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ART “4”
“2”-DAY 29 January |
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Died on 29 January 1899: Alfred
Sisley, French painter born on 30 October 1839. — Sisley was born in Dunkirk to parents of Anglo-French descent. His father worked in the silk business and as an exporter of artificial flowers. From 1857 to 1861, Sisley lived in London and studied for a career in business. A growing interest in art, however, led him to return to Paris in 1862 and enter the studio of Charles Gleyre, where he met Monet, Renoir, and Frédéric Bazille with whom he painted in the Forest of Fontainebleau under the influence of Corot and Daubigny. Together they formed the vanguard of the impressionist movement. Sisley exhibited at the Salons of 1866, 1868, and 1870, and at the impressionist exhibitions of 1874, 1876, 1877, and 1882. The Franco-Prussian War brought financial ruin to Sisley's father and left the artist with no means of support, although about 1872 Durand-Ruel began to handle his work. One-person exhibitions were organized by Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1883 and New York in 1889, but sales remained scarce. During the 1870s and early 1880s, Sisley lived and worked in various locations in Paris, the Seine valley, and England as well. In 1882 he moved to Moret-sur-Loing, then to Sablons in 1883, and finally back to Moret-sur-Loing in 1889. Plagued by ill health in his later years, Sisley died after a long battle with cancer. — LINKS — Les Oies (color lithograph 29x40cm; 3/4 size) — Les Oies II (color lithograph 21x32cm; full size) — Le pont d'Argenteuil en 1872 (1872; 1326x2131pix; 874kb) — Le Bac de l'Ile de la Loge - inondation, 1872 (1831x2419pix; 2086kb) — Inondation à Port-Marly (1876; 1272x1689pix, 303kb) — Bords du Loing (1891, 36x45cm; recommended 3/5 size — ZOOM to 6/5 size) — Le Loing à Moret (1886; 583x800pix, 125kb) — Garde-Chasse dans la Forêt de Fontainebleau (1870; 946x759pix, 182kb) — Avenue of Chestnut Trees — Meadow — Snow at Louveciennes — The Bark During the Flood at Port-Marly (1876) — Louveciennes — Tugboat — Flood (753x1000pix, 136kb) — Factory in the Flood, Bougival 1873; Oil on canvas; Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen Photo 13 of 16 : Image resolution 800 x 607 — Seine at Bougival in Winter (1872) — Church at Moret (1894) — 298 images at Webshots |
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Born on 29 January 1936: Patrick
Caulfield, British Pop
artist. — Born in London, he studied at the Chelsea School of Art between 1956 and 1960, and from 1960 to 1963 at the Royal College of Art, London. In 1963 he was included in the Young Contemporaries exhibition, London. From 1963 to 1971 he taught at the Chelsea School of Art. He worked briefly with wooden grids which he laid across his canvas, and then later destroyed; this method led to his first black-and-white paintings. He had his first one-man exhibition at the Robert Frazer Gallery, London. He exhibited at the Robert Elkon Gallery, New York, in 1966. In 1965 he was represented at the Biennale des Jeunes, Paris, in 1967 at the international Exhibition of Graphic Art, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. In 1973 he illustrated the poems of Jules Laforgue for the Petersburg Press. In 1977 he exhibited at Santa Monica, California, in 1978 at the Tate Gallery and was given retrospective exhibitions at the Tate Gallery and the Walker Gallery, Liverpool, in 1981. His pictures combine levels of illustrative expression found in comics with a naive pictorial language, in which personal, social, political and artistic images meet. He has a predilection for referring to work by the Old Masters. — LINKS — Freud's Smoke (1997, 61x51cm) |
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Died on 29 January 1632: Jan
Porcellis (or Parcellis, Persellis, Pourchelles), Flemish-born
painter and etcher specialized in Maritime
Scenes, born in 1584. — Porcellis was active in Holland. His parents moved to the northern Netherlands before he was one year old. His teacher was probably Hendrick Vroom. Porcellis worked in many places. He is first traceable in Rotterdam where he went bankrupt by 1615. He then moved to Antwerp. By 1622 he returned north and settled for a few years in Haarlem, then in Amsterdam, next in Voorburg near The Hague, and finally in Zoeterwoude in the environs of Leiden. The properties he amassed before his death in 1632 indicate that he had accumulated a considerable fortune during his last years. Porcellis was regarded as the greatest marine painter of his day and his works mark the transition from the busy and brightly colored seascapes of the early 17th century, with their emphasis upon the representation of ships, to monochromatic paintings which are essentially studies of sea, sky, and atmospheric effects. His favorite theme was a modest fishing-boat making its way through a choppy sea near the shore. Rembrandt and Jan van de Capelle collected his works. His son Julius (1609-1645) was also a marine painter. — LINKS — Shipwreck on a Beach (1631) _ Rather than large, historical portraits of great ships that trumpet the power of the new nation's navy (as painted later, for example, by the van de Veldes), Porcellis and his younger contemporaries painted cabinet-size pictures of anonymous boats under high skies in unidentifiable seas, rivers, and inland waters. Most of them were probably not commissioned but done for the open market. Porcellis's shore scenes are equally remarkable. He painted the Shipwreck on a Beach only a few months before his death. Few later landscapes match the naturalism of its sombre mood broken by burst of sunlight indicating that the storm has broken and the spaciousness created by the extensive stretch of beach and huge breakers, low horizon, and huge dunes running obliquely into the far distance. |
