Category Archives: Art

Art

Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (c. 1658)

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Johannes Vermeer is rightly considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, but it wasn’t always so. Although modestly recognised in his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, he quickly slipped into obscurity after his death, and it remained that way for nearly two centuries, until his rediscovery in the 19th century by French art critic, Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who was so impressed when he came across Vermeer’s View of Delft that he spent years seeking out other paintings by this virtually unknown artist. Today, Vermeer’s paintings are of course lauded as masterpieces and worth mega-millions; should you ever come across his painting The Concert, which was stolen in 1990 and remains missing, do grab it – it’s worth about $200M.

Although “launched” by a cityscape and particularly famous for a tronie (Girl with a Pearl Earring), Vermeer painted mostly domestic interiors. As his biographer put it: “Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women”.

A prime example is today’s choice, The Milkmaid, painted around 1658 and showing a domestic kitchen maid, suitably attired and pouring milk into an earthenware pot (and thus possibly making bread pudding, judging by the amount of bread on the table). Vermeer’s careful design (there were several revisions) resulted in a masterpiece of light and shadow, colour, contours, and shape. He restricts his palette mainly to the primary colours of red, blue, and yellow, and the pigments are rich and vibrant – Vermeer is known to have used only the very best, and most expensive, pigments. Above all, the skill of the artist has wrought a remarkably realistic scene, with quirky but authentic features such as the foot warmer, lower right, and the hanging basket, upper right.

Art

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942)

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If I ever get to Chicago, one of the first things on my list will be to see the iconic masterpiece of American art that is Edward Hopper’s oil on canvas, Nighthawks, housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. It has been there ever since the Institute bought the piece from the artist, for the sum of $3000, just a few months after its completion in 1942.

The picture shows a late-night, sparsely populated downtown diner, somewhere in New York. Many people have speculated and tried to work out where the diner actually was but it is far more likely to be a composite of various joints from around the artist’s home patch of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, cobbled together in Hopper’s imagination.

Hopper and his wife Jo kept meticulous notes about his work, and they provide a rare glimpse into this oft-unconsidered aspect of the artist’s life: the planning and thought behind a planned work. This excerpt, in Jo’s handwriting, describes Nighthawks:

“Night + brilliant interior of cheap restaurant. Bright items: cherry wood counter + tops of surrounding stools; light on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles 3/4 across canvas–at base of glass of window curving at corner. Light walls, dull yellow ocre [sic] door into kitchen right.

Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Other figure dark sinister back–at left. Light side walk outside pale greenish. Darkish red brick houses opposite. Sign across top of restaurant, dark–Phillies 5c cigar. Picture of cigar. Outside of shop dark, green. Note: bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street–at edge of stretch of top of window”

The picture was clearly not thrown together, and indeed for all this attention to detail, the finished artwork adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It exudes a sense of loneliness, of separation, of eery silence and thus disquiet. Who are these people? What stories of quiet desperation (since we somehow suspect that the protagonists are not of a happy and stable disposition) have brought them to this late-night rendezvous? Nighthawks allows the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks.

 

Edward Hopper 1941
Art

Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432)

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Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb of 1432, better known as the Ghent Altarpiece, ranks among the most significant works of art in Europe. Housed at Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, this large and complex altarpiece has suffered a varied history over the centuries, having been dismantled, stolen, damaged, reassembled, recovered, cleaned, and restored several times over. Thank goodness that it is currently in good and safe condition, and open for viewing by the public, at St Bavo’s.

I stumbled across this great work of art on a TV programme just days before I was due to take a weekend break in Brussels. It seemed too serendipitous not to arrange the short side-trip to Ghent, and thus I have been fortunate to view this piece up close and personal.

The van Eyck brothers, and Jan in particular, were significant artists of the Northern Renaissance, operating out of Bruges and leaving to posterity such varied works as the Arnolfini portrait, the illuminated manuscript known as the Turin-Milan Hours, and this great altarpiece in Ghent.

