ART 4
2-DAY 29 August |
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Born on 04 August 1826: Émile
Lévy, Parisian academic
painter, illustrator, and pastellist, who died on 04 August 1890. He studied
under François-Edward Picot and Abel
de Pujol. — He was a student of Alexandre Abel de Pujol and François-Édouard Picot at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and made his début at the Salon of 1848. In 1854 he won the Prix de Rome with Abraham Washing the Feet of the Angels. In 1855 he sent Noah Cursing Canaan from Rome for exhibition at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and the work was bought by the French government. He specialized in classical and biblical subjects painted with the soft coloring, linear precision, prettiness and graceful poses of the Neo-classical style. He became particularly famous for his antique pastoral love scenes, such as The Bowl: Idyll, which were much appreciated by such contemporary critics as Jules Claretie [1840–1913]. However, he also depicted moments of violence and drama such as The Death of Orpheus (1866) and The Judgement of Midas (1870). His Jewish background led him to choose subjects from the Old Testament in such works as Ruth and Naomi (1859) and to describe Jewish rituals in such others as The Feast of Tabernacles as Celebrated by a Jewish Family in the Middle Ages. He made a few attempts to treat modern subjects in the manner of Carolus-Duran, depicting fashionable and worldly ladies in low-cut dresses using brilliant and contrasting colors, as in the interior scene The Love Letter. — Photo of Lévy. LINKS — La Lettre d'Amour (1872, 121x160cm) — Mort d'Orphée (1866, 189x118cm) — The Dizzy Spell (1866, 110x58cm) — Le Vertige, Idylle (1867, 135x75cm) — Young Mother Feeding Her Baby (1881, 119x70cm) — Morning Glories (1000x694pix, 70kb) _ This is a beautifully designed genre painting that utilizes a window opening as an interior graphic frame. Washed in cool northern light, the artist's keenly observed detail results in various palpable surfaces: stone, terra cotta, fabric, wood and foliage. |
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Died on 29 August 1797: Joseph
Wright of Derby, English Romantic
painter born on 03 September 1734. Wright of Derby was a pioneer in the artistic treatment of industrial subjects. He was also the best European painter of artificial light of his day. Wright was trained as a portrait painter by Thomas Hudson in the 1750s. Wright's home was Derby, one of the great centers of the birth of the Industrial Revolution, and his depictions of scenes lit by moonlight or candlelight combine the realism of the new machinery with the romanticism involved in its application to industry and science. His pictures of technological subjects, partly inspired by the Dutch followers of Caravaggio, date from 1763 to 1773; the most famous are The Air Pump (1768) and The Orrery (1764). Wright was also noted for his portraits of English Midlands industrialists and intellectuals. LINKS The Dead Soldier (1789, 102x127cm) _ detail Shakespeare's The Tempest Act VI Scene 1 Experiment with the Air~Pump (1768) The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers' Stone (1771) Earthstopper at the Bank of Derwent (1773, 97x121cm) Indian Widow (1785) A Philosopher Lecturing with a Mechanical Planetary (1766, 147x203cm) _ Like other artists, Joseph Wright went to Italy, but he was more interested in its natural effects than its art. It is apt that he should be known as Wright of Derby, for it was there that he was to find pioneers of science and industry who provided him with subject-matter and with patrons. His is a provincial milieu, with serious rather than sophisticated interests, more doggedly bourgeois than the capital, and still optimistic about the benefits of progress. As Hogarth has been the initiator of 'la peinture morale', so Wright was the initiator, and the finest exponent, of the century's final contribution to genre: the industrial picture. Miravan Opening the Grave of his Forefathers (1772, 127x102cm) _ Antiquity was the great theme in British painting in the last decades of the 18th century. Its influence can be traced in two areas particularly - in literature, which often comes close to the macabre, and in the excavations of antique sites, which were followed with intense interest at the time. Joseph Wright's Miravan Opening the Grave of his Forefathers illustrates an example from literature. One story is that Miravan found on the grave of his forefathers the inscription: "In this grave lies a greater treasure than Croesus possessed." But the central character finds only bones and another inscription: "Here dwells rest! Criminal, you seek gold among the dead? Go, greedy one, you will never find rest!" The subject has a double meaning. It not only illustrates the legend itself, but was also probably intended as a criticism of the growing desecration of antique sites. Landscape with Rainbow (1795, 81x107cm) _ This late work of the artist, depicting a landscape near Chesterfield, shows reminiscences of his journey to Italy. |
