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Dancer: John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, and James Carroll Beckwith
Spanish dancers make excellent subjects for paintings, especially if they’re enjoying success at the time. Carmen Dauset Moreno (1868-1910), popularly known as Carmencita or La Carmencita, was perfect...
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Into the Light: Carroll Beckwith, the under-age model, and the jealous husband
There were many very talented and successful painters in the US during William Merritt Chase’s career. Among his friends and colleagues was James Carroll Beckwith (1852–1917): in his day as...
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Is crapware now the price of blocking tracking?
If you use any form of ad blocker, or even a tracker blocker such as Better 1.0, you will undoubtedly have discovered that many commercial sites refuse all connections unless you turn your blocker off....
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Into the Light: Robert Henri and the Ashcan School
Robert Henri (1865–1929) was a colleague, friend, and rival of William Merritt Chase, and one of the most influential painters in America in the early twentieth century. He was born Robert Henry Cozad,...
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Into the Light: Frank Duveneck, silent companion
One name crops up time after time in the biographies of American painters who were active in the late 1800s, someone who seems always to have been there, in company with, but never to stand on his own:...
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Alchemy: 8 – Bladders and Megilp
During the 1700s, a new trade spread around Europe: the artists’ colourman. Although larger workshops had no trouble employing assistants to make fresh oil paint, stretch and prime canvases, and do all...
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George Morland: genius, debt, and mistaken identity
Having recently posted this article about Edward Charles Volkert (1871-1935), America’s cattle painter, I mentioned that I had been intending to write about one of the best British painters who...
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Constant Troyon: landscapes with animals
Having written about Edward Charles Volkert and George Morland and their paintings of farm animals, I cannot but cover the great Constant Troyon (1810–1865) in this article. He was born in Sèvres, into...
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Brief Candles: Paulus Potter
… Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. (William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5, scene 5.) Several of...
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Alchemy: 9 – Turner and tubes
With artists’ colourmen supplying growing ranges of ready-made oil paints in bladders, it was relatively straightforward for landscape painters like John Constable (1776-1837) to go out in front of the...
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William Merritt Chase paints history, for a brief moment
You may know William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) as one of the American Impressionists, and as one of the most influential teachers of his time, but did you know that he made two history paintings? After...
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Into the Light: Frederick Frieseke’s flickering females
Many of the great American painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spent quite long periods in Europe, both training and developing their art. A few spent longer, in fact most of...
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Alchemy: 10 – the direct and the dangerous; Impressionists and Pre-Raphaelites
By the middle of the 1800s, oil painting was finally changing. Although there were still those who painted in layers, painstakingly in the studio, according to traditional techniques, many now took...
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Into the Light: Rosa Bonheur, animalière extraordinaire
No accounts of the painting of animals, nor of French painting in the nineteenth century, can omit one of the most famous animalières of all, and one of the leading women painters, Rosa Bonheur...
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The Story in Paintings: The spirits of nations
Recent debate about prohibition of ‘burkinis’ and other dress in France has elicited discussion of Marianne, the legendary figure shown in Delacroix’s famous painting Liberty Leading the People (1830)....
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In William Merritt Chase’s Studio: insights and informal portraits
The studio is personal to the artist. Freed from the earlier need for a full supporting workshop with craftspeople, canvas manufacture, and paint preparation, from the eighteenth century the studio...
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Alchemy: 11 – intent overrides craft
So far, this series has concentrated entirely on oil painting in Europe, and until about 1800, the vast majority of fine art works painted using oil paints were confined to Europe. During the...
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James Ward: between Constable and Turner, 1
John Constable (1776-1837) and JMW Turner (1775-1851) are now generally recognised as being the major figures in British painting in the first half of the 1800s. At the time, critics would have added...
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James Ward: between Constable and Turner, 2
By 1810, James Ward (1769-1859) had established himself as a painter of repute, an Associate of the Royal Academy, and had patrons on whom he could rely. He had had to sacrifice his career as an...
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Porting from WordPress to Storyspace, 1: imports and prototypes
No matter how much work you put into them, blogs are inevitably ephemeral, and it is a brave blogger who tries to build complex structure into them. Having just completed writing a series of articles...
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