ART 4
2-DAY 09 June
v.5.51 |
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Died on 09 June 1932: Émile
Friant, French realist
painter born in 1863. — Émile Friant commence sa formation à l'École des Beaux-Arts de Nancy et expose dès l'âge de quinze ans au Salon local. Il poursuit ses études à Paris dans l'atelier du peintre Alexandre Cabanel et devient à vingt ans second prix de Rome. Peintre naturaliste, Émile Friant réalise essentiellement des portraits et des scènes de la vie quotidienne. Ses toiles puisent leur caractère instantané dans le procédé photographique. Après le succès de l'Exposition universelle de 1889, qui le couronne d'une médaille d'or pour La Toussaint, Émile Friant reçoit de nombreuses commandes de portraits de personnalités nancéiennes et américaines. Son apport aux art décoratifs est plus restreint que ceux des peintres Camille Martin ou encore Victor Prouvé. Il donne à Louis Majorelle, en collaboration avec Camille Martin, un décor de mobilier sur le thème de Don Quichotte et fait réaliser chez René Wiener une reliure illustrant “La guillotine et les exécuteurs des arrêtés criminels pendant la Révolution”. Il est membre du Comité directeur de l'École de Nancy dès 1901. Il enseigne à l'École Nationale des Beaux-Arts en 1906. — LINKS — Autoportrait aka Un étudiant (1885) — Autoportrait — Les canotiers de la Meurthe (1887; 1287x1977pix, 217kb) — Les Amoureux aka Soir d'automne (111x145cm) — La Discussion politique (1889, 26x34cm;_ Zoomable) — La Lutte (1889, 180x114cm;_ Zoomable) — La Toussaint (1888, 254x325cm;_ Zoomable) almost monochrome — Douleur (1898) — Mme Petitjean (1883) — L'Expiation (1908, 166x166cm) almost monochrome. A guillotinage. — Chagrin d'Enfant — Madame Coquelin Mère — Tendresse Maternelle — Le Repas Frugal — Studio Visit (1906, 24x17cm) |
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Born on 09 June 1597: Pieter
Janszoon Saenredam (or Zaenredam),
Dutch Baroque
painter who died on 16 August 1665 (or was buried on 31 May 1665?).
{ ¿Se enredan con Saenredam?} — Pieter Saenredam was born in Assendelft in 1597, the son of the engraver Jan Pieterszoon Saenredam [1565-1607]. When Jan died in 1607 he left his wife and child a healthy legacy, having invested in the lucrative Dutch East India Company. Mother and son moved to Haarlem, where Pieter was apprenticed to Frans de Grebber for no less than eleven years. He was to live in Haarlem the rest of his life, although he regularly traveled around the country to paint in other Dutch cities. Saenredam focused almost from the start on architectural subjects. His depictions of church interiors formed the basis for an entirely new genre in Dutch art. Saenredam was extremely careful in his method: his paintings resulted from weeks of preparation. The sketches he made on site, as well as the technical drawings, were essential guides when he started the painting. Saenredam's use of perspective in his church interiors showed his perfect control. His work exudes a sense of peace and harmony, not least because of the use of color. He was a painter of architectural subjects, particularly church interiors, active in Haarlem. Saenredam, the son of an engraver, was a hunchback and a recluse, but he was acquainted with the great architect Jacob van Campen, who may have played a part in determining his choice of subject. He was the first painter to concentrate on accurate depictions of real buildings rather than the fanciful inventions of the Mannerist tradition. His pictures were based on painstaking drawings and are scrupulously accurate and highly finished, but they never seem pedantic or niggling and are remarkable for their delicacy of color and airy grace. The Cathedral of Saint Bavo (where he is buried) and the Grote Kerk in Haarlem were favorite subjects, but he also traveled to other Dutch towns to make drawings, and Utrecht is represented in several of his paintings. He also made a few views of Rome based on drawings in a sketchbook by Marten van Heemskerck that he owned. His work had great influence on Dutch painting. Saenredam's working method generally consisted of three stages. First he made a preliminary freehand drawing at the site. The freehand study was then used for a more exact construction drawing made in the studio with the aid of measured ground plans and elevations; sometimes he subtly manipulated the dimensions of a building and its elements to heighten pictorial effects. Finished drawings were kept on file as part of the stock to which he turned when he was ready for the final stage: an oil painting on panel. The main outlines of his architectural paintings are frequently transferred by tracing from his construction drawings. A description of his working procedure makes it appear mechanical, one may think it suitable for the production of architectural renderings, not works of art. However, a look at Saenredam's paintings proves this is not the case. None of his paintings - about fifty are known - can be categorized as tinted perspective studies. The unmistakable clarity of his vision and the intensity of his scrupulous observation, as well as a sensitive tonality, mark every one. — Pieter's