Joshua Reynolds

One of the advantages of being an artist is that it allows you to rub shoulders with a better class of people. While one no longer has to be wealthy to afford good art, a certain amount of discretionary income seems to be a prerequisite for acquiring fine art, even today. And of course, the better artist one is, the better class of clients one attracts (read wealthier). This was certainly well-entrenched in the mind of an aspiring teenage artist named Joshua Reynolds as he completed a four-year apprenticeship in the London portrait factory of Thomas Hudson in only two years. Thereupon, he set himself up in Plympton, Devonshire, England near a royal naval base where he painted portraits of young officers while their ships were in port. He was at best, mediocre, his work ranging from poor to good though even his best work was unexceptional.

Miss Price, 1769-70, Sir Joshua Reynolds

But the young man was nothing if not doggedly determined. Born of middle-classed parentage in 1723, Reynolds was the son of a clergyman who moonlighted as a school master. He painted his first portrait at the age of twelve on sailcloth using paint from the local shipyard. His formal education ended in his early teens when he left his father's tutelage for London. At the age of 23, he hitched a ride on a British naval vessel to Italy where he studied intently the work of Raphael and other Italian masters. In returning to England, he shrewdly began painting portraits of children of doting English aristocrats. Although he was a bachelor all his life, his work from this period indicates a certain "way with children." The mischief and merriment he captured in the faces seems to light up every one of his juvenile depictions.

Admiral Augustu Keppel,
1752-53, Sir Joshua Reynolds



But Reynolds longed for better things. In 1760, with the ascension of George III to the throne, some 69 London painters held a sort of English version of the Paris Salon in which Reynolds' portrait of a dashing young Admiral, Augustus, Viscount Keppel, striding along a stormy seashore stood out among the 130 other works exhibited. It served to topple Allan Ramsay as the leading painter of London society. The pose in the painting is based quite literally on the Roman statue known as the Apollo Belvedere which Reynolds had studied in Rome. With this success, he acquired a mansion in the fashionable London suburb of Leicester Fields and was soon turning out over 150 portraits a year, employing a staff of assistants to paint backgrounds and clothes in the portraits. It wasn't quite the Thomas Hudson portrait factory but it was close. Reynolds cultivated a number of literary friends who helped him acquire the classical education he'd missed as a child. They also powered a PR machine to augment Reynolds' already shameless knack for self-promotion. The stature he acquired later came in handy as he helped found the British Royal Academy of art which he personally ran for some twenty years until his death in 1788. Reynolds is credited with being most responsible for lifting the status of English art that his countrymen enjoy to this day.

Joseph Stella

If you think the painters and paintings of the Ashcan School, in depicting the urban landscape with their social realism was a bit grim, take heart. There is another side to the coin. There was also a school of artists (though it's an ism rather than a school this time) that looked upon the urban landscape not with foreboding but with an exciting, optimistic outlook, reveling in the soaring skyscrapers, the gaudy neon, the noise, the perpetual motion, and the gargantuan scale that was the American cityscape in the first half of the twentieth century. This movement included artists such as Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, and Joseph Stella. This movement was called Futurism (sometimes Precisionism).


Coney Island, Battle of the Lights, 1913, Joseph Stella


The city might be New York, but the movement, as well as its most prominent practitioner, were both imported. Joseph Stella was one of the original signers of the Futurist Manifesto, which, like Stella, was born in Italy where he happened to be a student at the time; and where he was greatly influenced by Gino Severini, Carlo Carra, and Umberto Boccioni, the real founders and leaders of Futurism in Europe. However, even though he was born in Italy, Stella had been an American since the age of 19 and thus was able to endow the American brand of Futurism with a delightful, bustling vigor not seen in the work of his European counterparts. His painting, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, done in 1913, is a fantastic example of this. Though stylistically quite abstract, one can nevertheless make out a melange of roller coasters, sea gulls, Ferris wheels, and neon signs rising from a dark well-littered base to a towering pinnacle replete with searchlights and skyrockets. You can almost smell the popcorn and cotton candy!

