Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Artists in the Studio – 17th and 18th Centuries

attributed to François Duquesnoy
Young artist modeling statuette of Dancing Faun
ca. 1620-43
drawing
British Museum

Willem Buytewech
Interior of artist's studio (Title-page design)
ca. 1620-22
drawing
British Museum

Rembrandt
Artist in studio drawing model on dais
1639
drawing
British Museum

from Under Ben Bulben

Quattrocento put in paint,
On backgrounds for a God or Saint,
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky
Resemble forms that are, or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream,
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That Heavens had opened.

                                        Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.

– William Butler Yeats (1939)

attributed to Willem Drost
Artist's worktable
ca. 1650-55
drawing
British Museum

Cornelis Galle after Peter Paul Rubens
Pictura (Allegory of Painting)
before 1650
engraving
British Museum

David Teniers the Younger
Monkey masquerade - Painter's studio
1664
drawing
British Museum

Cornelis Dusart
The old painter
ca. 1675-1704
drawing
British Museum

Henri Bonnart (publisher)
Gallant Peintre
ca. 1678-1700
etching, engraving
British Museum

Bernard Lens
Putto painting at an easel
ca. 1680-1700
mezzotint
British Museum

Baroque Epigram

Ant upon ant write the text in
     The ground and the grass only of waiting
          And of the gap of gold sing silently and
               Illustrate ennui with their antennae

And they cross out noon as in the tit-tat-toe
     Time plays with itself and it is soon
          That the absence of sound and of no-sound speaks
               And love in its veiled pure minute grows old

The sunlight wearily lies down on naked
     Buttock and pap and that grass blades
          Prepare elaborately to celebrate neglect
               And whimsies of shade spell out the label flesh

Assumes for itself wrapped tightly in a niche
     Having only the one voice unique among kinds
          Unpeeling itself to show what an artist's intent
               Soft hand requires a lifetime to find

And what is vocally named in a brief
     Polysyllable: "induplicable"
          So from estrangement comes at arm's length
               (Nappy among naps) on a new bathsheet

Its song near weeds' weave unassailably yet
     Assailably moist till the checks and stripes
          Pressed still flatter shout out a triumph
               As on their local tricolor's great fête

And with the aid of earth (abetted by eternity
     And the muscular planets) buoy up a loller
          Supine on less than breath of what moves
               Concealing its own hot length in the atom

Its weight and rhythmic outline stretched in
     Mysterious hesitance and cosmic bottleneck
          To throw in my eyes suddenly like soothing acid
               Its clothed phrase and unclothed symphony

Washing them instantly of their waiting with pink
     Ablutions and drying them with cursive hairs' wit
          Till flush a the center as of bottomless space
               A blue-sky of shadow lifts out of pink

But a few inches off! absenting itself only
     To return at once in an enormous wink
          By shifting its accent and slowing unclosing
               Pale wings of an armpit's bruised butterfly

– Parker Tyler (1956)

Nicolaas Verkolje after Arnold Houbraken
Painter and naked model
ca. 1690-1715
mezzotint
British Museum

Anonymous French artist
Academy life-class with nude model on dais
ca. 1700-1800
drawing
British Museum

Jean-Michel Moreau le jeune after Pierre-Antoine Baudouin
Le Modèle honnête
1770
etching, engraving
British Museum

Benoît-Louis Prévost after Charles Nicolas Cochin fils
The Study of Drawing (illustration for Diderot's Encylcopédie)
1773
etching
British Museum

William Dent
The Historical Painter
(Charles James Fox caricatured as Oliver Cromwell painting the execution of Charles I)

1784
etching
British Museum

William Henry Pyne
A Sculptor's Studio
ca. 1790
watercolor
British Museum

Women – as Drawn and Printed by Walter Sickert

Walter Sickert
The Barnacle Girl (at the Café Royal, London)
ca. 1919
etching
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Woman with a Fur Collar
ca. 1887
lithograph
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Sally (artist's model Marie Hayes)
ca. 1911
etching
British Museum

from The Building of the Ship

In the ship-yard stood the Master,
With the model of the vessel,
That should laugh at all disaster,
And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!
Covering many a rood of ground,
Lay the timber piled around:
Timber of chestnut, and elm, and oak,
And scattered here and there, with these,
The knarred and crooked cedar knees;
Brought from regions far away,
From Pascagoula's sunny bay,
And the banks of the roaring Roanoke!
Ah! what a wondrous thing it is
To note how many wheels of toil
One thought, one word, can set in motion!
There's not a ship that sails the ocean,
But every climate, every soil,
Must bring its tribute, great or small,
And help to build the wooden wall!

