Significant Expressions

Chinese Culture
Figure of Woman with Mirror
AD 700-750
glazed earthenware
Art Institute of Chicago

Chinese Culture
Three Gentlemen
ca. 1550-1700
carved wood with traces of paint
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Immortals collecting Mountain Fungus
18th century
lapis lazuli
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Calligraphic Tile
1822
porcelain
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Figure of Musician
AD 700-750
glazed earthenware
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Figure of Musician
AD 700-750
glazed earthenware
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Figure of Musician
AD 700-750
glazed earthenware
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Libation Cup
(lotus blossom with swarming dragons)
18th century
rhinoceros horn
Newport Mansions Preservation Society, Rhode Island

Chinese Culture
Falcon
18th century
glazed earthenware
Newport Mansions Preservation Society, Rhode Island

Chinese Culture
Tomb Guardian
AD 690-750
painted and glazed earthenware
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Spirit Guardian
AD 500-525
painted earthenware
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Spirit Guardian
AD 618-907
painted earthenware
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Snuff Bottle
19th century
turquoise
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Ornament
(grave goods)
4700-2900 BC
nephrite
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Roof Ornament
16th century
glazed stoneware
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Chinese Culture
Tripod
2500-2000 BC
earthenware
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Parable of Flight

A flock of birds leaving the side of the mountain.

Black against the spring evening, bronze in early summer,

rising over blank lake water.

Why is the young man disturbed suddenly,

his attention slipping from his companion?

His heart is no longer wholly divided; he's trying to think

how to say this compassionately.

Now we hear the voices of the others, moving through the library

toward the veranda, the summer porch; we see them

taking their usual places on the various hammocks and chairs,

the white wood chairs of the old house, rearranging

the striped cushions.

Does it matter where the birds go? Does it even matter

what species they are?

They leave here, that's the point, 

first their bodies, then their sad cries.

And from that moment, cease to exist for us.

You must learn to think of our passion that way.

Each kiss was real, then

each kiss left the face of the earth.

– Louise Glück (1996)

Quattrocento Tempera Painting on Vellum and Wood

Anonymous Florentine Artist
Scholar with Book
(initial R in manuscript of the Epistole of Leonardo Bruni)
15th century
tempera on vellum
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence

Antonio di Nicolò di Lorenzo
Initial N applied to printed Commentary on Dante
1481
tempera on vellum
Accademia della Crusca, Florence

Antonio di Nicolò di Lorenzo
Initial P applied to printed Commentary on Dante
1481
tempera on vellum
Accademia della Crusca, Florence

Anonymous Italian Artist
Ideal City
ca. 1480
tempera on panel
Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino

Anonymous Italian Artist
Ideal City (detail)
ca. 1480
tempera on panel
Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino

Anonymous Italian Artist
Ideal City (detail)
ca. 1480
tempera on panel
Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino

Andrea da Murano
St John the Evangelist
mourning the Dead Christ
ca. 1490
tempera on panel
Detroit Institute of Arts

