Museums and Paintings

The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Madame Pierre Gauterau
By John Singer Sargent (American)
Mmme Gautreau, born Virginie Avegno in New Orleans, married a French banker and became one of Paris's notorious beauties during the 1880s. Sargent probably met her in 1881, and impressed by her charm and theatrical use of makeup, he determined to paint her. Work began teh wollowing year but was attended by delays and numerous reworkings of teh canvas. The picture was shown at the 1884 Paris Salon with the title "Portrait of Mme...". It was given a scathing reception by reviewers critical of the character of Mme Gautreau, the lavender coloring of her skin, and the impropriety of her dress, with its revealing decolletage and slipped strap that bared her right shoulder (this strap was later painted over).
The portrait lacks the bravura brushwork of many of Sargent's major paintings, partly because of the many reworkings, but the elegant pose and outline of the figure, recalling his debt to Velazquez, make it one of his most striking canvases. When he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1916, Sargent wrote:"I suppose it is the best thing I have done."

The Princesse de Broglie
By J.A.D.Ingres (French)
Although portraiture was a gentre he disliked, Ingres painted many of the leading personalities of his day. His portrait of the Princesse de Broglie, a mumber of the most cultivated circles of the Second Empire, amply attests to his gifts at transcribing not only the material quality of the objects he painted---the rich satin and lace of the sitter's gown, the brocade chair, the elegant jewels---but also the character of his subject, whose aristocratic bearing and shy reserve are compellingly captured. The princesse de Broglie died prematurely at the age of thirty-five, and her bereaved husband kept this portrait behind draperies as a tribute to her memory.

Fear of Cupid's Darts
By Jean Louis Lemoyne (French)
In this lightly erotic group, a nymph reacts with a startled, self-protective gesture to the sudden appearance of Cupid, who is about to cast an arrow into her breast. The technique, in which the marble seems touched with flickering light, and the delicately off-balance pose are typically Rococo.

Finches and Bamboo
By Emperor Hui-Tsung (Chinese)
"What good fortune for these insignificant birds to have been painted by this sage," mused the famous connoisseur Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322) in a colophon attached to this gemlike painting. The sage he refers to is Hui-tsung, the eighth emperor of the Sung dynasty and the most artistically accomplished of his imperial line. During his reign (1101-25) he spent vast sums in the pursuit of fine calligraphy, of great paintings, and of spectacular rocks for his garden-parks. Finches and Bamboo illustrates the suprarealistic style of bird and flower painting practiced at Hui-tsung's Painting Academy. The painting is signed at the right with the emperor's cipher over a seal that reads "imperial writing." Over one hundred other seals of subsequent owners and connoisseurs dot the scroll. The scroll is also valued for the superbcalligraphy in the form of appreciative comments that follow the painting.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse
By Claude Monet (French)
A prime mover among the artists who came to be known as Impressionists, Monet spent the summer of 1867 at the resort town of Sainte-Adresse on the English Channel. It was there that he painted this picture, which combines smooth, traditionally rendered areas with sparkling passages of rapid, separate brushwork and spots of pure color. The elevated vantage point and relatively even sizes of the horizontal areas emphasize the two-dimensionality of the painting. The three horizontal zones of the composition seem to rise parallel to the picture plane instead of receding clearly into space. The subtle tension resulting from the combination of illusionism and the two-dimensionality of the surface remained an important characteristic of Monet's style.

Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children
By Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French)
The well-to-do publisher Georges Charpentier and his wife entertained political, literary, and artistic notables on Friday Evenings, and they welcomed Renoir to these gatherings. He was paid handsomely to paint this stunning group portrait, which is dated 1878. Though Renoir conveys the opulent ease of his subjects' lives, he made no attempt to capture their personalities. Consequently, his portrait of this stylish family is closer in spirit to works by Rubens and Fragonard that he admired than to the more penetrating portraits of his colleague Degas. This picture was well received at the Salon of 1879.

Irises
By Vincent Van Gogh (Dutch)
In May 189- Van Gogh was released from the asylum in Saint-Remy. His last month there was a period of relative calm and productivity, and he wrote to his brother:"All goes well. I am doing...two canvases representing big bunches of violet irises, one lot against a pink background in which the effect is soft and harmonious...the other... stands out against a startling citron background with an effect of tremendously disparate complementaries, which strengthen each other by their juxtaposition. This is the first picture. The entire different effects achieved through alterations in his palette emphasize Van Gogh's interest in the symbolic meaning as well as the formal value of color.

