Transcripts - A Long Look

The Christmas Episode

Hi everyone! Karen here.

I’m sort of celebrating a cautiously optimistic Christmas. We’re starting to hear some good news and this awful year is finally coming to an end.

I decided to pull together a few past episodes that reflect the season and the idea of hope and miracles. If you want to follow along, I’ll provide links to each work on the Gallery’s site. When you get there, just click on the image and you’ll be able to zoom in and pan around!

So join me for this extended Christmas episode of A Long Look!

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We’ll start off with my very first Christmas episode and one of my all time favorites, the glorious Annunciation by Jan Van Eyck. This stunning oil painting depicts an astonishing moment in one young woman’s life. You can find it at alonglook-slowart.com/mary

So, what do you first notice?

The painting is about 35 x 14 in. so not very big but its sumptuous colors, and dazzling fabrics and jewels draw you in.

For those of you not familiar with this theme, the annunciation is the biblical story of the archangel Gabriel coming to Mary to announce she’s been chosen to bear the son of God.

They stand in a space that looks like the interior of a church. Think of cathedrals like St. Patrick’s in New York, the National Cathedral in DC or Notre Dame in Paris, just a whole lot smaller! They take up the lower half of the space and are surrounded by arcades made by rows of columns and arched openings leading to aisles on two sides. The interior is 3 levels high.

Gabriel’s rainbow colored wings are outstretched, like he just landed. He wears an ornate gold crown with blue and red gemstones and holds a delicate staff in his left hand. His breathtaking gold and red brocaded cloak decorated with gleaming jewels parts to reveal a shimmering patterned gold gown underneath. His reddish blonde hair falls around his shoulders in soft spiral curls. He’s slightly flushed, maybe from the exertions of his trip?

Mary, however, wears a simple blue dress and enormous matching cloak with folds that dip and zigzag on the floor around her. It’s hemmed with gold and the neckline and cuffs are lined with white fur. A red belt is cinched tightly above her waist. Her long chestnut hair is decorated by a thin bejeweled headband. Oddly, she looks at us, not Gabriel, her head slightly titled. There’s a low table in front of her and her cloak drapes over part of it. On top of all this is an open book. On the floor below the table is a vase of white irises and below that at the bottom of the canvas is a low stool topped with a red cushion.

Gabriel raises his right hand to point to the words he’s speaking to her, painted in gold. He says, Ave gratia plena [hail, full of Grace]. Mary, her hands raised in surprise, answers “Ecce ancilla domini [behold, the handmaid of the Lord]. The strange thing is, Mary’s response is painted backwards!

On the second level is an arcade that wraps around the central space. Above Gabriel, the openings have 4 columns but above Mary, each opening has only three. On the third level above Gabriel, light gleams through arched windows. From one of those windows, thin gold rays stream down towards Mary. Flying along those rays is a dove with smaller rays surrounding its head. On the third level above Mary is a stained glass window depicting a man but I can’t tell who. The window is flanked by other dimly seen figures, one of whom has a halo painted the same blue as Mary’s gown! What’s up with that??

Behind Mary are three arched windows that are a mix of clear embossed circles and areas of color. The left window is red, the middle, right behind Mary, is a kind of dark purple and the right is yellow.

The ceiling is a dark reddish brown, striped with a darker brown to look like wooden planks and beams.

Even the floor is complex! It’s a light tan color and is divided into square tiles, each painted with what look like biblical scenes, painted in black with thick black borders with tan floral motifs. The longer I look at it I realize that where the tiles meet are signs of the zodiac! Kind of odd for an annunciation scene, no?

The other amazing thing aside from the knockout color and incredible composition is that you can barely see any brushstrokes. Now, you have to paint in thin layers of color to get this smooth a look so I can’t imagine how long this must’ve taken with all this detail!

Finally, in contrast to all this splendor, the frame is just simple light colored wood painted with gold leaf highlights.

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Van Eyck was a Netherlandish painter which means he lived and worked in the region that included the Netherlands and Belgium during the 1500s. These Northern Renaissance painters loved to pack their works with symbolism, so let’s see what we can find out.

Turns out many of the elements reflect the Christian belief that the Annunciation marked the transition from an old era to a new one. Some of the symbols are familiar, like the dove and rays descending from the window represent the holy spirit and his gifts and lilies were commonly used to symbolize Mary’s purity. That backward writing of Mary’s response is, according to the website, written in reverse for God to see.

The scenes on the floor and the shadowy figures above Mary all depict stories in the Old Testament Christians believed foreshadowed Christ’s life. The site says the figure in the middle window is probably Jehovah and the gentleman with the blue halo is the Lord, handing Moses a scroll with the Second Commandment on it.

The groupings of three, seen in the columns and windows behind Mary refer to the Holy Trinity.

That puzzling zodiac on the floor, according to the site, suggests “God’s dominion over all creation.”

Remember that question about why Mary would be looking at us? Well, turns out Van Eyck worked for the Duke of Burgundy as a painter but also was sent on secret missions. One of these was to help finalize a marriage contract between the duke and Isabella of Portugal. The site, says that Van Eyck probably escorted her to Flanders and almost certainly painted her portrait. It’s been suggested her features were used for Mary.

Next is The Adoration of the Shepherds by Giorgione. This beautiful but curious painting combines mystic visions, floating baby heads and the hidden meaning of rocks. It’s at alonglook-slowart.com/jesus

Today I’m looking at The Adoration of the Shepherds by Giorgione.

So what do you first notice? The gorgeous glowing cloak of Joseph kneeling next to Mary. They’re kneeling just outside the large mouth of a dark, mysterious cave. The infant Jesus lies on the ground in front of them, resting on a white cloth extending from his mother’s cloak and his head pillowed by a mound of hay. Just inside the cave to the right you can make out an ox and an ass.

Joseph kneels behind a large boulder, resting his arms on it with his finger tips touching while he looks down at Jesus. His orange cloak drapes over his shoulders but is gathered into an odd vertical looping fold on his right shoulder. Under the cloak, he’s wearing a dark grey garment and his head is covered by a thin white cap.

Mary’s shimmering cobalt blue cloak is draped over a wine colored gown and folds and flows to the ground around her. She wears a long head scarf wrapped loosely around her neck and has her hands joined in a prayer gesture.

Opposite them are two young men, one kneeling, the other stepping forward, leaning over to see the baby. They’re dressed roughly, with tattered shirts and cloaks. The standing shepherd wears a white tunic with scarlet sleeves, white leggings and a blue grey Vest. His cloak is flung over one shoulder. He has his hat in one hand and a tall staff in the other. The kneeling shepherd has a moss green vest over a tunic with teal sleeves. His dark brown cloak also hangs from the left shoulder with the other side wrapped under his right arm. His hat lies on the ground next to him.

The really strange thing is the 4 baby heads floating above the entrance to the cave! Some have wings but others seem to be emerging from small rust red clouds. They’re looking in all different directions.

The painting is divided roughly in half. The cave and the rocky hill it’s part of take up almost half the right side of the painting while on the left is a beautiful landscape. The shepherds are placed just about in the middle. All the figures take up about half the height of the canvas.