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Born on 29 January 1627: Jan
Siberechts (or Sibrechts), Flemish landscape painter, active
in England, who died in 1703. — He was the son of the sculptor of the same name and became a master in the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp by 1648. He married in 1652. Siberechts settled in England sometime between 1672 and 1674. About 100 landscape paintings by him are known, 65 of them dated. His landscapes are somewhat Rubensian, but he is best known for his "portraits" of English country houses, done in a simple, rather archaic manner; two views of Longleat, Wiltshire (1675 and 1676), are still preserved in the house. He was the first professional exponent of the genre. —LINKS — Crossing a Creek (1669, 94x116cm) _ In Flemish genre painting the representation of country life remained somewhat conventional. The exceptionally vigorous naturalism with which Jan Siberechts rendered landscapes and peasants makes one think of Courbet. — The Market Garden (1664, 158x241cm) _ A farmyard in front of a well-appointed farmhouse, which rises up centrally in the background, with to the right a well and a small barn, and to the left in the distance a vegetable garden and a rural hamlet around a church, all set the scene for the busy occupations of the countryfolk in the foreground. Three women are preparing their vegetable harvest for market, assisted in the right background by a waggoner and watched on the left by a friendly-looking dog and a maid with a milking pail on her head and a pot with a handle in her hand. Behind her a peasant woman is letting cattle out of the barn whilst a lad is driving towards the herd a couple of sheep that have strayed into this attractive tableau, producing a light-hearted anecdote that links the various planes. The motif of the poster announcing the sale of the farm introduces a hint of uncertainty and of impending doom. Even so, the general impression of Siberechts' composition is that of an undisturbable natural order and rural calm. In doing so he touches a sensitive chord with the modern city-dweller. Country life already exercised a particular attraction on the painter's contemporaries, leading to the building of many country houses away from the cities. The dignity with which the country-folk are depicted is typical of Siberechts. There is no longer any hint of "boorish" behavior - a proverbial term for the low appreciation in which a “civilized” bourgeoisie held country people and which expressed its dislike in many a vituperative tableau. Siberechts' noble peasants are often compared with those of France's brothers Antoine Le Nain [1600-1648], Louis Le Nain [1603-1648], and Mathieu Le Nain “le Chevalier” [1607- 20 Apr 1677]. Possibly Siberechts drew inspiration for his noble portrayal from Brussels painter Michael Sweerts. For the motifs, such as the milkmaid carrying her heavy pail on her head, the reader is referred to her counterpart in Rubens' late landscapes. When it comes to the sculptural stateliness of Siberecht's figures, we should not forget that his father was a sculptor. This painting, the theme of which departs from his more usual "Landscapes with Fords", came into being in his Antwerp period, before the artist entered the service of the English aristocracy. An analogous work, the Farmyard, dated from 1662, is also conserved in the Brussels museum. — Landscape with Rainbow, Henley-on-Thames (1690, 82x103cm) _ Even in its later period, Flemish landscape painting retains the main distinguishing characteristics that emerged as early· as the 16th century in the works of such atrists as Pieter Brueghel and Momper. This painting shows a sweeping view from a slightly elevated position, sloping down over the cattle pastures in the foreground towards a river plied by a cargo boat on the left and with a village on its banks to the right. Towards the background, the terrain slopes upwards again, with fields under changing sunlight and clouds, and a double rainbow in the sky. On the left, the view broadens out into the background towards the hills on the horizon. A Dutch landscape painting, for example by Ruisdael, could hardly be described in this manner. Unlike Flemish landscape paintings. their Dutch counterparts rarely include so many different and contrasting elements. Here, we have proximity and distance, hill and plain, animals, people, boats and houses. While Flemish landscapes frequently have a universal theme, Dutch landscapes tend to concentrate on a single aspect. This painting is typical of the later work of Sibcrechts, who emigrated to England in1672. Whereas his Flemish landscapes generally portray a small detail, his later work is topographically more precise; on the right we can recognize the village of Henley-on-Thames. — The Wager (1665, 120x160cm) _ The dynamic, cosmic vision in the tradition of Rubens is absent from Jan Siberechts' The Wager. The artist was seduced by Dutch landscape art with its lightness of touch, and clear, impressionistic atmosphere. Siberechts' paintings have, however, a certain solidity of form and evenness of execution. |