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Born on 29 August 1780: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, in Montauban, France, neoclassical painter, specialized in portraits and orientalism, who died on 14 January 1867. Ingres was one of the major portrait painters of the 19th century. He was the last grand champion of the French classical tradition of history painting. He was traditionally presented as the opposing force to Delacroix in the early 19th-century confrontation of Neo-classicism and Romanticism, but subsequent assessment has shown the degree to which Ingres, like Neo-classicism, is a manifestation of the Romantic spirit permeating the age. The chronology of Ingres’s work is complicated by his obsessive perfectionism, which resulted in multiple versions of a subject and revisions of the original. [Le premier consul, 1804 >] Ingres was a leading figure in the neoclassical movement. Ingres was the son of an unsuccessful sculptor and painter. He entered the studio of the neoclassical painter Jacques Louis David in Paris in 1797 and won the Prix de Rome in 1801 for his painting The Ambassadors of Agamemnon. From 1806 to 1820 he painted in Rome, where he developed his extraordinary gifts for drawing and design. He was greatly influenced by the work of the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, and his style has been described as doubly inspired by Raphael and David. While in Italy, Ingres made many pencil portraits that are distinguished for purity and economy of style. In 1820 he left Rome and went to Florence for four years. On his return to Paris, Ingres won great acclaim with The Vow of Louis XIII (1820), commissioned for the Cathedral of Montauban and exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1824. He became the recognized leader of the neoclassical school that opposed the new romantic movement led by Eugene Delacroix and Theodore Gericault. During this period Ingres painted The Apotheosis of Homer (1827) for a ceiling in the Louvre in Paris. Angered by the poor reception given his Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian (1834, Autun Cathedral), he left Paris to accept the directorship of the French Academy at Rome in 1834. At the end of his seven-year term as director he returned again to Paris and was welcomed as one of the most celebrated painters in France. His position both as a painter and as the official academic spokesman against the romanticists was established, and he was given the rank of commander of the Legion of Honor in 1845. In the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1855 both he and Delacroix, his chief rival in art, were awarded gold medals. Ingres died in Paris. Ingres's strengths—superb draftsmanship, keen sensitivity for personality, and precise neoclassical linear style—were perfectly suited to portraiture. Mme. Moitessier (1851) and La Comtesse d'Haussonville (1845) are outstanding examples, and M. Bertin (1832) is considered one of the finest portraits of the 19th century. Ingres continued to paint vigorously in his old age, producing in his 82nd year his famous Le Bain Turc (1863), the culmination of his superb depictions of female nudes. Ingres's influence on art to the present day has been immense; among important later painters who acknowledged deriving inspiration from his style are Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. |
Ingres received his first lessons in art and music from his father, Joseph
Ingres (1755~1814), miniature artist and sculptor. In 1791, he entered the
Royal Academy of Arts in Toulouse, where his teachers were J. Vigan and
Guillaume-Joseph
Roques . Simultaneously he took violin lessons, and played in the local
orchestra (in French violon d'Ingres has come to mean hobby).
