Showing posts with label casts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label casts. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 8, 2026

Lord Arundel's Collections

Ancient Greek Culture
Head of a Female Figure
2nd century BC
limestone
(discovered at the former site of Arundel House)
British Museum

Roman Empire
Altar Fragment with Married Couple
 AD 100-130
marble
(discovered at the former site of Arundel House)
British Museum

The two battered fragments of Roman sculpture above (only deemed worthy of "reference photos" taken with a crude flash and out of focus) were discovered on separate occasions in the nineteenth century at or near the riverside site where Arundel House had long since been demolished.  Receiving the pieces, officials at the British Museum were not slow to recall the famous collection of antiquities on display in Lord Arundel's gardens two hundred years earlier.  Stories are legion of the indifference of the later Howards to the gloomy lumps of stone left untended at the time of the Civil War, so the level of neglect required to see them reburied in the earth or submerged under water was not inconceivable.  Still, there is no solid evidence that either or both of these pieces did not arrive in London by other means.   

Ancient Greek Culture
Head of Homerus
(later known as the Arundel Sophocles)
2nd century BC
bronze
(formerly in the Arundel Collection)
British Museum

Ancient Greek Culture
Head of Homerus
(later known as the Arundel Sophocles)
19th century
plaster cast
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Johann Heinrich Lips
Head of Homerus
(later known as the Arundel Sophocles)
1775
etching
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Jean Baron after Thomas Wood
Head of Homerus
(later known as the Arundel Sophocles)
ca. 1790-1810
etching
British Museum

Jean Baron
Head of Homerus
(later known as the Arundel Sophocles)
ca. 1790-1810
etching
British Museum

Anonymous Sculptor
King Henry VIII
ca. 1630-40
limestone
(copy commissioned by Arundel)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Egidio Moretti
An Orator
1614
marble
(commissioned by Arundel in Rome)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Egidio Moretti
A Senator
1614
marble
(commissioned by Arundel in Rome)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Again, in the case of the two statues above, a sub-standard level of museum photography indicates a correspondingly low status among museum professionals regarding these generic imitation-antiquities commissioned by Lord Arundel in Rome.  Egidio Moretti, the artist, was a low-end restorer with no reputation for independent work.  Better artists were certainly active in Rome at this time, but a foreign heretic like Arundel, even though a nobleman of political significance, could not obtain access to sculptors already committed to princes, cardinals, the emperor and the pope.      

Egidio Moretti
Armed Man
1614
marble
(commissioned by Arundel in Rome)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Egidio Moretti
Armed Man
1614
marble
(commissioned by Arundel in Rome)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Ancient Greek Culture
Torso of a Youth
5th century BC
marble
(formerly in the Arundel Collection)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Ancient Greek Culture
Metrographical Relief
460-450 BC
marble
(formerly in the Arundel Collection)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

" . . . the foot in relief measures 29.42 centimeters, while the proportional foot of the four-cubit measurement represented by the outstretched arms is 34.33 centimeters, a 7 to 6 ratio with the shorter foot."  

Roman Empire
Sphinx
1st-3rd century AD
marble
(formerly in the Arundel Collection)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Daniel Mytens
Portrait of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
1630
oil on panel
Temple Newsam House, Leeds
 

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Equine Participation

Aaron Bohrod
Four Horsemen
1974
oil on panel
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin


Marc Chagall
Le Cavalier
1966
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Alen MacWeeney
Horsewoman, Ireland
1965
gelatin silver print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Gordon Parks
Racetrack in Paris
1964
dye imbibition print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Walter Hege
Parthenon, West Frieze, Horsebreaker
ca. 1928-29
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean-Léon Gérôme
Boy riding Horse
before 1904
drawing
British Museum

Albert Pinkham Ryder
The Racetrack
ca. 1896
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Paul Gauguin
In the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse
1891
oil on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Gustave Surand
St George and the Dragon
1888
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Constantin Guys
Sketch of Horsewoman
ca. 1842-48
watercolor on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Anonymous Italian Sculptor
Horse of San Marco
ca. 1816-17
plaster cast
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Abraham Pietersz van Kalraet
Horses and Cattle in a Landscape
ca. 1680-1700
oil on panel
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, West Midlands

Simone Cantarini (il Pesarese)
Homage to Scipione Borghese
ca. 1633
etching
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Anthony van Dyck
Equestrian Portrait of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
ca. 1620
oil on canvas
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Severo da Ravenna
Child on Rearing Horse
before 1563
(marble and gilt-bronze mount added in France ca. 1760)
bronze
Musée du Louvre

Andrea del Verrocchio
Study of one of the Bronze Horses of San Marco
before 1488
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Roman Empire
Man restraining Horse
1st century AD
vessel fragment of cast cameo glass
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

    Renaissance cabinets of curiosity typically contained both natural and man-made wonders.  There was debate among contemporary scholars and collectors over the origin of what are now known as prehistoric stone tools (such as flint hand axes) which had found their way into these gentlemanly accumulations.  Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), the first professor of natural sciences at the University of Bologna, favored a "natural" explanation, holding that the shaped flints had fallen out of the sky.  They existed, he explained, "due to an admixture of a certain exhalation of thunder and lightning with metallic matter, chiefly in dark clouds, which is coagulated by the circumfused moisture and conglutinated into a mass (like flour and water) and subsequently indurated by heat, like a brick."  