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Died on 29 January 1888:
Edward Lear,
England, landscape painter, writer of nonsense verse, born on 12 May
1812. ^top^ Here is an example of his limericks:
Lear was an English landscape painter who is more widely known as the writer of an original kind of nonsense verse and as the popularizer of the limerick. His true genius is apparent in his nonsense poems, which portray a world of fantastic creatures in nonsense words and show a Tennysonian feeling for word color, variety of rhythm, and often a deep underlying sense of melancholy. Their quality is matched, especially in the limericks, by that of his engaging pen-and-ink drawings [here is one which I colored >].  ILLUSTRATED WRITINGS BY LEAR ONLINE: A Book of Nonsense — Laughable Lyrics: A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, Etc. — More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, Etc. — Queery Leary Nonsense: A Lear Nonsense Book. — not illustrated: A Book of Nonsense ARTWORK BY LEAR ONLINE:— LINKS — The Pyramids Road, Ghizeh — Civita Castellana — Masada |
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Died on 29 January 1968:
Tsuguharu (or Tsugouharu, Tsuguji) Leonard Fujita
(or Foujita), Japanese French painter
born on 27 November 1886. A friend of Modigliani and of Soutine, Fujita
was one of the best-known figures in Montparnasse. He very quickly acquired
notoriety in fashionable circles, who enjoyed his nudes with their discreet
eroticism. He is still considered one of the great draftsmen of his generation. — A friend of Modigliani and of Soutine, Fujita was one of the best-known figures in Montparnasse. He very quickly acquired notoriety in fashionable circles, who enjoyed his nudes with their discreet eroticism. He is still considered one of the great draftsmen of his generation. After graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1910, he went to France in 1913. Though associated with the École de Paris he developed an individual style. He became an annual member of the Salon d’Automne in 1919 and a permanent member in the following year. Subsequently his reputation in Parisian artistic circles rose, established by such works as My Studio (1921) and Five Nudes (1923), where he used a thin, delicate line on a background of milk-white material, like the surface of porcelain; this style was particularly impressive in his cool, complaisant nudes. In 1929 he briefly returned to Japan, holding a successful one-man show in Tokyo. He left Paris in 1931 and traveled through South, Central and North America before returning to Japan in 1933. He was made a member of the Nikakai (Second Division Society) in the following year and painted several murals in Japan, including Annual Events of Akita, Festivals of Miyoshi Shrine of Mount Taihei, commissioned by Hirano Masakichi of Akita. He visited Paris in 1939 to 1940, painting Still-life with Cat and Cats (Fighting). In 1941 he left the Nikakai and was appointed to the Imperial Art Academy. He was also attached to the Navy and Army Ministries and used his excellent descriptive and compositional skills to depict war zones in China and South-East Asia. He was awarded the Asahi Culture Prize for The Last Day of Singapore (1942) and other works. He went to the US in 1949 and to Paris in the following year, taking French nationality in 1955 and becoming a Catholic convert, with the baptismal name of Léonard, in 1959. In 1966 he had the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix built in Reims, and he devoted his last years to its design and its stained glass and murals. — Born in Tokyo. Graduate of what is now Tokyo University in 1910. Lived primarily in France from 1913 to World War II, though he made frequent trips to Japan. Friend of the Paris school of painters between the wars. Returned to Japan during World War II, leaving in 1949 and settling in France in 1950. French citizen in 1955. Adopted name of Leonard at time of his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1966. Died in Zürich. Adapted Japnese brush techniques to his use of western oil paints, speciualizing in images of cats and women. Japanese-born painter who settled in France; died of cancer in Zurich. Foujita reached Paris in 1913 and hobnobed with the brilliant and the bizarre in the Montmartre of the 20s. He painted cats by the thousands and almost as many catlike women, achieving the first real fusion of Oriental brushwork and Western oils. — LINKS — Jean Rostand (1955) complete painting with cluttered background featuring skeletons, the sitter holds a frog in each hand. — Edmond Rostand (lithograph with yellow, 50x33cm; 2/3 size) with no background and unfinished at the bottom where there are six loose frogs, but it is the same sitter, in the same pose as the previous Jean Rostand: they are both Jean or both Edmond, but which? — Child in Hood in the Snow (1930 color woodcut, 37x29cm; 2/3 size) |
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Born on 29 January 1767: Anne-Louis
Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, French painter who died on 08