father, Jan Pieterszoon Saenredam [1565-1607] is best known as a gifted engraver and draftsman in the circle of Hendrick Goltzius. Besides his artistic activities, he invested wisely in the Dutch East India Company and made sufficient profits to ensure that his only son, Pieter, need not ever depend on painting for his living. Pieter was nevertheless enormously successful as a painter; he is generally appreciated as the artist whose depictions of actual church interiors established a new genre in Dutch painting. While important precedents occur in the work of other artists (mainly Flemings, such as Hendrik van Steenwyck), no painter or draftsman before Saenredam had the interest, tenacity, or the art market to support a career largely devoted to this specialty. His paintings of churches and the old town halls in Haarlem, Utrecht and Amsterdam must have been appreciated by contemporary viewers principally as faithful representations of familiar and meaningful monuments. Yet they also reveal his exceptional sensitivity to aesthetic values; his paintings embody the most discriminating considerations of composition, coloring and craftsmanship. His oeuvre is comparatively small, the paintings numbering no more than 60, and each is obviously the product of careful calculation and many weeks of work. Their most striking features, unusual in the genre, are their light, closely valued tonalities and their restrained, restful and delicately balanced compositions. These pictures, always painted on smooth panels, are remarkable for their sense of harmony and, in some instances, serenity. Here, perhaps, lies a trace of filial fidelity to the Mannerist tradition of refinement and elegance, of lines never lacking in precision and grace. But Mannerist figures and the more comparable components of strap- and scrollwork embellishment lack the tension and clarity of Saenredam’s designs, which also have a completeness reminiscent of the fugues of Gerrit Sweelinck [1566–1628]. LINKS Dutch Interior with Woman Sweeping (1636, 41x37cm ; 1000x939pix, 78kb _ ZOOM to 2333x2191pix, 430kb) Interior of the Church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem (1636, 95x57cm; _ ZOOM to 1600x933pix, 176kb) _ The eye is immediately drawn to the organ in this painting, through the high, white arch. The contrast between the gold, brown, black and blue of the organ and the cool blankness of the interior is striking. The church is still in Haarlem, the town in which he lived. Saenredam was the first in Holland to specialize in the painting of church interiors. He made several versions of the Grote or Saint Bavo church. In this church interior, Saenredam has given particular attention to the organs. The large organ is beautifully depicted with its open shutters and guilt inscriptions. He chose his position in the church so that he could also record the second organ. This organ is much simpler and considerably smaller. The large organ, built in the fifteenth century, is richly decorated with fine woodcarvings and guilt ornaments. Depicted on the open shutter is the Resurrection of Christ. To represent the gold in the painting, Saenredam mixed gold powder with his paint. Anything that was gold in reality had to shine like gold in the painting. At the time Saenredam painted the St Bavo church, leading music-lovers were campaigning for more organ music to be played in church services. Calvinist ministers objected to organ music. Little music was played in church and psalms were sung unaccompanied. The ministers would rather have had no organs at all in church because they felt the beautifully decorated organs were evidence of ostentation and excess. Haarlem's music-lovers handed a petition to the town council, in which they asked to be allowed to use the organ, 'the ornament of the church', everyday. It is possible that Saenredam gave the organs a prominent position in his painting in support of this campaign. The height of the church building has been emphasized through the presence of a few people. In the seventeenth century, churches were not only places of prayer and worship, they were also meeting places where people could walk in at any time. One particularly fascinating detail is easy to miss - the man and the woman standing up in the gallery. The man is half-hidden by a column. It is an intimate scene in this enormous, bright space. Saenredam made several drawings and paintings of the Grote or St Bavo church. These differ from each other in that he took a different angle each time. The painting with the organs is a view through the oldest part of the church: the choir, which dates from around 1400. The organ hangs above the northern ambulatory. This beautiful organ case no longer exists today. It was demolished in 1773. In 1738, an enormous organ was placed on the western wall, made by the organ-maker Christian Müller. This organ became famous. It led to Haarlem becoming known as the 'city of organs'. Interior of the Church of Saint Odulphus at Assendelft, seen from the Choir to the West (1649, 50x76cm) _ In the distance, in a large, light church a congregation is listening to a sermon. The figures are tiny and the space immense. The extreme brightness of the airy space and the utter tranquility emanating from this picture, make it one of Saenredam's most beautiful works. The church floor is paved with dark tiles. The walls are white and unadorned. This is as it should be in a Protestant church. On the wall to the right hand are two funerary inscriptions. In some places on the high white walls Saenredam has given small accents of co lour, here and there a little pink or yellow. The predominant co lour is the soft brown of the church benches, the pulpit and the wooden vaulting of the ceiling. Prominent figures are seated on raised benches, while the common folk sit in the middle on low benches or on the floor. On the church bench at the left Saenredam has written: 'the church in Assendelft, a village in Holland, by Pieter Saenredam' and 'this was painted in the year 1649, on the 2nd of October'. Meaning that the picture was completed on 02 October 1649, not that Saenredam painted it in one day. Names are chiseled into one of the stones in the foreground. It is the grave of Saenredam's father, Jan Saenredam, and various members of the family. The family lived in the village of Assendelft. Jan Saenredam is buried at the foot of the large tomb. This was the last resting place of the lords of Assendelft, who had been his patrons. Pieter Saenredam had his own method of working. First he made a careful study of the building, drawing sketches and making notes on the spot. For example, he would measure certain items, such as the circumference of a pillar or the size of a tomb. Often he let his preliminary studies lie dormant for years. He made the sketch for St Odulphus' on 31 July 1634 and did not paint the picture until 1649. Indeed, he had already made sketches of the Assendelft church in August 1633. Only after many years did Saenredam decide to paint the church of St Odulphus. First he produced a 'construction drawing' based on his notes and sketch. He began by drawing guidelines. For a church floor of ten meters wide he would divide his paper into ten vertical segments. Then he introduced a horizontal line, always at eye level from the chosen viewpoint. All the vertical lines meet at one point on this horizontal line, the “vanishing point”. In this way Saenredam created a grid within which to draw the interior of a building with accurate measurements, balance, and perspective. The next stage was to transfer the construction drawing onto the panel. Saenredam would blacken the back of the drawing. Then, pasting or pinning the drawing onto the panel, he would draw over the lines with a sharp object. In this way, he could transfer the drawing onto the panel. Saenredam could then start painting. Pieter Saenredam was the first and one of the few who worked in this exacting way. And despite his fastidious accuracy, he was not always able to resist a little meddling. If it suited him or he considered it more attractive, he was not above making a pillar thicker, a vault higher or a space larger. The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam (1657, 65x83cm) _ The houses and the tower were all part of Amsterdam's town hall on Dam Square until 1652. It looks rather decrepit, despite the attractive pink and yellow co lour In 1641 Saenredam made a sketch of the old town hall. Not until 1657 did he develop the drawing into this painting, which was then bought by the burgomasters of Amsterdam. Pieter Saenredam was a painter of architecture. He specialized in church interiors, but also portrayed other buildings with utmost care and precision. Pieter Saenredam was meticulous in his work. He spent six days sketching the old town hall. On the drawing he noted 'Pieter Saenredam drew this on 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 July 1641'. But he was not to paint the old town hall for another sixteen years - and by then it no longer existed. Across the window shutters he wrote 'Pieter Saenredam, first made a drawing from observation, with all its colors, in the Year 1641. And painted this in the year 1657'. And on the balcony at the left he wrote 'This is the Old Town Hall of the city of Amsterdam, which burnt down in the year 1651 on 07 July, in no more than 3 hours'. Meticulous perhaps, but not infallible: the old town hall burnt down in 1652. Amsterdam's town hall stood on Dam Square, the vibrant heart of the city and center of economic activity. But the burgomasters of Amsterdam Burgomasters of Amsterdam Until 1795, Amsterdam was governed by a regency of four burgomasters. They had far-reaching executive powers, setting policy for Amsterdam and often dictating that of the Republic itself. This was due to Amsterdam's pre-eminent position as the wealthiest city in the country. Amsterdam's regency was re-appointed annually. Each year, the burgomasters, together with the magistrates and the town council, or senate, elected three new regent burgomasters from among their number. Burgomasters and other high-ranking officials were drawn from Amsterdam's wealthy regent class. were ashamed of the old town hall. It hardly reflected the prosperity of their city, the center of world trade. In 1648 a start was made on a new