Filippo Lippi
St Damian
(detail of Virgin and Child enthroned with Saints) 
ca. 1445
tempera on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Tempera – In the history of art, the word is normally used to denote egg tempera, the type of paint favoured for Italian panel painting until the early 16th century; it consists of pigments ground in water mixed with egg yolk or whole egg.  The resulting paint is opaque and eventually dries to a waterproof film with a velvety sheen, the first stage in its drying being the rapid evaporation of the water, followed by the slow and gradual hardening of the egg proteins.  These properties mean that, unlike oil paint, tempera can neither be applied in translucent glazes, nor thickly applied with textured impasto, nor blended  and worked when wet, because the partially set paint will redissolve and peel away from the surface.  The necessary convention of tempera painting is thus to build up the paint film gradually with repeated lightly-touched hatchings or stipplings, not unlike those of drawing.  Once mixed with the egg the paint will begin to dry in its dish or pot; in order to avoid wastage of sometimes expensive materials, the amount of pigment needed had to be assessed accurately before the paint was made.  It seems likely therefore that in painting a panel the artist may have moved from colour to colour rather than concentrating on a single figure or scene – that is, painted all the blues, say, at one time across the whole panel.  (In workshop practice someone else, with a paint pot of a different colour, could then move in to paint, say, all the vermilion reds.)  Tonal  modelling of drapery also required the most meticulous planning.  Since colours could not be blended and modelled on the surface of the painting, each tone from shadow to highlight had to be mixed and prepared in advance.  In practice this meant that the pigment was at its purest and most saturated in the shadows; for the highlights it was mixed with a high proportion of white.  A mid-tone was made by mixing equal amounts of the colour prepared for the shadows with that for the highlights; further intermediary tones could then be mixed from these three, and the pre-mixed shades would be systematically applied, beginning with the shadows and working through to the highlights, the initially sharp transitions softened by the intermeshing of the hatched brushstrokes.  An alternative method, called cangiante (changeant in French), used different hues, such as, say, a dark red and a light yellow, for shadows and highlights, imitating the appearance of shot silk woven with yarns of different colours in the warp and weft.  It is easy to see why the laborious methods of tempera panel painting and fresco, both requiring elaborate planning at an early stage and militating against spontaneous revisions on the surface of the paint, fostered the rise of disegno in its practical sense of 'drawing' and its philosophical extensions, so crucial in the evolution of Italian art.

– The Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists by Erika Langmuir and Norbert Lynton (2000)

Girolamo Mocetto
Portrait of a Boy
ca. 1490
tempera on panel
Palazzo dei Musei, Modena

Pisanello
Madonna of the Quail
ca. 1420
tempera on panel
Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona

Carlo Crivelli
Madonna della Passione
ca. 1460
tempera on panel
Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona

Carlo Crivelli
Madonna della Passione (detail)
(Cherubs making Music)
ca. 1460
tempera on panel
Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona

Carlo Crivelli
Madonna della Passione (detail)
(Cherubs with Instruments of the Passion)
ca. 1460
tempera on panel
Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona

Carlo Crivelli
Madonna della Passione (detail)
(Cherubs with Instruments of the Passion)
ca. 1460
tempera on panel
Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona

Carlo Crivelli
The Crucifixion
ca. 1487
tempera on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Old World Master Drawings across 300 Years

Eustache Le Sueur
Head of a woman
ca. 1646-49
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean Joseph Bernard
Marie Antoinette
1787
drawing
British Museum

Jean Joseph Bernard
Louis XVI
1786
drawing
British Museum

"Jean Joseph Bernard began his career as writing-master at the court of the cultivated Stanislas, exiled King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lorraine.  After Stanislas's death in 1766, Bernard moved to Paris, where he developed a form of calligraphic portraiture which rapidly brought him acclaim among the French elite.  In around 1778 he was invited to make portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  He produced numerous versions of these portraits during the next ten years to satisfy popular demand.  The present sheets are among the later examples of these portraits.  . . .  Although his pen-portraits seem to have been better known than his pure calligraphy, Bernard always seems to have regarded himself as a writing-master.  He was one of the founding members of the Bureau académique d'écriture in 1779, and, after the French Revolution, he found an appointment as writing-master to the pages of the Imperial Court.  His pen-portraits, however, continued to be popular."

– curator's notes from the British Museum

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Study of a ruined building
(probably a demolition-site in London)
ca. 1792
drawing
Tate Gallery

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Ruined building at Albano
(from an album of copies of Italian views)
ca. 1794-98
drawing
Tate Gallery

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Lecture Diagram - Ruined Amphitheatre
ca. 1810
drawing
Tate Gallery

"Made by Turner for his lectures as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, this representation of a ruined amphitheatre is associated by Maurice Davies with a larger group of diagrams illustrating the production of shadows.  Peter Bower writes that the sheet is Double Elephant size Whatman paper made by William Balston at Springfield Mill, Maidstone, Kent."  

