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Art

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881)

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Le déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party) wowed the critics at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882 and remains one of the greats of Impressionism. It depicts a convivial bunch of diners enjoying a summertime meal alfresco at the Maison Fournaise, overlooking the Seine on the Île de Chatou, just west of Paris. This is the heart of Impressionist leisure land, and to this day the restaurant exists, on what is now dubbed L’île des Impressionnistes.

The diners are all friends or colleagues of Renoir. In the foreground, seated lower-right, is his fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte, who is gazing at Renoir’s future wife, seamstress Aline Charigot, sitting opposite and cooing at her dog. Next to Caillebotte is actress Angèle Legault and, standing above her, Italian journalist Adrien Maggiolo. At the back, wearing a top hat, art historian and collector Charles Ephrussi speaks with poet and critic, Jules Laforgue.

Leaning against the railing are Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise, the daughter of the restaurant’s proprietor, and her brother, Alphonse Fournaise Jr, who handled the boat rentals. Rowing was the main attraction at Chatou, and Renoir’s diners wear the straw hats and blue dresses that were the fashionable boating attire of middle-class Parisian daytrippers.

Renoir spent months making numerous changes to his canvas, painting the individual figures when his models were available (there is correspondence from Renoir moaning about models failing to turn up). Nonetheless, Renoir captures the freshness of his vision splendidly, and we can allow ourselves to be fooled that he has spontaneously captured a moment in time. It is a vibrant work of art celebrating good company and good dining, and it certainly gives us the impression of a very pleasant and carefree afternoon.

Details of the party-goers

 

Art

J M W Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (1839)

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J M W Turner is famed for his mastery of light and colour. For him, as for Monet, light was a miraculous phenomenon — it produced colour, it sculpted form and mood and it revealed the beauty of nature. He was also remarkably prolific, leaving some 550 oil paintings and 2,000 watercolours (as well as about 30,000 sketches), so you don’t have to go out of your way in this country to find a Turner. He was a keen traveller, and I love the fact that he came to Yorkshire and painted such familiar landmarks (to us) as Hardraw Force, Malham Cove, and Harewood House. Indeed, the Tate holds six full sketchbooks from Turner’s tour of Yorkshire in 1816.

However, the subject of this blog is set not in Yorkshire but on the Thames river. This painting by Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, on display in the National Gallery, depicts the last journey of the HMS Temeraire. The Temeraire had been a celebrated gunship that had fought valiantly in Lord Nelson’s fleet at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Indeed, prior to that battle, she had been merely the Temeraire; it was afterwards she was honoured with the “Fighting” sobriquet. Thirty three years later, however, decaying and well past her glory days, she was towed up the Thames from Sheerness to be broken up in a Rotherhithe shipyard.

Turner’s painting pays tribute to the Temeraire’s heroic past. The glorious sunset is a fanfare of colour in her honour. Paint is laid on thickly to render the sun’s rays striking the clouds, whilst by contrast, the ship’s rigging is meticulously painted. It can be seen as a symbol of the end of an era, even the decline of Britain’s naval power, with the sun setting on the days of elegant, tall-masted warships. The Temeraire is already phantasmal, behind the more solid form of the squat little steam tug that pulls her along to her fate.

Turner was in his sixties when he painted The Fighting Temeraire; perhaps this was behind his thinking in terms of the end of an era. In any event, the painting is an arresting piece of work and, distinct from Turner’s many strictly-landscape paintings, it tells a story. I love it.

 

Art

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Census at Bethlehem (1566)

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Last Sunday, my family and I attended a Christmas carol service at our local church, resplendent, as every year, with candlelight and seasonal goodwill. As well as the age-old carols that we all know and love (or at least tolerate fondly, after the decades of repetition), there were of course several apposite readings, and it is the one below, from Luke 2:1-5, that inspired the subject of today’s blog.

And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered… So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child.

This of course refers to the census at Bethlehem, and the scene was depicted wonderfully well (albeit set anachronistically and anatopistically in 16th century Flanders) in this 1566 oil painting by one of my favourite artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As is usual with works by this Netherlandish Renaissance master, much pleasure is derived from viewing the piece up close and discovering the multitude of details.