building. This was to be a palatial town hall and is now in fact the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. Part of the old building was pulled down, for the new town hall was planned right behind it. In 1652 a fire broke out in the old building. Little survived of the dilapidated old town hall. Amsterdam's old town hall had not always appeared so shabby. In the sixteenth century it was a proud, impressive building. The house on the right had an imposing façade. Arches decorated the top of the tower, where the town bells hung. In fact, the complex was a random mixture of buildings. When the houses and tower were built is not known, but it must have been after 1452, since a major fire destroyed much of the city in that year. The row of houses at the left had originally been a hospital - St Elizabeth's. Here were the offices of officials such as the 'Commissioners for minor Affairs' Commissioners of Minor Cases (lower-court judges) and 'Treasurer Extraordinary' (collector of regional property taxes). The city council and various civil servants were not the only ones to use the town hall. It was also where the sheriff, the magistrates and their assistants worked. Their functions were similar to today's courts and police. In the house at the left behind the fencing between the pillars hearings were held. The tribunal Medieval court 'Schaar' is Old Dutch for a bench. In the Middle Ages the 'Vierschaar' was a group of four benches on which the sheriff, the magistrates, the prosecutor and the accused sat. was where legal cases were tried. When a trial was taking place people would throng the galleries outside, where they had a good view of the proceedings. On the left of the façade is the jaw of a whale; its significance is unknown. Several Dutch town halls had one hanging on the wall In 1609 the bank of Amsterdam moved to this house. It was called the Exchange Bank. Currency markets in 16th-century Europe were in chaos. Many cities minted their own coins, all of different quality. Taking its cue from the Venetian Banco di Rialto of 1587, in 1609 Amsterdam set up an official exchange bank (Wisselbank). The new bank established standard rates for the various currencies, it also settled bills and transferred sums, taking deposits of money with the city itself taking ultimate responsibility. Each new account holder had to pay ten guilders into the civic poor relief fund. The exchange bank enjoyed a solid reputation at home and abroad. It remained the world's premiere financial institution until well into the 18th century. Besides merchants, nobles, towns and governments also held accounts at the bank. There was an enormous turnover of money in Amsterdam. As a security measure the entrance was plastered into the façade. The space in front was leased out to craftsmen. On the left was a bookshop, beside it what appears to be a clerk. Various civic officials had their offices on the first floor. Saenredam completed the painting of the town hall five years after the fire that destroyed it. He was paid 400 guilders for it. The burgomasters hung it in their room in the new town hall, beside a painting by Jacob van der Ulft, showing the new building. Both pictures were framed with dark ebony. There they hung for several centuries, the painting by Saenredam receiving the most praise. — Le choeur de l'église Saint-Bavon à Haarlem, avec la tombe fictive d'un évêque (1630, 41x37m; 750x694pix, 100kb) _ Vue du nord vers le déambulatoire sud ; au fond, la chapelle Breewer. La tombe épiscopale, inventée, est sans doute là pour affirmer la permanence du catholicisme et de l'évêché de Haarlem malgré la Réforme calviniste (voir l'inscription latine célébrant la gloire post mortem d'un évêque assurée par la vérité de la doctrine et la sanctification plus encore que par les insignes de la fonction...). Tableau peut-être peint pour un client catholique et certes l'un des plus anciens de l'artiste (le premier connu est de 1628), lequel a souvent choisi pour motif l'église Saint-Bavon (30 dessins, une dizaine de peintures). — Haarlem, the Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, Seen From the South West (1658, 30x31cm; 1000x957pix; 312kb) _ This is the fourth and latest of four known Saenredam paintings of the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem. The Nieuwe Kerk was the only modern building that Saenredam painted, and is thus the only church he painted built in Classical rather than Gothic or Romanesque style. The church was built to the designs of Saenredam's friend Jacob van Campen between 1646 and 1649 on the site of the demolished medieval chapel of Saint Anne, retaining the tower, which had been erected by Lieven de Key in 1613. Van Campen devised a square ground plan of an austere and simple enclosed Greek cross. The groin-vaulted crossing is carried on four square Ionic piers, the barrel-vaulted arms by beams supported by the piers, by Ionic columns and Ionic pilasters, which continue around the perimeter supporting the square, flat, coffered ceilings of the four corners. Saenredam made many drawings of the church; indeed, from 1650 onwards he drew this church exclusively, starting with