Brooklyn Bridge: Variaton on an
Old Theme, 1939, Joseph Stella

However Stella's most famous work came some 26 years later and is, coloristically at least, more subdued, lofty, and grand. The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an old theme, came at the high point in his career (he died in 1946). Rising this time from a base depicting the city's skyline, steel cables sweep upward majestically to a pinnacle illuminated by the beam of a single searchlight, between the lofty, Gothic arches that are the trademark of this landmark. Through these arches are the stylized skyscrapers that symbolize his version of the urban landscape, soaring daily to new heights amidst the chattering of the jackhammers and the shrill sirens of emergency vehicles. Here it seems, Stella has replaced the delicious smells of the amusement park with the vibrant sounds of the big city.

John Singleton Copley

For a budding young artist in Colonial America the possibilities of making a living at his craft must have seemed rather daunting. There was basically only two types of painting provincial America was interested in--sign painting and portraiture  Later, as the American Revolution neared, there was a growing use of etchings and woodcuts but these were more in the area of illustrations or advertising/graphic design, and while they were good training for the would-be painter, they offered limited options in the area of creativity and, like sign painting, they were mostly utilitarian in nature. Portraiture of course was a high art and those few who were very good at it (sadly most were quite mediocre at best) could earn a respectable livelihood. However if one aspired to more, there was only one optionm go to Europe; and being English, that usually meant London.    
 

Paul Revere, 1770,
John Singleton Copley

  
This was the plight of John Singleton Copley. Born in 1738, he'd learned his craft from his stepfather who was an engraver. He'd paid his dues as a portrait painter, and a very good one at that. His portrait of Paul Revere, for instance, and several group portraits of his own and other colonial families before the war raised him to perhaps the preeminent portrait artist in the colonies. And, residing in Boston, he probably could have lived out his years quite comfortably as the New England equivalent of Philadelphia's Gilbert Stuart, or Charles Wilson Peale. Many would argue, in fact, that he was a better painter than either of these countrymen. Instead, he chose England, and later, at the behest of Benjamin West, studied in Italy.  He arrived in London in 1774. Later, seeing war on the horizon, his family joined him there.   
   
 

Watson and the Shark, 1778, John Singleton Copley

Probably Copley's greatest, non-portrait masterpiece is Watson and the Shark, painted in 1778. The work is considered history painting in the broad sense, because it depicts an actual incident, although it doesn't encompass an epic event such as a war or a coronation. In many respects however, it is one of the most dramatic and exciting paintings of its kind ever done. The scene is Havana harbor in Cuba where a nude boy of perhaps 18 (Brook Watson) with long, flowing, blond hair is about to be attacked by a sizable shark. The boy and the shark are arrayed in the watery foreground while in the middle-ground, in a longboat, a harpooner is about to plunge his weapon into the shark passing just in front of the boat.  Meanwhile seven other figures in the boat strain to rescue the hapless young man.  A misty Havana waterfront can be seen in the background.  The work, commissioned by the boy's father, is a masterpiece of planning, draftsmanship, and emotion-filled action. The painting served as a sort of "grand entrance" for Copley into London art circles. So successful was he in London that after the war, Copley and his family never returned to this country.

John James Audubon

Not too far from where I live, in Marietta, Ohio, is published a monthly periodical, founded by a local couple, which is considered the premier source for the legions of amateur and professional ornithologist in this country. It's called The Bird Watcher's Digest. Today we take this rather refined, outdoorsy hobbyist for granted and sometimes even make jokes about them, but for those taken with the frolics and fortunes of our fine, feathered friends, the magazine is like their bible. They take their avocation very seriously.  Not surprisingly, their patron saint was an artist.      

The Ivcry-billed Woodpecker,
John James Audubon

I'm sure, when John James Audubon first undertook his groundbreaking travels trying to document visually in a bird encyclopedia, the fowl of his adopted fatherland, there must have been amateur bird watchers then as now. Without cameras and zoom lenses however, they were undoubtedly quite localized and disorganized. Audubon managed to remedy both these problems. What he brought to his effort was most of all patience, followed by intense curiosity, wanderlust, the ability to record acute observations, and a credible facility for handling watercolor. It was a rare mix, and generations of bird watchers for 150 years have been indebted to him.

Golden Eagle, 1833-34,
John James Audubon

 
   





Audubon was born in 1785 on the Caribbean Island of Haiti. As a teenager, he moved to Philadelphia to manage some family properties, which he was never very good at. He was 37 when he first decided to combine his two hobbies, birds and painting. For the next sixteen years he traveled from Florida to Labrador and west well into Texas waiting, watching, sketching, and ultimately painting. Fortunately, he'd had the foresight to solicit subscriptions amongst his bird-watching friends to support his ornithological vice.  He completed some 435 studies in detailed watercolors. His painted compositions were exciting and often lighthearted. Upon his return, he enlisted the help of London printmaker, Robert Havell, in using the aquatint process to reproduce his work. The larger areas of neutral colors were inked on the plates while the other colors were added by hand on the prints themselves. It was a costly process. In all, Audubon invested the then astronomical sum of $100,000 in the project. However, he was well rewarded for his work and financial risk. Between 1840 and 1844, 2000 sets of prints were sold at $1000 EACH.  Do the math.  
                       

John Constable

If one were to take a census of painters today I think we'd find that there are more landscape painters (artists who primarily paint landscapes) than any other type. Of course in a country as broad and diverse geographically as ours, this is not altogether surprising. The tradition for landscape painting in this country is second only to portrait painting. I guess we could derive from this that we hold dear to us family first, and then the land. Yet in Europe, from whence we inherited most of our artistic antecedents, the art of painting the land is not all that ancient. Durer in the 1500s and Loraine and Poussin in the 1600s painted a few "scenes" as they were called then, as did Rubens. But it was left to the Dutch painters, Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob Van Ruisdael, and his pupil Meindert Hobbema to treat the landscape as anything much more than mere "backgrounds" and do any serious artistic study of the land around them.   
   
Although the French Rococo painters such as Watteau played with fantasy landscapes in the 1700s, in France, it took Barbizon painters until the 1850s to "discover" nature and real landscape painting. This discovery happened somewhat earlier in England as John Constable began a love affair with the English countryside in the early 1800s. Born in 1775, the son of an upper-middle-class miller, Constable drew on the landscape images of his youth in rural southern England. Although influenced by Van Ruisdael and Rubens, Constable undertook something approaching a scientific study of the sky, the land, the water, and the activities of his fellow countrymen he saw struggling to make the most of these natural elements.   
    

The White Horse, 1819, John Constable

One of Constable's most interesting works, bringing together all four of these interests, was his 1819 painting The White Horse. In the sky, we see his trademark clouds with a storm brewing in the distant far right side of the painting. The landscape is rural, but not wild, with numerous period structures giving evidence of man's long history of inhabiting the area. In the foreground is a pristine river upon which floats a barge with the white horse and it's attendants. It would appear to be the depiction of an actual location in that Constable seems to have struggled with the tendency of the scene to divide itself into three sections. Each third of the painting divided vertically works quite well as an independent composition. In fact, he seems to have had some success in solving this problem in that the left two-thirds also seems fairly satisfactory compositionally. However the right third, while pleasing enough in itself, has the most noticeable "divide" and seems not to contribute much to the rest of the painting. But then, who ever said landscapes were easy? No doubt, even Constable would agree.   
                       

Joan Miro

If one wished to undertake a study of abstract art, I can think of no better place to start than with the work of the Spanish surrealist/abstractionist, Joan Miro. There is a historical perspective in terms of the development of abstraction but studying this difficult vein of art from that point of view is rather dry and academic, it offers little help in terms of understanding abstraction. Miro on the other hand is "lite" abstraction. He's a fun artist. Even in some of his "heavier" works, there is still a lighthearted, squiggly playfulness that makes his painting much easier to digest than a DeKooning or Franz Kline, for example. Somehow, we get the feeling Miro's work doesn't take itself too seriously.     

The Tilled Field, 1923-24, Joan Miro

 Born in 1893 in Barcelona, Spain, Miro was the sun of a successful goldsmith. Like many artists, he exhibited prodigious talent from childhood though with apparently little encouragement from his parents. Upon graduation from high school they forced him into an office job.  When he became ill, he was sent to the family farm to recover. There he found the freedom to pursue his first love--painting.  The First World War came and went. Realizing their son was serious about an art career, his parents allowed him to attend art school. In the 1920's, like so many other would-be artists, Joan Miro found his way to the capital of the art world at the time--Paris. There he started out painting quaint, story-book-like farm scenes from his childhood. But the avant-garde quickly invaded his psyche and his work began to become more and more symbolic. He flirted with Dali's surrealism, toyed with Picasso's cubism, and played endlessly with abstracted forms popular with any number of artists of the time, even going so far to paint abstractionist versions of famous Dutch masterpieces.   
 

La Lecon die Ski, 1966, Joan Miro

  
With the deja-vu of WWII tormenting him, he fled France for his homeland, the horrors of Nazism in France for the fascist "security" of Spain, only to find it necessary to flee again, this time into himself--into his deepest inner being where he explored the fantasy dreams and nightmares, drawing them out from his psyche, onto hundreds of canvases representing his mature style. Symbolic elements recurred, ladders, mobile-like figures, spidery figures, chirping figures, all floating about over visually textured surfaces of make-believe environments. Miro is a good primer in the study of abstraction. There is an easy progression from the representational, through the symbolic, to the non-representational with little side-trips to surrealism and cubism. Late in his life, Miro moved once more to the US, where he undertook a number of murals celebrating the delightful little world of his inner self. He died in 1984 at the age of 91.

Jean-Simeon Chardin

Every era in art has those artists that seem to, march to the beat of a different drummer. Today that might be an artist painting wall-size landscapes on canvas, or painting grandiose history paintings, or perhaps genre, or surrealism. Such an artist would seem to be "out of touch," so to speak. Perhaps one of the best examples of just such an artist would be Jean-Simeon Chardin. Born in 1699, he came to bloom during what we call the Rococo period in French art, working opposite artist such as Francois Boucher, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Honore Fragonard. His work, had it reflected the prevailing style, would have been light, frilly, pretty, sweet, decorative, and perhaps slightly erotic, all terms, both positive and negative, that we have come to associate with French Rococo painting.


Silver Cup, 1768, Jean-Simeon Chardin


Yet strangely, Chardin's work is none of these things. First of all, during much of his life, he painted only still-lifes and even then more in a Dutch style rather than any manner seeming the least bit French. In fact, one could almost say he brought still life painting to French art where there had been practically no tradition of it in the past. And unlike his contemporaries, he painted only on a small scale, meticulously, and slowly, just a few simple objects, exploring subtle differences in shape and texture, totally absent any moralizing or complex compositions. Though exquisitely done, his still-lifes of simple foods, fruits, kitchenware, etc., lacked anything one could in any way consider elegant, frilly, or frothy.  It was not Rococo.

Dressing Table, Jean-Simeon Chardin

In his forties, Chardin began applying his skills as a still-life painter to small domestic scenes, especially those exploring the quiet lives of everyday, middle-class families, predominantly women, domestic servants, and children. Again there was a Dutch quality to his work but with a distinctively French flavor. His paintings would seem almost to be miniatures of that which his fellow Parisian artist were doing at the time. Perhaps it was nostalgia, perhaps the novelty of them, whatever the case, his work had an appeal to the aristocracy of the time, and even to royalty. In fact, they bought so many of them it kept Chardin busy constantly painting copies or variations of his most popular works.

Soap Bubbles, 1754, Jean-Simeon Chardin

Probably the most popular subject was one of a teenage boy, at a window, quietly blowing soap bubbles. A 1745 version, now in the National Gallery in Washington, is typical. In it, Chardin has added a smaller boy peering up over the edge of the window trying to see what the older boy (his brother perhaps) is doing.  Even to this, simple scene, the French typically attached moral strings--the boy's wasting of precious time blowing bubbles which represent the fragile, fleeting nature of human life. Can't anyone have any fun anymore?