We are looking down on a snow-covered village (and indeed this is one of the first examples of snowy landscape in Western art, the previous winter of 1565 having been, not uncoincidentally, one of the harshest on record). People are going about their daily business: clearing the snow, crossing the frozen pond, warming themselves around a fire. The children are throwing snowballs, skating, sledging, spinning tops. In the right hand foreground, we see a man with a large carpenter’s saw, leading an ox and an ass, on which rides a woman wrapped up tightly against the cold. These are of course none other than Joseph and Mary, who have come to Bethlehem to be enrolled in the universal census ordered by Emperor Augustus.

With a few deft brushstrokes Bruegel brilliantly captures village life, whilst subtly depicting the scene just prior to the nativity (since after registering, there was, of course, no room at the inn). I could spend ages glimpsing new details revealed in Bruegel’s works, and indeed have done on several occasions in various galleries of Europe, where I have usually been left to it, meeting my long-suffering family later in the gift shop! Funnily enough, this piece I have yet to actually see (it’s in Brussels’ Musée des Beaux Arts, which is still only “on the list”).

 

Art

Antonio Canova’s Sculpture of the Three Graces (1817)

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Back in May, my family and I visited the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and enjoyed, amongst other things, its impressive collection of sculptures, including this beautiful piece from the great Italian neoclassical sculptor, Antonio Canova. The Three Graces were daughters of Zeus and companions to the Muses, and were a celebrated subject in classical literature and art. They are Thalia (youth and beauty), Euphrosyne (mirth), and Aglaia (elegance), and the goddesses are depicted huddled together, nude, hair braided and held atop their heads in a knot, the three slender figures melding into one in their embrace.

The sculpture is carved from a single slab of white marble. Canova’s assistants would have roughly hewn out the marble, leaving Canova to perform the final carving and shaping of the stone to highlight the Graces’ soft flesh. It was commissioned by John Russel, 6th Duke of Bedford, who visited Canova at his studio in Rome in 1814. Bedford was captivated by the group of the Three Graces which Canova had carved for the Empress Josephine, the estranged wife of Napoleon Bonaparte (“I frankly declare”, he is reported to have said, “that I have seen nothing in ancient or modern sculpture that has given me more pleasure than this piece of work”). Josephine had died in May of that year, and the Duke offered to buy the sculpture from Canova, but Josephine’s son claimed it (and that version is now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg) so Bedford commissioned a new one.

The completed statue was installed at the Duke’s home, Woburn Abbey. An 1822 catalogue of the sculpture at Woburn summed up the appeal of the work: “in the constrained flexibility with which their arms are entwined round each other; in the perfect symmetry of their limbs, in the delicacy of detail, and exquisiteness of finish, in the feet and hands; in that look of living softness given to the surface of the marble, which looks as if it would yield to the touch…this great sculptor has shown the utmost delicacy and judgement”.

It is indeed remarkable to get “up close and personal” with a great sculpture like this and marvel at the skill and delicacy required to achieve such an exquisite finish from a block of stone. Canova’s other masterpiece, Cupid and Psyche in the Louvre, elicits the same admiration.

 

 

Antonio Canova
Art

Claude Monet exhibits Impression, Sunrise (1874)

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In 1872, Claude Monet visited his hometown of Le Havre in the north west of France and proceeded to paint six canvases depicting the port “during dawn, day, dusk, and dark and from varying viewpoints, some from the water itself and others from a hotel room looking down over the port“. One painting from this series was to become very famous.

Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise) was debuted in April 1874 in Paris at an independent exhibition launched as an alternative to the official Salon de Paris exhibitions of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The exhibition, by a group calling itself the “Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs etc” was led by Monet, along with other such future luminaries as Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Two hundred works were shown and about 4,000 people attended, including, of course, some rather unsympathetic critics.

Monet described how he came up with a title for the painting: “They asked me for a title for the catalogue…it couldn’t really be taken for a view of Le Havre, so I said: ‘Put Impression’“. While this title was apparently chosen in haste for the catalogue, the term “Impressionism” was not new. It had been used for some time to describe the effect of some of the naturalistic paintings emanating from the so-called Barbizon school of painters. However, it was in critic Louis Leroy’s review of the 1874 exhibition, “The Exhibition of the Impressionists”, for the newspaper Le Charivari, that he used “Impressionism” to describe this new style of work displayed, and he said it was typified by Monet’s painting.

This term, then, initially used to both describe and deprecate a movement, was taken up by all parties to describe the style, and Monet’s Impression, Sunrise was thus considered to have encapsulated the start of the movement. The rest, as they say, is history.