Looking from the bottom of the canvas, on the right in front of the Holy Family are rocks and pebbles scattered around. On the left are a few bushes and a tree stump. Up from these is a small pool of water surrounded by a low ring of rocks. Giorgione does this great thing where he uses short thin parallel strokes of white to illustrate water flowing over the lip of the pool. Past that are more plants and trees and on the far left side is a structure with a steep roof that’s open in the front. There’s a very small man who looks like he’s sitting on the ground just inside. Behind the structure are more trees going up the left side of the canvas.

Across from him and above the shepherds is a rocky area with a tall slender tree and some bushes growing out of it. There’s a grassy area under the tree with two men, one sitting on the ground, the other leaning against the rocks. They seem to be looking over at the guy in the barn or whatever that structure is. Beyond them the landscape meanders away in shades of green, ochre and tan with a few buildings rising in the distance. It finally ends in blue mountains that stretch up to a sky filled with blue grey clouds. Sunlight streams in from the upper left with highlighted patches on the landscape suggesting the light is breaking through a clearing sky. There’s even a sliver of light pink sky in the distance.

The rich colors and soft lighting gives this scene a very serene feel. The shepherds smile a little looking at the infant, Mary and Joseph appear deep in mediation. Even Jesus, lying on the ground, looking back at his mom, seems pretty content.

So why is the Holy Family in front of a cave and why is Jesus on the ground? Isn’t he supposed to be in a manger? And what’s with those floating baby heads?

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So setting the scene in a cave came from the writings of Saint Bridget of Sweden who lived in the 14th century. She describes a mystical vision she had of Christ’s birth: Mary while on her knees in prayer, gives birth and the child lies naked on her cloak glowing with light. This version of the Nativity was more common in the Byzantine church. The version we’re more used to–with the manager and the stable–was common in the Western church.

As for the floating heads, they’re cherubs. They’re probably included here because of the Biblical accounts talking about a heavenly host proclaiming Jesus’s birth to the shepherds. As a matter of fact, if you look closely you can see a tiny angel flying in from the upper left, with his arms outstretched, swooping in to make the grand announcement.

Cherubs are kind of a mashup of putti and cherubim. During the Renaissance, artists created these putti characters who look like male babies or toddlers with wings. Like Cupid, they represent love but a more spiritual love not romantic love. The cherubim, however are a different story. They are not cute cuddly babies. They’re fierce angels with multiple wings embedded with eyes and they’re described as having 4 faces, that of a man, a lion, an eagle, and an ox. They act as God’s security guards and record everything going on. Cherubim were even posted to guard Paradise after Adam and Eve were expelled.

Somehow, over time, these two creations merged into our idea of cherubs. Adorable little winged kids who help out in religious paintings, holding up clouds, playing music, providing a little humor and playfulness to these dramatic scenes. They’re kind of the cat videos of Christian art!

As for Giorgione, the Gallery calls him one of the most mysterious artists in the history of art. He lived and worked in Venice in the early 1500s and was an innovator. He created a whole new type of art called the pastoral landscape which is what we’re seeing on the left side. Up until then, landscape was kind of an afterthought. You might see a few trees and hills through the windows in a painting but in his pastorals, the landscape is front and center. And a lot of them weren’t based on anything! No Bible story, no mythology. He’d just come up with these gorgeous scenes filled with random people. You’re never quite sure what’s going on. The Venetians just loved them! David Gariff, a senior lecturer at the Gallery explained that Venetians loved landscapes because they had so little of their own. Remember the whole place is built on canals! Sadly, he died young from the plague, so we’ll never know what else he could have achieved but he had tremendous influence on the artists around and after him.

Oh and those rocks in the foreground? They actually have a meaning! They’re supposed to represent our sins as obstacles separating us from Jesus.

Finally, the last work isn’t about Christmas but is about a cold, snowy, winter day: The Skater (Portrait of William Grant) by Gilbert Stuart. He’s at alonglook-slowart.com/skater

Today I’m looking at The Skater (Portrait of William Grant) by Gilbert Stuart.

So what do you first notice? An almost life-sized man is ice skating in an odd twisted pose with his arms crossed. This stylish gentleman appears to be in his 40s and he’s dressed almost all in black–coat, vest, breeches and stockings. Even his shoes are black with gleaming silver rectangular buckles. It looks like the skates strap onto the shoes somehow. He wears a hat with a large upturned brim, also black and his brilliant white cravat and silvery fur lapels really stand out against this outfit.

So here’s his pose. He’s got his arms crossed, his head turned to our right, his shoulders turned slightly to our left and his hips are turned toward us, kind of like a corkscrew. His left leg extends towards us and his right foot is back, the toe pointed down and his coat flaps a little, like he just came to a stop. You can even see sketchy thin white circles painted under the blades of his skates!

He looks very satisfied, with a little smile on his lips and his eyes look off the right side of the canvas. His cheeks are flushed from the cold.

Behind him a frozen river winds back to some dimly seen buildings in the distance, one of which has two square towers. On the right side the riverbank slopes gently downwards and is lined with trees. Some are bare but others still have their leaves.

The tree closest to us stretches up to an overcast sky and there’s streaks of white on some of its bare branches. Maybe a dusting of snow? It’s painted in shades of grey and black with a few patches of umber and red. Under it stand two men who gaze over towards two other men sitting on the riverbank putting on their skates.

Further back on the left is a group of men on the ice, two of whom seem to be greeting each other very enthusiastically. Their arms are spread wide, hats in their hands and their legs are also spread with their knees bent a little.

Stuart uses very cool subdued colors. The ice and cloud filled sky are a blend of thinly painted white, shades of grey and a little pale lavender. The trees are grey and moss green. The few hints of color come from the clothing of the other skaters. In that group on the left, one man wears a mustard yellow vest, another wears a blue coat and a third has a red coat. One of the men strapping on his skates on the right also wears a red coat.

Features are indistinct and details get faint and blurry very quickly as the scene recedes. It almost feels like there’s a mist rising. But our main man is very clearly painted in all his stylish glory, his features highlighted by light coming from the upper left.

Stuart does a great job of making us feel the cold with that milky grey white sky and cool color palette.

The painting is about 8 ft tall by 4 feet wide and he takes up most of the height, so he’s definitely life-sized. It’s in a gold frame about 4 inches wide, with egg and dart molding. I’ll include a picture in the show notes.

So who is this gentleman and why the odd skating pose?

Our friend is William Grant, a Scottish lawyer who hired Gilbert Stuart to paint his portrait. Stuart was living and studying painting in London with another artist, Benjamin West. Both men were American. When Grant arrived at the studio he said it was so cold he was better off going skating than sitting for a portrait. So off they went to the Serpentine, a popular skating spot in Kensington Gardens, which is between Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace.

The two men in the background are saying hello with a maneuver called the Serpentine greeting. It’s a kind of complicated gliding stepping turning move that showed off each man’s skill on the ice. Nowadays it’s called the Mohawk. I’ll include a video link in the show notes so you can see for yourself.

When they got back to Stuart’s rooms, he got the idea to portray Grant in this skating pose set in a wintry background. This was his first full-length portrait but he created something completely new. The standing cross-legged pose was common in men’s portraits but showing someone skating was an innovation. There were plenty of portraits set outdoors but the guys are usually just standing, not doing anything.

As for the crossed arms, that came from a writer named Robert Jones who recommended the crossed arm pose as “a proper attitude for genteel rolling.”