After 1797, Ingres was in Paris, in the studio of David. He studied principles of composition and human anatomy. In 1801, he got a Roman prize for his picture The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles (1801). Staying in Paris till 1806 he painted portraits; Napoléon on the Imperial Throne, Self~Portrait, Mademoiselle Rivière. The sitter in every painting is portrayed on a large scale, filling the canvas. Ingres was criticized for imitation of Gothic masters and Jan van Eyck. From 1806 till 1824, Ingres lived in Italy; he worked and studied the art of Renaissance; Raphael was his idol. His fame as a portraitist grew; his commissions increased. In 1807-24, he painted a lot of portraits: his masterpiece beautiful and mysterious Mme Duvauçay, a mistress of d’Alquier, the French ambassador to the Holy See; Joseph~Antoine Moltedo, Charles-Joseph-Laurent Cordier, Count Nikolay Gouriev, etc. In 1813, Ingres married. See his wife's portrait: In 1813-14, in Rome he painted his popular La Grande Odalisque. In 1824, Ingres returned to Paris and showed Vow of Louis XIII in the Salon. This canvas brought him official recognition and fame: he was elected to the Academy. He opposed Romanticism, which had developed while he was away in Italy. Ingres was looked upon as the hope of classicism. In 1835, he returned to Italy as Director of the French Academy of Arts in Rome (1835-1841). Though the big mythological and religious canvases such as Apotheosis of Homer (1827) and Martyrdom of St. Symphorien (1834) are grandiose, they are cold and rational, and do not equal Ingres's art as a portraitist, such as in the Portrait of Louis-François Bertin. The best of Ingres’ portraits were those of women. Though not all Ingres’ models were beauties, he could find in each one special harmony: Madame Ingres,Baroness James de Rothschild, Madame Gonse, Madame Moitessier Sitting. One cold winter day Ingres accompanied a beautiful young model to a carriage and, as a gallant man, he stayed bareheaded. He caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, he did not recover he was 86. — Ingres became the greatest practitioner of the classical ideal of French art in the first half of the nineteenth century. A precocious artist, Ingres studied at the Toulouse Academy before entering the studio of Jacques-Louis David in 1797. In 1801 Ingres won the Prix de Rome for his Envoys of Agamemnon before Achilles but owing to the uncertain political climate did not arrive in Rome until 1806. He lived in Rome from 1806 until 1824, supporting himself on the sale of historical paintings and the creation of highly insightful pencil portraits. After returning to Paris in 1824 he became the chief exponent of the virtues of classicism and line against the forces promoting romanticism and color as exemplified in the art of Eugene Delacroix. From 1835 to 1841 Ingres served as the director of the French Academy in Rome. — Auguste Flandrin was an assistant of Ingres. — The students of Ingres included Henri Lehmann, Théodore Chassériau, Hippolyte Flandrin, Marie Bracquemond, James Pradier, Charles Muller, Charles Nègre, Eugène-Emmanuel Amaury-Duval, Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo, Edouard-François Bertin, Jean-Marie-Bienaimé Bonnassieux, Paul-Marc-Joseph Chenavard, Sébastien Melchior Cornu, Alexandre Blaise Desgoffe, Hippolyte-Jean Flandrin: Jean-Paul Flandrin, Nicolas-Auguste Galimard, Joseph-Benoît Guichard, Janet-Lange, Anne-François-Louis Janmot, Louis-Marie-François Jacquesson de La Chevreuse, Dwight W. Tryon, Lehmann, Charles Ernest Rodolphe Henri Salem Lehmann, Barthélemy Menn, Victor-Louis Mottez, Eugène-André Oudiné, William Blundell Spence, Alfred Emile-Léopold Stevens [1823-1906], Franz Adolph von Stürler, Jules-Claude Ziegler. LINKS Self~Portrait (1804) Self~Portrait (1858) The Artist and his Wife (1830) — Copy of Ingres's 1804 Self-Portrait (1860, 86x70cm) Jeanne d'Arc au Sacre de Charles VII dans la Cathédrale de Reims (1854; 895x659pix, 71kb — ZOOM to 2684x1977pix, 684kb — or, for more fun than watching the grass grow, but not a better picture, try this 2684x1977pix, 8172kb) — Virgil Reads the Aeneid to Augustus (895x859pix, 71kb — ZOOM to 2247x2368pix, 684kb — or, for more fun than watching a dead cockroach decompose, but not a better picture, try this 2247x2368pix, 8720kb) M. Bertin (1832) Le Bain Turc (1862) — Virgin of the Adoption (1858, 70x57cm) — Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne (1806, 259x162 cm) _ detail — The Death of Leonardo da Vinci (1818; 2046x2610pix, 8135kb) — Vicomtesse Othenin d'Haussonville, née Louise-Albertine de Broglie (1845, 132x92cm) _ detail — Venus Anadyomène (1848) — La Source (163x80cm) — Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808) — Half-figure of a Bather (1807) — Paolo and Francesca — Antiochus and Stratonice (1840) — Jupiter and Thetis (1811) — Baronne James de Rothschild, née Betty von Rothschild Bonaparte as First Consul (1804) The Apotheosis of Homer (1827) _ detail: Poussin and Corneille _ detail: Racine, Molière, Boileau Countess D'Haussonville (1845) _ detail: head Raphael and the Fornarina (1814) Paganini (1819) Molière (1843 print, 26x20cm) |
