Showing posts with label pre-Raphaelites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pre-Raphaelites. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Men Scrutinizing Female Heads - Drawings - II

Alfred George Stevens
Head of a Woman
ca. 1863
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Head of a Woman
ca. 1865
drawing
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Head of a Young Woman
ca. 1870
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Alphonse Legros
Head of a Woman
1879
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Frederick Sandys
Head of a Woman
ca. 1880
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

John Singer Sargent
Head of a Young Woman
ca. 1880
drawing
Yale University Art Gallery

Edward Burne-Jones
Head of a Woman
1889
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Théophile Alexandre Steinlen
Head of a Woman
ca. 1890
drawing
Princeton University Art Museum

Jean-Jacques Henner
Head of a Woman
1901
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Joan González
Face of a Woman
ca. 1902
drawing
Tate Gallery

Joseph Southall
Head of a Woman
1904
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Augustus John
Head of a Woman
ca. 1905
drawing
Yale Center for British Art

Pablo Picasso
Head of a Woman (Fernande Olivier)
1906-1907
drawing
Yale University Art Gallery

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Head of a Woman
ca. 1910
drawing
Yale Center for British Art

Henry Lamb
Portrait of Violet Holloway
ca. 1910
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

James Havard Thomas
Head of Alma Wertheimer
ca. 1910
drawing
Tate Gallery

Edmund Joseph Sullivan
The Sibyl
ca. 1914
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

James Cowie
Head of a Woman
ca. 1930
drawing
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

For Eurydice: A Song of Ascent

The songs I sang in Hell
Recalled for each his fate,
Not metaphysical freight
But the mechanical –
Beginning, middle and end
Of each eternal chore –
Till every shade deplore
Having to recontend.

So fierce those cries for change
That Hades ordered us
To leave his realm, and thus
We now approach the strange
World of the living, where
All seek stability
Through blind activity,
And comfort through despair.

– David Galler (1974)

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Maternal Exhibitions

Samuel Baruch Halle
"Good Morning, Mamma" 
(Mother and Child caressing)

1859
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

George Elgar Hicks
Mother and Child
1873
oil on board (sketch)
Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire

George Elgar Hicks
Mother and Child
1873
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery

Sassoferrato (Giovanni Battista Salvi)
Virgin and sleeping Christ Child
ca. 1650-60
oil on canvas
Galleria Estense, Modena

Giovanni Francesco Maineri
Holy Family
ca. 1500
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

attributed to Nanni di Banco
Virgin and Child
ca. 1405-1410
painted stucco
Bode Museum, Berlin

Anonymous Neapolitan Artist
Adoration of the Shepherds
ca. 1630-40
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Girlhood of Mary Virgin
(supervised by her mother, St Anne)
1848-49
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

Gianfrancesco Modigliani
Birth of the Virgin
ca. 1590-1600
oil on canvas
Musei San Domenico,
Chiesa di San Giacomo Apostolo, Forlì

Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli
Virgin and Child in a Landscape
ca. 1536-37
oil on panel
Harvard Art Museums

Giuseppe Nicola Nasini
The Finding of Moses
ca. 1690-1700
oil on canvas
Palazzo Pretorio, Prato

attributed to Bernardino da Asola
Virgin and Child
ca. 1525-35
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Bernardino Luini
Virgin and Sleeping Child with Angels
ca. 1510
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
before 1765
oil on paper
Musée du Louvre

Francesco Granacci
Virgin and Child (detail)
ca. 1520
oil on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller
The Old Violinist
1828
watercolor and gouache on paper
Musée du Louvre

"If grace is born out of the harmony between the feelings of the soul and the actions of the body, the painter, in order to represent it, must learn through observation and meditation to recognize this correspondence between feeling and movement.  . . .  The female sex, suppler in its movements, more sensitive in its affections, where the desire to please arises as though of its own accord, as part of nature's great system, renders beauty more interesting, and when it escapes artifice and affectation, conveys grace in the most comely manner that it is given to us to imagine.  . . .  In childhood and youth, the soul acts in a free and easy manner on all forms of expression.  The child's movements are simple, and his limbs flexible and supple.  A pleasing unity and honesty results from this.  Consequently, childhood and youth are the age of grace.  Flexibility and suppleness are essential requirements for grace; in maturity they begin to fade, and in old age they are lost altogether."

– Claude-Henri Watelet and Pierre-Charles Lévesque, from Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure (1792), translated by Jonathan Murphy (2000)  

Saturday, March 4, 2023

Intimate Interiors

Federico Zandomeneghi
The Awakening
1895
oil on canvas
Palazzo Ducale, Mantua

Carel Weight
Hamlet and his Mother
(Act III scene 4)
ca. 1960
oil on board
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust,
Stratford-upon-Avon

William Somerville Shanks
A Question of Colour
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
The Hepworth, Wakefield, Yorkshire

Carl Seiler
Conversation Piece
ca. 1890
oil on panel
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Carl Seiler
Count Brühl's Goat
1892
oil on panel
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Annunciation
(Ecce Ancilla Domini!)
ca. 1849-50
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

Pasquale Ottino
Supper at Emmaus
ca. 1610-20
oil on canvas
Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona

Pietro Longhi
The Alchemist
1757
oil on canvas
Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice

Alphonse Legros
Three Men around a Table
before 1911
drawing
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Leo von König
At the Breakfast Table
1907
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Leandro Ramón Garrido
Woman in a Kitchen
ca. 1900
oil on canvas
Pannett Art Gallery, Whitby, Yorkshire

Henry Fuseli
Blind Milton dictating to his Daughter
1794
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Giovanni Andrea de Ferrari
Esau and Jacob
before 1669
oil on canvas
Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti, Genoa

Donato Creti
St Peter with an Angel
visiting St Agatha in Prison

before 1749
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Frederic William Burton
Hellelil and Hildebrand:
The Meeting on the Turret Stairs

(scene from a medieval Danish ballad)
1864
watercolor and gouache on paper
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Anonymous French Artist
Christ and Nicodemus by Candlelight
18th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

"Historical painters, attaching more importance to the attitudes and physiognomy of their figures than to the other parts of their composition, attend less to small details, the faithful imitation of which is the essential merit of the painter of interiors.  Besides, the historical painter is never in a position to see the whole of the scene he would represent, while the painter of interiors, having constantly his model before him, sees it completely, as he imitates it upon the canvas.  Hence, therefore, in every small composition the colours, as well as the objects represented, must be distributed with a kind of symmetry, so as to avoid being what I can best express by the term spotty.  In fact, for want of a good distribution of objects, the canvas will not be filled in some parts, or, if it is, there will be, in many places, evident confusion; so also if the colours be not properly distributed, the picture will be spotty, because they are too far isolated from the others." 

– Eugène Chevreul, from The Laws of Contrast of Colour: and Their Application to the Arts (1839), translated by John Spanton (1859)