 

 

Claude Monet
Art

The Book of Kells (c.800)

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The Book of Kells, held in Dublin’s Trinity College Library, is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament. It was created in a Columban monastery in Ireland around 800 AD, and it’s a masterwork of Western calligraphy. It represents the pinnacle of insular illumination (“insular” deriving from insula, the Latin for “island” and referring to post-Roman art of Britain and Ireland). It is also widely regarded as Ireland’s finest national treasure, and although I haven’t yet made it past the pubs of Dublin to view it, it’s definitely on the list.

The illustrations and ornamentation of the Book of Kells are exquisite. The decoration combines traditional Christian iconography with ornate, swirling motifs. There are figures of humans, animals, mythical beasts, along with Celtic knots and interlacing patterns in vibrant colours, all scribed onto leaves of high-quality calf vellum with iron gall ink (the standard ink used in Europe, made from iron salts and tannic acid extracted from oak galls) and colours derived from a wide range of substances imported from distant lands.

The manuscript takes its name from the Abbey of Kells, in County Meath, which was its home for centuries. Its exact place of origin is uncertain, although it is widely thought to have been started at Iona and then later completed in the scriptorium at Kells itself. Regardless, it’s true to say that the Columban monks responsible for its creation had skills in calligraphy honed to a remarkable degree.

Art

John Thornton’s Great East Window at York Minster (1408)

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The last time my family and I visited York, we wandered outside York Minster but our indigenous frugality (being ourselves of Yorkshire soil) baulked at the then-recently introduced admission fee of £10 to go inside. If you too visit York and find yourself in similar frugal mode, let me advise you to take a hold of yourself, with an optional shake, and remind yourself never to put filthy lucre ahead of artistic splendour. For York Minster, as well as in itself being one of the great gothic cathedrals of northern Europe, and thus replete with the resplendent architectural beauty for which such cathedrals are known, contains also the largest expanse of medieval stained glass in the world, including the subject of today’s blog, the Great East Window.

Some call it England’s Sistine Chapel, and indeed, had it been done in paint, instead of in glass, it might well be considered a rival to Michelangelo’s masterpiece in Rome. However, stained glass has always fallen on the wrong side of that dividing line between fine and applied art, and thus it is seen primarily as a craft. Let’s not fall for that one. The great east window in York Minster is one of the triumphant achievements of the Middle Ages: 1,690sqft of artfully executed stained glass, recounting the story of the world from Creation to Apocalypse.

It was in 1405 that John Thornton of Coventry was commissioned to glaze the east end of the Lady Chapel. A copy of Thornton’s contract for the window survives, specifying that he was to draw all the cartoons, and paint a large number of the individual panels. For all this Thornton was paid a total of £56, and contracted to complete the job inside three years. For doing so, Thornton received a £10 bonus, and proudly put the date of completion – 1408 – at the very apex of the window.

Doubtless Thornton had behind him a team of glaziers, hired locally or brought with him from Coventry, but the painting on the glass would primarily have been his. It was Thornton’s task too to turn the commissioner’s highly theological and precise concept into a work of art. And this he self-evidently did.

While much medieval glass is dominated by reds and blues, John Thornton had a penchant for yellow as his base colour. In addition, the painting in Thornton’s faces had greater realism (and meticulously drawn hair) than his rivals. The typical Thornton face is sensitive, with eyes down-turned, a small mouth and a somewhat prominent nose. What Thornton was pioneering in his glasswork was the European style – new to England – known as International Gothic. It is elegantly stylised work; for sure, the York commissioners were buying cutting edge art, and, of course, good glass can’t be made without a cutting edge.

Art

William Harnett’s The Old Violin (1886)

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William Harnett (1848-1892) was an Irish-American painter of the nineteenth century, whose fame may not have withstood the passage of time very well but who nonetheless was responsible for some excellent work in the trompe l’œil still life genre. Trompe l’œil, meaning “deceive the eye” in French, is a style of painting that seeks to create a highly realistic, three-dimensional depiction of objects, using perspectival illusionism.