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

Thomas Rowlandson
Christie's Auction-Rooms, Pall Mall
ca. 1808
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Heneage Finch
Ruined Classical Tomb under Trees
before 1812
drawing
Tate Gallery

John Hayter
Mrs Siddons (in old age)
1826
drawing
British Museum

Thomas Rowlandson
Classical Figures
before 1827
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Alessandro Sanquirico
Coronation of the King of Lombardy-Veneto (Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria) in the Cathedral of Milan
1838
drawing
National Gallery of Canada

Frederick Walker
The Moray Minstrels
1865
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"This design for a printed invitation was created for the well-to-do silk merchant Arthur James Lewis, who often welcomed male friends to Moray Lodge, his bachelor establishment on Campden Hill, overlooking London's Holland Park.  Once a month between January and March, singers would gather on a Saturday evening at 8:30 pm to perform modern and ancient works; and an oyster supper was served at eleven.  Lewis was an amateur artist who joined the Junior Etching Club and welcomed London artists, such as Whistler, to his home.  The invitation captures the jolly informality of  Lewis's entertaining."

– curator's notes from the Metropolitan Museum

Jacobus van Looy
Detail of Gondolier (after a painting by Titian)
before 1930
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

John Craxton
Llanthony Abbey
1942
drawing
Tate Gallery

"This drawing is of the medieval Llanthony Abbey which stands in an isolated position on the bottom of a steep valley in the Black Mountains, South Wales.  Craxton visited the abbey in 1942 with the graphic designer E.Q. Nicholson.  Although he was surprised to find someone living there, in a house attached to the south side of the building, Craxton was pleased to see that the abbey itself "was wonderfully untouched by the ruinous and dead hand of the then Office of Works."  Describing the abbey as a "living ruin," he recalled, "crows and jackdaws were nesting in the broken gothic windows, ivy everywhere."  Although there are no birds or other animals in this drawing, the buildings and vegetation are given a sense of life by Craxton's anthropomorphic treatment of the uprooted tree, and the vigorous intensity of his technique.  . . .  The writhing, menacing vegetation that frames the ruined abbey was already a standard feature in picturesque landscapes and writing of the Romantic period around 1800.  . . .  The linear technique and dramatic contrasts of light and shade, foreground and background are reminiscent of Samuel Palmer's pastoral scenes.  This combination of human emotion and nature lies at the heart of the British Neo-Romantic movement.  The sense of an endangered earthly paradise had considerable resonance in wartime Britain.  Craxton can be included among a number of artists, including Keith Vaughan, Graham Sutherland, and John Minton, who were concerned with what David Mellor described as, "the body and sexuality; nostalgia and anxiety; myth-making; organic fantasies; the threat of war and extinction." 

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

Inscribed Ceramics from Ancient China

Ru stoneware bowl
opaque lavender-blue celadon glaze with copper rim
Northern Song Dynasty (1086-1125)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Ru stoneware bowl
opaque lavender-blue celadon glaze with copper rim
Northern Song Dynast (1086-1125)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

"Jun wares were all produced at the Xiuneisi. Many dishes have survived but bowls are difficult to find. In the palace alone are stored well-nigh a hundred dishes. Yet bowls are as rare as stars in the morning. What is there, forsooth, for which a cause cannot be found? Large bowls are difficult to preserve, small dishes easy. In this I find a moral and a warning. The greater the object, the heavier the task of its care. Composed by the Qianlong emperor in the cyclical year bingwu [AD 1786]."

The Qianlong emperor composed this poem in eight lines of seven characters each. It is faintly visible in the photograph immediately above on the inside of the bowl, where the poem was inscribed by Imperial Order in the year 1786. At that time the bowl itself was already around 700 years old and had evidently remained inside the Forbidden City for the entire span of its existence. It has been on display in London since the 1930s and can now be seen inside a special Chinese Ceramics gallery opened in 2009 at the British Museum to accommodate the famous Percival David Collection.