When the painting was shown at the Royal Academy, audiences just loved it. As a matter of fact, Grant went to see the exhibit, dressed like he was in the portrait and was so overwhelmed by visitors who recognized him, he had to leave!

The portrait was such a hit, Stuart was able to move out of Benjamin West’s studio and start his own.

Stuart, who was born and raised in Rhode Island, returned to America in 1793, determined to paint George Washington’s portrait as a way to establish himself. He supposedly said, “I expect to make a fortune by Washington.” And it worked! He ended up painting the Madisons, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and for decades after painted nearly 1000 portraits of the rich and powerful.

Despite making a fortune by Washington, Stuart did something pretty rotten. He ripped off the first First Lady. His portrait of Washington was so popular that he was asked to paint several copies of it. When he was about halfway through these copies, Martha Washington commissioned him to paint a new portrait of George, just for her. Well, when he was done with George’s likeness, he liked it so much better than the first version, he wouldn’t give it to her! He kept it for himself to refer to while producing future copies, one of was the engraving of George that’s on the $1 bill! You can see this version called the Athenaeum Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery in DC.

I want to thank everyone who took part in my Instagram poll, voting 100% yes on the idea of a Christmas episode! I appreciate your support. If you enjoyed it, please leave a comment on the site! And if you’re listening for the first time, you can find more episodes and show notes there or on your favorite podcast app or streaming service.

Here’s wishing you a safe and healthy Christmas and hope for a better New Year. As always, thanks for listening!

The Thanksgiving Episode

Hi everyone! Karen here.

With Thanksgiving coming up, I’ve been thinking alot about gratitude. Trying to acknowledge small blessings every day is one way I’ve been getting through this crazy year.

I wanted to share this idea with you by pulling together three past episodes that speak to the idea of gratitude.

So join me for this extended Thanksgiving episode of A Long Look!

We’ll start off with one my favorites, A Pastoral Visit by Richard Norris Brooke. This painting of a Sunday dinner with an important guest reflects the role of faith and community for a rural Virginia family. A Pastoral Visit transcript here.

Next is The Return of the Prodigal Son by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. This enormous, dramatic painting presents the emotional return of a wayward son to his family.

This is an enormous painting, about 8 ft x 8.5 ft. so almost square. You have to stand across the room to take it all in. It’s a scene filled with people but all the attention is on an old man reaching out to embrace a young man kneeling in front of him. They’re slightly off center and the young man gazes up with his hands clasped to his chest. His whole body language is a plea for forgiveness.

The old man has a long grey beard and wears a black skull cap and he’s dressed in a enormous rose colored fur lined cloak that’s draped over a dark blue robe. The young man wears tattered rags, his white shirt so ripped, one shoulder is bare. And his shredded pants are more like shorts, barely holding together. His feet are dirty and his face is covered by a rough beard and moustache. Despite his appearance, a small white dog jumps excitedly at his feet.

They’re in some kind of courtyard with walls that extend back on either side. On the left, the wall ends a few inches into the canvas and past it are a couple of dimly painted buildings. The wall on the right reaches further back and has a square column jutting out from it. At the end of the wall stands a simple round column. Filling the space behind all this are billowing grey white clouds.

On either side of the central pair are two groups. To the right are 5 people, some looking at the embracing men, others at each other. In front are two young men, one holding a silver tray piled high with gorgeous satin clothing. There’s a sky blue and scarlet tunic trimmed with gold, a white silk shirt and sandals. He wears a shimming yellow tunic belted at the waist and what appear to be boots. Although as i look closer, they look more like black socks and sandals! So maybe that’s how that got started!

His companion is dressed in grey with a dark blue cloak draped over one shoulder and he holds up a ring topped with a large red stone, maybe a ruby. The rest of the group are a little more dimly seen. A woman and little girl stand beyond the young men and finally, to the right of all of them, another man looks out from the shadows.

On the left, a smiling young boy leads a calf into the scene. With him is a thin but muscular man carrying an ax on his shoulder who gazes down at the boy… or the calf. They’re dressed as peasants.

What’s striking is the focus on the central figures and the two young men holding the garments and ring. They’re painted in such rich color compared to the rest of the scene, they almost look spotlighted. Everyone and everything else is kind of faded or in shadow.

There’s a lot of emotion and energy here. The pleading look on the young man’s face as he looks up to his father. The father’s tender expression in return. The wonder of the servants as they approach. The heads in each group are all turned in different directions, they look amazed and some are starting to smile. All except that calf…

So who are all these people? Why is the young man in rags? And what’s going to happen to that calf?

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If you know the story of the prodigal son, you understand the calf’s lack of enthusiasm.

But for those of you who don’t know it, the story of the prodigal son is a biblical parable. A wealthy man has two sons. One asks for his inheritance and promptly leaves town and blows it on partying and prostitutes. He ends up struggling through a famine and a terrible job in his new country, and decides he’s had enough and it’s time to go home. He realizes his stupidity and throws himself on his father’s mercy when he gets there. His father is so overjoyed at his safe return, he calls for his servants to “Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and now is found.” There’s more to the story, but this is the part that’s relevant here.

Murillo painted this as one of 8 paintings for the Church of the Hospital of St. George in Seville, which was a hospice for the homeless and hungry. He used only the main elements of the story’s climax, the penitent son welcomed home by his forgiving father; the rich garments and ring that signify his return to his position in the family; and the fatted calf for the celebratory banquet. Murillo may have chosen to emphasize the charitable aspects of the parable because of the charitable organization that commissioned the work.

It turns out these paintings Murillo did for the hospital were so popular that the Secretary of State for King Charles tried to get them moved to Madrid. He wanted to display them in a royal museum that was being proposed. But the Brotherhood who ran the hospital was able to prevent the move. However, ten years later, they were seized by the government of Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napolean, and placed in the Alcazar of Seville, a royal palace in the city.

Fun fact about Joseph Bonaparte, his brother made him king of Spain and Naples. While he was king of Spain he loved wine and parties so much, he got the nickname “Joey Bottles!” And after his brother’s empire collapsed, he fled to… New Jersey! The New York Times has a great article on their website about this. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

Finally, one of my Dutch favorites, River Landscape with Cows by Aelbert Cuyp ends with the story of how a refugee family gifted the painting to the country as thanks for the opportunities it provided.

Today I’m looking at River Landscape with Cows by Aelbert Cuyp ALBERT COWP
If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice? An enormous evening sky filled with clouds takes most of the canvas which is about 2 ft by 3 ft.. The clouds swirl with white, blue gray and hints of pink from the setting sun. A flock of birds flies out from the middle of the canvas towards the upper right, getting a little bigger as they get near us. The’re just hinted at with quick V shaped strokes of dark color.

Below them is a herd of cows bathed in warm sunlight lying clustered together along a low riverbank. They take up most of the foreground in the bottom third of the canvas.

Three in front are lying down, while the others stand behind them. An eighth cow lies by himself in the shadows off to one side. They’re painted in a mix of browns, black and ochres. These are some very alert cows. Their heads are up and they look out intently. Some look left towards the river, others look at some point off to the right and one looks right at us with a kind of arrogant expression. As the site explains, “Aelbert Cuyp was not the first Dutch artist to focus on a herd of cows, but he portrayed them with a dignity lacking in similar works by his predecessors.”