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1870)

Walter Sickert
Portrait of Mrs. Jopling
ca. 1887
etching, drypoint
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Venetian Model
ca. 1903-04
drawing
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Marie
ca. 1919
etching, engraving
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Little Sally Walters - the American Sailor Hat
1907
lithograph
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Cicely Hey
1923
etching
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Girl with a Bow
ca. 1887
lithograph
British Museum

Woman Unborn

I am not born as yet,
five minutes before my birth.
I can still go back
into my unbirth.
Now it's ten minutes before,
now, it's one hour before birth.
I go back,
I run
into my minus life.

I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel
with bizarre perspectives.
Ten years before,
a hundred and fifty years before,
I walk, my steps thump,
a fantastic journey through epochs
in which there was no me.

How long is my minus life,
nonexistence so much resembles immortality.

Here is Romanticism, where I could have been a spinster,
Here is the Renaissance, where I would have been
un ugly and unloved wife of an evil husband,
The Middle Ages, where I would have carried water in a tavern.

I walk still further,
what an echo,
my steps thump
through my minus life,
through the reverse of my life.
I reach Adam and Eve,
nothing is seen anymore, it's dark.
Now my nonexistence dies already
with the trite death of mathematical fiction.
As trite as the death of my existence would have been
had I been really born.

– Anna Swir, as translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan (1996)

Walter Sickert
Mornington Crescent - La Belle Hollandaise
ca. 1919
etching, engraving
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Nude Woman looking into Mirror (Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, Paris)
1906
drawing
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Leah Pinder, a Circus Rider
1884
etching, engraving
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Dieppe - Juliette Lambert (a darling) shopping in the rue de Clieu
ca. 1885
etching, drypoint
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Dieppe - Juliette Lambert (night scene, draper's shop)
ca. 1885
etching
British Museum

Walter Sickert
L'Armoire à Glace (model, Marie Pepin)
1922
etching
British Museum

Walter Sickert
L'Armoire à Glace
1924
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Walter Sickert in the Music Hall

Walter Sickert
The Old Bedford (study for etching)
ca. 1890
drawing
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall
(performing "The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery")
ca. 1894
lithograph
British Museum

"Unlike the majority of the Camden Town Group, Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was recognised during his own lifetime as an important artist, and in the years since his death has increasingly gained a reputation as one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century British art.  He was universally acknowledged throughout his life as a colourful, charming and fascinating character, a catalyst for progress and modernity, yet someone who remained independent of groups, cliques and categories.  . . .  By 1887 he had fixed upon the theme which would occupy him intermittently for most of his career, the world of the British music hall . . ."

Walter Sickert
 The Old Mogul Tavern, Drury Lane
1908
etching, aquatint
British Museum

Walter Sickert
 Noctes Ambrosianae (Gallery of Middlesex Music Hall)
ca. 1908
etching, aquatint
British Museum

Walter Sickert
The Old Bedford
1908
etching, engraving, drypoint
British Museum

Walter Sickert
The Old Bedford
1910
etching
British Museum

Walter Sickert
The Old Middlesex (Orchestra-pit and Stalls of Middlesex Music Hall)
1910
etching
British Museum

Walter Sickert
The New Bedford
1915
etching, drypoint
British Museum

Walter Sickert
Gaité Montparnasse
ca. 1919
etching, engraving
British Museum

Walter Sickert
The London Shoreditch
ca. 1920
etching
British Museum

Walter Sickert
 The Orchestra of the London Shoreditch
ca. 1920
etching
British Museum

The London Music Hall in Shoreditch High Street, site of the two images directly above and one of Sickert's favorite haunts, had in fact been destroyed in 1915 during a zeppelin raid. 

