"WARTS AND ALL" Lesson #8

Lesson #8 Warts and All

PORTAITURE THROUGH THE AGES

Portraits have been a means of making those in Power immortal and thus leaving their mark in the world. They were the main employment of court painters. The portrait artists and their apprentices pictured many of the lords and ladies throughout history. Even as the Merchant classes rose to power because, they too, wanted to be immortalized and leave their faces behind for future generations. Aside from the large studio paintings, there was the miniature portrait often worn as jewelry. The resembled a broach or ring made of copper or ivory. They were a gift amongst lovers and a record for children. Often a lock of hair was kept in back of the little paintings. Naval officers and soldiers took them with them when called away to duty. These became a new branch of portraiture since the 11^th Century.

Jan Van Eyck (1422 –1441) was a painter from Belgium. He and his brother painted many alter-pieces and was court painter for Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. In 1434 Van Eyck painted the “The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait” It is a double portrait of a man and his bride. It has almost the purpose of a wedding document with the artist as witness. Iconography is in use here as it was in the Middle Ages. The dog represents fidelity. The shoeless feet denote holy ground. The mirror on the wall shows the artist at work reflected in it. The one candle burning stands the sacrament of marriage. Arnolfini was a banker from Italy, who married Jeanne Cenami.  They are shown taking an oath of marriage.

 This one of the early northern European painting that has a foundation of egg tempera as an under painting and oil used to the surfaces of the panel. The painting shows the skillful brushwork in oils. Look at the handling of the drapery and clothing. If you examine the floor and windows in the painting you can see that there is an understanding of perspective in the painting, but not to the scientific level of later works. The space in the painting is in one-point perspective but the depth is not deepened and is somewhat limited. There is a wonderful understanding of light and shade in the painting.

 The bride seems to be pregnant in the portrait. This doesn’t mean that she was knocked up before the wedding. It was a symbolic condition showing the wishes of the couple rather than what might have been her condition at the time. It wasn’t a shotgun wedding since they were yet invented. The artist was expressing the future wishes of the couples.

Dominico Ghirlandaio (1449 – 1494) was a southern Renaissance (15^th century) fresco painter from Florence. He tended toward realism in his figures and landscapes. He owned a large family studio that included his brothers and many assistants. He illustrated the life of St. Frances of Assisi and did many alter pieces. Michaelangelo, who studied under this painter, was one of his many assistants. He received many commissions from merchants and bankers in Florence. He also designed mosaics.

He painted St. Michael holding scales of justice in his left hand and a sword in his right.

His most famous work in a portrait of  the Old man and his Grandson now hanging in the Louvre. It has none of the heroic drama of the High Renaissance.

Note: The realism of the wrinkles of the old man and the hair is more linear and stylized as Bottecelli might have painted it.

Note: The Tuscan landscape in the background, out the window, has three main shapes in the design and a repeat of diagonal lines.

Hans Holbein (1497 – 1543) painted an oil on tempera on wood (1542). Holbein fled to England to escape religious persecution. The reformation affected the work of such painters. Mannerist painting was born out of this time and the counter-reformation. One of his most famous portraits is the portrait of Henry VIII painted in 1542. Without the benefit of Facebook or the vast number of dating the king needed these portraits to advertise for a mate. One princess of the time commented that she would marry King Henry, but she only had one head and preferred to hang on to it. Holbein had very little sitting time with the king and painted the cloak and other objects from a dummy setup.

Frans Hals (1580 – 1666) was born in Antwerp and moved to Harlem where he rained till his death. Father of eight children, he worked as an art dealer and restorer. In 1652 he was bankrupt. He had a period of popularity second only to Rembrandt. What was distinctive was his painting technique where he used successive layers and simulated vitality by using smeared lines, spots, large patches of colour, and hardly any detail.

After he died and memory of him faded his painting sold very cheaply. It wasn’t until 1900 that he began to become popular again. His legacy is that he is on the 10 guilder

bank note.