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Died on 29 (23?) August 1777: Charles~Joseph Natoire,
French Rococo painter, draftsman and teacher, active also in Italy, born
on 03 Mars 1700. He was a student of François Lemoyne and of Nicolas Vleughels. Natoire was a winner of the Rome Prize, academician, director of the French Academy in Rome. He made numerous decorative cycles and tapestry models for the Gobelins and Beauvais factories. An exact contemporary of François Boucher, he was a painter of cabinet pictures, decorations and tapestry cartoons and one of the most adept practitioners of Rococo art in 18th-century France. The greater part of his career was spent in Paris, where he received important commissions from Louis XV as well as from private patrons. In 1751 he accepted the post of Director of the Académie de France in Rome. From then on he devoted himself to his teaching duties at the expense of his painting. — The students of Natoire included Aignan-Thomas Desfriches, François-Hubert Drouais, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Nicolas Guibal, Johann Christian von Mannlich, Jean-Baptiste Pierre, Allan Ramsay, Joseph-Marie Vien. — LINKS — The Rest by a Fountain (1737; 787x1059pix, 116kb — ZOOM to 1968x2648pix, 1411kb — or, for more fun than watching your toenails grow, but not a better picture, try this 1968x2648pix, 10'798kb) — Vénus demande à Vulcain une arme pour Énée (1734; 836x600pix, 54kb — ZOOM to 2517x1809pix, 564kb — or, for more fun than watching paint dry, but not a better picture, try this 2518x1809pix, 8828kb) — Bacchanal (1749; 893x1189pix, 154kb — ZOOM to 1912x2419pix, 1170kb — or, for more fun than watching the flow of a glacier, but not a better picture, try this 1912x2419pix, 9273kb) — La Toilette de Psychée (1737; 787x1059pix, 116kb — ZOOM to 2375x2015pix, 1411kb — or, for more fun than watching a snail sleep, but not a better picture, try this 2375x2015pix, 10'798kb) Le Siège de Bordeaux (Histoire de Clovis) _ An episode from the conquest of Aquitaine, at that time a Visigoth kingdom, by Clovis I, King of the Franks. This representation bore witness to a revival of interest in national history and was inspired by a passage from a heroic poem in twenty-six cantos and 11'052 alexandrin verses, Clovis ou La France chrestienne, written by academician Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin [1595 28 October 1676] and published in 1657. Clovis pourvoid à tout, actif et diligent:/ et par les escadrons brille en armes d'argent./ Car depuis son baptesme, il ne craint plus les charmes. Il peut braver l'enfer, sans les celestes armes./ La gloire et le bon-heur semblent luire en ses yeux./ Il va parmy les rangs, d'un air victorieux,/ sur un tartare blanc, à la bouche écumante./ Braves guerriers, dit-il d' une grace charmante,/ nos coeurs sont enflammez par le divin esprit:/ et nous allons vanger l'honneur de Jesus-Christ./ Il arreste ses pas. Maxent fait la priere./ Aurele à son costé tient la sainte banniere./ Tout soldat brule d'estre ou vainqueur ou martyr. Télémaque dans l'Ile de Calypso (1745, 121x153cm) Truth (24x19cm) drawing) |
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Born
on 29 August 1609: Giovanni~Battista Salvi il Sassoferrato,
Italian artist who died on 08 August 1685. Giovanni Battista Salvi, Italian painter known by the name of his town of birth Sassoferrato and active in nearby Urbino and other cities of central Italy, notably Rome (where he was a student of Domenichino) and Perugia. He did some portraits but specialized in religious works painted in an extremely sweet, almost Peruginesque style. They are very clearly drawn and pure in coloring and totally un-Baroque in feeling indeed they have a deliberately archaic quality that brings the paintings of the Nazarenes (a group of young, idealistic German painters of the early 19th century) to mind. Little is known of his life (in the 18th century it was evidently generally believed that he was a contemporary of Raphael) and few of his pictures are dated or datable; they seem to have been in great demand, however, as his compositions often exist in numerous very similar versions. Most of them were presumably done for private collectors, as few are in churches. LINKS — Le Sommeil de l'Enfant Jésus (77x61cm; 862x682pix, 47kb) _ L'enfant endormi pourrait être une allusion à la Passion future du