a copy of Van Campen's ground plan. Saenredam's working method was to make sketches, sometimes many sketches of a subject which would result in so-called construction drawings, made in careful preparation for paintings. His drawings of the Nieuwe Kerk, culminating in a construction drawing dated 31 July 1651 yielded his first painting of the church, a prospect of the interior seen from west to east taken from just north of the center line, dated 23 May 1652. A second construction drawing dated 26 August 1651 yielded another prospect, dated 16 August 1653, showing the interior from the southwest corner of the transept looking north. Saenredam's third painting of the Nieuwe Kerk shows its interior looking west from the east side of the south aisle, and gives prominence to the pulpit designed by Van Campen. It is dated 1655 (without indication of month or day). The present work, dated 1658, is the last of the sequence (and one of only two paintings by Saenredam dating from the second half of the 1650s). In view of Saenredam's working method, one might reasonably expect him to have made preparatory drawings on which construction drawings for each painting would have been based. Saenredam's construction drawings did not always survive well the process of transfer to the panel, and it is understandable that neither one appears to have survived. Both paintings show the church seen from the same vantage point, (from a height of about 1.2 m - perhaps seated on a stool - against the base of the central pilaster on the eastern wall of the southeast corner), and both paintings share a common vanishing point, so that when placed side by side both paintings form a continuous panorama, with only small gap consisting of much of the width of the central pier between them, and are thus part of a common continuous scheme of perspective. The heights of the figures in both paintings is the same, and the vanishing point is approximately at their head-height. The paintings are of different dates, and were certainly not conceived as pendants, but as Liedtke has argued, they were almost certainly based on the same sketch, probably done when the other sketches were made, in June 1650, and possibly traced to provide construction drawings. While it is tempting to conclude that Saenredam used both halves of the same construction drawing for each picture, their different dimensions make this unlikely: for example, the base of the same pillar in the left and right foregrounds of each is of a different height. Given the rigid symmetry of the architecture of the church, Saenredam may have used for the architectural structure of both paintings a sketch of the interior of the Nieuwe Kerk seen from the same spot but looking in exactly the opposite direction, i.e, rotated 180º, and then reversed by tracing to provide construction drawings, or an intermediate drawing upon which the construction drawings were based. That sketch may be the one dated 23 June 1650, which shows indenting perhaps caused by tracing. An examination of the present work using infra-red reflectography revealed extensive geometric underdrawing, which is consistent with Saenredam's usual practice. Each of the stained glass windows in the Nieuwe Kerk bore the coat-of-arms of one of the twenty highest office-holders in Haarlem. Apart from documentary evidence for them, they are recorded in a drawing by Saenredam in which the status of each and the position in the church in 1647, the year the windows were installed. They may be seen in each of Saenredam's drawings of the church, and in his 1652 painting. In the present painting, however, all but two are absent, together with all other armorial devices, including the shields which hung in the vaults, leaving only the arms of the Burgomasters Cornelis Backer [–1655] and Johan van der Camer [1585-1657] in the right hand two windows. This may have resulted from the elimination of the other armorials following the marriage of the grandchildren of the two Burgomasters, Adriaen Backer and Anna Catharina van der Camer in 1698, and of the present picture being then in the possession of the Backer family. Technical analysis has shown that there were originally armorials in the other windows, that they were painted out, and that the lead-white overpaint has a mixture of natural ultramarine, which makes it most unlikely that the overpainting took place much after 1700, since ultramarine was supplanted rapidly after 1704 by Prussian Blue (Saenredam also used ultramarine for the original sky. Though favored by Vermeer, this pigment was not widely used in the Netherlands in the mid-17th Century, because of its cost). Furthermore, the inventory of Adriaen Backer's estate, taken at his death in 1739, lists two church interiors by Saenredam: one unidentified; the other “a view in the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem”. While it cannot be ruled out that the painting listed is one of the three other paintings of the church that survive, the theory is highly plausible. In the light of the close connections between Saenredam and the painter Cornelis Vroom, whose sister was married to the Burgomaster Cornelis Backer, this picture was probably in the Backer collection from the outset. Saenredam witnessed Vroom's deathbed testament appointing Adriaen Backer guardian to his son Jacob Vroom. Adriaen was son of Cornelis, and father of the Adriaen who married Anna Catherina van der Camer, and thus the possible first owner of this picture. |