They lie on green grass that fades to brown as it rises up a hill to the right. And there are quick short strokes of white scattered around, I think they’re meant to be hightlights, As I look closer, I realize there are white scratches in the paint to make highlights for reeds in front of them.

At the top of that hill are three men, who appear to be having a conversation. They’re about halfway up the canvas. One is on horseback and has his back to us. The other two stand to the right of him. They’re dressed simply in tunics and knee length pants and wear soft caps.They also carry tall staffs.

There’s a break in the clouds to the left of the men with rays of sunlight streaming down towards them.

The glistening, silver river winds from the left side to about the middle of the canvas and a handful of boats with billowing sails glide along.

The far side of the river is a greenish gold, loosely painted treeline that’s reflected in the water. The far shore fades and becomes even more loosely painted as it recedes. It’s more of a suggestion than actual landscape.

Most of the scene is loosely painted. All the detail seems focused on the cows and trio of men.

And the soft evening light creates a very dreamy, peaceful feeling.

So why would this artist paint a bunch of cows? There are actually 3 other Cuyps in the same gallery, all with cows!

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It turns out this painting was done around 1650, the start of the Dutch Golden Age. The Netherlands had just ended 80 years of war with Spain for their independence. Despite the years of fighting, they had a strong economy and their economy really took off after the war ended. Cows were a symbol of that prosperity because milk, butter and cheese were a big part of the Dutch diet and cheese was one of their major exports.

And in a video about the painting, Curator Arthur Wheelock explains those rays of light shining down on the three men as “ sort of though God is looking down on this world and giving it his blessing.”

So a lot of these idealistic landscapes were done by Cuyp and others to celebrate Dutch peace and prosperity. And maybe to brag a little.

Aelbert was born in Dordrecht and became one of the most famous landscape painters of the time. But surprisingly, he scaled back his painting after marrying a wealthy widow. According to the site this was, “probably owing to a combination of his increased church activity and the absence of financial pressures.”

This piece has an amazing back story. It was owned by the Petschek PETCHECK family in Czechoslovakia and in 1938 they knew the Nazis were coming. The Nazis were stealing works of art during their invasions and a lot of it was sent back to Hitler or Herman Goering. So to screw with the Nazis the family had a copy made, framed it and left it hanging in the house. Then they had a friend an artist paint a watercolor landscape over the original. At some point, an art historian friend, Walter Barant removed the fake landscape to reveal the gorgeous original.

And for 2 years, the family carried this thing as they fled, on trains and busses through Switzerland, France, Spain, then on a freighter to Brazil, they even went up to Canada. They finally arrived in New York City in 1940.

After the deaths of their father and mother the Petscheck daughters Elisabeth de Picciotto PICHIATO and Maria Smith donated the painting to the National Gallery. They wanted to express the family’s gratitude to the United States for providing safe haven, freedom and opportunities to refugees like them and so many others.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, please leave a comment! If you’re listening for the first time, you can find more episodes and show notes on the website, alonglook-slowart.com or your favorite podcast app or streaming service.

I hope you all find a way to enjoy Thanksgiving and as always, thanks for listening!

End of Season 5

Hello and welcome to A Long Look!
Well, we’ve reached the end of Season 5! I hope the show provided some kind of relief from this extraordinary year. And I hope you enjoyed being introduced to the amazing Evans-Tibbs Collection!

I’ll be taking some time off to figure out what’s next for A Long Look. Despite all the help of the wonderful Gallery librarians, not being able to do research in person is really making it difficult to bring you the great stories I love discovering. Some of the best I found were buried in sources listed in a bibliography somewhere!

Thanks so much to all of you who’ve listened, subscribed, rated and spread the word about the show. You’re the reason I’ve done 5 seasons!

You can keep up with me on Instagram and as always, thanks for listening, take care of yourselves and each other and vote!!

Quarry by Edward Loper

Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson

Most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art. But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Let’s find out with a work in the National Gallery of Art!

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Today I’m looking at Quarry by Edward Loper. If you want to follow along, you can find it at the Gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

A stormy sky swirling with bands of smoke grey, white and steel blue clouds fills the top third of this oil painting. These swirls ripple as they move down and back into the distance on the canvas, which is about 2 ft by 2.5 ft., so almost square.

Thin streaks of white stream downward from the upper left. They seem to be streaks of light breaking through the gloomy clouds. That light illuminates a sort of industrial scene. Just left of center is a charcoal grey water tower and to its right, is a row of 7 large silos, connected along the top. There’s a gap between the tower and the silos where a distant church is tucked between them, its thin spire rising up towards the stormy sky. It’s ghostly looking, almost the same grey as the sky and outlined in strokes of white.

The silos back up to a red brick building. We can see a part of its roofline and right side. Further to the right is another structure with a steeply pitched dark brown roof that kind of looks like a barn. The silos and the barn are both painted in steel grey, with gleaming highlights from that light in the upper left.

In front of these buildings are a row of telephone polls and a chain link fence, painted with delicate horizontal and crisscross strokes of white and taupe. As it stretches left to right it follows the rough contours of a rocky landscape.

The landscape sits between us and those buildings. A series of rocky hills start below and to the left of the watertower, stretching down and to the right til they run off the canvas. The landscape continues in the foreground. It flattens a little where we’re “standing,” then climbs halfway up the left side The hills are covered in dark green moss and grassy dark brown, green and tan overgrowth. Their craggy faces are painted in ochre, stone beige and dark brown, delineated with angled strokes of black. A gleaming silver grey stream meanders towards us between those hills in the middle distance and the one to our left.

One scrubby, ghost white tree clings to one of the lower slopes near the water. And as I kept looking at it, I suddenly saw three tiny figures walking up a rocky path from the water! One looks like he’s heading for a tall brown patch on the face of the central hill that could be the mouth of a cave. He’s bent over, looks like he’s wearing a backpack while his companions remain standing near the water.

On the hill beside us is a gnarled tree, leaning a little to the right. Its dark bare branches stretch up and out, just brushing the top and left sides of the canvas. Two smaller similar trees sit on either side of it. They’re all painted in tones of charcoal grey and dark brown, highlighted with touches of white.

Through their branches, I see another barn in the distance, this time russet red, like an autumn leaf. The mood of this scene is definitely autumnal, almost wintery. It reminds of late November when colors have faded and the wind whips around you.

MUSIC

Edward L. Loper was a native of Wilmington Del and Quarry is one of many scenes of the city he painted over a career that lasted more than 60 years.

He started out when he was 20, struggling to find work during the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s and 40s. He was hired by the Works Progress Administration to work on a project called the Index of American Design. The Works Progress Administration was the US government’s massive program that provided jobs to millions of people during the Depression. In addition to the Index, artists, including Black artists, were hired to create paintings, sculptures and murals for public buildings.

In a 1964 interview, Loper explains how he got job because of his wife saying, “So, finally my wife gave up the idea of trying to make it by ourselves and she went up to see about some form of help and while there she met a lady and they were discussing…they needed people for art projects…she told this woman, whoever it was, that I had painted. So, they said to send him in…‘rather than giving him a job on relief, we’ll give him a job on something we need.’”

He‘d taken art classes in high school but didn’t have formal training. But he interviewed anyway and got the job. He and three other men were put to work making detailed illustrations of folk art objects found in American homes since colonial days. This was a way of preserving American decorative arts that were in danger of disappearing. These included toys, metalwork, furniture…

The drawings are beautiful, really detailed and the collection lives at the Gallery. I’ll include one in the post.

He credited working alongside these trained artists for really bolstering his illustration skills. Their day ran from 9-1:30 and every day after work, he’d go outside and paint.

Loper got into painting when he saw works by N.C. Wyeth displayed in Wilmington store windows. He talked to Wyeth who encouraged him to learn by looking at other artists. So he started going to the Wilmington Library every day to see their collection.

Loper was invited to join the Easel Project run by Walter Pyle. This was the part of the WPA that hired artists to paint murals and other works for public buildings. He focused on painting outdoor scenes of Wilmington and really liked working for the easel project. He said, “With easel painting you painted as much as you wanted. In fact, you painted more but you were doing something more exciting.”

Loper and his colleagues on the Project talked a lot what art is about. This question really fascinated him, so he’d go up every weekend to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to study works by different artists. He studied the gritty urban scenes by American artists like George Bellows and the wildly experimental art of Picasso and Matisse. But a big influence were the dramatic scenes of Veronese, Tintoretto and El Greco.

He said, “I do not feel good about one of my paintings unless my painting has a glow, luminosity and drama—those kinds of qualities that move me most.” which you can totally see in Quarry.

Another influence was the artist Horace Pippin. Watching him work and talking with him about his artistic choices one day, Pippen told him he needed to paint exactly what he sees, not what other people see. From that moment on, Loper says, “I made up my mind I was never going to paint like someone else.”

One night Loper was working outside the local Allied Kid Company which specialized in making kid leather and suede. As Loper sat painting the scene of workers inside, the owner Saul Cohen, came out and they started talking. Cohen ended up offering him a job and Loper agreed. Even though he had a longer workday, he didn’t stop painting! After clocking out, he’d get his paints and brushes and head outside, working til it got dark.

Around this time, Cohen asked him to teach art classes at the factory. He opened a classroom in the top floor, teaching co-workers and other locals, all while working full-time.

He started exhibiting and as he said, “I’d win a prize here and a prize there and it was working out pretty well.” One of those prizes was an Honorable Mention in the Annual Delaware Show which led to him exhibiting in influential exhibitions in Chicago and Atlanta and getting represented by galleries in Philadelphia and DC. His break came when every one of his 35 works was sold in a show in Philadelphia. Later that year, another show was almost a sell-out. An art dealer said he should quit the factory and paint full time.

So he did! Loper left Allied Kid in 1953 and supported himself by teaching at various sites around Wilmington, including the art museum and YMHA, along with sales of his work.

His career continued to grow. He frequently showed in the Annual Delaware Show, where he was often the only Black person at the openings. Mainstream magazines like Art Digest and Art News featured his work.

Loper has been called an arts ambassador who opened doors for diversity in the arts. One way he did this was by taking his classes on painting trips, starting in the ’60s. In an exhibition catalog called Edw. L. Loper: On the Prism’s Edge, one student described the bonds built during these trips, saying, “Gender, class, religious or racial differences melted away. Edward Loper’s passion for visual experience draws disparate personalities to him with a force like gravitational attraction.”

His career lasted more than 60 years with works displayed in the National Gallery of Art, the Delaware Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And—fun fact—one painting hung in the Naval Observatory when it was home to Vice President Joe Biden. I found a really terrific interview with Loper from 1998 called Edward Loper : African American Painter. I’ll include a link in the show notes, you should really check it out.

OUTRO:

I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglook-slowart.com and in most podcast apps.

Once again, my thanks to Anna Tomlinson of the Gallery’s Art Library for her invaluable help with today’s episode.

Visit the site for subscription links! If you want to leave comments or questions, there’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

Still Life by Margaret Burroughs

So what do you first notice?

Strong light streams in from the left of this poster sized painting and illuminates a group of shapes and fruit that form a rough pyramid. They sit on a chocolate brown surface or table filling the lower eighth of the painting. The tallest shape is a red cylinder that sits in the center and almost reaches the top. You get the sense of its volume by how it’s painted, running from a white highlight on the left to scarlet in the middle, then a cranberry red shadow.

Below and to the right of it is a shorter cylinder. This one though is topped with a semi circle that looks like a mushroom cap. It’s butter yellow blending to orange then to spinach green shadow. Each cylinder has a partial circle emerging from the its left side. The one next to the yellow cylinder is chartreuse bordered in dark grey. The other is filled with a peacock pattern.

In front of all this are fruits scattered left and right to complete the pyramid. On the left is an oval shaped melon cut in half. Its skin is a bluish black and its flesh is a rosy pink, studded with two parallel rows of seeds. A cluster of green grapes is draped in front of it and nearby is a pomegranate. It’s almost pumpkin orange highlighted with a warm golden yellow.

An upside down anjou pear sits between the melon and pomegranate, tilted a little to the left. Its left side is chartreuse with flicks of blue blending into a cobalt blue then black on the right.

The last object is a sort of vessel. Imagine a cross between a horseshoe and a chalice and you’ll get the idea. A red apple is nestled in its curve which is black decorated with alternating strokes of cobalt blue and yellow. Its stem and base are chartreuse.

Pattern plays a huge role in this painting. The whole background behind the group is filled with angled shapes filled with different ones. They remind me of bolts of cloth on display.

Starting from the left, a silver parallelogram covered with alternating burgundy and yellow stripes angles up from the table on the lower left and ends to the left of the red cylinder. A smaller yellow copy of it, dotted with pink, is tucked along its right edge.To its left, an upside down pink right-angle triangle drops down from the top edge of the painting. Quick circles of red with dark blue dots in the center suggest flowers. A narrow band of olive green fills the rest of the left side, suggesting a wall.

On the right, another angled shape rises from the table and intersects the silver shape just to the left of the red cylinder. The gap where they meet forms a triangle the same blue black as the melon. This rising shape is coral, covered with thin black squiggles and light blue circles with yellow dots. To its right, another upside down right angle triangle drops from the top. It’s light grey and covered with broad, wavy yellow shapes, outlined in chocolate brown. It’s flipped to mirror the pink triangle. Finally, the rest of the right side is filled cobalt blue dotted with faint dabs of grey and brown.

Aside from being so colorful, these patterns are painted very loosely which makes it vibrate with energy. It’s very Cubist in style and while I’ve described things as being behind one another, you could also say they interlock, like a puzzle.

MUSIC

Margaret Taylor Burroughs was born in Louisiana in 1917. Her family moved to Chicago when she was 5, and was her home for the rest of her life. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art education from Chicago Teachers College and the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Still Life was done in 1943 while she was in her 20s. It’s an example of her arts training at the Art Institute, where students learned modern styles like Cubism and expressionism. And it’s another piece in the Evans-Tibbs collection. Like Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Burroughs became focused on “the uplift of African American and Africans including the diaspora.”

She lived and worked at a time when a lot of Black women in Chicago were very involved in social activism and devoted her public life to art, teaching and community organizing. She spent 23 years teaching art in DuSable High school and 10 years teaching humanities and art history at Kennedy-King College and Elmhurst College.