Christ, tandis que la Vierge semble méditer sur sa destinée. Peut-être inspiré par une gravure de Guido Reni, ce sujet a été l'un des plus fréquemment traités par l'artiste qui en a donné de nombreuses versions, parfois dans un format ovale. The Virgin in Prayer (1645, 73x58cm) _ Like Carlo Dolci, Giovanni Battista Salvi, called Sassoferrato from his birthplace in the Marches, had close ties with the Benedictines. Their motto, laborare est orare, seems as fitting to him as it does to his devout Florentine contemporary. Like Dolci, he relied on the compositional inventions of others: fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists such as Perugino, Dürer, Tintoretto, Lo Spagna; contemporaries, above all Reni; and the fashionable Madonnas painted in Rome by the Frenchman Mignard. His work has often been mistaken for that of a follower of Raphael, so closely did he model himself on the 'pure' style of an earlier age. After he had copied some pictures for the Benedictine monastery in Perugia at the age of 21, he was introduced to a reformed Franciscan friary in Rome, the city in which he lived for some forty years and where he died. A pious princess commissioned his one famous altarpiece, for the Dominican church of Santa Sabina in Rome, to replace a precious Raphael which the Dominicans unwisely sold to a collector. With the exception of some portraits of devout ecclesiastics, and a self portrait commissioned by a cardinal in 1683 for Duke Cosimo III de' Medici's gallery of artists' likenesses, Sassoferrato made his living from devotional pictures such as this one. Most were made in 'multiple originals', on commission and for sale to pilgrims. This popular composition, based on an engraving purported to be after Reni, is known in over fifteen variants. Sassoferrato suffers in our estimation partly for being the kind of self-abnegating artist we least admire, and partly because his pictures directly influenced the pious art of the nineteenth century in all its sentimental excess. Yet his own work is too robust to be sentimental, and too well painted. The enamel-like finish, the jewel brightness of white, red, costly ultramarine blue on black, preclude neither vigorous modeling of form nor acute observation as of the pale reflections of the Virgin's veil in the shadows on her face and cheek. Sassoferrato is catering to the Counter-Reformation reaffirmation of the cult of the Virgin and of the efficacy of her images, in the same spirit in which histories and atlases of these miracle-working icons were being compiled and published throughout Europe. The Virgin in Prayer, her veil leaning out of the painting into our space, is praying over us, for us, as an example to us, in submission to the will of the Father, to the Son. She has been abstracted from narratives of the Annunciation, the Adoration, the Nativity, so that we may pray through her, lose our fretful egoism in her infinite mercy and humility, as the artist has submerged his handwriting in the icon. Her eyes are lowered, but if we look up at her from a hassock or a prie-dieu, a sickbed or a deathbed, her tender glance will fall on us. She is alone, without the Child, our mother, our nurse, intercessor on our behalf, and Sassoferrato's message is that to submit to her is to reclaim our strength, our freedom and our dignity. Monsignor Ottaviano Prati (1650, 119x92cm) _ This painting is fundamental for the reconstruction of Sassoferrato's production as it is one of his few known portraits and the only one of these to be signed by the painter. Considered one of the highest quality examples of Sassoferrato's oeuvre, the canvas is datable to around 1650. The sitter is Monsignor Ottaviano Prati, a Parmese nobleman who served the papacy as Governor of Benevento and following that, served for a few months as Bishop of Bertinoro. He is shown here at about the age of fifty. It is possible that the introduction between the patron and the artist was made by the Aldobrandini family, for whom Sassoferrato also worked. With its subject shown standing and in three quarter view, this composition is arranged according to the Renaissance canon of portraiture, a style reintroduced in the seventeenth century by Domenichino, Sassoferrato's teacher. The lively rendering of the sitter's intense psychology is realized through the subtle vibrations of light and color. The brilliant chromatic range, based prevalently on primary colors, underlines the monumentality of the portrait image. An inscription on the sheet of paper that the sitter holds reads "al..Monsignor... Ottaviano Prati per Giovan Battista Salvi". The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (1650) Madonna and Child (1650) — The Holy Family (1645, oval 72x93cm; 512x678pix, 86kb) — Head of a Woman (drawing 26x21cm) |