs. Chase (c 1886) is an early sketch which probably dates from their first summer together. Initially, the couple lived with William’s parents in Brooklyn before moving to their own place in Greenwich Village.

Between the years 1887 and 1904, Alice bore a total of eleven children, of whom seven are believed to have survived childhood. They include:

• Alice Dieudonnée (1887-1971), nicknamed Cosy, who was, after his wife, his favourite model
• Koto Robertine (1889-1956)
• William Merritt, Jr (1890-1891)
• Dorothy Bremond (1891-1953), another favourite model
• Hazel Neamaug (1893-?)
• John Rudolph (died 1895)
• Helen Velazquez (1897-1965)
• Robert Stewart (1898-1987)
• Roland Dana
• Mary Content (1904-1943).

Chase’s pastel My Baby Cosy (1888) expresses the particular joy that every parent feels in their first baby, reflected in Alice’s second name of Dieudonnée (‘given by God’), when she was just a year old. She wears a kimono-like gown, which makes her appear quite Japanese.

Hide and Seek (1888) does not show the Chase children (Alice was but a year old at the time, and the older girls were dark-haired too), but two visitors. It is both a familiar representation of a childhood game, in which the seeker has crept up behind the girl in the distance whose attempt to hide has failed, and one of his most unusual studies in space and its representation.

Its stark, sparse, and almost flat image with simple geometry – reminiscent of Whistler’s work – only gains depth through the echoed figures of the girls, in similar postures, their backs turned and looking into the picture.

Children Playing Parlor Croquet (c 1888) must also show the daughters of others, if it is correctly dated, as they take over a room to play the indoor version of this game, which was popular at the time.

Alice the mother and Alice the daughter are the subjects of his fine pastel I’m Going to See Grandma (Mrs. Chase and Child), dated to about 1889 when the girl was just two years old, and being dressed in her best for the visit.

In 1892, Chase, his wife and three daughters found fresh freedom when they moved into their new summer home in Shinnecock, Long Island. Away from the seemingly endless buildings and streets of New York City, just a few steps outside their front door they were surrounded by countryside. Unlike in the city, Chase’s studio was here integrated into the family home, and the children seem to have enjoyed frequent and unlimited access to it.

Many of Chase’s most candid paintings were made here in Shinnecock. His pastel Shinnecock Studio Interior (1892) shows one of the girls looking through pictures, perhaps a reminder of his earlier Child with Prints (above).

Those pictures have moved out into the Hall At Shinnecock (1892), another fine pastel, this time showing his wife, Alice and Koto, in the rich summer light.

Caring for their growing family must have kept Mrs Chase hard at work for most of her waking hours. By the time that she is seen sewing in For the Little One (also sometimes confusingly known as Hall at Shinnecock) in about 1896, they had four daughters ranging from three to nine years of age.

While mother was busy making and mending, and caring for little Hazel, the older girls might play with father. The Ring Toss (c 1896) shows those older girls – Alice in yellow, with Koto and Dorothy – playing most probably in the Shinnecock studio.

Did You Speak to Me? (c 1897) shows Alice, then aged ten, in the studio at Shinnecock, perhaps while she was waiting for her father.

In my previous use of Chase’s Alice in the Shinnecock Studio (c 1900), I had presumed that his painting showed his wife Alice, when it is almost certain that it shows daughter Alice, at the age of thirteen. By this time, his wife’s support to their six or seven children severely limited her availability as a model, and Chase was only too happy to use his oldest daughter instead.

But Chase was still not done with superb celebrations of childhood: with several young children in the family, and Mary Content still to come, The Birthday Party (Helen Velasquez Chase) (c 1902) captures what it is like to become five.

Having seen Chase’s family in their normal life, and at play, I will next select some of the many portraits which he painted of them.

References

Hirshler EE (2016) William Merritt Chase, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. ISBN 978 0 87846 839 3.
Longwell AG (2014) William Merritt Chase, A Life in Art, Parrish Art Museum and D Giles. ISBN 978 1 907804 43 4.
Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

Having seen the family of William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) at leisure and play, this article shows a selection of the many portraits which he painted of his wife and their children.

Chase gained experience of family portraiture when one of his demanding professors at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Karl von Piloty, commissioned him to paint his children in about 1877. He seems to have risen to that task, and to have enjoyed maintaining a pictorial record of his own family later.

Alice Bremond Chase, née Gerson, (1866-1927)

Chase’s wife came from an artistic family, but was not herself a visual artist. She did become a keen photographer, and appears to have kept extensive photographic records of their growing family. She was Chase’s favourite model, and appears in various roles in many of his paintings, but these are some of the portraits which he painted of her.

A Spanish Girl (Mrs. Chase in Spanish Dress) (1886), when she was aged 20.

The Tamborine Girl (Mrs. Chase as a Spanish Dancer) (1886)

Mrs. Chase (c 1890-95), here aged approximately 26.

Mrs. Chase and Cosy (c 1895), when the mother was aged 29, and her daughter just 8.

Mrs. Chase (Portrait of Mrs. C.) (c 1902), aged 36.

Mrs. W.M. Chase and R.D. Chase (1916), when she was aged 50 and Roland Dana was about 16.

Alice Dieudonnée Chase (1887-1971)

Nicknamed Cosy, she became his favourite model as his wife’s family duties restricted her availability.

Alice (1892), when aged 5.

Portrait of Alice Dieudonnée Chase (c 1899), here aged 12.

Alice Dieudonnée Chase, Shinnecock Hills (c 1902), aged 15.

Alice Chase Sullivan (Mrs. Arthur White Sullivan) (c 1912), now aged 25 and married.

Koto Robertine Chase (1889-1956)

Although their second child, she does not appear much in Chase’s paintings.

Koto Chase (1899), when she was aged about 10.

Dorothy Bremond (1891-1953)

After his wife and oldest daughter, Dorothy was his next favourite model.

Dorothy and Her Sister (1901), when she was aged about 10.

Dorothy (Dorothy in Pink, Portrait of Miss Dorothy Chase) (c 1913), now aged about 22.

Roland Dana

Of the two boys who survived their childhood, is was Dana, as he was known, who appeared in more paintings.

Roland Dana Chase (1905), when he was aged about 5.

Master Roland Dana Chase (1914), when aged about 14.

References

Hirshler EE (2016) William Merritt Chase, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. ISBN 978 0 87846 839 3.
Longwell AG (2014) William Merritt Chase, A Life in Art, Parrish Art Museum and D Giles. ISBN 978 1 907804 43 4.
Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

This final article in the series draws together the details from the previous articles to produce a chronological summary of the major milestones in the materials and techniques of painting in oils.

Before 1150 – drying oils

The ancient Mediterranean civilisations knew that some vegetable oils ‘dried’, and some did not. They used pigments which could readily have been ground with drying oils, and had surfaces which could have taken oil paint. But they lacked organic solvents in sufficient quantities, so were unable to dilute oil paints or to clean painting tools properly.

c 1180 – 1400 – first oil paintings

The earliest known and dated painting which uses drying oils is that of the altar frontal at Tingelstad in Norway. By this time, small amounts of solvents including alcohol (earliest) and turpentine (from pine resin) were becoming available. Over this period, the primary drying oil used was that extracted from the common flax plant, widely distributed particularly in northern Europe – linseed oil.

1400 – sophisticated painting in layers, glazes

Control over paint viscosity was accomplished using pre-polymerisation of drying oil (with heat), adding resin thickeners such as pine resin, and solvents such as turpentine, which was now widely available. Drying time could be controlled by the addition of siccatives, such as lead and copper salts. These enabled greater sophistication in the use of layers, the application of transparent glazes, and finely detailed realism – characteristics of the Northern Renaissance.

c 1445 – oil painting introduced to Italy

It is unclear who first brought oil painting to the Southern Renaissance, but one of its first exponents was Niccolò Colantonio (c 1420-1460) in Naples.

One of the first Southern Renaissance painters to match the achievements of the north was Antonello da Messina (c 1430–1479), who was an early user of walnut oil (which was more readily available around the Mediterranean) as his primary drying oil.

By about 1490, the Southern Renaissance painters, including the Bellinis, were advancing techniques independently of the north.

c 1470 – painting on canvas

Mantegna (1431-1506) popularised stretched linen as the support for his distemper (glue tempera) paintings during the latter half of the 1400s. These became particularly popular in Venice, whose maritime climate made fresco unsatisfactory, and where demand from churches led to early production of very large oil paintings on stretched canvas.

1500 – wet-into-wet, simpler layer structures, broken marks, visible brushwork, sfumato, impasto

In the north, Lucas Cranach the Elder in particular developed a rich repertoire of techniques supported by fine control of paint viscosity and drying time. These were mainly used for depicting fabrics and flesh.

In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci used soft blending, sfumato, painting wet-on-dry; Giorgione and others developed wet-into-wet techniques.

As early as 1501, Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione started to use impasto, initially in fine details of fabrics, metalwork, and jewellery, where those details were applied in the upper layer of paint. Impasto passages were soon used by many Italian artists, and found their way to northern Europe by way of Martin van Heemskerck, who visited Rome between 1532-36.

c 1625 – complete versatility in paint

Although earlier oil painters had managed very good control of paint viscosity and handling, it was probably Rubens who achieved the most remarkable levels. Upper layers of his paint were applied using a wide variety of techniques, using paint which ranged from thin (diluted using turpentine) to the buttery and even stiff. His paint was stiffened by boiling the oil down or possibly by adding small amounts of egg white (there is doubt over that, as it may result from misinterpretation of paint analyses), seldom by using resins, and was applied most commonly in highlights, where his brushmarks remain apparent.

c 1650 – manipulation of surface texture

Over the period 1650-60, Rembrandt became the first major oil painter to exploit the visual effects achieved by manipulating the surface texture of the paint layer, which significantly alters its optical properties.

c 1750 – colourmen, bladders, and plein air

Artists’ colourman appeared during the 1700s, supplying stretched and primed canvases, prepared oil paints, and other materials. Oil paints were supplied in small airtight bags, often made from a pig’s bladder. These enabled painters to work without the support of a large and expensive workshop, and made oil paints much more 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.

c 1780 – the perils of rapid surface drying

Some painters, including Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), endeavoured to recreate the effects achieved by Rubens and Rembrandt. A popular basis for this was Megilp, a medium modifier consisting of drying oil heat-treated with drying agent (usually litharge) and resins. This has resulted in many problems in their paint layers, including extensive surface cracking and the rise of still-liquid paint from lower layers. Despite these obvious problems, several painters continued to use Megilp and other dangerous methods through the twentieth century.

c 1850 – tubes

John Goffe Rand patented what he termed “metal rolls for paint” in 1841. Although initially expensive and only used for new paints using the latest pigments, they were adopted almost universally by the late 1800s. Coupled with a lightweight easel and pochade box, they made plein air painting even more feasible.

c 1870 – alla prima and the deliberate impression

Direct painting, alla prima, in which there are only one or two layers, including any underdrawing, had been used intermittently since about 1500, often unsuccessfully. It was standard when painting en plein air, and became increasingly popular in studio painting too during the 1800s, particularly after about 1870. Although often associated with the Impressionists, many of their paintings consisted of complex layers (without glazes) applied wet-in-wet and wet-on-dry, sometimes over periods of several months.