The Old Violin is one of Harnett’s most famous paintings and a superb example of painted realism. The subject is deceptively simple; a violin, rendered in actual size, a sheet of music, a small newspaper clipping, and a blue envelope are shown against a background formed by a green and rusty-hinged wooden door. It created a sensation when first exhibited at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition in 1886, where viewers were enthralled by the technical virtuosity of the picture. A local newspaper reported that “a policeman stands by it constantly, lest people reach over and attempt to see if the newspaper clipping is genuine by tearing it off”.

Along with other Harnett pictures that convincingly tricked viewers’ perceptions, The Old Violin aroused considerable contemporary debate about the aesthetics of imitative artwork. The genre is hardly unprecedented, however – there’s a great little story in Greek myth about the 5th century BC contest between painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. The contest was to determine which of the two was the most realistic painter. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, they appeared so real that birds flew down to peck at them. But when Parrhasius, whose painting was concealed behind a curtain, asked Zeuxis to pull aside that curtain, the curtain itself turned out to be a painted illusion, and Parrhasius won the contest.

Back to The Old Violin…note how every element of grain and worn area of the violin is reproduced in impeccable detail. The age of the violin is clearly key; as Harnett himself said: “As a rule, new things do not paint well; I want my models to have the mellowing effect of age”. Well said!

The painting is currently held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and, although there is no longer a need for it to be guarded from touch by a less credulous audience of modern times, I for one will pay my regards to this charming still life should I ever be passing through Washington.

 

 

Art

Sir James Guthrie’s A Hind’s Daughter (1883)

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During a work visit to Scotland some years ago, I took the opportunity to visit Edinburgh’s National Gallery of Scotland. It has some excellent artworks and is well worth an afternoon’s tarriance. It houses the subject of today’s blog, Sir James Guthrie’s A Hind’s Daughter.

The Glasgow School was a circle of influential artists and designers that began to coalesce in Glasgow in the 1870s, and flourished from the 1890s to around 1910. Dubbed the Glasgow Boys, these men had a passion for realism and naturalism, as well as a distaste for the Edinburgh oriented Scottish art establishment, which they viewed as oppressive (cf. the Impressionists). Driven and motivated by naturalistic ideals, they embraced change, created masterpieces, and became Scottish icons in the process.

James, later Sir James, Guthrie was one of the leading lights of the Glasgow Boys. He focused on the life and landscape of rural Scotland for his oeuvre; the land and its inhabitants provided a rich resource for Guthrie and none typifies his artworks of this period more than A Hind’s Daughter (a hind being a skilled farm labourer). The small girl has just straightened up after cutting a cabbage and looks directly and arrestingly at the viewer, as if she has just spotted you. It’s a quintessentially Scottish scene, with girl and landscape inextricably merged.

Guthrie painted the picture in the Berwickshire village of Cockburnspath. The warm earth colours and distinctive square brush strokes demonstrate the influence of French realist painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, who similarly sought inspiration from the peasant farmers of rural France. I love it.

 

 

Sir James Guthrie
Art

Niccolò dell’Arca’s Lamentation of Christ (between 1463 and 1490)

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Niccolò dell’Arca (c. 1435-1440 – 1494) was an Italian Early Renaissance sculptor, about which little is known except for his possession of a sublime skill in the art of sculpture.

His Compianto sul Cristo morto (the Mourning, or Lamentation, of Christ) is a life-size group of six separate terracotta figures lamenting in a semicircle around the dead Christ, in the Sanctuary of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna. Lamentations were commonly depicted in Renaissance Europe, it being the thirteenth of the Stations of the Cross. Here, the pain of Jesus’s friends, as he is taken down from the cross, could not have been expressed with more intense pathos. Sorrow digs into their faces, forever frozen in anguish.

More than 600 years after they were made, these fragile, now colourless terracotta statues continue to move and surprise visitors to the church who often don’t know about the church’s prized but untrumpeted possession. It’s a universal and timeless grief the figures express. The only peaceful figure of course is that of Christ who looks serenely asleep on a decorative scalloped coverlet. Each of the other figures’ dramatic pathos is intensified by the realism of the facial details.

It’s uncomfortable viewing, of course, due to the nature of the scene, but you know these Renaissance artists; they had a remarkable capacity for depicting pain and suffering, all part and parcel of the concepts embodied in the Christian religion. The anguish is stark, but the cause of the anguish becomes the focus for the Renaissance viewer: the dead Christ and the implications of that death for mankind. Check out the image details to fully appreciate Dell’Arca’s artisanship.