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Adolph Menzel

Adolph Menzel
Man fallen out of Bed
ca. 1843
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Man fallen out of Bed
ca. 1843
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Unmade Bed
ca. 1846
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Cast Collection, Altes Museum, Berlin
1848
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
The 1000-year-old Linden Tree at Lorch Abbey
ca. 1860
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Portrait Studies of Dr van Zander and Graf zu Dohna-Schlodien
1863
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Moritzhof Garden Restaurant
1864
watercolor and gouache on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Seated Officer in Historic Garb
ca. 1870
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
The Barberini Faun (in Munich)
1874
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Model in Renaissance Clothing
ca. 1875
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Models in Renaissance Clothing
ca. 1875
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Judge Walther Enters
(illustration to The Broken Jug by Heinrich von Kleist)
1877
wood-engraving
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Madonna in the Theatine Church in Munich
ca. 1880
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Market Umbrellas in Piazza delle Erbe, Verona
ca. 1881-83
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolph Menzel
Figure Study for Neptune
1888
drawing
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Adolph Menzel
Entrance Steps, Maria Magdalenen Kirche, Karlsbad
1894
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

We have seen before that science is always a double-edged weapon to defend or attack any artistic procedure.  It can probe a little into the mysteries of vision; it cannot tell the artist what conclusions to draw from his findings.  And so the observable fact that looking at the elements in our field of vision will result in a picture which will not create an illusion can be adduced to prove that traditional methods are false or, conversely, that they are indispensable. 

We have no right to assume that the upholders of the academic tradition were ignorant of this dilemma.  It is formulated quite explicitly in the charter of academic theory, Idée de la perfection de la peinture by Roland Fréart de Chambray, one of the patrons of Poussin, published in Le Mans in 1662: "Whenever the painter claims that he imitates things as he sees them he is sure to see them wrongly.  He will represent them according to his faulty imagination and produce a bad painting.  Before he takes up his pencil or brush he must therefore adjust his eye to reasoning according to the principles of art which teach how to see things not only as they are in themselves but also how they should be represented.  For it would often be a grave mistake to paint them exactly as the eye sees them, however much this may look like a paradox."  

It is this paradox, I believe, which accounts for the fact that illusionist art grew out of a long tradition and that it collapsed as soon as the value of this tradition was questioned by those who relied on the innocent eye.  . . .  In fact, the achievement of the innocent eye, what modern authorities call "stimulus concentration," turned out to be not only psychologically difficult but logically impossible.  The stimulus, as we know, is of infinite ambiguity, and ambiguity as such, to return to the theme song of this book, cannot be seen – it can only be inferred by trying different readings that fit the same configuration.  I believe, indeed, that the artist's gift is of this order.  He is the man who has learned to look critically, to probe his perceptions by trying alternative interpretations both in play and in earnest.  Long before painting achieved the means of illusion, man was aware of ambiguities in the visual field and had learned to describe them in language.  Similes, metaphors, the stuff of poetry no less than of myth, testify to the powers of the creative mind to create and dissolve new classifications. 

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)

Groups

George Segal
Rush Hour
1983
bronze
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri


Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi)
Abduction of the Sabine Women
ca. 1505
oil on panel
Palazzo Barberini, Rome

Alex Webb
Wall Painting
(series, Mexican Border)
1978
gelatin silver print
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Jon Serl
Texas Scene
1975
oil on board
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Gustavo Simoni
Reception at the Prefecture
ca. 1902
ink and wash on paper
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Arthur Segal
Untitled
1972
woodcut
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Caroline Walker
Theatre
2021
oil on linen
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Francesco Allegrini
Cavalry Skirmish
before 1663
drawing
British Museum

Ivan Shagin
The Sport Parade, Moscow, Red Square
1932
gelatin silver print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation)

Miron Sokole
Soldiers resting, Pacific Theater
before 1985
gouache on board
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Thomas Struth
Musée d'Orsay 1, Paris
1989
C-print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Ansel Adams
Store Room, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco
ca. 1933
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Gaspare Venturini
Allegory of the House of Este
1592-93
oil on canvas
Galleria Estense, Modena

John Sloan
Yeats at Petitpas
(Irish painter John Butler Yeats in New York with Ashcan School painters)
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Underwood and Underwood (New York)
The Famous Monk Gregory Rasputin
ca. 1916
gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Jean Alaux
Nicolas Poussin presented to Louis XIII by Cardinal Richelieu
1832
oil on plaster (mural)
Musée du Louvre

Herbert Singleton
Glad You Dead You Rascal You
ca. 1990
painted cypress relief
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

from Hundred-Gated Thebes

Where is now the loud acclaim?
Where the trample and the roll,
Shaking staid Earth like a mole?
Sunk to a rush's sigh! – Farewell,
Thou bleached wilderness o'erblown
By treeless winds, unscythable
Sandbanks, with peeping rocks bestrown,
That for thy barrenness seem'st to be
The bed of some retreated sea!

– George Darley (1835)