By about 1900, even more traditional painters in oils such as John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla, and Anders Zorn were using virtuoso combinations of techniques, often well away from their studios.

c 1900 – industrial manufacture of paint

Oil paint manufacture was transformed from a small-scale craft to an industrial process, supported by technical developments of industrial chemists. Tubed paints contained elaborate systems of additives, to promote flow and handling, and achieve a consistent buttery feel irrespective of pigment. Pigments were ground more evenly, using machines, leading to more controlled and even quality. Research, led by conservators, brought much better understanding of the process of drying, and how paint layers can fail.

1976 – alkyds

Industrial chemical research brought a new type of resin for paints in the 1930s: alkyds. Much faster-drying than paints using traditional drying oils, they were first offered in artists’ paints in 1976. Although alkyd paints have not become popular, the use of alkyd resins as a medium modifier, to accelerate drying, has become far more popular. Since 2000 many painters have used them for alla prima work and in intermediate layers. However, when used over slower-drying layers they can cause problems.

c 2000 – just add water

With rising concerns over the toxicity of organic solvents (turpentine is particularly irritant and potentially toxic), and their environmental problems, many oil painters have now switched to using what have quite incorrectly been described as water-soluble oil paints. These consist of a supension of fine particles of oil paint, still with their drying oil included. Carefully packaged with a series of additives such as surfactants – detergents, as they are more commonly known – these are extremely convenient in use. They are also as yet unproven over the timescales that we currently expect of fine art paintings.

Deepening understanding of oil paints among conservation experts and the array of scientists who now support them has raised a new issue in oil painting technique: the threat of soap formation in the paint layer. Given the presence of water, additives such as surfactants, and certain metal salts, oil paint can slowly transform into mechanically weak soap, rather than polymerising into a robust paint layer. This can also occur when oil paint is applied to acrylic grounds, which have become popular.

We still have much to learn about oil paint, painting with oils, and how to make paintings which will last as long as those of Rembrandt and van Eyck.

When William Merritt Chase moved into his new Tenth Street Studio in 1878, he took over the prime studio area in what was almost certainly the first purpose-designed building for visual artists in North America. Its architect was Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895), who remains a pre-eminent figure in American architecture. Among his many other designs were the New York Tribune Building, William K Vanderbilt House, Marble House (Newport, RI), the Fifth Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.

Hunt’s brother, William Morris Hunt (1824–1879) must have been a key influence over the design of the building, as he was the major painter in Boston at the time. He also had the distinction of being one of the few painters of the Barbizon School outside France.

William Morris Hunt was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, into one of the state’s wealthy and artistic families. His father was a Congressman, but died young. His widow decided to take their children with her to Europe, where they would be able to learn to draw and paint in the best academies.

The family travelled through Switzerland, the south of France, and Rome, before Richard and William settled in Paris, as students. William had originally intended to be a sculptor, and had already been a student in Düsseldorf from 1845-6. Then, while Richard attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris studying architecture (the first American to do so), brother William attended it to study painting under Thomas Couture, until 1852.

William Morris Hunt became great friends with Jean-François Millet, and from him learned the style of the Barbizon School.

Hunt painted Girl at the Fountain (1852–54), when he was learning the Barbizon style with Millet, near Paris. This painting was clearly not one which had any influence from Millet, and may date from his time with Couture instead.

After leaving Paris, Hunt returned via Newport, RI, Brattleboro, Faial Island in the Azores, and finally settled in Boston in 1855. His early paintings in Boston were mainly portraits, but tragically many of his paintings, drawings, and five large paintings by Millet which he owned, were all destroyed in the Great Boston Fire in 1872.

The Listeners (c 1859) appears more typical of a British Victorian piece from that time, but includes a fine study of the interlocked hands of the two women.

Hunt’s portraiture practice rapidly became very successful, with all the wealthiest Bostonians – known as Boston Brahmins – wanting him to paint them. He was also a prolific print-maker, and sculptor.

The outbreak of the Civil War was probably the motivation behind Hunt’s unashamedly militaristic The Drummer Boy (c 1862), confirmed by the inscription on the plinth below the boy’s feet 1861 U.S. VOLUNTEERS 1 1862. Behind him, the clouds are darkening with an incoming storm.

Hunt travelled back to Europe on several occasions, and it is likely that he painted Italian Girl (1867) and its companion boy during one of those visits.

The Ball Players (1871) shows three men playing baseball on a rough field. It was painted in the year that the first professional league was established, when the game was growing rapidly in popularity, and seems to have been one of the earlier paintings showing the US national sport.

After 1870, Hunt turned more to landscapes, where his loose style was particularly apparent. Those landscapes were a significant influence over the work of Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, and others. He taught John La Farge and, until he decided to concentrate on his writing, William James. He also promoted the paintings of European artists, including his friend Millet. His writings on art were widely read. Among his circle in Boston were figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William James, and Erastus Brigham Bigelow, who was a founder of MIT.

Hunt painted a few works showing farm animals and activities, including his Plowing (1876). The team shown is made up of two horses and two oxen, which was apparently not unusual at the time. This is one of his most overtly Barbizon paintings: tonal, relatively dark (although much of that may be old varnish), painterly, with predominantly earth colours.

In other paintings, he appears to have painted more like Corot than Millet, as in his Sand Bank with Willows, Magnolia (1877). Although the landscape is hardly imposing, the young boy and his younger sister appear small in comparison to the low trees. There is another child to the left of that boy, apparently trying to climb the tree.

His Landscape remains undated, but was probably painted during the 1870s. Although his marks are very gestural, and the cloud banks rich in brushmarks, it is still tonal with muted colours.

In 1877, Hunt painted two subtly different versions of the same motif, and produced an engraving: The Bathers (1877). This is the slightly larger version now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the other version, now in Worcester Art Museum, is shown below. Like other painters at the time, Hunt had trained himself to be able to paint entirely from memory, something which was popularised in several books and courses in the 1800s, before photography became commonplace.

According to Helen M Knowlton, Hunt’s biographer in 1899, he was driving past a cove on the Charles River one day when he saw two young men in the water. One, his feet apparently on the bed of the river, had the second standing on his shoulders, naked and ready to dive into the water. Hunt drove back into town, made a charcoal sketch from memory, then later completed the two substantial paintings of the scene.

In the late 1870s, Hunt was commissioned to paint murals in the New York State Capitol Building at Albany, New York. Winged Fortune (1878) is a study which he painted for the figure of Fortune, within those murals. Although only a study, Hunt has exercised great care in the flesh, and has used high chroma colours elsewhere.

The Capitol was constructed over a protracted period between 1867 and 1899. In the end, Hunt only completed two, named The Flight of Night and The Discoverer, each about 15 m in length, and painted directly onto the sandstone wall of the Assembly Chamber. They unfortunately became damaged by moisture, and started to flake. Then the chamber’s vaulted ceiling was found to be unstable, and had to be lowered to cover them.

His last and greatest landscapes are views of the Niagara Falls (1878): this is probably the most famous of those, and shows the Canadian Horseshoe falls from the Canadian side, a view almost identical to that of Frederic Edwin Church in 1857.

Niagara (1879) was painted from the other side, and is unusual in that Hunt used casein paints rather than his customary oils. Casein paints use the milk protein of that name as their binder, making them a distemper using water as the diluent. They dry as quickly as egg tempera, but can be reworked for a period until the binder has fully hardened. They were very popular among commercial artists until the advent of acrylic paints in the late 1960s, and underwent periods of popularity among fine art painters too.

In his later years, he suffered from depression (bouts which were almost certainly a part of bipolar disorder), and when he died at the Isle of Shoals, New Hampshire, it was believed to have been suicide. In addition to strong collections of his work in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Athenaeum, significant paintings of his are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, as well as most other major collections in the US.

References

Wikipedia.
Wikipedia on Boston Brahmin.

Several of John Singer Sargent’s works feature another artist as a model, together with his beautiful wife: Mr and Mrs Paul Helleu. Below, for example, is the best-known of these, usually titled rather unhelpfully An Out-of-Doors Study (c 1889), although sometimes fleshed out as Paul Helleu Sketching with his Wife. So who were they, and why don’t we ever see Helleu’s paintings?

Paul César Helleu (1859–1927) was born into a bourgeouis but not wealthy family in Vannes, on the west coast of Brittany, in France. His father died when he was in his early teens, so he left home and moved to Paris. In 1876, at the tender age of just 16, he gained a place at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme. That same year, Helleu attended the Second Impressionist Exhibition, where he was introduced to the paintings of the revolutionary movement, and met John Singer Sargent, Whistler, and Monet.

Helleu made two early friends who were to be great influences on his style and career: Giovanni Boldini, and John Singer Sargent. The latter was the first person to buy one of Helleu’s paintings – for the huge sum of a thousand francs. Helleu followed Boldini’s and Sargent’s leads and started to establish himself as a portraitist to the fashionable and wealthy. In 1884, he was commissioned to paint a beautiful girl named Alice Guérin; the couple fell in love although she was only fourteen at the time, and they married two years later.

Alice helped introduce Helleu to circles of the wealthy, ensuring that his painting prospered financially.

There can be no doubt that Helleu was an extremely accomplished, prolific, and successful painter of portraits. But as with others of his time, such as James Tissot, I here ask whether he demonstrated his talent in other genres, and perhaps justified being rated a fine artist as well.

One of Helleu’s earlier Impressionist works, Gare Saint Lazare (1885) offers his version of this motif which had become very familiar with Monet’s 1877 series, discussed here. Interestingly Helleu adopts a high viewpoint which was first used by Manet, rather than Monet.

In 1885, he visited London, where he renewed his friendship with Whistler, and met James Tissot, who had been painting portraits very successfully. Tissot introduced Helleu to drypoint etching, following which Helleu became a virtuoso print-maker using that technique.

Back in Paris, Helleu became friends with Degas, who persuaded him to exhibit at the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886. That year he was introduced to literary salons of Paris, where he became friends with Marcel Proust among others. His clients were then being drawn from the very highest ranks, and included the Duchess of Marlborough and Helena Rubinstein.

From about 1890, Helleu explored other genres and themes more actively. The Interior of the Basilica of Saint-Denis (c 1891) is an example of his interest in churches and their stained glass, which included Reims Cathedral. The Basilica of Saint-Denis was the burial place for almost every French king between the tenth and eighteenth centuries, and now lies within the north of the city of Paris, although Saint-Denis was formerly its own city. The window shown is that of the north transept, which features the tree of Jesse; a south transept rose shows the Creation.

After that series of churches, he turned to floral studies, including Vase of Flowers (c 1896).

From the moment that he could first afford to do so, Helleu was an enthusiast yachtsman. With commercial success came the ability to own his own yacht, and over his life he owned four in all. Aboard (1897) is a very loose sketch made on board what appears to be one of Helleu’s sizeable yachts, with two small boats seen in their davits.

Portrait of Madame Chéruit (1898) shows Madame Louise Chéruit (1866-1955), among the most prominent couturiers of her generation, and one of the first women to control a major fashion house. She and Helleu apparently had an affair around the time that this portrait was painted.

His wife Alice was his favourite model, and his most recurrent subject from the time that he first painted her portrait. Portrait of Mrs Helleu with an Umbrella (1899) is a very loose sketch almost entirely in blue and white, which seems to refer to John Singer Sargent’s earlier A Gust of Wind (c 1886-7), shown below.

Many of his later paintings are centred on his yachting activities. Bedecked Yacht Entering Port (1899) shows a racing yacht proceeding into harbour under power, presumably after a race.

Madame Paul Helleu Seated at Her Secretaire, Seen from the Back (c 1900) is a more unconventional portrait of his wife, who appears dressed for a social engagement.

The Flute Player (c 1900) is an example of his drypoint etching. It is estimated that he produced more than two thousand prints over his career.

Regatta (1901) is another yachting scene, this time almost certainly a view looking out from Cowes Harbour on the River Medina, Isle of Wight, over the racing grounds of the Solent. At the left is the Royal Yacht Squadron, which still organises the racing.

Le Grand Pavois (c 1901) uses the French term for what in English is called dressed overall, and refers to the naval tradition of displaying a rich variety of flags as a mark of celebration or recognition. As in Regatta above, this appears to be at the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes, Isle of Wight, and would have occurred during the annual Cowes Week racing, perhaps to welcome the monarch. If painted in the summer of 1901, that would have been for the as-yet uncrowned King Edward VII, whose mother, Queen Victoria, had died that January at Osborne House, her palace on the other side of the River Medina.

Helleu had become one of the most celebrated artists in both Paris and London, and in 1904 was recognised by being admitted to the Legion of Honour.

On the Beach (1908) is an impressive panoramic view which may have been influenced by the many panoramas which were being shown to the public across Europe.

The Harbor at Deauville (1912) is a more static scene from one of Helleu’s favourite French ports and yachting centres, on the Normandy coast of the Channel. The square-rigged sailing ship shown in the background was not unusual: although steam power was becoming widely adopted, there were still a great many sailing ships in commission.

During his second visit to the US that year, Helleu was awarded the commission for the ceiling decoration of Grand Central Terminal in New York City. He chose a design based on the signs of the zodiac which was widely admired, but became covered in the 1930s. In 1998 it underwent restoration and you can still see it there today.

The Artist’s Yacht, the Port of Sanville (1913) shows two grand yachts in Sanville, a port which I have been unable to trace, surprisingly. Either would attest amply to Helleu’s opulence.

Helleu was an early friend of Coco Chanel, the fashion designer, perfumier, and businesswoman. It was Helleu who advised her to adopt beige as a signature colour, and his son and grandson worked as her artistic directors.

In addition to his portraits in oils, Helleu made a very large number of quick sketches of women, including this Portrait of a Woman (c 1920), in pastel and charcoal.

Realising that the good and rich years of the Belle Époque were over, after his final visit to the US in 1920, Helleu destroyed most of his copper plates (to prevent more prints being made from them), and went into retirement. He died in 1927, followed by his wife six years later.

As with James Tissot and John Singer Sargent himself, this small selection of Paul Helleu’s non-portrait works shows him to have been highly talented, very progressive in his styles, and surely sufficient to merit retention in the history of painting around 1900.

References

Wikipedia.

de Montesquiou R (1913) Paul Helleu, peintre et graveur, H Floury, Paris, available here. (In French.)

Now unfortunately overshadowed by Impressionism, the Pre-Raphaelite movement was a major influence in European painting in the middle and later years of the 1800s. The core of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was small and transient, but the movement and its periphery spread further, and lasted until the early twentieth century. Like Impressionism, it was also notable for being one of the first art movements in Europe in which women artists became a major influence.

Today, the women of the Pre-Raphaelite movement are mainly known as models, lovers, and partners; at the time, several were productive and original painters in their own right, but somehow their work never got into major public collections, and is now generally overlooked. Of the women painters who were part of the movement, probably the most prolific and significant was Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927).

She was born Marie Euphrosyne Spartali in Hornsey, Middlesex, to the west of London. Her parents were wealthy merchants; father, Michael Spartali (1818-1914), had moved to Britain as a boy, and his successful trading had enabled him to buy a large Georgian country house on Clapham Common, which was then in the country south of the city. Among his trades were objets d’arts and archaeological objects from the Middle East (some of which are now in the British Museum and others). He enjoyed the company of rising writers and artists, and held garden parties and dinners to cultivate them.

His business connections resulted in being appointed Consul-General for Greece in London, a role which he held from 1866 to 1879. Unfortunately his business then went through a bad patch, and in 1885 he went bankrupt. He and his wife were able to retain much of their possessions, and he seems to have recovered quite quickly. Following that, Marie’s parents seem to have largely retired to live in one of the properties which they had used on the Isle of Wight as summer homes.

In her late teens, Marie associated with her cousins Maria Zambaco and Aglaia Coronio, who became collectively called The Three Graces for their beauty and grace. In 1863, they became known to Whistler, Swinburne, and then members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and were frequently used as models for their paintings. In 1864, after chaperoning her sister when modelling for Whistler, she started as a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, and for two days each week he taught her in his studio.

Marie Spartali was first sent to the pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) at her father’s wish (and cost). Cameron’s Marie Spartali Stillman (1868) is an example from that commissioned series. Later, Mrs Cameron put her in a variety of roles as a model, in her studio at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, close by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s winter residence there. Cameron was one of the earliest ‘artistic’ portrait photographers, specialising in women.

The following year, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) sketched her in red chalk; Rossetti was among the core members of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and openly expressed his admiration of her beauty, and his inability to capture it in his work. He used her as a model for several of his paintings.

Mariana (1867) is a remarkably accomplished watercolour version of this popular motif, set here in the context of Shakespeare’s character in Measure for Measure, and Tennyson’s poem of 1830. In the former, Mariana is a betrothed woman who, when rejected by her suitor, lives in a moated house. In the latter, the rejected and world-weary woman becomes suicidal. Despite a favourable reception when shown in the Dudley Gallery, Marie kept the painting, and it did not re-appear until the 1980s. It was probably an inspiration for Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Mariana of 1868-70.

She first exhibited five watercolours in the Dudley Gallery in 1867. That gallery had only opened in 1865, to specialise in works on paper. Shortly afterwards, she met and fell in love with the American journalist and minor painter William J Stillman, who had just returned from supporting the Cretan rebels in their uprising on Crete. He had recently lost his wife, and had three children from that marriage. In 1870, Marie exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in London.

It seems probable that her undated Farm Scene was painted when she was on the Isle of Wight one summer, perhaps fairly early in her career, when she made a number of such landscapes. It appears inappropriately titled though: it depicts a small thatched cottage on a public road (the signpost at the right), of which there were innumerable examples around Shanklin and Godshill at the time. Many have been preserved, and still carry a full thatch. There is some form of narrative taking place between the two adult figures, while a young girl shrugs her shoulders at some geese.

Her Self-Portrait (1871) was a study in charcoal and white chalk which she turned into a watercolour painting in 1874 and exhibited in Boston later that year. It is fascinating for including elements of both the Pre-Raphaelite in terms of her mediaeval costume and Renaissance treatment, and the Aesthetic in the Japanese fan.

Although opposed by her father, in 1871 Marie and William married in Chelsea Register Office, London, following which they celebrated their wedding breakfast in Ford Madox Brown’s house. They spent six weeks of the summer in New York and Boston, where William was reunited with his children. The following year, their first child, Euphrosyne (‘Effie’) was born, and her parents welcomed them into a small cottage near the family home on Clapham Common. Her husband had difficulty in obtaining work, and Marie had to run the household and bring up their family; in spite of those heavy demands on her time, she maintained her painting output.

In 1872, Marie paid her first visit to Kelmscott Manor, near Lechlade in Gloucestershire, England, where William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were driving forward the new derivatives from the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including the Arts and Crafts movement. Marie remained good friends with the Morrises and Rossettis thereafter.

Having laid the groundwork in their working honeymoon, in 1873 Marie had her first paintings shown in a Boston, MA, gallery. She maintained a presence in the US from then until close to her death.

In 1876, William Stillman was employed by The Times newspaper as its correspondent in the Balkans, and he left London to work there, increasing the household demands on Marie. She had another important success at the Royal Academy that year, in the exhibition of a painting, The Last Sight of Fiammetta, which has subsequently been lost. That same painting was exhibited (alongside paintings by Burne-Jones and others) at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878.

In 1877 she was one of the 64 artists invited to inaugurate the Grosvenor Gallery in London, as an alternative to the Royal Academy.

William Stillman moved with his work, and in the spring of 1878, the family moved to Florence, which he used as a more central base for his journalistic work. Later that year, their son Michael (‘Mico’) was born.

Fiammetta Singing (1879) was the second painting that she made based on Boccaccio’s poetry, here the sonnet Of Fiammetta Singing, probably using Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s verse translation. Her third tribute to Boccaccio was By a Clear Well, Within a Little Field (1883), below. It demonstrates the rapid effects which exposure to northern Italian art were to have on her work.

Fiammetta, in red at the left, sings to the accompaniment of a lute, and with six other women in support (one of whom rests to the left of Fiammetta, with her lute). Boccaccio is seen to the right, behind, his ship waiting for him in the distance. Fiammetta carries a fan of peacock feathers, more typical of the likes of Whistler and Oscar Wilde, but the whole painting merges multiple artistic modalities – music, visual art, poetry – which is characteristic of the Aesthetics.

While they were based in Florence, Marie returned each summer with her children to her parents’ residence on the Isle of Wight. This also enabled her to keep in touch with her British friends, and the London art scene.

The full title of her “Certain ladies of her companionship gathered themselves unto Beatrice…” (1880) actually quotes even more from Dante’s Vita Nuova:
Certain ladies of her companionship gathered themselves unto Beatrice where she kept alone in weeping. And as they passed in and out, I would hear them speak concerning her, how she wept.

This refers to the ladies of Florence who paid their respects to Beatrice as she kept vigil following her father’s death. Dante is shown sat outside the house, wearing his customary chaperon hat, his head bowed, and being comforted by two of the women who had visited Beatrice inside. This was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880.

In contrast to the Italianate settings of the previous two paintings, her A Wreath of Roses (1880) is very English, and may have mainly been painted during the previous year, when she was in England for most of the year, and stayed for the summer at her parents’ house in Shanklin, Isle of Wight. It is likely that her two step-daughters, Lisa (then 15) and Bella (12) acted as models. The view through the bottle-glass window has been extensively modified, though: the house has diamond-pane leaded windows, not bottle-glass, neither does it have a moat.

She also returned, to Clapham Common, for the birth of their third child in 1881, who sadly died the following spring in Florence.

Marie undoubtedly modelled for this painting, and appears to have assisted Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) in the making of The Mill (1882) in oils. The three dancers were modelled by the Three Graces: Maria Zambaco, Marie Spartali Stillman, and Aglaia Coronio (from left to right).

The Childhood of Saint Cecily (1883) was one of the last paintings which she composed when in Florence, which is reflected in its idealised Tuscan background. As with so many paintings of saints, it departs from even the most inventive of hagiographies, here for the patron saint of music, Cecilia. The saint is shown playing a harp-like psaltery, while an angel adjusts the garland on her head. It was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883, but did not receive favourable review.

In the autumn of 1883, the family moved back to London, where she developed her friendship with the young John Singer Sargent.

By a Clear Well, Within a Little Field (1883) is her third and concluding painting based on Boccaccio’s sonnets. That tells of three young women seated “by a clear well, within a little field” who relate their loves. Each has “twined” a small tree branch to shield her face, and put their golden hair in shadow.

