Monday, November 5, 2018

Low-Contrast Prints and Drawings

James McNeill Whistler
Soupe à Trois Sous (Threepenny Soup)
1859
etching
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

James McNeill Whistler
Reading by Lamplight
1858
etching
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

after Filippo Lippi
Drapery Studies
ca. 1450
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Alphonse Legros
Death of the Vagabond
1875
etching, aquatint
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"It is once more in Constable's correspondence that we find rich documentation of this difficulty which besets the path of the artist-innovator.  Hearing of that rare bird, a prospective buyer for one of his landscapes, the embittered painter writes: 'Had I not better grime it down with slime and soot, as he is a connoisseur, and perhaps prefers filth and dirt to freshness and beauty?'  'Rubbed and dirty canvases,' he writes elsewhere, 'take the place of God's own works.'  Intent as he was on the rendering of light, he could not but deplore and despise the visual habits of the public that had adjusted its eyes to the gloom of old varnish.  His point of view, as we know, has prevailed.  The yellow varnish that was spread over paintings in the nineteenth century to give them what was called a 'gallery tone' has disappeared with the Claude glass.  We have been taught to look into light without putting on black spectacles."

"But it would be a little rash to assume that this revolution has at last given us the truth and that we now know what pictures should look like.  Constable rightly deplored the visual habits of those who were used to looking at dirty canvases, and he went so far as to deplore the founding of the National Gallery in London, which would mean 'the end of art in poor old England'.  But today the position may be reversed.  The brighter palette, the strong and even loud colours to which first impressionism and then twentieth-century paintings (not to mention posters and neon lights) have inured us may have made it difficult for us to accept the quiet tonal gradations of earlier styles."

"The question of what paintings looked like when they were made is more easily asked than answered.  Luckily we have additional evidence in images that neither fade nor change – I mean particularly the works of graphic art.  Some of Rembrandt's prints, I believe, provide an astounding object lesson in reliance on dark tones and subdued contrasts.  Is it an accident that there are fewer print lovers now than there ever were?  Those who got used to the sound of the concert grand find it difficult to adjust their ears to the harpsichord."

– E.H. Gombrich, from Art and Illusion: a Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, originally delivered as the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta
Standing model posed against a tree
ca. 1715-20
drawing
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francesco del Pedro after Jacopo Tintoretto
Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne
ca. 1790
etching, engraving
Philadelphia Museum of Art

follower of Giovanni Battista Franco after a medal by Danese Cattaneo
Portrait of Cardinal Pietro Bembo
ca. 1560-61
engraving
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Paulus Moreelse
Two young women dancing with Cupid
1612
chiaroscuro woodcut
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

after Giuseppe Salviati
Warrior and Three Women attending a Dying Woman
ca. 1550-75
drawing
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Simone Cantarini
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1639
etching
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Johannes van Somer after Karel Dujardin
Four Figures gathered among Tombs (The Soldier's Tale)
ca. 1670-80
mezzotint
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edgar Degas
Marguerite De Gas, the artist's sister
ca. 1860-62
etching
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jean-Léon Gérôme
Fallen Gladiator
ca. 1870
drawing
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

attributed to Giuseppe Marchesi
Holy Family with St Anne and the infant St John the Baptist
before 1771
drawing
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston