St. Paul's Cathedral

Night falls over St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

Over the past fifty years I've visited several big churches. Now my numerous health problems and my wife (mostly the latter) have forced me to limit my travels to three-hour road trips to the Cleveland Clinic. There aren't many world-class churches along I-75 so it's unlikely I'll visit any more. Starting with the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. some fifty years ago, each, for various reasons, have left a lasting impression. The most impressive was La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, which is not actually a cathedral at all but simply a huge church. Close runners-up would St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and Notre Dame in Paris. Strangely enough, the most recent (and final) cathedral I've visited did not seem to me to be all that impressive. St. Paul's Cathedral in London is huge, ornate, and architecturally significant, but it did not seem to me to be in the same class as most of the others.

Wren revised his design for St. Paul's Cathedral numerous times.



Sir Christopher Wren

St. Paul Cathedral is unique due to the fact that, although it was constructed over a period of some thirteen years (1707-20), it was totally designed by just one man, Sir Christopher Wren. Wren came by his commission due to a tragic accident. In the 1666 the Great Fire of London gutted Old St Paul's (below). While it might have been possible to reconstruct it, a decision was taken to build a new cathedral in a modern style. This course of action had been proposed even before the fire. As early as 1661 (before the fire) Wren had planned to replace Old St. Paul's dilapidated tower with a dome, using the existing structure as a scaffold. He produced a drawing of the proposed dome which shows his idea that it should span nave and aisles at the crossing. After the Fire, it was at first thought possible to retain a substantial part of the old cathedral, but ultimately the entire structure was demolished in the early 1670s.



Old St. Paul's Cathedral was originally a Gothic structure.



The result was the present St Paul's Cathedral, still the second largest church in Britain, with a dome proclaimed as the finest in the world. The building was financed by a tax on coal, and was completed within its architect's lifetime with many of the major contractors engaged for the duration. The "topping out" of the cathedral (when the final stone was placed on the lantern) took place on 26 October 26, 1708, performed by Wren's son Christopher Jr and the son of one of the masons. The cathedral was declared officially complete by Parliament on 25 December 1711 (Christmas Day). In fact, construction continued for several years after that, with the statues on the roof added in the 1720s. In 1716 the total costs amounted to £1,095,556 (£161 million or $213,775,800 in 2018) completed within its architect's lifetime with many of the major contractors engaged for the duration.

 

One of the earliest photographs of the cathedral. It dates from sometime before 1860.

St Paul's Cathedral, London, is an Anglican cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of London and the mother church of the Diocese of London. It sits on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City Its dedication to Paul the Apostle dates back to the original church on this site, founded in AD 604. The cathedral is one of the most famous and recognizable sights of London. Its dome, framed by the spires of Wren's other city churches, has dominated the skyline for over 300 years. At 365 feet (111 meters) high, it was the tallest building in London from 1710 to 1967. The dome is among the highest in the world. St Paul's is the second-largest church building in area in the United Kingdom after Liverpool Cathedral. Services held at St Paul's have included the funerals of Admiral Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher; jubilee celebrations for Queen Victoria; peace services marking the end of the First and Second World Wars; the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer; the launch of the Festival of Britain; and the thanksgiving services for the Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees celebrating the 80th and 90th birthdays of Queen Elizabeth II. The cathedral is a working church with hourly prayer and daily services. The tourist entry fee at the door is £20 for adults as of January 2019, (cheaper online). No charge is made to worshippers.

 

St. Paul's Cathedral after the London blitz of WW II.

During WW II, the iconic St Paul's Survived the Blitz although struck by bombs on October 10, 1940 and April 17,1941. The first strike destroyed the high altar, while the second strike on the north transept left a hole in the floor above the crypt. The latter bomb is believed to have detonated in the upper interior above the north transept and the force was sufficient to shift the entire dome laterally by a small amount. On September 12, 1940, a time-delayed bomb that had struck the cathedral was successfully defused and removed by a bomb disposal detachment of Royal Engineers. Had this bomb detonated, it would have totally destroyed the cathedral; it left a 100-foot (30-meter) crater when later remotely detonated in a secure location Extensive copper, lead, and slate renovation work was carried out on the Dome in 1996 and in June, 2011, a 15-year restoration project—one of the largest ever undertaken in the UK was completed.

 

Wren's final design floor plan of St. Paul's Cathedral.

In designing St. Paul's, Christopher Wren had to meet many challenges. He had to create a fitting cathedral to replace Old St. Paul's, as a place of worship and as a landmark within the City of London. He had to satisfy the requirements of the church and the tastes of a royal patron, as well as respecting the essentially medieval tradition of English church building which developed to accommodate the liturgy. Wren was familiar with contemporary Renaissance and Baroque trends in Italian architecture and had visited France, where he studied the work of François Mansart. Wren's third design is embodied in the "Great Model" of 1673. The model, made of oak and plaster, cost over £500 (approximately £32,000, or $42,000 today) and is over 13 feet (4 m) tall and 21 feet (6 m) long. This design retained the form of the Greek-Cross design but extended it with a nave. Another problem was that the entire design would have to be completed all at once because of the eight central piers that supported the dome, instead of being completed in stages and opened for use before construction finished, as was customary. The Great Model was Wren's favorite design; he thought it a reflection of Renaissance beauty. After the Great Model, Wren resolved not to make further models and not to expose his drawings publicly, which he found did nothing but "lose time, and subject [his] business many times, to incompetent judges". The Great Model survives and is housed within the Cathedral itself.

 

Structural drawing of Wren's
design for St. Paul's dome.

Another of the design problems that confronted Wren was to create a landmark dome, tall enough to visually replace the lost tower of St Paul's, while at the same time appearing visually satisfying when viewed from inside the building. Wren planned a double-shelled dome, as at St Peter's Basilica. His solution to the visual problem was to separate the heights of the inner and outer dome to a much greater extent than had been done by Michelangelo at St Peter's, drafting both as catenary curves, rather than as hemispheres. Between the inner and outer domes, Wren inserted a brick cone which supports both the timbers of the outer, lead-covered dome and the weight of the ornate stone lantern that rises above it. Both the cone and the inner dome are 18 inches thick and are supported by wrought iron chains at intervals in the brick cone and around the cornice of the peristyle of the inner dome to prevent spreading and cracking. The final& design showed external buttresses on the ground floor level. These were not a classical feature and were one of the first elements Wren changed. Instead he made the walls of the cathedral particularly thick to avoid the need for external buttresses altogether. The clerestory and vault are reinforced with flying buttresses, which were added at a relatively late stage in the design to give extra strength. These are concealed behind the screen wall of the upper story, which was added to keep the building's classical style intact, to add sufficient visual mass to balance the appearance of the dome and which, by its weight, counters the thrust of the buttresses on the lower walls.



The interior of St. Paul's Cathedral as seen from the dizzying height of the dome.

I think one reason St. Paul's Cathedral did not seem as impressive as some of the other churches and cathedral's I've visited was the fact that I was there on a rainy, heavily overcast day. Churches such as St. Paul's need light. Any interior as large as St. Paul's cannot possibly be lit effectively. Add to that Wren's infatuation with the Baroque naturally entails a certain massive "heaviness," with smaller windows and fewer of them than the Gothic or Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia.

 

St. Paul's Nave from eye level.






























 

Colorizing Artists

Claude Monet, 1923, a very valid use of colorization by Dana Keller. I tried unsuccessfully for hours to find color photos of the two paintings for comparison. I was stunned to realize how many water lilies Monet painted.

An oil-tinted, 1963-era photo
portrait. No it's not me. I wore
a red jacket which the artist
was reluctant to color.

There are a surprising number of art media which have acquired over the years a bad reputation. Among them we might include velvet painting, erotic art, balloon sculpture, macramé, and the fine art of colorizing black and white photos. Some of these art forms were quite popular at one time, only to reach a point in which their popularity caused them to become trite (mac-ramé, for example), now residing in the same category as tie-dyed t-shirts. The latter of these arts I just men-tioned (colorizing photos) may, in fact be one of the most hated of the lot. The art is nearly as old as pho-tography itself and may have derived from the art of painting miniatures. As such artists were suddenly denied a sustenance from their work, they struggled to adjust to the "new" portrait technology during the latter half of the 19th-century. They developed the art of oil-painting (tinting) black and white photos to add a sort of artificially lifelike appearance, which continued well into the 1960s (my 1963 high school graduation photo was oil tinted). Of course, with the advent of color film and printing, even this last vestige of such art quickly disappeared.

Red Hawk of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on Horseback, 1905

It disappeared, that is, until the advent of Photoshop and digitized photography. Although such art today is a far cry from that which photo painters rendered for about a hundred years (1860-1960), it is still not without many of the same crude missteps that caused artists and photo purists to come to despise colorization of the tinted variety. Add to that the fact that most photo colorization today centers around the adding of digital color to historic photos such as that of Red Hawk (above). Some might look at such an effort as creating a whole new (and better) work of art than the original. Others might see it as a horrid desecration of an historic artifact. In any case, this and other examples I've collected here serve to underline a longstanding, ongoing problem in colorization--how much is enough (or too much). The line between the two is very real and very thin.