The woman at the right is spinning, and it is tempting to suggest that the trio might represent the three Fates. But the absence of their other attributes – particularly scissors or shears – makes that most unlikely. The other two women are covering their heads with small branches from the chestnut tree, as described in the sonnet. Its landscape is neither overtly Tuscan, nor recognisably British, and the well and trees could be almost anywhere in western Europe. It was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1884.

The next article will resume her story in 1884.

References

Delaware Art Museum, in Wilmington, Delaware, has one of the best public collections of Marie Spartali Stillman’s paintings. This compares, for example, with London’s Tate Gallery, which has none at all.

Wikipedia.

Frederick MS & Marsh J (2015) Poetry in Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Marie Spartali Stillman, Delaware Art Museum. ISBN 978 0 996 06761 4. Astonishingly, few other books on the Pre-Raphaelites even mention her, and if they do it is as a model and member of the circle.

In the first article, I gave an account of the early life and work of Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927), up to her return to England after five years in Florence, in 1883. During that period she had made good advantage of her time in northern Italy, which had brought a maturity to her technique and style of painting. However, even with several substantial periods spent back in England, it had been hard for her to progress her own career and standing in her home market.

For convenience, I start with three works which could of course be from much earlier or later.

This undated watercolour Self-portrait appears unrelated to her earlier (1871, 1874) self-portraits, and has a slight gaucheness in the eyes and mouth which suggests that, if it really is hers, it may be from before 1871. The fan she is holding is not the folding fan in those other paintings, and the flowers appear to have been painted in watercolour rather than gouache.

Antigone Giving Burial Rites to the Body of Her Brother Polynices is much more interesting, as it was painted in oils. Marie’s letters of 1883 record that she was then learning Burne-Jones’s technique of oil-painting, and that year and the next she purchased oil paints and ancillaries from her suppliers, Robersons. This may have followed her involvement in Burne-Jones’s The Mill (1882) – covered in the previous article – and this oil painting was then made slightly later.

Polynices and Eteocles, the sons of Oedipus, quarrelled over which should rule Thebes, leading to their deaths. King Creon, who succeeded them, decreed that Polynices was neither to be mourned nor buried, on pain of death by stoning. Polynices’ sister, Antigone, defied the order and was caught. Here Marie Stillman shows Antigone (centre) attending to the burial of her brother, her companion fearfully trying to draw her away. They are greeted by carrion crows, and at the far right is the headstone of a grave.

It is possible that Marie painted this in late 1884, as a response to her own sister’s death (below).

Her Autumn appears to be a simpler watercolour, and may date from her early years. It shows a pensive girl harvesting apples, against a background of corn stooks in a cornfield.

Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni (1884) was one of her first major works after her return to England, and was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in the summer of 1884. It was accompanied by a translation of the poem (a sestina) by Dante of the same title, describing a woman who is as cold as stone in a wintry landscape. The painting’s symbols not only reflect the details of the poem, but may form homage to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had died two years earlier.

That September, though, her own family problems became dominant. First her sister, Christina, died apparently as the result of a drug overdose, leaving teenage sons. Then the following year her father’s business went onto the rocks, he had to petition for bankruptcy, and the family mansion on Clapham Common was sold, with all its contents. Thankfully her parents did manage to keep at least one of their properties on the Isle of Wight, the lovely Rylstone Manor in Shanklin.

Marie’s step-children were a relief from these problems: Bella had started training as a sculptor, and Lisa studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and was a pupil of George Frederic Watts, who had long been a friend.

Love’s Messenger (1885) is considered to be the finest of her single-figure paintings, and was her most successful ‘problem picture’. I have discussed such problem pictures in another article, suffice it to say that they started to appear around 1850, and were at their most popular between 1895 and 1914.

The woman stands by her embroidery at an outside window. On her right hand is a messenger dove/pigeon, to which a letter is attached. She clutches that letter to her breast with her left hand, implying that its contents relate to matters of the heart. The dove is being fed corn, which could either be its reward for having reached its destination (thus the woman is the recipient of the message), or preparation for its departure (she is the sender).

On balance, the presence of corn on the windowsill implies that it is more likely that the dove has just arrived, and the woman is the recipient. These clues are accompanied by alternative interpretations of the other objects and symbols, such as the embroidery.

Despite being exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885, and elsewhere, this painting did not sell until after Marie had reworked the background in the 1890s. In 1901, it was snapped up by a US collector, and has been in the US ever since.

A detail view of Love’s Messenger shows how Marie’s watercolour technique results in a facture more closely resembling that of oils, although this painting is an extreme example with its use of tempera too. This was accomplished by using transparent watercolours more like oil glazes, and gouache (opaque watercolour) for details. Although this is unusual, I do not believe that this is as unique as has been claimed.

In 1886, William Stillman was sent out to Italy again, this time to Rome, as its correspondent for The Times newspaper. The family followed him, allowing Marie to make friends with Giovanni Costa, a noted landscape painter of the day. Costa took young Lisa under his wing, and mother and step-daughter exhibited with his Etruscan School, and the group of notable British artists under the banner of In Arte Libertas (which included Watts, Burne-Jones, and Frederic Lord Leighton).

In Dante’s Vision of Leah and Rachel (1887), Marie returns to her favourite Florentine author, and references Canto 27 of Purgatory, in his Divine Comedy. Here, Dante is on the Seventh Terrace, representing the sin of lust. Just before the dawn of the Wednesday morning, when Dante and Virgil are sleeping on the steps between that terrace and Earthly Paradise, Dante experiences his third dream, a vision of Leah and Rachel. They are symbols of the active (lay) and contemplative (monastic) Christian traditions.

Marie shows this fairly true to Dante’s verse, with the poet sat at the left, wearing his customary red chaperon, Leah in red, standing fashioning a garland of flowers for her head, and Rachel, as ever staring at her beauty in reflection. The whole is set in a northern Italian landscape, rising to the southern edge of the Alps in the far distance.

She kept with Dante in the following painting, Dante at Verona (1888), one of three related works which she submitted for the inaugural exhibition of the New Gallery, which succeeded the Grosvenor Gallery that year. Now she was back in Italy, such themes were only to be expected, but she accompanied the painting with a quotation from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s highly popular poem of the same title. This describes Dante’s exile from Florence to the court of Verona.

Marie sets her version in the public garden in Verona, where “wearied damsels” request the poet to recite his early poem Vita Nuova. As previously, she takes the opportunity to reference three modes of art – poetry, music, and painting – and thereby evokes the Aesthetic, albeit in a Pre-Raphaelite mediaeval setting.

In her The First Meeting of Petrarch and Laura (1889), Marie goes back to one of the influences over Dante, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), widely known as Petrarch, whose sonnets became a model for lyrical poetry through the Renaissance. After Petrarch had given up his vocation as a priest, he saw a woman known only as “Laura” in the church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon.

She was apparently very beautiful, already married, and refused him – although it is unclear whether Petrarch had any personal contact with her. It did though drive him to express his feelings in exclamatory love poems, and to condemn men who pursue women. Laura apparently died 21 years later, and Petrarch was consumed with grief.

Petrarch is seen at the right, and Laura on the left, their looks and body-language following Petrarch’s account. Although the opportunities are limited in this story, Marie follows a Pre-Raphaelite rather than Aesthetic approach here.

The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo (1889) draws on another classic of Italian literature, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and was exhibited with a written explanation of the scene.

Ansaldo has been wooing Madonna Dianora, who tells him that if he could get flowers to bloom in the winter, then she would respond to his seduction. Here, surrounded by his enchanted blooming garden, and with snow on the ground outside, Ansaldo (at the right) has invited Dianora (just right of centre) and her entourage to see. Dianora is then torn between her honour as a married woman, and her promise.

Marie painted this when in London, and exhibited it at the New Gallery later that year. Failing to sell it in the UK, she took it with her to the US in 1900, where it was bought in Boston by a distant relative of her husband. The painting then disappeared until it was re-discovered in the 1980s. It is therefore not clear whether it may have influenced JW Waterhouse, who painted a similar work in 1916-17.

Cloister Lilies (1891) seems altogether plainer in its reading. A beautiful young woman rests in thought, holding lilies (symbols of purity), with beads (rosary, for prayer) and an illustrated book. Although this appears set within the walls of a convent (probably based on one in Florence), she is not (yet) a nun herself.

When first exhibited at the New Gallery in 1892, though, it was accompanied by lines from Edward FitzGerald’s popular translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám – hardly a model for the contemplative life of a nun – which lament the passing of beauty and youth.

Marie became even more enigmatic in her treatment of the hugely popular theme of Saint George (1892) – long tackled through his hagiographic achievement of killing a dragon. What she appears to have done is to ignore that established if not ingrained tradition, and painted an icon of him, poised with lance and shield. Sadly I have no further details of any accompanying references which might have explained this approach.

I will complete my brief sampling of her works in the next article in this series.

References

Delaware Art Museum, in Wilmington, Delaware, has one of the best public collections of Marie Spartali Stillman’s paintings. This compares, for example, with London’s Tate Gallery, which has none at all.

Wikipedia.

Frederick MS & Marsh J (2015) Poetry in Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Marie Spartali Stillman, Delaware Art Museum. ISBN 978 0 996 06761 4. Astonishingly, few other books on the Pre-Raphaelites even mention her, and if they do it is as a model and member of the circle.

In my previous article, I described the life and work of Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927) during some of her most active and productive years. This article completes my account.

Late 1892 saw Marie’s step-daughter Bella married after a brief engagement to the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University, and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum there.

How the Virgin Came to Brother Conrad of Offida and Laid her Son in his Arms (1892) is one of a small group of religious works, of which two were drawn from the legends of the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. Marie loved the Italian text of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, on which she based them.

This painting shows Friar Conrad (kneeling), who took himself to a wood to meditate on God, only to experience a vision of the Virgin Mary in response to his prayers to her. His colleague Friar Peter (at the left edge) witnessed this from his hiding-place nearby. Marie’s composition was discussed in correspondence with Edward Burne-Jones, who approved of it, and Marie painted it during the winter of 1891-92, when in Rome. Although too late to be exhibited at the New Gallery, she sent it to Liverpool instead.

Its companion, The Vision of the Good Monk of Soffiano (1893), was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1893.

In 1893-4, she painted a series of fine Italian landscapes in the company of Giovanni Costa. I regret that I have been unable to locate any usable images of them.

I have already commented that her A Rose in Armida’s Garden (1894) has little narrative as such, although it refers to the Eastern sorceress who is a central figure in Torquato Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered. Unlike the many highly narrative paintings by Poussin and others, Marie chose instead to paint what amounts to an Aesthetic portrait. There is more here than just her beauty, though, as some of the petals fall symbolically off her roses. Exhibited at the New Gallery in 1894, this work was already marked as a wedding gift for a family friend.

Love Sonnets (1894) was a companion to A Rose in Armida’s Garden, and a simple exercise in pictorial poetry. Shown alongside one another, it was this work which sold to the American Samuel Bancroft, whose support she later cultivated.

A Lady with Peacocks in a Garden, an Italianate Landscape Beyond (1896) sets the full-length figure of a woman ascending steps, to reach three peacocks, against a superb background of the Italian countryside at dusk.

Beatrice (1896) refers to Dante’s Vita Nuova, through Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s popular translation into English. In this earlier version, Marie shows Dante’s beloved Beatrice lost in contemplation while reading, an intimate insight set firmly in the Pre-Raphaelite mediaeval. This was exhibited at the New Gallery later that year.