Oedipus and the Sphinx
By Gustave Moreau (French)
Moreau's interpretation of the Greek myth draws heavily no Ingres's Oedipus and the Sphinx. Both painters chose to represent the moment when Oedipus confronted the winged monster in a rocky pass outside the city of Thebes. Unlike her other victims, he could answer her riddle and thus saved himself and the besieged Thebans. This painting was extremely successful at the Salon of 1864; it won a medal and established Moreau's reputation. Critics offered a variety of interpretations of the theme: Oedipus was thought to symbolize contemporary man, and the confrontation between the Sphinx and Oedipus was believed to symbolize the opposition of female and male principles, or possibly the triumph of life over death.

The Calmady Children
By Sir Thomas Lawrence (British)
The children in this portrait are Emily and Laura Anne, the daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Biggs Calmady of Langdon Hall, Devon. In composition this work shows the influence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian paintings of the Infant Christ and Saint John the Baptist; its circular form recalls the Madonna della Sedia, Raphael's celebrated tondo. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1824 and later engraved under the title Nature, this portrait became one of Lawrence's most popular paintings. The artist himself declared:"This is my best picture. I have no hesitation in saying so---my best picture of the kind, quite---one of the few I should wish hereafter to be known by."

The White Captive
By Erastus Dow Palmer (American)
The Neoclassical style dominated American sculpture during the second quater of the 19th century, and works in white marble were especially popular because of the medium's associations with purity. Although the Neoclassical spirit is evident in this graceful life-size nude, this figure ws probably inspired by tales of the Indians' captives along the colonial frontier. An upstate New Yorker, Palmer was self-taught and, unlike most of his contemporaries, did not go abroad to study. He worked directly from live models; his model for "The White Captive" was a local girl "less than eighteen years old." Completed in 1859, this work is Palmer's first attempt at an undraped figure and one of the finest nudes produced in the United States during the nineteenth century.

Portrait Statue of a Roman Prince
(Probably Lucius Caesar) (Roman)
The mixed nature of adolescence is nearly presented in this portrait: the subject has the body of a boy and demeanor of a self-possessed young man. His hands are empty but probably once held objects connected with a religious ceremony. The richly decorated pallium he wears is a mark of wealth, and his features strongly suggest that he is a relative of the emperor Augustus. The most likely candidate is Lucius Caesar, the younger of the emperor's grandsons.
Augustan portraiture in general tempers the stark realism favored in preceding decades with graceful, classicizing modeling but, as this portrait attests, not at the expense of vivid characterization.

The Hope Dionysos
(Roman)
The Hope Dionysos is one of the finest and best preserved Roman replicas of a Greek sculptural bype that originated in the second quarter of the fourth century B.C. It has been known since 1796, when the English collector and antiquarian Henry Philip Hope acquired it in Rome from the csulptor and restorer Vincenzo Pacetti. What a beautiful piece of art!

Portrait Bust of a Child;
(Roman)
Likeness of children were not uncommon in the Roman imperial period, but they are usually made of marble of of less expensive materials. A portrait of one so young as this boy in a material so costly as bronze is highly unusual and indicates that he was especially wellborn. It has been argued that the sitter is Nero as a boy of five or six. The bust resembles other images of the future emperor at an early age, and the style of the work accords well with portraits from the 40s A.D. It is nonetheless difficult to identify portraits of children, particularly when there are so many who share the family traits of the Julio-Claudian house.

from: The Metropolitan Museum of Art .

National Gallery of Art (Washington):

Model for Poetry and Music
By Clodion (Claude Michel) (French)
Clodion specialized in small-scale terra-cotta figure groups, often with playfully erotic subjects loosely based on ancient myths concerning the wine god Bacchus and his devotees. Intended for enjoyment at close range in elegant domestic settings, these inventions were the fruits of years of study in Italy. Although signed and clearly meant to be preserved, this example was sculpted as a model for a large-scale work in marble.
The marble Poetry and Music was one of four groups symbolizing the arts and sciences, ordered by the Abbé Joseph-Marie Terray to decorate the dining room of his Parisian mansion, celebrating his appointment as Director of the Royal Buildings in 1774. In realizing these plump little figures, Codion made knowing use of terra cotta's effectiveness for representing flesh, with soft, pliant forms and even a pinkish color. Particularly engaging is the children's absorbed concentration. Peotry, with head on hand, devours a book, while Music strums his stringed instrument and sings with head thrown back.

A companion of Diana
By Jean-Louis Lemoyne (French)
Louis XIV commissioned at least ten sculptured Companions of Diana for the grounds of his beloved Château de Marly, between Paris and Versailles. After his death in 1715, his successor Louis XV installed some of the completed statues in the forests of La Muette, another hunting retreat.
In classical mythology Diana was goddess of the moon and of the hunt. Her woodland companions were nymphs like this one, appropriate denizens for a royal hunting preserve. Lemoyne's Companion, supple and long-limbed, moving with effortless grace and joy, epitomizes the rococo ideal of beauty.
With a dancing step, the girl seems barely to touch the ground as she lifts the leash to signal the beginning of the chase. In amusement and affection she smiles down at her hound and, incidentally at the viewer, who would have seen her on a high pedestal.

