Aluminum

Kind of Red

The view inside Timothy Taylor Gallery in London, showing new compositions on aluminum by long-established Irish abstract painter Sean Scully. Pigments drip into blank borders (not an effect commonly seen before in the work of this artist). The shapes themselves are familiar, but realized now with increasingly kinetic brushwork.

Landline Grey Grey

Landline Grey

Landline Blue

Modern & Unmodern

Bill Blass

When I was searching back issues of shelter magazines online for pictures of bookshelves, I inevitably also found many interesting rooms that had few books or no books in them. This is that spillover group of designer spaces that did not quite qualify for the bookshelves group but all the same struck me as too alluring in one way or another to ignore.

Campion Platt

Coco Rocha

David Kleinberg

Fredric Mechiche

Garagnani & Poccianti

James Huniford

Jean-Paul Beaujard

Jorge Elias

Lars Bolander

Michael Corengel

Nancy Lancaster

Reed Krakoff

Reed Krakoff

Robert Couturier

Sig Bergamin

Steven Volpe

Suzanne Kasler

Stately English Home

Vicente Wolf

Daniel Chester French

The Metropolitan Museum designates Daniel Chester French "the leading American monumental sculptor in the early twentieth century." Born in 1850, he belonged to the large and busy generation that brought Beaux Arts style from Europe to the United States. By 1897 French was successful enough to build himself an estate called Chesterwood near Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It included a studio and gardens now preserved as a museum.

Images of surviving public works by Daniel Chester French (below) from the Carol M. Highsmith archive at the Library of Congress.

The Progress of the State, gilded quadriga, Minnesota State Capitol  

The Republic, gilded replica of colossal statue for World Columbian Exposition, Chicago

Marble fountain, Dupont Circle, Washington DC

Marble fountain, Dupont Circle, Washington DC

Monument, Old North Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts

America, marble statue, U.S. Custom House, New York

Africa, marble statue, U.S. Custom House, New York

Alma Mater, bronze statue, Columbia University

History, marble statue, Library of Congress

Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC

FBJ

Future photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston was born during the American Civil War. She grew up near Washington DC, the only child of wealthy parents. In the early 1880s Johnston studied art in Paris, then at the Art Students' League in New York (below).

Back in DC, she began training as a photographer in 1888. An album of early work survives (above) at the Library of Congress– Pinkey's Blue Book, or, The Indigo Agonies of a Photographic Amateur.

By the 1890s Johnston had a proper photographic studio in Washington DC.

Above, the DC studio (with conspicuous syklight) – an exterior view from the back garden.

Below, Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1896 inside the studio space – a famous "Bohemian" pose (legs crossed, petticoats exposed, holding a cigarette in one hand and a beer stein in the other) reproduced widely in later years as an icon of early feminist spirit.

Johnston was 32 years old in 1896 when she posed for the beer stein picture – and for the sepia portrait in male drag (above) with mustache, three-piece suit, and bicycle. At this period she was making cyanotypes like those below of the Potomac River and of a naked young man playing the flute among rocks along the shore.

Other surviving work from the apprentice years (below) includes a partly hand-colored view of the White House dated 1897, and an outdoor panorama of female dancers seemingly paying homage to Isadora Duncan.

The garden work and architectural photography that dominated Frances Benjamin Johnston's mature career did not properly begin until the years of the Great War, when she reached middle age. The photo-portrait below, taken in 1938, shows the established career woman and artist engulfed in foliage and roses.