This detail view of Beatrice provides more insight into her watercolour technique, which better resembles that of oil painting.

In 1898, William Stillman finally retired from The Times, allowing the family to move back to England, where they had a woodland house built for them at Deepdene, Frimley Green, Surrey – an affluent and then quite rural area well to the south of London. Marie was better able to put her paintings into the UK market again, and renewed her visits to Kelmscott Manor. However, sales of her paintings were slow.

Marie’s second treatment of Beatrice (1898) employs similar floral language, perhaps emphasising innocence in its lilies, but is less contemplative and more sensual, in a manner more typical of Rossetti, perhaps.

The Lake of Nemi (1899) is one of the many superb landscapes which Marie painted during the 1890s. This is a small circular lake to the south of Rome, which has been a popular motif for painting. JMW Turner visited the lake on several occasions, sketching it extensively in 1819, and painted it at least five times, from different points of view.

Marie’s husband died in 1901; her step-daughter Bella’s husband had died in 1896 (at the age of only 49, following an accidental overdose of morphine), so the two moved to live together in Kensington, London. Marie took both step-daughters for the summer to Rome in 1902. The following year she visited the US, where she spent time with Samuel Bancroft, who had purchased Love Sonnets in 1894.

Marie painted many views of Kelmscott Manor, which was the residence of William and Jane Morris, and a centre of the Arts and Crafts Movement at the time. Her A Lady in the Garden at Kelmscott Manor, Gloucestershire is undated, and could have been painted rather earlier.

The Manor was originally built in stone in about 1600, and nestles in countryside near the River Thames, to the west of Oxford. Among its many features is a walled garden, which Marie found particularly secluded and peaceful.

Kelmscott Manor: Feeding Doves in Kitchen Yard (1904) is possibly her finest view of the house, with a woman on one knee on the crazy paving slabs, her right arm held up to feed one of the white doves from its flock. Marie’s rendering of the different textures of the stone and tiles is painstaking and highly effective.

Kelmscott Manor: The Long Walk (1904) is another wonderful view of the house. The woman shown is clutching lilies in her left hand, as a symbol of purity, and her head is covered as if she was from mediaeval times, not the early twentieth century.

Marie returned to the US in 1908, where a solo exhibition was held in New York.

The Pilgrim Folk (1914) may well have been Marie’s last major painting, and is a valediction to Italy, which had influenced her so much. It again refers to Dante’s Vita Nuova via Rossetti, a quotation from which was shown with the painting. This passage contains Dante’s account of Beatrice’s death to a group of newly-arrived pilgrims.

Dante leans out from a window at the left, addressing three pilgrims below. At the lower left corner, the winged figure of Love crouches in grief, poppies scattered in front of him. Pilgrims around the well are taking refreshment after their travels, and more are arriving through the alley beyond. Black crows fly in flocks above, symbolising death. The landscape behind is very Italian, and the whole has a fairy-tale unreality about its mediaeval details. This painting was completed prior to the outbreak of war, but was not exhibited until 1919.

After the First World War – in which two of her cousins died – Marie resumed painting in earnest, and continued to paint actively until shortly before her death. She visited the US again in 1923, and died in London in 1927. She was probably the last survivor of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Her obituary in The Times (for which her husband had written so much) seems to have decided her fate in the history of art, though: it dwelled on her beauty, grace, and charm. Its single short paragraph about her art described it as a leisuretime activity. No catalogue raisonné of her work has been attempted, but more than 150 paintings of hers are known or survive, from a career which lasted about sixty years, during which her paintings were exhibited throughout the UK, in France, Italy, and Boston and New York in the USA.

My next and final article in this series will attempt an appreciation of the works of Marie Spartali Stillman, and I will try to cast a little more light on her visits to the Isle of Wight in particular.

References

Delaware Art Museum, in Wilmington, Delaware, has one of the best public collections of Marie Spartali Stillman’s paintings. This compares, for example, with London’s Tate Gallery, which has none at all.

Wikipedia.

Frederick MS & Marsh J (2015) Poetry in Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Marie Spartali Stillman, Delaware Art Museum. ISBN 978 0 996 06761 4. Astonishingly, few other books on the Pre-Raphaelites even mention her, and if they do it is as a model and member of the circle.

In 1891, plein air painting, particularly in oils, was a relatively new technique in the US, and growing rapidly in popularity. It was Janet Hoyt who first invited William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) to come to the new art village in western Southampton, Long Island, to teach the hundreds of students attending her new plein air art school. This was to be the start of a new chapter in his teaching, his art, and for his family.

By the following summer, his friend Stanford White had designed and built him a summer house at Shinnecock, with an integral studio. The Chase family moved out of New York at the start of the summer, and while father was busy teaching the hundreds of students, his wife and children were able to enjoy the surrounding almost untouched countryside, the beaches, and a different pace of life.

Chase continued to teach for twelve consecutive summers at Shinnecock, his skills and experience being shared with thousands of aspiring painters. In later years, when he was drawn back to Europe, and Florence in particular, his family continued to grow up in the sunny Long Island summers.

Although as we have seen Chase was a masterly painter of portraits and other genres, his Impressionist style was at its strongest when he was sketching outdoors in oils at Shinnecock. There is little point in trying to elaborate or explain his paintings in words: they show the skies, rough scrub, the Chase house, beaches, old tracks, and of course his wife and children. I have arranged them in approximate chronological order, but otherwise I will leave it to his paintings to show you Chase’s favourite Shinnecock.

Note: I am not sure that An Afternoon Stroll (c 1895) was necessarily painted at Shinnecock, and am prepared to be corrected if I am wrong. However it does appear to belong in this series of his work.

References

Hirshler EE (2016) William Merritt Chase, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. ISBN 978 0 87846 839 3.
Longwell AG (2014) William Merritt Chase, A Life in Art, Parrish Art Museum and D Giles. ISBN 978 1 907804 43 4.
Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

The year 1916 was pretty grim. In Europe, the Great War had been raging two years, at a prodigious cost in human life, and looked set to continue until all the fathers and sons in Europe lay dead in the icy mud. In the US, which did not enter the war until the following year, there was frustration at watching US citizens die – the previous year 128 were lost when the RMS Lusitania was torpedoed, for example.

America also lost two of its greatest artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), whom I have been celebrating in other articles, and Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). Eakins died in Philadelphia on 25 June 1916, at the age of 71. Chase and Eakins were almost complete opposites, but between them, their colleagues and many students, they laid the foundations for American art in the twentieth century.

Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he attended Central High School, and excelled in drawing. His father was a calligrapher and writing teacher, and at first that seems to have been Thomas Eakins’ direction too. From 1862, though, he studied drawing and anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and attended courses in anatomy at Jefferson Medical College in 1865.

He decided that France was the best place for education as an artist, so from 1866-70, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme, and of Léon Bonnat – both meticulous and detailed realists. He developed a particular interest in painting nude figures. Before returning to the US, he spent six months in Spain, where he studied the Spanish masters, and completed some slightly looser paintings than he had worked on in Paris.

Arriving back in Philadelphia in 1870, he embarked on a group of rowing scenes, which came to a total of eleven oils and watercolours.

The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) (1871) is probably the most famous of these, the first in the series, and still an astonishing painting. Eakins’ friend and successful rower Max Schmitt is in the nearest boat, and Eakins (a keen oarsman himself) is the figure in the further single scull. It is meticulously detailed, even down to the puddles in the water made by Eakins’ oars as he rows into the distance, and its clouds are calligraphic.

This was shown among the first of his paintings to be publicly exhibited in Philadelphia, but its theme of a modern sport was felt to be a shock to artistic convention. The following year, Eakins painted his first full-length portrait, of Kathrin Crowell, to whom he became engaged two years later. Painting portraits then became an important part of his art, for the remainder of his active career.

Starting Out After Rail (1874) shows two of Eakins’ friends sailing a ‘Delaware ducker’, setting off to hunt the small waders along the Delaware River. After preliminary studies, he painting this oil version, and one in watercolour. This was exhibited at Goupil’s gallery in Paris, and the following year was one of two accepted for the Paris Salon.

That year he turned his attention to painting the portraits of prominent professionals. He also sold his first painting, one of his original rowing scenes which is now lost, and became engaged to Kathrin Crowell.

Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) (1875) is a portrait of this eminent professor of surgery at work in a teaching theatre at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. The operation, a conservative procedure to treat osteomyelitis of the femur, took place before the advent of aseptic technique, so instruments were clean but not sterile, and gloves and gowns were not worn. The patient, lying with their feet towards the viewer and their head under the anaethetist’s mask, would have been receiving a general anaesthetic using ether or chloroform.

Gross stands near the middle of the painting, a scalpel held in his bloodied right fingers. Behind and to the left is the only woman in the painting: not a nurse, but apparently the patient’s distressed mother. Although there was interest in initial photos of this painting, when he submitted it for exhibition the following year it was rejected as unsightly, and sent first to an Army hospital before returning to Jefferson Medical College.

In 1876, Eakins started as a volunteer teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy. The following year, following internal problems over his role, he moved to teach at the Art Students’ Union, but in 1878 returned to the Academy.

William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1876-77) is the first of three paintings which show William Rush, a wood sculptor, carving his Water Nymph and Bittern for a fountain in Philadelphia’s waterworks, in 1808. The water nymph is an allegory of the Schuylkill River, which was the city’s primary source of water at that time.

Rush had been a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and an enthusiast for the use of nude models in art – as was Eakins. This painting was therefore, at least in part, an attempt to promote Rush’s name, and the practice of working from nude models. Eakins prepared thoroughly, as usual, in carving wax studies, and making a series of drawings and oil sketches.

Seated at the right of the model is a chaperone, more interested in her knitting. The model’s complicated clothing is hung and scattered in the light, as if to emphasise her total nudity (apart from a hair-band!), and the sculptor is working in the gloom at the left. Eakins anachronistially included several later works by Rush, as if to provide a resumé of his output.

Eakins returned to this motif thirty years later, and painted two further versions, including his William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1908). These lack the scattered clothing, which had earlier been deemed ‘most shocking’, and rearrange the figures into what most consider an inferior composition.

The Courtship (c 1878) was an attempt by Eakins to use a motif which would not cause offence. It shows a young woman busy spinning, while her young man sits at a distance and watches. Both are fully and properly dressed in colonial clothes. It has been suggested that one influence on Eakins here was Velázquez’s The Spinners (1657), although there is neither visual resemblance nor any narrative relationship between the paintings. In any case, spinning would have been quite a common and normal activity in the circumstances.

In Eakins’ watercolour The Dancing Lesson (Negro Boy Dancing) (1878), three African-Americans are seen together in a dancing school. Shown in the miniature portrait at the top left are Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad, emphasising collaboration between the generations. This was his first painting to be awarded a medal, at the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association in Boston that year.

In 1879, his fiancée died of meningitis, but in that autumn he was appointed Professor of Drawing and Painting at the Pennsylvania Academy. He was promoted to be its Director in 1882.

Arcadia (c 1883) was an unusual venture into mythology, tackled using the most modern of methods: the camera. Eakins had bought his first camera in 1880, and started to use it as a photographic sketchbook. He was also involved in Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photographic studies of human and animal motion.

In addition to a series of conventional studies, Eakins used several photographs to compose and paint this work, then a ‘magic lantern’ projector to incise marks on the canvas to aid his painting. Although it can be read as another step in his campaign for painting from life, it is also a quite painterly pastoral landscape. His fiancée Susan Macdowell (whom he married in 1884) was probably the model for the girl at the left.