Jan van Eyck, the younger and more famous of the two brothers, was a master of naturalistic detail. He pays as much attention to earthly beauty as he does to the religious themes in the altarpiece. The folds of the clothes, the jewels, the fountain, the flowers and vegetation, the churches and landscape in the background – all reveal a systematic and discriminating study of the natural world.

Compare with the earlier, “flatter” International Gothic art of the 14th century. Although artists like Duccio and Simone Martini had begun to explore depth, perspective, and space, van Eyck takes it to a whole new level and we recognise, for the first time, an unquestionable realism in the finished artwork.

See here for the whole altarpiece and below that for a selection of some of the wonderful details.

 

 

Art

Michelangelo’s Pietà (1499)

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The Virgin Mary has featured prodigiously in Christian art for many centuries. There are numerous genres of her depiction including the familiar Madonna and Child, and the Madonna Enthroned, the Adoring Madonna, the Madonna of Humility, and several others.  One such, the Pietà (Italian for “pity” or “mercy”), is a subject that depicts the sorrowing Virgin Mary cradling the dead Jesus, and is most often found in sculpture. Today’s subject is the Pietà of Michelangelo, completed in 1499 and residing in St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City.

There is no doubting the sublime genius that created this piece. Carved from a single block of Carrara marble, Michelangelo created, with consummate skill, a coherent and moving piece of art incorporating both Classical and Renaissance tendencies.

The figures are deliberately out of proportion owing to the difficulty of depicting an adult man cradled full-length in a woman’s lap. When designing Mary’s measurements, Michelangelo could not impose realistic proportions and have her cradle her adult son as he envisioned, so he had to make her body oversized. To ameliorate this compromise on her form, Michelangelo carved out cascading sheets of draping garments, camouflaging her true fullness. The result is a triumph of form; observe the monumental drapery, the youthful face of Mary, the anatomical treatment of Christ’s elongated body…

Michelangelo was 24 when he completed this sculpture, and his fame became assured long before he completed his other masterpieces such as his David (completed 1504) and the Sistine Chapel ceiling (completed 1512)

 

Michelangelo’s Pietà
Art

Ilya Repin’s Barge-haulers on the Volga (Volga Boatmen) (1873)

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Just as in France where painting and sculpture were controlled and influenced by the Salon, in 19th century Russia, the equivalent was the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. And just as in France, where the Impressionists rebelled against the conservatism of the Salon, in Russia a group of artists who became known as the Peredvizhniki (Itinerants or Wanderers) rebelled against the Academy’s classical tendencies. Instead of the mythological theme proposed for the annual painting competition in 1863 (“The entrance of Odin into Valhalla”), the Peredvizhniki were far more interested in exploring themes of real life in Russia: the Russian peasantry, the Russian landscape, the Russian clergy. Thus, the Itinerants broke away, created their own group, and painted as they pleased.

A leading member of the Peredvizhniki was Ilya Repin (1844-1930), and here we look at his sublime masterpiece, the Volga Boatmen. Repin takes the physical labour and fatigue of the common man as his subject, and it’s hard to imagine a more physically demanding and oppressive labour than that carried out by burlaks, the men (and women) who hauled barges along the river Volga.

The eleven figures in the group have been called metaphors for Russia itself, and there is allegory aplenty for art scholars, but the piece is powerful enough on a straightforward reading: Life for the downtrodden is tough; and there is no hope…

…or is there? In the middle of the dark and beaten-down figures of the haulers, a young man has lifted his head and is staring off out of the picture. His is the only visage to be illuminated. The meaning is clear: he is raising his head in an act of defiance, a symbol of hope and the promise of a better future.  With the benefit of hindsight it might even be seen as a foreshadowing of the Revolution that would free the proletariat nearly fifty years later.

For a little extra atmosphere, how about listening to this 1936 recording of Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin singing the dirgy folk song, Song of the Volga Boatmen?

Repin, Self-portrait