(09?) December 1824. — A student of Jacques-Louis David, Girodet received rigorous neoclassical, artistic instruction at the Royal Academy. However, during the reign of Napoléon, he achieved fame as a painter of pre-Romantic battle scenes and apotheoses of the Imperial army. — Girodet was named ‘de Roussy’ after a forest near the family home, Château du Verger, Montargis. He took the name Trioson in 1806, when he was adopted by Dr. Benoît-François Trioson [–1815], his tutor and guardian and almost certainly his natural father. Girodet took lessons from a local drawing-master in 1773 and by 1780 was studying architecture in Paris, where he became a student of the visionary Neo-classical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée. Boullée persuaded Girodet to study painting under Jacques-Louis David, and Girodet joined David’s atelier in late 1783 or early 1784. He belonged to the highly successful first generation of David’s school, which included Jean-Germain Drouais, François-Xavier Fabre, François Gérard, Antoine-Jean Gros and Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Wicar. David’s students showed great stylistic uniformity, based on a close emulation of his elevated Neo-classicism, and Girodet’s early compositions are distinguishable from those of his contemporaries only by their slight quirkiness and excessive attention to detail. — The students of Girodet included Hyacinthe Aubry-Lecomte, Édouard Bertin, Antoni Brodowski, Eugène Devéria, Théodore Gudin, Mathieu Kessels, Charles Langlois, Antonin-Marie Moine, Henry Monnier, Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, Philippe Jacques Van Brée. — LINKS — Self-Portrait — Hortense de Beauharnais (1808) — Mlle. Lange as Danae (1799, oval in ornate large 65x54cm rectangular frame, half-size; ZOOM to full size, 4000kb) _ Miss Lange was a talented actress known for her beauty and wealthy lovers. Girodet had painted an earlier portrait of her that she found unflattering. When she refused to pay the agreed-upon price and insisted that the painting be removed from public view at the Paris Salon, the enraged Girodet sought revenge with this second, satirical portrait. Eighteenth-century artists sometimes portrayed people as mythological characters to highlight their virtues. Girodet inverted this convention to defame Miss Lange. Danae was one of the mortals loved by the Greek god Zeus, who transformed himself into a shower of gold and fell upon her. Girodet shows Miss Lange greedily catching the gold coins. All of the painting's details are scathingly symbolic. For example, the turkey wearing a wedding ring represents a man the actress married for his fortune. The cracked mirror denotes her inability to see herself as Girodet saw her — a vain, adulterous, and avaricious woman. — Academic Study of a Male Head (1817 drawing, 19x18cm; full size, 534kb) _ This drawing reflects the artist's Romantic sensibilities. Although Napoléon was in exile when Girodet made this drawing in 1817, the model sports a type of Gallic mustache that was popular with the Emperor's corps of body guards; he is not a typical studio model. Girodet was highly influenced by the treatise Physiognomical Fragments (1775-1778) by Johann Kasper Lavater, who claimed that the human face is a mirror of a psycho-spiritual reality. The dramatic, three-quarter profile perspective, which emphasizes the cyclopean eye, heightens the Romantic impact of this head of a fierce and defiant soul. — L'Enterrement d'Atala (1808 _ ZOOM to 1400x1792pix) — Le Citoyen Jean-Baptiste Belley, ex-Représentant des Colonies (ZOOM to 1400x980pix). — A Woman in a Turban — Endymion Asleep (1793) |
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Died on 29 January 1923: Elihu
Vedder, in Rome, US Symbolist
painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer, born on 26 February 1836. — He studied under Tompkins Harrison Matteson in Shelbourne, NY, and went to Paris in March 1856. After eight months in the studio of François-Edouard Picot, he settled in Florence until the end of 1860. There he learnt drawing from Raffaello Bonaiuti, became interested in the Florentine Renaissance and attended the free Accademia Galli. A more significant artistic inspiration came from the Italian artists at the Caffè Michelangiolo: Telemaco Signorini, Vincenzo Cabianca [1827–1902] and especially Nino Costa [1827–1902]. This group sought new and untraditional pictorial solutions for their compositions and plein-air landscapes and were particularly interested in the experiences of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon painters. They became known as Macchiaioli for their use of splashes (macchia) of light and shadows and for their revolutionary (maquis) attitude to prevailing styles. Among Vedder’s most notable Florentine landscapes are Mugnone Torrent near Fiesole and Le Balze, Volterra; he also made many sketches, drawings and pastels of the Tyrrhenian coast, Lake Trasimene, the Roman Campagna, Egypt and Capri, which exemplify the realistic approach to landscape practiced by the artists of the Macchiaioli. — LINKS — The Sphinx of the Seashore (1879, 41x71cm; half-size _ ZOOM to full size) — Dominicans. A Convent Garden, near Florence (1859, 29x24cm; 5/6 size) — Bed of the Torrent Mugnone, near Florence (1864; 17x41cm) — The cup of Death (1885, 113x53cm) — Memory (1870, 52x37cm) — Lair of the Sea Serpent (1880, 41x71cm) — Death of Abel (The Dead Abel) (1869, 31x116cm) — The Rescue (Tennyson study for wood... (1864) |
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