The ink-stone below from the same source has a different sort of inscription, cut into the clay before glazing and firing. It reads, "Beautifully made in mid-autumn of the third lunar year of Yuan Fu [AD 1100]"

Yue stoneware ink-stone
rectangular straight-sided vessel with thick gray-green glaze
Northern Song Dynasty (1100)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Another poem by the 18th-century Qianlong emperor was inscribed by his order on the small round base of the bowl below. His text describes the extremely subtle, incised design of phoenixes and peony scrolls on the bowl's interior.  "Amid accumulated pollen and massed flowers the two phoenixes droop their wings. The color is confined to that prized by the Yin dynasty, simple and unadorned. It is not till we come down to the Zhu dynasty and Xuande and Chenghua that we get elaborate painting and employment of five colors. Composed by the Qianlong emperor in the Spring of the dingyou year [AD 1777]."  

Ding stoneware bowl
white clay with transparent glaze and copper rim
Northern Song Dynasty (12th century)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Ding stoneware bowl (interior)
white clay with transparent glaze and copper rim
Northern Song Dynasty (12th century)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Ding stoneware bowl (bottom)
white clay with transparent glaze and copper rim
Northern Song Dynasty (12th century)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Ding stoneware bowl (bottom, inscription detail)
white clay with transparent glaze and copper rim
Northern Song Dynasty (12th century)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

The vessel below was of a common type used in ancient Chinese burial practices to store supplies for those in the afterlife. Less commonly, the exact year of its creation and the name of its maker are documented. Incised vertical lines divide the sides into panels. Within these panels, the artist has incised a text: "With the prayer that this vessel will hold fragrant wine for hundreds and thousands of years; that I may have a thousand sons and ten thousand grandsons; that they be wealthy and live long lives; that they may enjoy good fortune and happiness; on the fifteenth day of the ninth month of leap year in the third year of the Yuanfeng period [AD 1080], I have fired this vessel, signed by Liang Yinghcheng."

Longquan stoneware funerary urn
ovoid vessel, incised, with celadon glaze
Northern Song Dynasty (1080)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Longquan stoneware funerary urn
detail of incised inscription
Northern Song Dynasty (1080)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

The Qianlong emperor also left a poetic appreciation of the head-rest below. His text is inscribed in characters of gold on the unglazed bottom surface: "Its color is the blue of sky after rain, just as it was described by the ancient Ba jian. The shape of the Ruyi pillow gives much pleasure whether one is asleep or awake. There will always be much discussion of a work of art, but the thing one must guard against is the temptation to sleep late. Pre-eminently the pillow demonstrates the genius of the potter in producing such an artistic design and in controlling the firing so successfully. Composed by the Qianlong emperor in the cyclical year xinchou [AD 1781]."

Jun stoneware head-rest
Ruyi-cloud shape, celadon glaze
Northern Song Dynasty (1000-1127)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Jun stoneware head-rest
unglazed bottom surface, inscribed in gold
Northern Song Dynasty (1000-1127)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

The simple stoneware jar below is another extremely old piece with an exact date and named creator, as written in brown on the side of the jar underneath the green-brown glaze: "In the third year of the Changqing period [AD 823] the Buddhist believer Bo Sidu respectfully made this vessel as an offering to be placed before the Great Buddha."  

Stoneware jar
underglaze painting of tiger and clouds
Tang Dynasty (823)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Stoneware jar
underglaze inscription in brown
Tang Dynasty (823)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

The final item is also the most recent, a blue-and-white porcelain ink-stone from the 17th century with a long underglaze inscription in cobalt blue: "I take home a stone, but it is like I have the entire ocean tucked into my sleeve; it has served me as an ink stone for a thousand years; transformed in the potter's kiln, it is round and bright like the moon. In it I put my ink and drive my brush, the task is effortless and the accomplishment doubled; having made this literary encounter, I achieve great ease. Autumn of the xinhai year [AD 1671] inscribed by the scholar Yi'an [pseudonym of Xiang Wenhuan]."

Circular porcelain ink-stone
underglaze inscription in cobalt-blue
Qing Dynasty (1671)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum