Thomas Gainsborough

As Americans we tend to worship British culture as something highly refined, tasteful, and perhaps just a little bit snobbish.  We tend to think of England and Shakespeare, Shelly, Spencer, Keats, and dozens of other literary masters in the same breath so to speak. While it's true that England and its marvelous language was quite precocious insofar as literature was concerned, well into the 18th century, we would have been hard put to come up with a single outstanding English artist. In the dominant art of painting, England didn't even come close to matching what the French, the Dutch, even the Spanish were doing. In a country were wars and political turmoil came close to matching their French counterparts across the channel, and kings and queens were almost routinely beheaded, the economic conditions for the blossoming of the visual arts were not right until the early 1700s.

Bumper, 1745, Thomas Gainsborough

It was into this world that John Gainsbourgh and his wife took delivery of their fifth of nine children and named him Thomas. The year was 1727. John was a clothier. the Gainsborough house still stands in Sudbury, Suffolk, England, now a museum dedicated to the work of the town's most famous citizen. It is across Gainsborough Street from the Gainsborough Book Store, and not far from a Gainsborough pharmacy,  a dry cleaner, a movie theater, a hotel, a guest house, a petroleum company, a silk weaving company and a social club which also bear his name. In school, young Tom was a shrewd but lackluster student. He began his art career drawing pictures of his classmates in return for their doing his homework. At the age of 13 he was sent off to London to apprentice under a silver engraver. But it was painting that came naturally to him, and soon he was being hired to repair old paintings. He hired himself a painting instructor by the name of Francis Hayman who was his only influence as an artist. Hayman also influenced him in the art of drinking and "petticoat reading." His earliest existing painting is one of his dog, Bumper, painted when Tom was 18.

Blue Boy, 1770,
Thomas Gainsborough

The Villers Brothers, 1635,
Anthony van Dyck

At the age of 19, Thomas Gainsborough met and married a Miss Margaret Burr, a strikingly beautiful young girl believed to have been the illegitimate daughter of the wealthy Duke of Beaufort. With his wife came a dowry in the form of a yearly annuity of two hundred pounds at a time when a skilled artisan usually earned less then fifty pounds a year. As a result, Gainsborough gained an enviable degree of independence that was to have a marked effect on the work of the amiable, lighthearted, young artist. He could afford to experiment, to improvise, and if the portrait client was too demanding, to turn down the commission. Unlike his artistic rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds, he painted for the love of art, rather than for political or economic purposes. His most famous painting, his Blue Boy, painted in 1770, is loosely based upon a Van Dyck portrait of the Villers brothers, foster sons of Charles II.  Preliminary drawings indicate he combined the pose of the two boys into the one in depicting the sensitive, elegantly dressed teenager in his painting. For years the identity of the setter was unknown.  It is now believed to be Jonathan Buttal, the son of a rich hardware dealer. They remained friends for life. The young man was one of the few named on a short list of those Gainsborough wished to attend his funeral when he died in 1788.

Mannerism

One of the difficulties of a colossal success is the aftermath, once all the glory and honor have passed.  What does one do for an encore? David O. Selznick encountered that quandary after Gone With the Wind, and James Cameron no doubt pondered the same Titanic dilemma. In art, Michelangelo probably had such thoughts once he climbed down from his ceiling, and the Renaissance in general left the artists that followed so in awe that they all faced the daunting question, where do we go from here? Their period during the late sixteenth century has come to be known as Mannerism and like Michelangelo, Selznick, and Cameron, once they climbed the peak there was no place else to go but down the other side. Michelangelo found other peaks to climb, but it's the exceptional artist who does so, and even he found some pretty deep valleys in the interim.

Francois I, 1535, Jean Clouet

The Italian Mannerists, such as Agnolo Bronzino, Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and a number of others just as well forgotten, tried to continue the climb, but history has judged that they were rather climbing into thin air. In their efforts to surpass their Renaissance masters, their work became contrived, distorted, ponderous, tedious, and pompous at every turn. Perhaps worst of all, young artists from the North, leaving behind them a pretty respectable Renaissance of their own, journeyed south in an attempt to study the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and others. And, like their Italian peers, they fell victim to the same overindulgent tendencies, carrying them back to their homelands like a contagious disease. 

In France, the results can be seen in Jean Clouet's 1525 portrait of his king, Francis I. Seldom has an uglier portrait ever been painted, though the king's overblown tunic, which threatens to break down the picture frame, is a fascinating study of richly textured fabrics.

The Judgment of Paris, 1615,
Joachim Wtewael

In the Netherlands, Joachim Wtewael chose to ignore the best efforts of Durer and Cranach as he brewed his The Judgment of Paris, painted in 1615. In it, the Trojan shepherd, Paris, for some unknown reason, bestows a golden apple upon the most beautiful of three nude, presumably divine, ladies in an absolute horror of overwhelming compositional complexity and perfunctory detail.

Vulcan and Maia, 1590 
Bartolomeus Spranger

And Bartholomeus Spranger, also of Flemish descent (with the emphasis on descent), first spread Mannerism to the Haarlem Academy in his homeland, before going on to inflicted his semi-erotic Vulcan and Maia (1590) upon the Austrians. Later he moved on to Prague and sponsored an infestation of Mannerism upon the hapless young art students he encountered there. Fortunately, in later years, the area recovered and became the seat for some of the best art and especially architecture the Baroque period had to offer.

Thomas Cole

What happens when a painter tries to rise above the ordinary? What happens when he decides what has always been considered acceptable coming from his palette is not "good enough"? And what happens when, in striving for something better, his friends and patrons meet his efforts with disinterest? Perhaps the best expert on this quandary was Thomas Cole. Cole was born in England in 1801, and had he remained there, he quite possibly might have been the happier man for it. Exposed at an early age to the academic style of the Grand Manner he was already a self-taught amateur painter when his parents left the industrialized cities of England and brought him to the Ohio and Pennsylvania frontier at the age of 17.   
   

The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), 1836, Thomas Cole

The experience was overwhelming to the senses of the young man at the time. The virgin wilderness had a profound effect upon him. It flowered in his art. Returning to New York at the age of 25, he journeyed up the Hudson River and came back with a boatload of landscape masterpieces of specific, familiar sites. They struck a responsive chord. He became not only a celebrity among New York artists, but he was rewarded with instant sales. Some men would have been satisfied with such fame and success, but Cole considered his work "merely" landscapes and yearned for a more "serious" painting success. So, in 1829 he broke free of his provincial ties and headed for Europe to travel, study, and paint with the best of them.   
   

The Course of Empire (Consumation), 1835, Thomas Cole

Upon returning, he prepared to "show his stuff" and impress the backward Americans with "important" work.  He first found a patron in the person of Luman Reed, a successful grocery wholesaler who purchased only works by American artists. Then he embarked on a series of allegorical paintings entitled The Course of Empire--five large canvases depicting a single site as it changed from savage, to pastoral, to consummation (a great, gaudy decadent city), to destruction, to desolation and ruin.  He obviously saw this as the course of the American Empire. So, perhaps, did the American empire builders of the time, and it was something they didn't want to think about. Whatever the case, the entire series was a bit "heavy" for American tastes and he quickly found himself back to painting Hudson River scenes such as his most famous, The Oxbow, a well-known scene overlooking the Connecticut River near Northampton. Undaunted however, he didn't give up allegorical painting.  He created another series of five paintings, entitled The Voyage of Life in the 1840s (which was highly esteemed and successful in a series of engraved prints) as well as a huge fantasy painting entitled The Architect's Dream for an architect friend. 
               

The Course of Empire (Desolation), 1836, Thomas Cole

The Grand Manner

Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1784,
Gilbert Stuart

In England in the early 1800s there existed a style of painting called "The Grand Manner" characterized by the work of  Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy. In effect, it was the British equivalent of the French Academie des Beaux Arts. The list of Americans studying under Reynolds reads like a who's who of American painting including Charles Wilson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, Ralph Earl, John Trumbull, Washington Allston, Rembrandt Peale, Charles Bird King, Thomas Sully, and Samuel F.B. Morse. While there was no concerted effort amongst them, their general hope was to have American art receive the mantle of the European painting tradition and raise it to new heights of excellence.

The Artist in His Museum, 1822,
Charles Wilson Peale

Several of these artist set up studios in London and were quite successful before retuning to this country where their success stories varied greatly. Those like Allston, Morse, and others who tried to carry on the tradition of grandiose subject matter involving history painting, mythological tales, or enormous canvases even with American subject matter, were only moderately successful, at best.  Often upon return to the U.S. their careers went into rapid decline. Few in America, even among the educated elite, understood such high-minded feasts of intellectual manna from the gods. However, those artists who chose to use the technical prowess they'd obtained in London, and were not above painting the mainstay of American art at the time, the portrait, were often quite successful.

Among these "Grand Manner" portrait painters were the Peales, Charles Wilson and his son Rembrandt, who were at the heart of America's first art dynasty in and around Philadelphia during the first half of the century. Thomas Sully injected a Romantic element into his portraits while John Trumbull tried his hand at architecture as well as painting. In New York, though without much success, he tried to establish an American version of the Royal Academy called the National Academy of Design. But most successful of all was Gilbert Stuart. He became something of an icon of American portraiture by whipping out paintings of the Presidents and other statesmen at an astounding rate, completing the faces in as little as two hours, often without so much as a preliminary drawing.

The Declaration of Independence, 1795, John Trumbull

The Last Supper

Probably the most overexposed artists in history is Leonardo da Vinci. Every school child from the second or third grade knows the name and maybe even a smattering of information about the man. And of his works, second only to the Mona Lisa, his Last Supper ranks as one of the most overexposed paintings ever painted. Most people know about the disastrous experiment using oil paints in a fresco manner and the piteous condition of the work today as a result of this and even worse attempts by bumbling artists/conservators down through the years to bring it back to life. An entire cult of information and misinformation has developed around the work and its history from conception to the most recent restoration efforts begun in 1979.

The Last Supper, 1495-98, Leonardo da Vinci

The painting was started in 1495 at the behest of Duke Lodovico Sforza, of Milan for whom Leonardo had been doing a number of military and civil engineering projects. Leonardo no doubt welcomed it as a change of pace in order to get back to painting, which was said to be his first love. But he apparently dawdled over it for three years, much to the distress of the monks at the Monastery of Santa Maria dele Grazie. And so rapid was the painting's deterioration that within fifty years, the image was barely discernible to the point that the monks felt no harm could be done in cutting a door in the wall of the dining room. The door reached well up into the table cloth.

Quite apart from the painting, Leonardo seems to have been concerned with numbers as he conceived the work. There are four groups of three apostles each. The background is composed of three walls upon which hang four tapestries, while the center wall is broken by three windows. The number three, of course, is associated with the trinity while the number four, the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, as well as the four seasons. Also, in medieval philosophy, there were three theological and four cardinal virtues. Leonardo departed from earlier versions of the scene (yes, he was not the first, nor the last, to depict it), in his placing of Judas (his elbow resting on the table), Peter, and John in the first triad on Jesus' right. He considered them the most important figures in the unfolding events of Christ's mission here on earth--Judas in his betrayal, Peter in later leading the Church, and John in foretelling the second coming and the last judgment.

The Affair of the Statues

In the early morning hours of August 22, 1911, as guards and workers made their opening rounds of the Louvre museum in Paris they made a startling discovery. The much-touted centerpiece of the entire museum's collections was missing! Headlines in the Paris-Journal the next day screamed indignantly: THE MONA LISA--STOLEN!! The newspaper offered a ransom for the return of the Leonardo Da Vinci masterpiece, while Paris and the other art centers in the world were in an uproar. The next day, in hopes of receiving a comparable ransom, an unidentified person turned over a Phoenician head stolen the previous May which had never been publicly disclosed. More than that, he told of two Iberian heads had been stolen in 1907. There is some disagreement as to whether the museum had even realized these works were missing. But in any case, they too had never been reported. This, in itself, caused something of a scandal.       

Guillaume Appollinare, 1914

The anonymous person was Gery-Pieret. A former employee of the Louvre, he'd had little difficulty smuggling the obscure works out of the facility. Shortly thereafter, he'd managed to sell them. The buyers? One was sold to the art collector and dealer Apollinare, while the other one was purchased by his friend, Pablo Picasso. Picasso, a Spanish citizen living in Paris, was frightened that he might be deported if his involvement in the "affair of the statues" was revealed so he nervously arranged through Apollinare to get rid of his "hot" art relic. The two carved heads were quickly returned via the Paris-Journal.   
   
Police apparently were informed of Apollinare's identity.  They arrested him and charged him with harboring a criminal thought to be connected with the Mona Lisa theft. But after four days of interrogation, they released the reputable gallery owner. Picasso's name was never mentioned. He continued to live in France for the rest of his life, his involvement in the nasty little affair not revealed until some thirty years later. Likewise, it turned out that Gery-Pieret had nothing whatsoever to do with the theft of the Mona Lisa. The immortal queen of the Louvre was successfully freed from captivity two years later in Milan, Italy. The thief had stolen the painting by simply removing it from its frame, tucking the priceless canvas under his painter's smock, and walking out of the museum unnoticed.  

Success

What makes an artist successful?  It all hinges on one's definition of success. As I see it, there are three prerequisites for success as an artist. The first is good eye-hand coordination. Sometimes we call this the ability to draw easily and well. It is so fundamental that sometimes artist come to take it for granted in their discussions of art, but without it, work becomes too difficult, too time consuming, and thus too "dear" to the artist to part with.   
   
The second prerequisite is a creative streak. I think all artists must have a yearning for immortality, that is, a wish that what they have to say in paint (or whatever medium) will live on after them and be treasured, enjoyed, and understood by posterity. That speaks of a strong ego. It also speaks of a strong intellect. Uncreative art seldom survives; and, like the artist who has difficulty drawing, if the creative effort is exceptionally difficult, then the work again becomes too time consuming and thus too "dear" to the artist to part with.   
   
And the third prerequisite is a strong work ethic. Art attracts lazy people. I've seen it dozens of times. Art can be fun, can bring pleasure, can bestow a great deal of joy upon the artist, but it is after all, artwork. The artist who doesn't work much doesn't gain experience, doesn't get appreciably better at his or her art, and also doesn't produce a sufficient quantity of work. Thus, what he or she does produce is too "dear" for the artist to part with.   
   
What we have, then, is a sort of tripod. Theoretically, the most successful artists are those with three equally strong, (or long) legs upon which to build a career. Unfortunately, I've never met an artist yet whose "legs" are all the same length. Each of us have more length in one or two of these "legs" and are inevitably weaker in the others. That's what makes us (and our art) all so different, and what breeds differing degrees, and definitions of success.