Just a few years before Still Life, she founded the South Side Community Art Center. The Center helped fuel a Chicago Black Renaissance in the 1940s, like the earlier Harlem Renaissance in the ‘20s. Black writers, dancers, composers and artists now had a safe place to come together to talk, learn and practice their art. The center was originally funded through the Works Progress Administration and its opening was attended by the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt and broadcast nationally on the radio. Another guest was Alain Locke, an enormously influential professor from Howard University.

Early in her career, Burroughs realized she could either use her art to just make money painting trendy abstract pieces like Still Life or she could create more representative art that would benefit her fellow Black citizens. She wanted to reach them, not an art elite. So she began creating linoleum block prints which everyone could afford. Instead of cold, geometric compositions, these bold black and white prints depict the lives of the Black community around her and images illustrating African heritage.

She also created works of racial harmony saying, “I wish my art to speak not only for my people-but for all humanity. My subject matter is social commentary and seeks to improve the condition of life for all people”

Preserving and promoting Black heritage was a passion for her. She once told The Chicago Defender, “Service and humanity is what’s important. You should always want to honor and help others, and leave a legacy of something positive you’ve done in your community.”
To that end, she and her husband Charles founded the Ebony Museum of Negro Art in their home, featuring their extensive collection of masks, fabrics and other artifacts gathered during visits to Africa. Several years later, the museum was renamed DuSable (DOO-SAH-BUL) Museum of African-American History and moved to a new location in the city, becoming the first museum of its kind in the country.

She was proud the museum grew out of the Black community. She said, “We weren’t started by anybody downtown; we were started by ordinary folks.”

Margaret Taylor Burroughs was an author, painter, sculptor, printmaker, curator, museum director, activist, and teacher who left an amazing artistic and historic legacy. She even served as the Chicago Parks Commissioner after her teaching career!

This is just an introduction to Burroughs. Go check out the links in the show notes to find out more about this remarkable woman.

OUTRO:
So this is what slow art is all about. You don’t have to see everything when you visit a museum. Just find a few pieces that catch your eye and let yourself really look closely. Let the art kind of reveal itself. The Slow Art website recommends 5 to 10 minutes. I hope you’ll try this out on your next museum visit and you can find more info at www.slowartday.com

Special thanks goes to Anna Tomlinson and Anne Simmons at the Gallery’s Art Library for their invaluable help with today’s episode.

You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglook-slowart.com and in most podcast apps. While you’re there, why not subscribe and share? It’s free and that way you and your friends won’t miss an episode! You can find subscription links and social buttons near the end of each post.

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

The Good Shepherd by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Today I’m looking at The Good Shepherd by Henry Ossawa Tanner

If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

The glow of creamy golden yellow and delicate shades of green creating this dream-like scene. Everything’s indistinct, there are no clear details, just vaguely recognizable forms. So here’s what I see.

A shepherd stands outside a simple cottage with his flock of sheep huddled alongside him.

The cottage emerges from the left side of the canvas, near the lower corner, and extends about 2/3 of the way across. It has a sage green front door just left of center. To the left of that, a window sits high on the wall. A young tree sits right outside that left-hand window leaning to the left as it runs off the canvas. On the right side of the cottage, there appears to be another door or opening and a small lean-to extending off it, its roof slanted downwards. Maybe it’s a pen for the sheep?

The shepherd stands in front of that right-hand opening. He’s turned to our right facing his flock, almost in profile. He’s tall, his head almost reaches the sagging cottage roof. He’s painted in that same sage green, even his skin, with thin traces of emerald green delineating the folds of his voluminous cloak and the shadow along his chin. His features are vague, barely hinted at. An angled narrow band of green stands in for eyes and patches of caramel brown suggest a beard.

In contrast, the sheep are a mass of yellow, delineated by brown strokes and patches. The occasional white dot suggests an eyes, staring out at us. They form a pretty large group that stretches to the right of the shepherd as far as the lean-to.

Sunlight from the upper right warms the scene and casts brown shadows under the eaves of the cottage and throws a faint watery green shadow of the shepherd onto the wall.

The ground in front, which fills the lower quarter of the canvas, is sketched in shades of green layered on each other that blend into areas of creamy gold and patches of caramel brown. Thick dabs of color suggest rocks and pebbles.

Tall trees rise up behind the cottage, their thin yellow trunks speckled with dark brown. They kind of melt as they rise, turning into watery blobs of emerald and sage green suggesting foliage. It almost looks like watercolor! Their branches reach towards a green-gold sky filling the upper third of the image. A vaguely round gold shape hovering over the cottage might be the sun. Like the tree out front, they lean to the left as if blown by steady wind over the years. Finally, a shorter tree fills the space between the cottage and the right side of the canvas.

Aside from the vague figures, what also gives this scene such a dreamy feeling is how Tanner applied this handful of colors. He built up layer after layer of dabs, blotches, dots, short strokes, thin trails of color, thick drops and strokes of impasto and in the sky, delicate washes of yellow and green. Some of these layers are translucent, there are a lot of places where the green is so thin, you can see the yellow through it. In others it looks like he used thick, loaded brushstrokes. The paint must be almost 3D in person! The effect is hazy, shimmering and mind-boggling!

So why would Tanner paint a Bible scene in such an unusual way?

MUSIC

Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, 1859. His dad, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was a minister for the African Methodist Episcopal Church who later became a bishop. His mother, Sarah Miller Tanner, was a former slave who had escaped north on the Underground Railroad. The family eventually settled in Philadelphia, when Tanner was about 10. A few years later, while walking through Fairmount Park, he saw an landscape painter at work and decided he wanted to be a painter too.

Dad wasn’t too pleased, he hoped he’d go into the ministry or business. He set him up with a job at a friends’ flour mill but eventually Tanner convinced his parents to let him study art and enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when he was 21. He was the first full-time Black student there.

He studied with a prominent American artist, Thomas Eakins who taught him the importance of working from reality, from nature. That meant drawing and painting from live models, vs just copying plaster casts of classic statues, which was the usual Academy method.

Eakins also introduced him to photography and after he left the Academy, he moved to Atlanta to open a photography studio. The business didn’t work out but he did meet Bishop Joseph Crane Hartzell. Hartzell and his wife became his first patrons and Hartzell got him a job teaching art at Clark College.

The Hartzells were such fans they mounted an exhibition of Tanner’s work and ended up buying all the works in the show. This gave Tanner the money to finally go study painting in Europe. He was supposed to go to Rome but on the way, stopped in Paris and just loved it. It wasn’t just for the arts but as an escape from the racism at home. He enrolled in the Académie Julian and joined the American Art Students Club. He attempted a couple of times to return to live and work in America, but the prevailing racism and rise of Jim Crow laws, convinced him to return to Paris. There, he could focus on his art and live a freer life.

Tanner’s early works depicted the lives of African Americans he met while spending a summer in the mountains of North Carolina. Just like Richard Norris Brooke, he wanted to depict African Americans with dignity and humanity to counterbalance the caricatures that were so widespread.

But back in Paris, he began painting biblical scenes. It might have been because of his religious upbringing or because most artists tried this at one point in their careers. Religious or history paintings were considered more important than scenes of everyday life, so it was one way to grow your reputation.