Country store in July 1939, Gordonton, North Carolina, a drastic improvement over the black and white image.

An otherwise neutral image
gains little from the addition
of flesh tones.

Thus, colorization is both a science and an art. That is to say, it takes an extremely astute artist to do it well, while at the same time knowing when to stop. Then there's also the question as to when to colorize and when to leave well-enough alone. Very often I've encountered historic photos in which the addition of color added absolutely nothing to either the human or historic impact of the image. The colorized photo of the Kennedy brothers (right) is a near-perfect example. However, the general store (above) and the famous Depression-era photo by Margaret Bourke-White both benefit greatly from the addition of color. White's American Dream, from 1937, has a gaudy "come alive" quality in the upper region of the billboard which contrasts with the drab, depression breadline beneath it. The result is that colorization strengthens both the sad irony of the message and its visual impact. Despite its dated imagery, the colorized version speaks to us as vibrantly today as it did in 1937.

American Dream, 1937, Margaret Bourke-White.

One of the most difficult and, indeed, treacherous areas of photo colorization is in the area of portraiture. Questions arise from that of simply "why bother" (as with the Kennedy brothers) to the amount of time the artist pours into a single image. The latter can vary wildly from hours, days, or weeks. Flesh tones often range from a deathly pallor to a made-up look akin the art of an embalmer. As a visual historian, everything has to be colored, from the buttons and ribbons on a uniform to nearby props and furniture. Colorist Marina Amaral recalls spending the better part of a month on an early 20th-century photo of New York’s banana docks (below), agonizing over each hat, face, and strip of fabric in the composition.

Banana docks, New York, ca. 1890-1910, Marina Amaral. Despite the artist's best efforts there is minimal color apparent in the image, and what there is seems to have barely more visual impact that the original black and white photo. 



By the same token, even familiar faces from the dry, black and white history books take on a new life in the talented hands of a competent colorizer, as seen at left in the portrait of Lincoln and below in the image of President Teddy Roos-evelt (the child is unidentified). Albert Einstein seems more friendly in color, though I'm not sure where the black and white or the colorized image of Alfred Hitchcock best captures his macabre persona. Of the colorized portrait of Ab-raham Lincoln, one user observed: “I feel like I’m looking at the man, and not the legend.”

 

President Lincoln as seen

by Marina Amaral

Portrait colorization and personalization at its best.

 

Winston Churchill, Yousuf
Karsh, 1941, Colorized
by Sanna Dullaway

Why do these reproductions resonate so deeply with so many people? Color images have a greater impact on our visual memory, and allow details we might otherwise gloss over to leap off the page. Marina Amaral’s colorization of Migrant Mother (below), the iconic Dust Bowl image by Dorothea Lange at a California migrant camp is already stunning in black-and-white. It looks strikingly familiar in color. Every detail, from Florence Thompson’s sun-burnished skin to the frayed fabric on her tattered sleeve, the scuffs of dirt on her son’s cheek, all seem to take on new dimensions and feel more alive. The hardship embodied is timeless, more viscerally human.



Colorizing artists ride a fine line between boldness and restraint as seen in these two Dorothea Lange images by two different individuals of both skill and taste.



Technology and the accessibility of software like Photoshop have allowed colorizing to become not just an artistic hobby, but for artists like Dullaway and Amaral, a career. Amaral first began to experiment with colorizing in 2015 on a cache of black-and-white World War II photos she found online. The artist is now collaborating on a book, The Color of Time, with historian and author Dan Jones. She restored over 200 historical photos for the project, many of which have never been seen in color before. Amaral confides, “I never imagined or planned that colorizing would become my profession or that I would built an entire career out of this."

Peace and War

Although purists may take offense at the idea of reworking history, there’s no question that these images have a powerful effect. Black-and-white images seem sort of alien in that they feel like relics from a bygone era. In grayscale, a historical photograph seems trapped under museum glass. When color is added, everything changes--wars are waged, leaders assassinated, a nation’s greatest moments of pride and disgrace are somehow made more real. Color doesn’t just make these images attractive or more palatable, it throws humanity into high relief and forces us to see historical events as things that happened in real life to real people, not events that turn like pages of a history textbook. It's right there in front of us. It takes us there almost like a time machine.


The Dirigible, Hindenburg, Lakehurst Air Station, Thursday, May 6, 1937

Colorizing artists often receives messages from strangers thanking them for help in gaining a better understanding of historical images after seeing such work in color. These artists often hear from people who are not really history fanatics, but who have started enjoying history on a deeper level once they’ve seen colorization and how it affects the human mind. That’s not to say there isn’t backlash. Colorizing artists are sometimes accused of “defiling” history, though most see their work as more of a complement than a replacement. (For what it’s worth, color photography elicited its own fair share of criticism back in its early days.)

 

OOPS!

The White House Art Collection

Presidents past, present, and future come together in the
same office for a photo-op.

England has their crown jewels, worn only rarely, if at all, and given the number of Royal Palaces, the little kingdom boasts, probably the largest collection of painted wall coverings in the world. Although President Donald Trump has yet to start wearing a crown, he does have a very respectable art collection at his disposal in case he chooses to redecorate the Executive Mansion (as it was originally know). And if that proves to be inadequate, few American art museums would dare turn down a request to loan the White House any item to which the President takes a liking. The Obamas, in fact, took advantage of this fact in requesting numerous items of Modern Art the likes of which one might never imagined as gracing such hallowed walls.

 

President Trump and his idol, President Andrew Jackson
by Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl.

One of the first items of business, even before inauguration, is, as one might stay, "measuring for new drapes in the Oval Office." President Trump resurrect on an old gold set from the Clinton days while the "new" sunburst carpet he chose was from the Reagan Administration. New presidents may also choose from the White House collection their favorite works of art. President Trump adopted a portrait of Andrew Jackson by Ralph Whiteside Earl as his thematic idol (above). It replaced two landscapes Obama had relished.

 

The Churchill bust was a gift of great symbolism from England after the World Trade Center tragedy on September 11, 2001.

The Oval Office also boasts several bronze busts of great world leaders. President trump chose to keep the heads of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., while adding that of Winston Churchill (moved from just across the hall in the Roosevelt Room). Also gracing the Oval Office is the wise old visage of President Abraham Lincoln painted in 1916 by George Henry Story (below). These were all holdovers from the Obama décor. Also, for several years now, Frederic Remington's bronze Bronco Rider (bottom) has come to evoke the rough and tumble nerve center of political intrigue for which the President's office is known.

 

Abraham Lincoln, 1916, George Story



Another Trump favorite, the portrait
of Theodore Roosevelt, has I believe,
found a new place of prominence
in the State Dining Room.

There are limits to how far any president (or his wife) may go in redecorating the White House. The family living quarters are there's to make their own so long as any changes are reversible. On the other hand, the "state" rooms on the main floor are all but sacrosanct. Any changes there must be approved by the White House Historical Society. There have been rumors that President Trump has added a big-screen TV to the family dining room and purchased, on his own, a new chandelier for the blue room, neither of which I have been able to confirm. Very often changes on the main floor involve little more than minor refurbishing due to age or moving from one room to another the paintings on the walls. President Trump has given the impression in interviews that he plans to make few changes. However, he may have made this declaration without consulting his wife.

The White House has been compared to living in a fishbowl and by Barack Obama, "very plush prison." One might also compare it to living in an art museum.

Leaving aside the ever-growing col-lection of official presidential portraits, and those of First Ladies, the main focus of the White House permanent art collection is on American painters. A perennial favorite is Mary Cassatt's Young Mother and Two Children (above)which hangs in a second floor sitting room. Childe Hassam's The Avenue in the Rain (not shown) is another long-time favorite. Also included are works by Georgia O'Keeffe (not shown), George P.A. Healy, William Harnett, David Martin and Francis Bicknell Carpenter (seen above). However, undoubtedly one of the most valuable paintings in the White House collection is not by an American painter, but the Frenchman Claude Monet and his Morning on the Seine, Good Weather (below), dating from 1897.

Morning on the Seine, Good Weather, 1897, Claude Monet.
 

Bronco Rider, Frederic Remington

 

Picasso's Villas

The Villa Notre Dame de Vie at Mougins on the French
Riviera, where Picasso lived for most of the years from
1961 until his death in 1973.

Recently I've been highlighting the homes of various important artists from the past--everyone from Rembrandt to Walt Disney. Today I decided I should explore the French villa of one of perhaps the most important artist of the 20th-century. He called it La Californie. It was only in delving into the artist's life that I discovered the Pablo Picasso actually only lived in Cannes just six years, from 1955 to 1961. Not only that, but over the latter half of his life (those years when he could afford such lodging) the man had four such homes, one in Paris; La Californie overlooking thee harbor at Cannes; another, the Villa Notre Dame de Vie at Mougins; and the Château Vauvernargues near Aix-en-Provence, where he was laid to rest in 1973.

Pablo Picasso's granddaughter, Marina Picasso (the daughter of Picasso's oldest son, Paulo), poses outside La Californie, which she renamed, Pavillon de Flore. The property overlooks Cannes, and recently sold for more than $110-million.

One factor too, which separates Picasso from many of his long-departed peers, is that none of these four homes is currently open to the public. As near as I can tell, only one, the Chateau Vauvernargues, is still owned by any of the descendants of Picasso's three wives or their four children. The other three Picasso residences appear to be privately owned. Moreover, it's not probable they will ever welcome the hoards of art tourists that would likely ensue, the one simple reason being they all occupy some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The going price for a prestigious address on the Cote d'Azur is roughly $390 (€365) per square foot. That would be a pretty pricey tourist attraction.

Grenier de Picasso (Picasso's attic).

Picasso in his Paris studio with
his wood-burning stove, 1944.

Pablo Picasso's first major home-studio was in Paris at the 17th-century Hôtel de Savoie on the Rue des Grands Augustins in the chic 6th arrondissement of Paris. A plaque out front next to the building's wrought iron gates proclaims: "Pablo Picasso lived in this building between 1936 and 1955. It is in this studio he painted Guernica in 1937." His studio was in the cavernous attic (seen just above). Picasso moved into this studio after separating from his first wife, Olga. It was here that Picasso sat out the Nazi occupation of Paris. When a German officer tried to bribe the artist with extra coal to heat his studio, Picasso reportedly refused, retorting: "A Spaniard is never cold!". The heavy overcoat he can be seen wearing in the 1944 photo at left suggests otherwise.

Picasso's view, the old harbor of Cannes. When high-rise
buildings came and blocked his view in 1961, Picasso left.

Picasso's Villa La Californie (top), is a grand mansion in Cannes, France. The house overlooks the bay of Cannes. In the background are the hills of the district of California, from which the estate gained its name. Built in 1920 by a Russian diplomat, Picasso bought the house in 1955 and moved there with his second wife, Jacqueline Roque. From this studio he painted the Bay of Cannes (below), in 1958. In his own Cubist manner, Picasso represents the seascape strangled by the urban environment. He live here only six years before the city's urban sprawl sent him "house hunting" a few miles further up the Mediterranean coast to Mougins.

The Bay of Cannes, 1958, Pablo Picasso.

The Villa Notre Dame de Vie, recently sold for €164-million ($220-million). This luxury mansion, where Picasso took up residence for the final twelve years of his life, is located in the French resort of Mougins (in the Provence of Alpes--Cote d'Azur). For that considerable hunk of cash the new owner got a 35-bedroom villa with two swimming pools, a tennis court, a flower garden, a guest cottage and a guardhouse for protection. The town has also played host to Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Arman, Yves Klein, César Baldaccini, Paul Éluard, Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Winston Churchill, and Catherine Deneuve.

The Villa Notre Dame de Vie today bears only a modest
resemblance to the house Picasso knew. Modernization
has erased all but the Picasso mystique--that which jacks
up its property value.

Picasso's time in Mougins coincided with the height of his fame and wealth. Although his productivity was slowing down, during this period of time he produced some important artworks from his 'later period'. Among these were: The Dance of Youth, 1961; Nu assis dans un fauteuil, 1963; The Chicago Picasso, 1967; and Femme nue au collier (below), from 1968, which was a painting of Jacqueline Roque.

Naked Woman in the Necklace, 1968, Pablo Picasso

Although Jacqueline Roque was not the easiest women to be around, (she later prevented two of Picasso's children from attending his funeral), there is no doubt that she loved him. Thirteen years after Picasso's death, in 1986, Jacqueline Roque shot and killed herself, unable to cope with the loneliness of life without him. Picasso produced over 400 drawings and paintings of Jacqueline during the twenty years they were together. He produced seventy portraits in one year alone. This was more than he had done from any of his previous relationships, with Dora Maar or Francoise Gilot.

The Villa Notre Dame de Vie, then and now. 