William Merritt Chase bought this painting during Eakins’ lifetime, perhaps from the artist himself, and it was included in the sale of Chase’s effects which took place after their deaths.

The next of Eakins’ paintings which I show here uses this albumen silver print by him or one of his friends, Eakins’s Students at the “The Swimming Hole” (1884).

Together with other photos and various studies, Eakins then painted Swimming (The Swimming Hole) (1885). Appreciated today as one of the most important paintings in Americam art, and a masterpiece in the depiction of human form, it has various readings. Bathers have been a popular and recurrent theme in paintings since the dawn of the art, at times becoming obsessive (Cézanne). For Eakins they provided him with an ideal opportunity to show his figurative painting skills, and to continue to press his campaign on life modelling.

There is a deep irony in his choice of subject, which Eakins undoubtedly recognised. The same public who were shocked at a painting of naked people, or painting nude models in an art class, were quite used to seeing naked men swimming, even in public places – that was an accepted norm, so long as you did not take it into the studio or art class. It had been commissioned, and perhaps inevitably was refused, although Eakins was still paid in full. Visually at least, this painting may have influenced George Bellows‘ Forty-two Kids (1907).

In 1886, he was forced to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy because of his insistence on allowing his students to work from completely nude models, even when his class contained female students.

The following year he started making studies for his next major painting, and stayed in the Bad Lands of Dakota for some weeks. The result was his Cowboys in the Badlands (1888), which combines a very American cowboy scene with an astonishing landscape, which would probably have appeared extraterrestrial to many on the East Coast.

He extended his teaching to include the Women’s Art School of the Cooper Union in New York, and then the National Academy of Design.

Previous experience with the reception of The Gross Clinic had perhaps discouraged him from painting in medical settings, but in 1889 students from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine persuaded him to accept a commission to paint their retiring professory of surgery, Dr. David Hayes Agnew. Eakins worked long hours to complete The Agnew Clinic (1889) in the three months allowed.

This fine painting shows how surgery had advanced in just fourteen years. Under the bright artificial light in the middle of the teaching theatre, the surgeon is performing a partial mastectomy. The patient is here shown at a more conventional angle, and no incisions are visible. The surgeons now wear gowns, although full asepsis with gloves, hats, etc., had yet to be introduced. A similar volatile liquid general anaesthetic is being used, administered via a mask.

The only woman present, apart from the patient, is now a nurse, Mary Clymer, although nurses had not yet developed specialist operating roles, and she is dressed for the ward, not handling instruments. The figure at the far right, on the edge of the canvas, is Eakins, allegedly painted by his wife.

Despite the care that Eakins had taken to avoid the problems of his previous painting, this work was rejected by the Society of American Artists, and brought about his resignation from that society in 1892.

With The Concert Singer (1890-92), Eakins concentrated more on portraits, and this was his first full-length portrait of a woman, the singer Weda Cook (1867-1937). She was known for her powerful contralto voice, and Eakins reduced distractions so that the painting is almost exclusively about Cook. There is just the glimpse of a potted palm, the disembodied conductor’s hand and baton, and a bouquet of roses thrown at her feet.

Eakins and Cook fell out late during the painting of this work, apparently over Eakins’ repeated insistence that he wanted her to pose disrobed. In the end he had to complete it using just her dress and shoes, but the two were reconciled three years later.

While Eakins was still painting Cook’s portrait, he completed that of Miss Amelia Van Buren (c 1891). Van Buren (c 1856-1942) came from Detroit, and studied under Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1884-85, and Van Buren remained friends with Eakins and his wife afterwards, staying with them from time to time. Although it attracted little interest at the time, since then it has grown in stature, and is now accepted as one of Eakins’ finest works.

In 1893, eleven paintings of his were shown at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and he was awarded a medal. In 1896, his only solo exhibition was held in Philadelphia – this was a critical success, but no sales resulted. The following year he ceased regular teaching.

Towards the end of the century, Eakins returned to some of his earlier sporting themes, in particular painting several depictions of boxing matches at the Philadelphia Arena. Some of these may have showed reconstructions of specific fights, but his Between Rounds (1898-99) is invented, constructed carefully from an assembly of individual studies. For their time and place, they were radical, and must have influenced George Bellows when he painted boxing matches around twenty-five years later.

In his later years, Eakins suffered failing eyesight, and became increasingly immobile. He died on 15 June 1916.

References

Wikipedia.

Sewell D (2001) Thomas Eakins, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 09111 3.

Like many artists, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) married another artist, Susan Hannah Macdowell (1851–1938), better known under her married name of Susan Macdowell Eakins. Like many artists’ wives, their lives, careers, and works have been largely forgotten. Indeed, several authoritative sources assert that “after her marriage, Susan Eakins gave up painting to devote herself to assisting her husband and, later, establishing his reputation.”

This article looks at the few examples of her work that I have been able to find (and can show here), and the truth of that statement, particularly in the light of the common acceptance that she was an example of the New Woman of the nineteenth century.

Born to a father who was an engraver, photographer, and painter in Philadelphia, she showed early drawing skills and interest in art. She was given an attic studio when still a girl, and encouraged. When she was 25, she attended an exhibition in the Hazeltine Gallery, saw Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic (1875), and was impressed by it. She met the artist there, and decided to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which then had a reputation for being one of the best (if not the best) art school in the US.

Susan Eakins started studying at the Academy in 1876, the same year that her sister Elizabeth started there, and Cecilia Beaux, and the year that Thomas Eakins started working there as an unpaid volunteer assistant to Professor Christian Schussele. Susan studied there for six years, during which she won prizes, including the Mary Smith prize for the best painting by a matriculating woman artist.

Thomas Eakins was not appointed Professor at the Academy until after Schussele died in 1879. Susan campaigned for women artists to be included in life classes using nude models, an issue which eventually led to Thomas’s forced resignation from his post as Director there in 1886.

Susan and Thomas became engaged just after she left the Academy in 1882, and married on 19 January 1884. They had no children, and current opinion is that Thomas Eakins was attracted to men and may have been a homosexual; however, there is also evidence attesting to his heterosexuality, so the issue remains unresolved in spite of much modern discussion of the homoeroticism of some of his paintings and photographs.

Her husband used Susan as a model for some of his paintings, including (probably) as a nude figure in his Arcadia (c 1883). The sole portrait which he appears to have painted of her is The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog (1884-89). Interestingly the one work hanging on the walls which can be identified readily is Thomas Eakins’ sculpted relief of Arcadia, which features Susan as a model.

If dated correctly, Susan’s Woman in a Plaid Shawl (1872) is an astonishing portrait in oils for a twenty-one year-old before training, and can only reflect a very well-spent childhood.

Gentleman and a Dog (1878) shows how rapidly she developed during her early years at the Academy. Although composed quite differently, there are interesting parallels with Thomas’ portrait of Susan almost a decade later. Thomas Eakins has been quoted as asserting that she was more adept with colour than he was, and that is reflected here.

Although this image of her Two Sisters (1879) appears to have had excessive contrast adjustment, this is a complex double-portrait which appears to have worked very well indeed.

During her training, Susan developed a clear preference for portraiture, and completed many quite innovative portraits while still a student. Her Woman Seated or Portrait of a Lady (1880) declares her interest in Japonisme, for instance, in the fan, and puts the subject’s head in profile, looking off to the right.

Susan also painted many still lifes, of which this undated example appears to come from her earlier period, with its Japonisme.

Woman Reading is presumed to have been painted before her marriage in 1884, but appears more consistent in style with some of her works from the period after Thomas’s death. It features another touch of Japonisme, perhaps, in the decorated plate peeping out from the curtain behind.

I have been unable to locate any usable images of her paintings made during her marriage to Thomas between 1884-1916. Of the 87 paintings of hers listed in her Wikipedia article (from a SIRIS database search), eight are attributed to that period, indicating that although she was less active in her studio, she did not by any means ‘give up painting’. Indeed it is well-documented that during the period of their marriage, Susan maintained her own studio, separate from that of her husband.

She also became an active photographer; unlike Thomas, for whom photography was primarily a sketchbook for his paintings, Susan explored photography as a new art medium. In 1898 she became a member of and started to exhibit with the Philadelphia Photographic Salon. She also exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1905, but did not have any solo exhibitions of her paintings or photographs during her lifetime.

When Thomas died in 1916, at the age of 71, she was 65, and immersed herself in painting daily. Some of her first works then inevitably worked through her grief, with titles such as Anguish (1916). But her style quickly became brighter, looser, and higher in chroma.

The one painting of hers from this period which I have been able to locate and use is one of her most remarkable: her posthumous portrait of her husband, Thomas Eakins (c 1920-25).

There are two other important paintings of hers from this period which are well worth viewing, although I cannot include their images here: her Self-Portrait (1910-20), and the thoroughly painterly The Tennis Player (1933).

Susan Eakins has not been entirely forgotten since her death in 1938. Her works did not have the benefit of the care which she had taken over Thomas’s after his death: she carefully preserved his paintings and photographs, and gave some of the finest to museums and collections, ensuring that his works are now largely intact. After her death, much of their remaining works were destroyed or damaged by executors, and it was only through the efforts of one of Thomas’s former students that many were salvaged. But while Thomas’s The Gross Clinic sold for a record $68 million in 2006, Susan’s paintings are worth but a tiny fraction.

Susan Eakins’ work was given its first solo exhibition in 1973, thirty-five years after her death.

Reference

Wikipedia.

No one knows how many students William Merritt Chase taught, but they must have run into the thousands. He taught from around 1879, when he took his first student on, until well into the twentieth century, just a few years before he died.

Over that period, he had private students, the hundreds who flocked each summer to the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of plein air painting, and the large numbers who passed through the doors of some of the leading art schools of the day. The latter included his own Chase School of Art (which he opened in 1896), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Students League, and the Brooklyn Art Association.

Although in time Robert Henri and Chase fell out and went their separate ways, Henri was first invited by Chase into teaching, and they held one another in respect.

Here is a brief survey of twenty of Chase’s many students, whose subsequent careers we know about today. They are given in order of their year of birth.

Emma Lampert Cooper (1855-1920)

Attended the Art Students League in New York City before 1886, where she was taught by William Merritt Chase and Agnes Abbatt, and Cooper Union. In 1886 she travelled to Paris and the Netherlands for further study.

Silas Dustin (1855-1940)

He trained under Chase, and became the curator of the National Academy of Design. He was also an art dealer, and led the Biltmore Salon.

Dora Wheeler Keith (1857-1940)

She was taught by William Merritt Chase from 1879-1881, one of his first pupils, and he remained her mentor and friend. She went on to study at the Art Students League in New York, then spent two years at the Académie Julian in Paris.

Lydia Field Emmet (1866-1952)

With her older sister, attended the Académie Julian in Paris in 1884-5. They returned to New York to study with Chase and others, then returned to Paris to study under Bouguereau, Collin, and Tony Robert-Fleury. As her paintings remain in copyright, I offer Chase’s superb portrait of her.

Louise Upton Brumback (1867-1929)

First attended a Shinnecock Summer School in about 1900, then went to the New York School of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

John Marin (1870-1953)

He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1899-1901, where he studied under Thomas Pollock Anschutz and Chase, and at the Art Students League in New York. His work remains in copyright.