Like every artist, he entered his works in the prestigious annual Salon. This was an opportunity to show his work to a large audience and kickstart his career. His first Bible painting, Daniel and Lions’ Den won an honorable mention in the 1896. A year later, his innovative version of The Raising of Lazarus won a third class medal and the French government bought it for display in the Musee du Luxembourg, bringing him even more fame.

BTW, there’s a mystery surrounding that first Daniel painting. Tanner did another version years later but that first one disappeared!

Tanner’s work got on the radar of Rodman Wanamaker. Wanamaker was a Philadelphia businessman who made his fortune in department stores. He saw The Rasing of Lazarus in Paris and was so impressed, he offered to pay for Tanner to go to see the Egypt and the Holy Land firsthand and learn how to more naturally depict the light, people and settings of these Biblical locations.

Tanner took him up on his offer and left in 1897, going to Cairo first. From there he traveled to Jerusalem, Jericho and the Dead Sea, making sketches of the people, mosques, architecture and landscape he encountered.

When he eventually headed back to Europe, he stopped in Italy where he finally got to see Rome!

Several years ago, Gwendolyn Everett gave a lecture at the Gallery where she tells the story of how Tanner found out his was famous. She said he was in Venice and a letter that had been following him around for three weeks finally caught up with him. It was an offer from the French government offering to buy his Lazarus painting. He also started getting letters from friends back in Paris telling him to come back to “see the crowds before your picture.” Needless to say, he went back immediately.

The Good Shepherd was painted in 1918, years after he had gained international recognition. He was working for the American Red Cross in Paris at the time, painting images of Black troops during WWI. A few years later, he was awarded France’s highest honor and named a knight of the Legion of Honor for his contributions.

And it was one of the founding pieces of the Evans-Tibbs collection. Madame Lillian Evanti, who we heard about in the introductory episode, bought it from Tanner while performing in Paris.

Although Tanner was trained to be a realist, the dreamy, hazy style of The Good Shepherd was probably inspired by the Symbolists, a group of poets and artists who wanted to convey the visionary and spiritual. They also were influenced by a color theory that said colors have emotional meanings and moods. This idea is still used in graphic and interior design. According to this theory the yellow and green Tanner used here stand for danger and hope. Since The Good Shepherd is a Biblical parable about a shepherd who leaves his flock to find one lost sheep, it makes sense!

His biblical scenes made Tanner an international art star. In 1908, he was given a one-man show at the American American Art Galleries in New York and spent the following years fielding offers from galleries around the country. Towards the end of his life, Tanner was made an academician of the National Academy of Design, a lifetime award.

OUTRO:

So this is what slow art is all about. Let the art kind of reveal itself. The Slow Art website recommends 5 to 10 minutes. I hope you’ll try this out when you can finally visit a museum and you can find more info at www.slowartday.com

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

Autumn Drama by Alma Thomas

Today I’m looking at Autumn Drama by Alma Thomas. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

Thick broken lines of color parade across and off the edges of this canvas, which is about 2 feet high by 3 feet wide. The vertical lines are built with short, blocky strokes of color. Bits of white canvas peek out from the gaps between them. The strokes form irregular rectangles about 2 inches wide. Thomas used acrylic paints so the colors are rich and vibrant.

It’s very playful but there’s an order to it. Groups of purple lines are interspersed among single lines of color. So here’s the progression, ready? Going from left to right: steel blue, cherry red, 5 purple lines; grass green, red, pink, turquoise, red, turquoise, 3 purple lines, red, steel blue, lime green, orange, 4 purple lines, pink, orange, 1 purple line, lime green, red, and finally lavender.

The ways these irregular shapes all interconnect reminds me of a mosaic.

So how is such a cheerful painting called Autumn Drama?

MUSIC

Alma Thomas was a Black artist in Washington DC who found success late in life. She was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1891, the oldest of four girls. At 15, her dad moved the family to Washington DC because there was no high school in Columbus that would accept black students. She eventually attended Howard University in DC and was the first graduate of its new art department. She became an art teacher, spending her whole 35 year career at Shaw Junior High School in the city. While teaching, she also earned her masters degree in arts education from Columbia University.

She kept up her own art education by taking painting classes at American University during the ’50s, where she began experimenting with abstract and expressionist art. She had been working in a more realistic style up til then.

Thomas was really active in the DC arts scene. She organized the School Arts League where junior high school students learned about art through trips to the city’s museums and lectures on Black artists. She launched an art gallery at Shaw Junior High featuring works by Black artists lent by Howard University. In the ’40s she became vice president of the Barnett Aden Gallery, the first gallery to break the color barrier in DC.

When she finally retired in the ’60s, she had such a bad attack of arthritis, she almost gave up painting. But when she was offered a show at Howard University, she became determined to keep working. There’s a great exhibition catalog called Alma W. Thomas : a retrospective of the paintings that tells the story.

She spent a year in bed, recuperating and watching the light flicker through the leaves of the holly tree out her front window. She began to realize the patterns the leaves made could be incorporated into her own art. She also took inspiration from Henri Matisse, who made compositions out of cut pieces of color paper when he became too old and ill to paint. She basically had the attitude, “if he can do it, so can I.”

Color and pattern became her passion, inspired by that flickering light on the trees and garden outside her windows and led her to, as she said, “paint something different from anything I’d ever done.”

Another favorite inspiration were the flower beds in the city’s National Arboretum. It’s a gorgeous place, well worth a visit, and as of this recording in August 2020, is still open!

Autumn Drama is one of a series she called Earth paintings. I found a manuscript she wrote where she talks about them. She says, “Autumn, with the aid of Jack Frost, gives overwhelming, luscious, strong colors to the earth to enrich man’s soul, seemingly relieving him of the hardships he encounters in life.”

“My earth paintings are inspired by the display of azaleas at the Arboretum, the cherry blossoms, circular flower beds, the nurseries as seen from planes that are airborne, and by the foliage of trees in the Fall.”

I found a stunning photo of the Arboretum in October which I’ve included in the blog post. You can definitely how its dramatic colors would have been a big inspiration!

While nature was hugely important, she also studied and experimented with color theory. Thomas explained the importance of color saying, “Man’s inspiration comes from nature. A world without color would seem dead. Color is life. LIfe is the mother of color. Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.”

She wasn’t the only DC artist fascinated by color. Two artists pushing abstract art in a new direction were Gene Davis and Kenneth Nolan. Through their focus on color and geometry, they became big influences on her work.

Through her work at the Barnett-Aden Gallery she got to talk with artists from all over the country, which helped her keep up with emerging directions in art. She drew inspiration from books, art magazines, visits to New York galleries, even a trip to Europe sponsored by the Tyler School of Fine Art at Temple University.

But by 1969 when she painted Autumn Drama, she had come up with her own unique style.

Her work was popular right from the start. She worked out her abstract composition ideas in watercolors. which were then shown at the Dupont Theatre Art Gallery in the early 60s and they almost always sold out.

Thomas really hit her stride in her 70s, when she developed these mosaic-like patterns. Sometimes they were used in fields of lines like this one. In others they formed concentric circles that expanded outward til they ran off the canvas.

As a child in Georgia, Thomas wasn’t even allowed into museums. But at 81 years old, she was honored with a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first Black woman artist to do so. Later that year she was given another solo show at the Corcoran Gallery in DC. Her work was added to the Metropolitan Museum’s permanent collection and has been displayed in the White House and US embassies around the world.