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Died on 09 June 1963: Gaston Duchamp
“Jacques Villon”, French Cubist
painter, printmaker and illustrator, born on 31 July 1875; half-brother
of Marcel
Duchamp [28 Jul 1887 – 02 Oct
1968], Raymond
Duchamp-Villon [05 Nov 1876 – 07 Oct 1918], and Suzanne Duchamp
Crotti [1889-1963]. {Villon vit long? et large?} — The oldest of three brothers who became major 20th-century artists, including Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp, he learnt engraving at the age of 16 from his maternal grandfather, Emile-Frédéric Nicolle [1830–1894], a ship-broker who was also a much appreciated amateur artist. In January 1894, having completed his studies at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, he was sent to study at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris, but within a year he was devoting most of his time to art, already contributing lithographs to Parisian illustrated newspapers such as Assiette au beurre. At this time he chose his pseudonym: Jack (subsequently Jacques) in homage to Alphonse Daudet’s novel Jack (1876) and Villon in appreciation of the 15th-century French poet François Villon; soon afterwards this new surname was combined with the family name by Raymond. Marcel Duchamp and their sister Suzanne Duchamp, also a painter, retained the original name. Villon’s work as a humorous illustrator dominated the first ten years of his career, but from 1899 he also began to make serious prints, exhibiting some for the first time in 1901 at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. By 1903 he had sufficient reputation in Paris to be an organizer of the first Salon d’Automne. He consciously began to expand his media in 1904, studying painting at the Académie Julian and working in a Neo-Impressionist manner. His printmaking style, formerly influencd by Toulouse-Lautrec, moved towards the fashionable elegance of Paul César Helleu. — André Fougeron was a student of “Jacques Villon”. LINKS Le Petit Manège Girl in a hat and veil (1925, color aquatint, 40x28cm) (after Henri Matisse, but, in my opinion, not much like Femme au Chapeau, 1905) L'Envolée (color lithograph 27x46cm) Coursier (lithograph printed in colors, 29x45cm) Les Yeux Futiles (1956, etching and color aquatint, 15x14cm) Les Lampes (1951, 25x28cm) Duo Galant (1905, 23x16cm) Abstraction (1927, 49x34cm) Two Women on a Terrace by the Sea (1922, color aquatint, etching, and roulette, 48x61cm) Autre temps: 1830 (1904, color aquatint and drypoint, 44x35cm) Jacques (1924, 145x113cm) — Magda Pach (55x46cm; 845x824pix, 62kb) — ZOOM to 2000x1648pix, 326kb) — Walter Pach (55x46cm; 865x1095pix, 113kb — ZOOM to 1999x1644pix, 416kb) — Le Grand Dessinateur (1934 sketch, 25x23cm; 875x773pix, 100kb) _ This preliminary study for a painting is a self-portrait of the artist as he sits at his tilted drafting table, a pencil held loosely in his hands. Behind him are three sculptures by his deceased brother, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, including Decorative Basin on the left, and a head of the poet Charles Baudelaire on the table at the right. Villon had been particularly close to his brother, who together with a third brother, the artist Marcel Duchamp, made up one of the most famous families in the history of modern art. The importance given in this drawing to the sculptures of Duchamp-Villon, who died from typhoid fever in 1918, show how his artistic legacy continued to inspire and support his older brother. L'entonnoir en Champagne (371x482ydb. 91kb) _ Craters blown open by mines or by large-calibre shells were a characteristic feature of any battlefield. In them, soldiers were crushed to death by shells or sought shelter once the artillery had changed targets. On the edge of this one, drawn by Villon, there are little dugouts in which the soldiers waited and rested. Such views abound in the photographs of the period, which deliberately linger over the human and material debris strewn around the crater. For Villon, it is sufficient to depict the depth of the cavity and its steeply sloping walls by means of oblique lines, in the manner of a draftsman. His aim is rather documentary than artistic, he establishes facts with a careful survey of the artificial contours caused by the explosion and leaves the spectator to imagine the power needed to open up the earth in such a way. Daguerrotype #2 (etching 17x22cm) Daguerrotype #1 (1927 etching, 16x22cm) La Faute (1904, 39x30cm) Mariée (1930) Devant un Guignol (1909, 40x30cm) After Jacques Villon (1957, 52x44cm) Les Cartes (1903, 35x45cm; 362x468pix, 115kb gif) L'Ombrelle Rouge (1901, 49x39cm; 375x300pix, 36kb) — Le Peintre (1931 etching 18x14cm) |
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Born on 09 June 1849: Michael-Peter
Ancher, Danish painter who died on 19 September 1927.