Walter Sickert
T.W. Barrett (Collins's Music Hall, Islington Geen)
ca. 1922
etching
British Museum

Walter Sickert
In Memoriam, T.W. Barrett
ca. 1922
etching
British Museum

Sickert's inscription on the plate reads – "To T.W. Barrett, in grateful and affectionate homage for countless hours between 1885 and 1922, cheered and sweetened by his gentle and reticent wit, his exquisite and lovable personality – his sincere admirer, Walter Sickert"

Walter Sickert
"That Old-Fashioned Mother of Mine" 
(the singer is "traditionally identified" as Talbot O'Farrell)
ca. 1928-29
etching, engraving
British Museum

Curious or Beautiful Paintings - Eighteenth Century

Anonymous Dutch artist
Skeleton
ca. 1700-1800
oil paint on glass
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anonymous Dutch artist
Two skeletons on gibbet
regarded by standing nude man
ca. 1793-1830
oil paint on glass
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

from Alastor, or, The Spirit of Solitude

        There was a Poet whose untimely tomb
No human hands with pious reverence reared,
But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds
Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness: –
A lovely youth, – no mourning maiden decked
With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep: –
Gentle, and brave, and generous, – no lorn bard
Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh:
He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.
Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,
And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined
And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes.
The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
And Silence, too enamoured of that voice,
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1815)

Alexander Cozens
Rocky Bay Scene
ca. 1759-65
oil on paper
Tate Gallery

Alexander Cozens
The Cloud
ca. 1770
watercolor
Tate Gallery

Jean-Frédéric Schall
Evening Toilet
ca. 1780-1820
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jean-Frédéric Schall
Morning Toilet
ca. 1780-1820
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Difficulty with a Tree

A woman was fighting a tree. The tree had come to rage at the woman's attack, breaking free from its earth it waddled at her with its great root feet.
        Goddamn these sentiencies, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.
        Look out, you'll fall on me, you bastard, screamed the woman as she hit at the tree.
        The tree whisked and whisked with its leafy branches.
        The woman kicked and bit screaming, kill me kill me or I'll kill you!

        Her husband seeing the commotion came running crying, what tree has lost patience?
        The ax the ax, damnfool, the ax, she screamed.
        Oh no, roared the tree dragging its long roots rhythmically limping like a sea lion towards her husband.
        But oughtn't we to talk about this? cried her husband.
        But oughtn't we to talk about this, mimicked his wife.
        But what is this all about? he cried.
        When you see me killing something you should reason that it will want to kill me back, she screamed.

        But before her husband could decide what next action to perform the tree had killed both the wife and her husband.
        Before the woman died she screamed, now do you see?
        He said, what . . . ? And then he died.

– Russell Edson (1973)   

Jan Ekels the Younger
A man writing at his desk
1784
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jan Ekels the Younger
A writer trimming his pen
1784
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Francis Towne
Rome - Arco Oscuro, Hollow Road
1780
watercolor
British Museum

Francis Towne
Rome - Arco Oscuro, Hollow Road
1780
watercolor
British Museum

Road

This is what poetry is (says the Road),
a laying down of uniform pattern
across a land you can't control
but which you think it best to flatten.
It's far from vivid. Look at the whole
flamboyant forest! Look at the paths
that can't be uttered by a mouth
and at the scattered arcs of light
more integral to this wide planet
than words will ever be. Your lines?
Like railroad tracks that cut the bracken,
bring something through, then disappear.
No one knows what speck was taken
or where it moved, and no one cares.

– Lisa Williams (2001)

Pietro Longhi
Portrait of a Venetian family with manservant serving coffee
ca. 1752
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

John Opie
Self Portrait
ca. 1790
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Charles de Wailly
Design with Muses for coffered ceiling
1780
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Nicolas Dupin after Augustin de Saint Aubin
Fashion plate - Marie Antoinette
ca. 1787
hand-colored engraving
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)