The Young Saint John the Baptist
By Antonio Rossellino (Florentine)
Like Desiderio, Antonio Rossellino probably came from Settignano. He was the most accomplished sculptor among five brothers, all trained in the important workshop led by the eldest brother Bernardo. Widespread admiration for Antonio's skill may explain why his nickname Rossellino , "little redhead," came to be attached to all his brothers, replacing the family name Gambarelli.
John the Baptist, portrayed by Antonio in this graceful bust, was a patron saint of the city of Florence and a favorite figure in Florentine painting and sculpture. The Florentine theologian, Cardinal Giovanni Dominici, recommended around 1410 that parents display images of the Christ Child and the young John together in their homes, as religious and moral examples for their children. When it was first made, this bust may have served just such a purpose in a Florentine home. But for at least the 180 years before 1940, it was in a Florentine religious building, the oratory of San Francesco of the Vanchettoni, together with Desiderio da Settignano's bust of the Christ Child, now exhibited in the same gallery. The Desiderio boy is considerably younger, with plump cheeks and silky hair; Rossellino's John is close to adolescence. His richly waving curls and the fine curving lines of his lips suggest the beauty of a young classical god.

A Girl with a Watering Can
By Auguste Renoir
The harsh reception of the first impressionist group exhibition and disastrous results of an auction that Renoir optimistically organized in 1875 placed him in dire financial straits. Perhaps as a remedy, within the year he began to paint anecdotal depictions of women and children, subjects in which he excelled. A Girl with a Watering Can, typical of these works, displays a mature impressionist style attuned to the specific requirements of figure painting. Renoir's colors reflect the freshness and radiance of the impressionist palette, while his handling is more controlled and regular than in his landscapes, with even brushstrokes applied in delicate touches, especially in the face. Brilliant prismatic hues envelope the little girl in an atmosphere of warm light and charmingly convey her innocent appeal.
Specific identifications have been proposed for the girl, but none is convincing. More probably Renoir depicted a neighborhood child whose pretty featuers pleased the artist. A girl with similar curly blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, plump pink cheeks, and smiling red lips appears, similarly clad, ina painting of about five years later. Futher recurrence suggests that she became a commercially viable stock figure in Renoir's repertory. A Girl with a Watering Can, designed to attract portrait commissions, is a showcase of the grace and charm of the artist's work.

Woman with a Parasol --- Madame Monet and Her Son
By Claude Monet With Manet's assistance, Monet found lodging in suburban Argenteuil in late 1871, a move that initiated one of the most fertile phases of his career. Impressionism evolved in the late 1860s from a desire to create full-scale, multi-figure depictions of ordinary people in casual outdoor situations. At its purest, impressionism was attuned to landscape painting, a subject Monet favored. In Woman with a Parasol --- Madame Monet and Her Son his skill as a figure painter is equally evident. Contrary to the artificial conventions of academic portraiture, Monet delineated the features of his sitters as freely as their surroundings. The spontaneity and naturalness of the resulting image were praised when it appeared in the second impressionist exhibition in 1876. Woman with a Parasol was painted outdoors, probably in a single session of several hours' duration. The artist intended this to look like a casual family outing rather than an artificially arranged portrait, using pose and placement to suggest that his wife and son interrupted their stroll while he captured their likenesses. The brevity of the fictional moment portrayed here is conveyed by repertory of animated brushstrokes of vibrant color, hallmarks of the style Monet was instrumental in forming. Bright sunlight shines from behind Camille to whiten the top of her parasol and the flowing cloth at her back, while colored reflections from the wildflowers below touch her front with yellow.

Joseph and Potiphar's Wife
By Guercino (Bolognese) For this depiction of Jesoph spurning the advances of his Egyptian employer's wife, as recounted in the Book of Genesis, Guercino chose a three-quarter length format that presses the life-sized figures close to the spectator. He has filled the scene with the bed --- all rumpled sheets and opulent curtains. As the temptress reaches for the strong and handsome Joseph, he struggles vigorously to extricate himself. But she holds tight to the vivid blue cloak and sets Joseph spinning like a top out of his garment. In panic, he turns his imploring eyes heavenward, seeming to realize that even if he escapes with his virtue unscathed, he is helplessly ensnared in an evil plot; Potiphar's wife, bejeweled and confident, will later use the cloak to support her denunciation of Joseph as the aggressor.
With a delicate play of light on the seductress' profile, the artist shows the very moment of lust shading into treachery. If Guercino's narration is clear and eloquent, his presentation of the moral implications is more subtle: as this woman's beauty conceals her wickedness, so the visual lushness of Guercino's painting disguises a serious lesson about righteous conduct.

from: National Gallery of Art --- Washington

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