{Was Michael-Peter Ancher my kelp-eater rancher's equal?} — He studied at the Kongelige Akademi for de Skønne Kunster, Copenhagen (1871–1875), where his teachers Wilhelm Marstrand and Frederik Vermehren encouraged his interest in genre painting. Ancher first visited Skagen in 1874 and settled there in 1880, having found that subject-matter drawn from local scenery was conducive to his artistic temperament. In Will he Manage to Weather the Point? (1880) several fishermen stand on the shore, evidently watching a boat come in. The firmly handled composition focuses on the group of men (the boat itself is invisible); each figure is an individual portrait that captures a response to the moment. Ancher’s skill at grouping large numbers of figures with heroic monumentality compensates for his lackluster color sense. A change in his use of color is noticeable in the works produced after an influential visit to Vienna in 1882; he was deeply impressed by the Dutch Old Masters at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, especially the Vermeers. Their effect on his painting can be seen in the Sick Girl (1883), a subject he repeated three times. Michael Ancher was 25 years old in July 1874 when he went to Skagen, which is the northernmost part of Denmark. He was from the southmost part of the country. He could not get into the National Art Academy, because he was not born in the right place or time. At the time he came to Skagen, the village was already known for the properties of its light. But it was Michael Ancher that invited most of the other artist to come on holiday in the village. In Skagen he invited artist like Oscar Bjørck, Viggo Johansen, P.S. Krøyer, Christian Krohg. It was no doubt because his work for the most time was about the fishermen and their family that he got to be an artist. He worked much with the poor people in Skagen, almost every painting he made, was a story from these people's daily lives. Ancher did not paint happy pictures, but he had a understanding for the color in Skagen, and in almost every painting he used this light to give his pictures that feeling of the land. In the painting Lunch in the Garden, there is a party, but the people are not happy, they are just there, but on the trees in the background Ancher used the light and shadow in an elegant way. No other painter has used his talent on the fishermen and their lives like Ancher did. In 1880 he married Anna Kirstine Brøndum, who thus became Anna Ancher [18 August 1859 15 Apr 1935], who is considered to be more important as a painter than he is. Their daughter Helga Ancher [1881–1964] also became a painter. — Portrait of Ancher (350x300pix, 13kb) by Krøyer — LINKS — På Stranden, Skagen: study of Anna Holst and a friend (1896, 46x37cm; 510x410pix, 34kb) _ Although Ancher is best known for his monumental and heroic depictions of the fishermen of Skagen, he was receptive to all aspects of daily life in the fishing village for the subject-matter of his paintings. He also had to keep an eye open for opportunities to earn money swiftly in order to support not only his wife and daughter Helga, but his extended family in his native Bornholm. The Anchers' means were often modest, and so when opportunities arose to paint portraits he gladly accepted them. The present work is a study for two elegant horizontal group portraits of the same title depicting, from left to right, Ida Holst, Anna Holst and a friend (these two the only ones shown in this study), and Minna and Sophie Holst, the four daughters of the merchant and magistrate Holst of Skagen. One of these works (1895 or 1896, 81x163cm) is in a private collection; the second (1896, 69x161cm) is in the Skagens Museum. The precise identity of Anna's friend, seen in the present work on the right, is unknown. It has been suggested that she is Elisabeth Bang, or else Sophie Bang. Whichever of the two, Ancher has left her facial features deliberately vague even in the finished paintings, so as to place the focus on the four Holst sisters. On the Beach, Skagen can be compared to similar compositions painted by fellow artist Peter Severin Krøyer in Skagen. The two painters had met in Vienna, and on Ancher's invitation Krøyer moved to the artists' colony to paint. In the event, Krøyer aroused some resentment in Ancher, who came to see the successful and worldly painter as a competitor in what had hitherto been his and his wife Anna's territory. But despite this disagreements, Ancher and Krøyer enjoyed a warm friendship, influencing each other's work. After Krøyer's wife Marie left him in 1903, he never recovered his mental health, dying in 1909 with the Anchers by his bedside. — On the Beach at Skagen (1914, 58x37cm; 1000x604pix, 137kb) _ just one woman, pensative, as if she is revisiting a place where she had been years earlier with long-lost friends. — Mens Vaadet Kastes Aftensol (1893, 112x144cm; 510x667pix, 47kb) _ Michael Ancher, a native Bornholmer, first visited Skagen, then an unspoilt fishing community at Jutland's northern tip, in 1874. Upon settling there later in the decade he lodged at an inn run by the Brøndums, a local merchant family, before marrying his host's step-sister Anna in 1880. The Anchers' painting played a major role in generating a myth of Skagen which continues to exercise a powerful emotive pull in Denmark. Focusing on the region's fishermen, Michael evolved a monumental iconography of