Rembrandt Van Rijn (1606-1659) was recognized as the most innovative artist amongst a great many talented artists of his day. The greatest Dutch master of all time

he was able to instill the essence of humanity in his portraits. His portraits live on beyond the day when they were painted. As we can clearly see in the early Hollywood film about his life, Rembrandt, he maintained a large studio with many assistants. This type of production was not unusual for the time.

Amsterdam was a rich city of merchants trading on a worldwide market. There were a large number of commissions and portrait orders to fulfill. Aside from works to enhance the homes of rich merchants and government people, he painted many religious paintings for churches showing scenes from the bible.

Practice for the expression and character for his paintings often found its way into a large number of self-portraits.

Rembrandt painted and etched countless hundreds of self-portraits. There was a ready market for these as well because his fame had spread far and wide and people collected them like hockey cards. He loved to collect costumes and props, so often his studio resembled a stage set.

Rembrandt has remained the artist with the best visual record of his life because of the many self-portraits and family portraits. The combination of impasto and glazes has been his trademark technique of those years.

Francois Pascal-Gerard (1770 – 1837) A follower of the neo-classical style, he was a student of Jacques Louis David. Unlike his master he weathered the French Revolution without taking sides. He practiced a gentler, more delicate classicism. His paintings have a courtly manner and he was employed by Louis XVIII for the gallery at Versailles. His portrait of Madame Recamier is considered his best work and  has hung in the Louvre since 1802. It is a beautiful painting of a lovely woman which shows much of the neo-classical style of dress and of furniture.

The pose is not the standard portrait position but shows the figure in a graceful posture.

It has been considered one of the great paintings in the Louvre’s collection though there is little else remembered of the artist’s paintings.

Q.:  How does the costume identify the sitter and the time when it was painted?

A.:  The dress is of the period of the Napoleonic reign and the empire waist was later

        worn by Josephine.

Q.:  What other objects in the painting identify the period?

A.:  The roman style fainting sofa. Also, the pillars and arches are Roman.

Movie: “Brush with Fate”

            Thomas Gibson and Glen Close /DVD

            “Lust for Life”

            Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn VHS

            “Painted Lady”

            Helen Merrin

As the Crow Flies

 One my favourite scenes in “Treasure of Sierra Madre” is when the old-timer says, “It’s not far, as the crow flies” and Fred C. Dobbs answers, “Yeah, but we aren’t crows.” The saying goes way back in history. Humans and crows have travelled in the same circles for thousands of years. Yet they remain cautious and careful around our kind. One of my early Christmas toys was a “Crow Shoot” set with a cork gun and a target perch of four wooden crows. People shot crows sometimes for sport and sometimes because they were thought to be a pest that stole their harvest. In fact in recent years it is thought that crows do more good by eating cutworms and pest insects. The urban crow has very different behaviour towards humankind than the country cousins. Still if you feed crows, you see clearly that they are not all that relaxed about the situation. They don’t mob in ‘every bird for himself’ like gulls and pigeons. In a feeding situation there is first a sentinel bird and he (usually a younger male uncle in a family group) checks around first to see if everything is on the ‘up & up’ before making the ‘dinner-call’ for the others. The call is two short “caws” delivered with his head pumped up and down. Older birds eat first and the younger ones come later. That’s crow manners. If there are gulls nearby they just jump in and grab much to the disgust of the watching crows. Some food is brought back to nestlings if there is a family in the nest. The uncle also feeds the young as part of the extended family. It takes two years for hatchlings to mature and leave the nest. During that time they are educated by parents and grand-parents. It takes time to learn to be a crow. They are amongst the few animals that make use of tools.

  Crows appear in art as far back as the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux Caves in France. These are the earliest known artworks produced by human kind. There are over forty-six species of crow and three of those are in danger of extinction. Hearing a crow talk is always a surprising experience for a person, but not as you get to know how smart these birds can be. 

KDM