Pablo Picasso died at his home of Notre Dame de Vie, Mougins in April of 1973. During the evening he and Jacqueline had been entertaining friends for dinner, when Picasso fell ill. The cause of his death was fluid on his lungs causing breathing difficulties which led to cardiac arrest. On the grounds of Château de Vauvenargues, near the provincial town of Aix-en-Provence, there is a simple mound of earth, covered in grass and ringed by ivy. Mounted on top is a curvaceous bronze nude, made by Pablo Picasso in 1933, and exhibited alongside Guernica in the Paris international exhibition of 1937. Beneath lies the body of the artist himself.

Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, 1887, Paul Cezanne

The Spanish artist bought Château de Vauvenargues in 1958. The estate is located in the foothills of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain immortalized in countless paintings by Paul Cézanne (above), whom Picasso regarded as his artistic father. The current owner, Catherine Hutin (the daughter of Jacqueline Roque from her earlier marriage to engineer André Hutin) resides there now. When Picasso bought Château de Vauvenargues, he had intended to spend the rest of his life there. He sent for all his bronzes to be placed on the terrace and hundreds of paintings he had collected were stacked in the château’s cavernous rooms. He loved the isolation and scale of the place, which reminded him of Spain. However Jacqueline apparently found it too draughty and unfriendly. Just two years later, the couple moved to Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins. Picasso lived at Château de Vauvenargues for only a very short time. In death's irony though, he has spent far more time at this villa than he did during his lifetime in all his other villas combined.

Pablo Picasso's castle--Château Vauvernargues, Aix-en- Provence, in the foothills of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

 

Sir Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley

Between 1934 and his death in 1952, Birley painted the whole
royal family including Queen Mary (not shown), wife of King
George V (lower-right).

In commenting upon portrait painters, someone (maybe me, I forget) once noted that portrait artists attain fame not by how they paint but by who they paint. That is, by moving the "w" two places to the left, so to speak. That's admittedly something of an oversimplification in that how portrait artists paint determines to a great extent who they paint. That is, if the artist doesn't paint well...well, he doesn't paint...at least no one of any great significance. It seems to me that the English, perhaps more than any other nation of art appreciators, have long set great importance on the painted portrait. From the time Anthony van Dyck rendered the first of a dozen or more portraits of King Charles I, until the present day and the more than nine-hundred portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, such works have become the mainstay of British art. One artist, Sir Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley, would probably have agreed with all of the above. At any rate, he certainly benefited from this British infatuation with portraiture.



India Dewar is seen restoring a portrait of Winston Churchill
by Oswald Birley.

Sir Winston Churchill,
Oswald Birley

Although there were dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of excellent portrait art-ists working in England during the first half of the 20th-century, none of them enjoyed the consistent patronage of the royal family, House of Windsor, more than Birley. Along with this royal favor came dozens of other commissions from the British upper classes, especially those in government, the military, and financial sectors. Along with King George V, his wife, Queen Mary, their son, King George VI, his wife Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother), and their daughter, the present monarch, Princess Elizabeth (before she became queen), Birley could count among his other famous subjects Sir Winston Churchill (to whom he also gave lessons), Mahatma Gandhi, Gener-als Eisenhower (below) and Montgomery, Admiral Mountbatten, and Air Marshal Trenchard. He also painted the wealthy American financiers Andrew Mellon and J. P. Morgan, the psychiatrist Sir James Crichton-Browne, and Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis.

Dwight Eisenhower, 1951, Oswald Birley,
whom he painted shortly before his death in 1952.

Oswald Birley,
photo of a self-portrait

Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley was born into an old Lancashire family in 1880 almost by accident in New Zealand, while his parents were on a world tour. Upon returning to England, he was educated at Harrow School, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge. During WW I, Birley served in France, first with the Royal Fusiliers (soldiers originally armed with light, flintlock muskets called fusils). Later he transferred to the Intelligence Corps. He obtained the rank of captain and was awarded the Military Cross in 1919. During World War II he served with the rank of major in the Home Guard.


Painting of a Young Man,
attributed to Oswald Birley

Most of Birley's portraits were painted between the wars, his last being a portrait of NATO Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1951. Lest you get the idea that Birley painted only royalty and wizened old men, two portraits from a younger generation stand apart for their exceptional strength and youthful character, that of Woolworth heiress, Barbara Hutton (below), painted as a teenager, and that of an unknown young man (right). The Painting of a Young Man is an attribution in that it was originally a full-length portrait, but was cut down. The artist's signature was on a portion discarded as scrap.
 

Barbara Hutton, Oswald Birley