virility, quiet fortitude, and truth, whose political significance ran deep. The newly potent veneration of folk spirit and culture dovetailed precisely with the tenor of increasingly assertive Nordic nationalism. Whether depicted in their courageous daily battle with the elements or, as in the present work, looking out to sea and enjoying a moment of respite, his noble characters were understood to embody a primordial ideal of authentic Danish identity unchallenged by the trade, communication, and transport links rapidly encroaching on the area during the period. Pigen med solsikkerne (1889, 101x95cm; 494x462pix, 35kb) — Syngende børn (1899, 56x48cm; 537x451pix, 37kb) — The Lifeboat is Taken through the Dunes (1883, 171x221cm; 448x582pix, 45kb) Redningsbåden køres gennem klitterne. — Stormvejr. Skagens Gren (576x768pix, 456kb) |
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Died on 09 June 1901: Edward Moran,
US painter born on 19 August 1829. {That's Moran, NOT Moron} — Edward Moran, the oldest of the artistic Moran brothers, was acknowledged as the impetus behind the family's entry into the art world. "He taught the rest of us Morans all we know about art," stated his famous younger brother Thomas Moran [12 Feb 1837 – 26 Aug 1926]. The other brothers were Peter Moran [1841-1914], who specialized in painting animals in landscapes, and John Moran [1831-1902], a landscape photographer. Two of Edward's children, Percy Moran and Leon Moran, were artists also. During a long and successful career, Edward Moran became a member of the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts and an Associate of the National Academy of Design. After working at a variety of trades, he turned to painting in the early 1850s. The first twenty-seven years of his artistic career were spent in Philadelphia, where he studied painting under the marine painter James Hamilton and under the landscapist Paul Weber. In 1861, Moran-traveled to London for additional instruction at the Royal Academy, and in 1871 he relocated to the New York area, where he remained for the rest of his life. Seascapes were Morans forte. By the 1880s, the artist was considered such an expert on the subject that his "hints for practical study' of marine painting were published in the September and November, 1888, issues of The Art Amateur. After his death, an admirer wrote that "As a painter of the sea in its many moods and phases, Edward Moran ... had no superior in America." — Edward Moran, brother of artist Thomas Moran, was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England. He began his professional life there as a weaver. In 1844 his family immigrated to Maryland, and soon thereafter Edward, the eldest of twelve children, left to work in a cotton factory in Philadelphia. His employer was impressed with Moran's sketches, which covered the factory walls and machine frames, and advised him to pursue an art career. First studying in Philadelphia, both Edward and Thomas returned to England in 1847 for further study. Edward began his formal career back in Philadelphia in the mid-1850s, a time when that city was experiencing the height of the United States' clipper ship production. The artist finally settled in New York City in 1872, where he spent the remainder of his life. It was in Philadelphia in the 1850s that Moran came under the influence of James Hamilton [1819-1878], a prominent Irish-born marine painter known for his silvery tones and loose accents of light. In 1861 Moran returned to England with his brother and made sketches along the Channel coast. Through Hamilton and his own trips abroad, Moran developed a style based primarily upon English painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Moran saw a distinction between decorative and scientific marine painters and aligned himself with the latter. Believing the decorative painter achieved handsome effects at the expense of fidelity, Moran advocated gaining scientific knowledge as a tool in art and even suggested the use of a portable camera. Moran was also a history painter, yet most closely identified himself as a marine painter. He chose a marine painting to represent his work in a portfolio published by the Artists Fund Society. In 1894 The Art Amateur proclaimed Moran "the best known painter of the sea in the United States." Upon his death in 1901, it was commonly admitted that Moran "had no superior [in marine painting] in America." Yet he was not mentioned in major texts of the early twentieth century, and his name makes only a brief appearance in more recent studies of marine painting. His obscurity may be attributed to the fact that he has been and remains today in the shadow of his more famous brother, Thomas. LINKS — Shipwreck (1862, 76x102cm) — Half-Way Up Mount Washington (1868, 76x128cm) — Unveiling the Statue of Liberty (1886; 857x580pix, 223kb) — Good Morning (1889; 107kb) — Shipping in New York Harbor (539x790pix, 108kb) — New York Harbor (484x797pix, 111kb) — Ships at Sea (56kb) — Burning of the Frigate Philadelphia (966x650pix, 142kb) _ On 16 February 1804, US Marines under Lieutenant Stephen Decatur [05 Jan 1779 – 22 Mar 1820] made an expedition into Tripoli harbor to destroy the captured US frigate Philadelphia; a mission that British Admiral Horatio Nelson [29 Sep 1758 – 21 Oct 1805] later called the “most daring act of the age.” — Red Light, Green Light (51x76cm; 530x800pix, 45kb). |