Edward Charles Volkert (1871-1935)

After studying at the Cincinnati Art Academy under Frank Duveneck, he was a student at the Art Students League in New York, under William Merritt Chase.

Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer (1873-1943)

Attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she was taught by Cecilia Beaux and William Merritt Chase. In the summer of 1900, she attended Chase’s summer school in the Shinnecock Hills. As the best in her class at the Academy, she won the Cresson Travelling Scholarship, and studied at the Académie Colarossi in Paris for three years.

Kate Freeman Clark (1875-1957)

She was introduced to Chase when at the Art Students League in New York City, after 1895. Chase taught her still life painting, and remained her mentor for the rest of his life. He particularly respected her work, and had two of her paintings in his personal collection. Her work remains in copyright, and can be seen here.

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943)

Studied painting at the New York School of Art from about 1898, under Chase, then went on to the National Academy of Design.

Joseph Stella (1877-1946)

Having started to study medicine, he turned to art, at the Art Students League in 1897 and the New York School of Art from 1898 under Chase. He also attended a Shinnecock Summer School in 1901, taught by Chase. His paintings come out of copyright later this year.

M Jean McLane (1878-1964)

She studied in Cincinnati under Frank Duveneck, then in New York under Chase. Her work remains in copyright.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967)

He studied under Chase and Robert Henri at the New York School of Art from around 1900-1906, and his mature style was strongly influenced by Chase, Manet, and Degas. A major painter by any standard. His work remains in copyright.

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971)

After studying composition and design at the Art Students League in 1900, he learned to paint at the Shinnecock Summer Schools in 1900-1902, then in 1902 was a student of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. A major painter by any standard. His work remains in copyright.

George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925)

Attended the New York School of Art from about 1904, mainly studying with Robert Henri. One of the school’s most distinguished alumni.

Julian Onderdonk (1882–1922)

Studied with Chase from 1901, initially at a Shinnecock Summer School, and a further two years after that. His father, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk (1852–1917) had earlier studied with Chase, and with James Carroll Beckwith.

Charles Henry Buckius Demuth (1883–1935).

From Drexel University, he went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, under William Merritt Chase. He travelled to Europe in 1907, studying at the Académies Colarossi and Julian in Paris.

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (1885-1968)

She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from about 1901, where Chase was one of her teachers. He became her mentor, until his death in 1916, which affected her deeply. Her paintings remain in copyright.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)

Probably Chase’s most eminent and popular former student, she studied under Chase at the Art Students League in New York City in 1907. The following year she won the League’s William Merritt Chase prize for still life. Her work remains in copyright. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum holds more than a thousand of her works, and has a good online collection.

Leopold Gould Seyffert (1887-1956)

He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1906-1913, where his teachers included Chase, Thomas Pollock Anschutz, and Cecilia Beaux. His work remains in copyright.

Additional articles:

Louise Upton Brumback (1867-1929)
George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925), up to 1914
George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925), after 1914
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), 1 experiments to 1921
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), 2 mature landscapes
Emma Lampert Cooper (1855-1920), the invisible wife
Edward Charles Volkert (1871-1935), the pastural painter
Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer (1873-1943) and Dora Wheeler Keith (1857-1940)
Charles Demuth (1883–1935), Precisionism, and flowers

Often omitted from lists of William Merritt Chase’s students, and known mainly to Texans, Julian Onderdonk (1882–1922) was a prolific American Impressionist painter.

The son of a painter and former student of Chase, he was born in San Antonio, Texas, on 30 June 1882. He was initially taught by his father, and became a competent painter in oils by the time that he was eighteen.

He painted this impressive early portrait of his younger sister, Eleanor Onderdonk, in 1900, before he had received any external training. She is seen coring fruit, in preparation for their preservation by bottling, or possibly making into jam or a similar conserve, on the verandah of the family home.

In 1901, he withdrew all his savings and borrowed as much as he could from a family friend, and left for New York. He there enrolled at the Art Students League, where he benefited from the structured classes of Kenyon Cox, and Frank Vincent DuMond. Onderdonk noticed some paintings by Chase at the National Academy of Design, and enrolled for the Shinnecock Summer School of 1901, taught by Chase himself – a move encouraged by his father. Chase painted Onderdonk’s portrait to celebrate the young man’s birthday.

Onderdonk continued to receive instruction from Chase, who became his mentor, and some from Robert Henri. In the summer of 1902, Onderdonk married Gertrude Shipman, and the following year their first child was born. His first painting was accepted for exhibition by the Society of American Artists, and in 1904 he sold another to the Dallas Art Association. He tried opening his own Onderdonk School of Art, but he was not yet well known, and it closed.

Recent research by James and Kimel Baker suggests that at this time he was in debt, struggling to make ends meet, and to repay a $500 loan. In addition to painting under his own name, he is believed to have provided a Manhattan dealer with a supply of rapidly-painted works signed mostly by ‘Chas. Turner’, with a few by other names too.

This is complicated by the fact that there was also a Charles Henry Francis Turner (1848-1908) active in Boston at the time, although his paintings appear quite distinct from those now attributed to Onderdonk.

Onderdonk’s Stone Bridge in Winter, Central Park (1901-09) is signed in his own name, and presumed to have been made in the time that he was resident in New York.

Signed by ‘Chas. Turner’, Seascape III (1905) is quite different from those works which bear Onderdonk’s own signature, so is now attributed to him.

Harbour Scene (1906) is also signed ‘Chas. Turner’ and attributed to Onderdonk.

Shinnecock (1906) shows unmistakeable influence of Chase, and was perhaps painted when Onderdonk was a guest of the Chase family at Shinnecock, on Long Island.

Onderdonk spent increasing amounts of time back in San Antonio, where he was responsible for selecting paintings for the annual Texas State Fair in Dallas. In 1908, his major creditor died, and his debt of $500 was written off, enabling him to stop painting under assumed names for his Manhattan dealer. Onderdonk exhibited his plein air paintings at the Rice Gallery in New York, then the family packed their bags and moved to his parents’ house and the family studio in San Antonio.

Onderdonk was at last able to devote some time to painting his favourite landscapes, such as Winter Twilight Southwest Texas (1908), using the techniques which he had refined in New York. This is an atmospheric sketch which was probably painted en plein air.

He also painted several fine watercolour studies, including this Landscape (c 1908/09).

He seldom painted figures, but when he did, he captured great character, as in his Goat Herder at the San Antonio Quarry (1909). The herder of the title appears almost elfin, with disproportionately large feet.

Already his studio landscapes were mature, very painterly, and breathtaking in their beauty: Sunlight and Shadow (1910) is a good example, and one of his finest works.

On the Old Blanco Road, Southwest Texas (1911) shows what was then a deeply rural track, and has now been swallowed into the northern part of the city of San Antonio.

In about 1911, Onderdonk started to paint views featuring the distinctive state flower of Texas: the bluebonnet (a lupin or lupine species). Field of Bluebonnets at Sunset is an undated example.

A Hillside of Blue Bonnets – Early Morning, Near San Antonio Texas (1916) is another example.

There had been limited opportunities for him to exhibit his paintings in Texas, and initially he relied on the Texas State Fair which he continued to curate. From 1914, he was able to exhibit locally in a San Antonio gallery, and in 1916 sent paintings north to Chicago, where they appeared in the huge Marshall Fields store. He had his first two solo exhibitions that year, hosted by the Palette and Brush Society of San Antonio, and later in Dallas.

His father died in 1917, leaving Julian Onderdonk as the senior painter in the state. Although he had benefitted from the popular recognition accorded to his bluebonnet paintings, he was naturally keen that his public saw him as much more than just that.

Road to the Hills (c 1918) shows how well he could depict the shimmering light, heat, and textures of the countryside, an environment which most painters avoided because of its harshness.

Early Spring — Bluebonnets and Mesquite (1919) is a very painterly sketch made when conditions were less challenging.

Dawn In The Hills (1922) was probably the last painting which he completed before he suddenly suffered an acute abdominal emergency in 1922, and died after emergency surgery, on 27 October. He was only forty years old, and had just entered his prime.

References

Biography.
Painting under a pseudonym.

One of the first changes that I noticed when my Mac started up after installing macOS Sierra was its display. I have loved its Retina 5K 27-inch display from the moment that I got it last December, but somehow Sierra seemed to make it even better, as if its surface had been grubby and it had had a good clean. The reason was that Sierra was – at last – using its full potential with a ‘wide’ colourspace.

macOS Sierra doesn’t introduce wide colourspaces to the Mac, but it turns what has been a specialist experience into the norm, what we should expect. Instead of a few apps doing smart things on their own, the default is now for the Finder, Preview, and everything else to handle colour as well as your graphics card and display can.

There will inevitably be some old quirky apps which somehow manage to make assumptions about colourspaces and colour rendering, and don’t take advantage of what Sierra offers for free. But for the great majority of local apps and documents, if your display is capable of better than sRGB, then Sierra should make it so.

Except, of course, for the web and online content. There we enter a murky area which can even mislead you into thinking that there’s something wrong with your Mac, or Sierra, or both.

Dean Jackson’s excellent article about wide colour spaces and the web explains how some of this comes about, and what web developers can do to address it. What he doesn’t emphasise sufficiently is that no matter how carefully a web developer might implement support for wide colour, and no matter how Sierra helps apps use the improved capabilities of modern displays, it all ultimately comes down to the rendering engine in your browser.

If you’ve got more than one browser installed on your Mac (or want to try this on an iOS device, PC, Linux, or anything else for that matter), point them at Dean Jackson’s superb page of demonstrations of wide colourspace images.

My experience here is that Safari 10.0 and Firefox 49.0 on Sierra 10.12 do make visible use of wide colour, but Opera 40.0 does not – although the ‘watermark’ is visible in the top image, there are shortcomings visible in all the others, when compared against Safari’s rendering.

It gets worse: repeat this test with an even simpler one, this page showing two even colour fields. Again, Safari and Firefox render the colours evenly and correctly, but Opera shows tiles of slightly different colours. If you had just upgraded to Sierra and browsed those pages using Opera 40.0, you’d be tempted to think that it was Sierra, or your graphics card, which was at fault, given that the two colours should be completely even.

Safari uses the WebKit engine, which clearly does now render wide colour as well as any. FireFox uses Mozilla’s own Gecko engine, which in recent versions at least seems to perform as well as WebKit (in this respect). Opera, like Google Chrome, uses the Blink engine, which was forked from WebKit over three years ago. Blink appears to sacrifice faithfulness of colour for performance.

As a user, if you see what appears to be faulty colour rendering in your browser, try a different one, such as Safari. Only if it is consistent across different rendering engines and appears in reliable recent releases of apps should you wonder whether it is Sierra or your hardware at fault.

As a web developer, you now have the problem of trying to cope with browsers which seem to handle wide colourspaces very well, and those which struggle to render a simple, even area of colour faithfully. Dean Jackson’s case is convincing and impressive, but where does that leave those using Chrome and Opera?

Finally, if you cannot see the ‘watermark’ in the first image or the tiling in the last, blame your browser, not me.

William Merritt Chase was born just five years later than Thomas Eakins, and they both had the benefit of a European training. Yet their paintings and working methods were so different.

Chase seems to have painted Impressions – generally direct or alla prima, straight onto the canvas, working progressively from a rough sketch to the finished work. Eakins took several months if necessary, producing drawings, sketches, and photographs before starting the final painting. This article illustrates these contrasting approaches.

William Merritt Chase and the nearly-spontaneous

There are occasions when Chase must have made quick sketches from life, which he then developed into a more formal painting – when he and John Singer Sargent painted La Carmencita, the dancer, for example. But his plein air landscapes, pastels and oil sketches of his family and others, all appear to have been virtuoso performances.

A few of his unfinished paintings have survived, and they reveal how he started with a quick sketch using diluted oil paint, then progressively brought areas into better detail. These unfinished works show passages at different levels of completion.

As with many skilled portraitists and figurative painters, the figure was usually the most advanced part of any painting, during its production.

There do not appear to be matching ‘finished’ paintings which originated in surviving oil or pastel sketches, although it is always possible that his sketches were normally destroyed once a finished version was complete.

The painstaking methods of Thomas Eakins

Most of Eakins’ paintings were preceded by extensive preparatory work, although individual sketches may not have proceeded in a particularly methodical fashion.

He abandoned this watercolour study of a woman’s portrait when her head was well advanced, her body still very sketchy, but her left foot is almost as advanced as her face! A faint graphite sketch is visible in between the body and foot, which he was presumably developing in watercolour when he abandoned.

For several of his works, particularly the highly geometric paintings of rowers which he made in the early 1870s, he made formal perspective drawings.

For later paintings, he also made extensive use of photography to supplement and at times replace the sketchbook.

This is evident in his preparatory studies for Swimming (1885), which grew from a series of photographs taken by Eakins and others. But photos never replaced his own sketches: for this work, Eakins made several figure studies, details such as the dog, and different landscape backgrounds, and then brought them together in oil sketches.

Once he was happy, he embarked on his final version. In at least some cases, including his paintings of shad fishing from 1881-82, the figures in his Arcadia (c 1883), and Swimming (1885), he put final photographic images into a ‘magic lantern’ projector, which he then projected at the canvas.

He developed a sophisticated system not only for using the projected image to make a graphite underdrawing, but as the painting progressed, to incise key points and lines of reference in the paint surface. This enabled him to create paintings which were accurately calibrated to his reference images: a great advance on the traditional system of enlargement using grids, and one factor in his detailed realism. This technique was discovered by Mark Tucker and Nica Gutman, and detailed in their chapter in Sewell (2001).

For his Cowboys in the Badlands (1888), Eakins wanted to use a Dakota landscape, for which he had to work in front of the motif, in Dakota.

Eakins lacked Chase’s virtuoso plein air painting skills, but returned from Dakota with some rough oil sketches which were sufficient for the purpose.

He made studies of the figures in both Dakota and Pennsylvania (Eakins had his own horse), and of details such as an appropriate saddle.

These were then assembled into the final painting in his studio.

Photography and painting

Chase and Eakins were painting at a time when working practices and methods were changing very rapidly. Their generation was the first to be able to use photography as a substitute for some sketchwork, although it was still a clumsy and specialist process. While Chase left his wife to wield the camera, Eakins saw it as a valuable tool, and to some degree an end of its own, although it was Eakins’ wife Susan who pursued it as an art in its own right.

Their use of photography may have been as contrasting as their methods of work, but in one respect they were united: their appreciation of the work of Eadweard Muybridge. Chase collected his photographs, Eakins worked with Muybridge and even invented his own system for recording motion in photographs. Those were exciting days.

References

Sewell D (2001) Thomas Eakins, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 09111 3.
Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

When first shown to the public in Philadelphia in 1871, Thomas Eakins’ astonishing painting The Champion Single Sculls (often known as Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) (1871) was described by one critic as “peculiar”. The public seemed unprepared to see such a modern sport portrayed in a work of art. Eakins was not the only painter, though, to break new ground in making novel watersports their theme: before the end of that decade, three other major artists had followed suit.

This article looks at the appearance of rowing and related sports in paintings at that time.

Rowing as a means of transport has long been an accepted and conventional theme in art, from idyllic couples on calm backwaters to Charon’s ferry of the dead across the Styx and Acheron. There were a few places where rowing races were held, but it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that rowing became an established sport.

Among the oldest events is the Boat Race, between crews from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and held on the River Thames, which was inaugurated in 1829, and became annual from 1856. A decade after the first of those races, Henley Royal Regatta (also on the River Thames) was established. In the US, the Harvard-Yale Regatta started in 1852, and has been held annually since 1859. The Head of the Schuylkill Regatta, held in Eakins’ native Philadelphia and the scene of his paintings of rowing, first took place in 1874, just after he had completed these paintings.

One of the major factors in the popularisation of such watersports was the application of technology to the construction of small boats. Until the introduction of plywood in around 1865, rowing boats were of clinker construction, making them both heavy and expensive. Manufactured plywood was much lighter, cheaper, and could be moulded in factories: relatively low-cost, lightweight boats then became readily available. Recreational boating and the sport of rowing were thus signs of the technological, social, and manufacturing changes which took place in the nineteenth century.

The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) (1871) marked Eakins’ debut as a professional artist, following his training in Paris and Spain. It was the first of a series of paintings which, even today, are startling in their very precise and geometric realism. Not only is it centred on this novel sport, but in the background other fruits of modern engineering are on display, in the form of two modern bridges, and a steamboat. In Eakins’ riverscape, the artefacts of man are starting to dominate over the trees, even the river itself.

The following year, his The Biglin Brothers Racing (1872) was less dominated by artefacts, with its broad belt of woodland, but more about the two brothers and their motive power. Instead of a single man in a scull (pulling a pair of oars), the brothers row a pair, each with a single oar, working as a team. In the distance is a coxless four, dependent on a larger team.

The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873) sees them further along the course, making the turn at one of its markers. In the background is another steamboat, and the stern of a paddleboat.

Eakins’ later watercolour returns to the lone sportsman pulling both oars, in his John Biglin in a Single Scull (1873). In the distance is a (coxed) eight, and a couple of sailing vessels.

As this meticulous perspective drawing shows, Eakins constructed these paintings with great attention to detail, just as the boats shown were carefully designed and manufactured. At this stage, he did not use photographs as an aid, but went on to develop a system for capturing images of human and animal motion, and for projecting images for use in painting.

Quite independently of Eakins, during a visit to England in 1874, Alfred Sisley painted Regattas at Molesey, which shows the colour and activity at one of the River Thames’ smaller rowing regattas, at Molesey in Surrey. This was established in 1867, with the huge growth in popularity of rowing as a sport.

Gustave Caillebotte was an avid racing yachtsman who owned his own boatyard, and painted the rapid growth in watersports on the rivers around Paris. Although his Périssoires sur l’Yerres (Skiffs on the Yerres) (1877) is more leisure than competitive sport, and its participants use paddles rather than oars, it has much in common with Eakins’ sculls. Here the bourgeois are out enjoying some time on the river – a very nineteenth-century phenomenon.

Renoir’s Les Canotiers à Chatou (The Boating Party at Chatou) (1879) captures both social rowing in the foreground, and two sports rowers further out in the River Seine. The latter are most probably in single sculls, just as shown by Eakins. Although Renoir is likely to have seen at least one of Caillebotte’s paintings of boating on the Yerres, neither are likely to have been aware of Eakins’ paintings.

After this flurry of paintings in the 1870s, it would appear that the novelty of rowing and related watersports wore off. There’s the occasional glimpse in some of the waterside paintings of the Divisionists (Pointillists) rather later, but nothing to compare with Eakins, Sisley, Caillebotte, and Renoir.

As this illustration from Le Figaro Illustré in the summer of 1900 shows, as attitudes towards women gradually changed in society, even the Lady Sculler became acceptable.

Of course, different standards of dress applied to the men shown in Hibberd Van Buren Kline’s Pride of Youth, 3: Pull, You Beggars, Pull, which was published in The Outing Magazine in 1910.

Anthony Conway (born 1961) is a modern realist who has in many respects followed in the footsteps of Eakins. It’s therefore only appropriate that he should have painted A Declaration of Interdependence (c 2001). These boats are now made from carbon fibre composite materials, but the demands on their crews are just the same.

References

Lloyd C, Charles D and Cate PD (2013) Impressionists on the Water, Skira. ISBN 978 0 8478 4025 0.
Sewell D (2001) Thomas Eakins, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 09111 3.

Still life painting has been popular among impressionists. Some, like Cézanne, made it central to their art, the means by which they tested approaches before taking them out into landscapes, for example. William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) painted many still lifes, for rather different reasons.

Early in his career, when his style was realist and before he went to Europe, they were a safe bet for bringing in some cash.

A painting like his Still Life With Watermelon (1869), painted when he was still nineteen and before he enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York, would have graced any wall in a well-appointed dining or drawing room of the day.

Still Life with Hummingbird (1870) introduced some genteel novelty too, and would have had wide appeal. This may well have been painted after he had had to leave New York and rejoin his family in St Louis, Missouri.

Although I do not have a date for it, I suspect that his Still Life with Vegetable was painted at around this time too.

Still Life with Fruit (1871) was also painted before he left for Europe, and was probably one of his paintings which impressed the group of St Louis businessmen sufficient for them to sponsor those studies overseas. In return for the $2100 which they provided Chase, he gave them a painting each.

Not a conventional still life, but still a fairly traditional variant of the genre, My Palette (1870-80) shows an extremely limited palette, which seems more plausible of his time as a student in Munich.

After completing his studies in Munich, he spent several months in Venice, where he painted one of his best-known still lifes, The Yield of the Waters, also known as A Fishmarket in Venice, (1878). This was probably his most complex and detailed still life, showing a wide variety of the fish and seafood available in the Mediterranean. It also established his own specialist sub-genre of still life: fish, characteristically set against a very dark background.

Soon after returning to the US, he became engaged in teaching, and most of his subsequent still life paintings were probably made when he was teaching, as demonstrations to his students.

Still Life with Flowers (1883) and Flowers (Roses) (1884-1888) (below) are both painted in pastels. The former shows his enthusiasm for Japonisme at the time.

Still Life Brass and Glass (1888) is a virtuoso example of painting reflections on polished metal, glass and wooden surfaces.

Still Life (1903) is more characteristic of his instructional paintings. These were described by Harriet Blackstone, when she was one of his students:
“It is a delight to watch Mr Chase make these fish pictures, for he so frankly loves them himself and takes such evident joy in the making – humming and whistling as he works, stepping back, admiring and smacking his lips over the luscious colours.”
(Quoted by Bourguignon in Smithgall, 2016.)

Paintings like Fish and Still Life (c 1904-1909) became Chase’s performance art. They may have been still lifes, but their greatest art was not in the resulting painting, but the performance of their making.

He usually painted works like Still Life with Fish (c 1910) in just a couple of hours, as if a musician running through their scales and other warming up exercises prior to a concert performance. It’s claimed that he worked only with fresh fish – which looked best – and that he was able to return his models to the fishmonger, still fresh enough to go back out for sale.

The quick portraits and still lifes such as Still Life, Fish (1912) were also awarded as prizes to those of his students who excelled. They could then start the student’s personal art collection, or be used as a very sound investment.

Even as he relinquished his teaching commitments towards the end of his career, Chase continued to paint his favourite fish, as in this Still Life (c 1913). It’s as if these fish had become an integral part of his working practice, and their silvery bodies a reflection of his artistic soul.

Reference

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