If you’d like to see more of her work, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has a great collection. I’ll include a link in the show notes.

Thomas died in 1978 at 86 years old, leaving behind a large body of work that can be found in museums around the country and a national reputation that continues to grow.

OUTRO:

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

Correcting the Canon: The Evans-Tibbs Collection

Hello and welcome to A Long Look! A podcast about experiencing slow art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. I’m your host, Karen Jackson

For the remainder of the season, I’ll be presenting works from the Evans-Tibbs Collection, one of the most important collections of works by Black artists in America.

We’ll be joined today by Sandy Bellamy, an adjunct art history professor at Howard University and manger of the Percent for Art Commissions program run by the Washington DC Department of General Services. Sandy will be sharing her extensive scholarship on Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., the prominent DC arts collector and advocate who built this incredible collection.

Along with the collection, Tibbs built an enormous archive of more than 1000 files on artists of the African diaspora. They contain exhibition brochures, photos, slides, letters, newspaper clippings, gallery records, anything he could find to document the careers and works of these artists.

Tibbs’ goal was to build support for the arts in Washington and raise the profile of Black artists. The collection and archive would be a way for art historians to reassess their work and their inclusion (or lack of it) in art history books and museum collections.

Tibbs donated his collection and the archive to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1996. The National Gallery acquired them after the Corcoran closed.

So let’s find out more from Sandy!

Sandy, welcome to A Long Look.

Sandy: Thank you. Karen.

Karen: Tell us how you got interested in Thurlow Tibbs.

Sandy: I went to Howard University, fine art department and studied art history. Graduated in 1995 and was introduced to the Washington African American art scene by my professor, Tritobia Benjamin. And of course the rich legacy of Howard University and its impact on scholarship as it pertains to African American art and how that art informed modern Western art. The Evans-Tibbs collection was one of the more recent, relatively recent and important collections in the country at the time.

Karen: So what got him into collecting? And especially to focus on not just African American artists, but from the whole African diaspora?

Sandy: I would say two things. Thurlow Tibbs was the grandson of Annie Lillian Evans Tibbs. Her stage name was Madam Evanti. She was the first professional African American opera singer to perform worldwide.

She took her grandson with her on international trips and exposed him to a very worldly culture and how African Americans were very much a part of that world culture. For instance, she befriended Henry Ossawa Tanner while she was performing in Paris but when she came home, her home welcomed many important figures who impacted American culture and also inspired civil right movements around the world, like W.E.B. duBois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes. Haile Selassie. His grandfather was the first African American United States Senator. His father was an attorney. I mean, he just said a very educated and cultured worldly family.

And then, you know, Thurlow Tibbs himself studied art history at Dartmouth. And after that, he went on to Harvard to earn his degree in urban planning. When he returned to Washington and after his grandmother passed, the home was the perfect place to continue her legacy of studying, appreciating and contributing to the canon African American arts and culture.

And that’s what he did. He turned their home on Vermont Avenue down the Hill from Howard University into a very vibrant place to be. As people say, who attended the events, it was the place to be, where you could not only appreciate and discover new artists, see old masters or relatively old masters, but to converse with other exciting people in the city. It was just a really vibrant synergy, a creative culture that he nurtured there at the Evans Tibbs home .

Karen: Nice. Now, can you give us a timeframe for when he had the gallery?

Sandy: So after earning his degree in urban planning, he worked for the GSA as a planner and retired from GSA in 1989. But a little bit before that he had already begun collecting. Of course he had very strong foundation in art history, but he also had a strong appreciation and understanding of African diasporic art history from his colleagues and peers at Howard University, but it wasn’t until 1983 that he had his first widely reviewed exhibit on surrealism and the African American artist. And in that show included Hughie Lee-Smith, Archie Motley, Gail Shaw Clemons who is still practicing art today in DC, Irene Clark, Raymond Dobard who was a professor of art history and practicing artist at Howard. Charles White, Hale Woodruff. And then he continued to hold exhibitions. During the eighties, he did a great job featuring African American women in the arts, including Margaret Burroughs and Sharon Sutton. Other exhibits featured Romare Bearden, Schroeder Cherry, who’s still practicing art in the DC area, Julie Dickerson, Louis Delsarte, who sadly recently passed Marion Perkins. Sam Gilliam, Betye Saar. And with Betye Saar, she also contributed to the Evans-Tibbs archives. They were working together to document the record of artists practicing. And of course, David Driskell.

Karen: What was his most influential exhibit?

Sandy: The biggest exhibit that he had was in 1989, an exhibit sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute, traveling exhibition service, otherwise known as SITES and sponsored by the NEH and the DC Humanities Council. This exhibit traveled to 20 different states and it was entitled African American Artists, 1880 –1987: Selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection.

It featured Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Hughie Lee-Smith, Betye Saar. Henry Ossawa Tanner and James Van Der Zee.

And also what’s very important about the Evans-Tibbs Collection is not just the works of art. The archive has very, rare documents. Joshua Johnston is known as the first African American professional artists in the country who practiced as a portrait in Baltimore. So having a primary source document of the Baltimore city directory of 1810 listing Joshua Johnston is very important to document his role in the canon of American art history. And then also add Edmonia Lewis, one of our earliest sculptors, African American female sculptors, just beautiful sculptures and very rare.

He has a rare leaflet published by Edmonia Lewis herself entitled, How Edmonia Lewis Became an Artist dated around 1870. So these are the kinds of things that collectors and historians love to come across to further document and record about the role of African American artists.

Karen: He has a wonderful quote in one of the sources I’ve found that says he wanted to “…provide options for art, historians and writers, when they start the revisionary studies and they will.” Do you know what new scholarship came out of the archive?

Sandy: Looking at the archive, again, one very important document—two–was around Joshua Johnston and Edmonia Lewis, you know, we don’t have much information on this artist, so to have those items and then.

His final act of benevolence, giving that collection to the Corcoran Gallery, which then gave it to the National Gallery enables artists today, historians collectors to see the timeline of African-Americans producing art in America. So I think those are two of the most probably most valuable archival materials in the collection that are still used to this day. And then, you know, scholarship doesn’t just happen from art historians and universities, but it happens a lot through the gallerists because when you do a show, you produce a catalog. You’re helping that artist further their career. That catalog itself becomes a record, a primary source document with quotes from the artist, background of the artist, that help scholars in future place those artists within a broader context.

In that quote, he also said in the nineties, 1990s, “all periods of American art are going to be reanalyzed and recalculated. There needs to be materials so that they can say, Oh, here’s an artist who was working in the 1960s. He wasn’t covered before, but he’s pretty good. Maybe we should put them in our anthology this time.”

That’s what’s happening, I mean. Because when you look at the development of African American history and African Americans in the field of museum studies, he’s completely right. Because at that time, during the nineties, you had Richard Powell, you had David Driskell. I mean, you had some major African American curators and scholars redefining, revisiting the traditional American timeline to insert and properly document Black artists who were contributing to American modern art.

And this is the result of a tree of knowledge that I think begins a lot with Alain Locke. Alain Locke, who authored The New Negro and advocated that African Americans should look toward African formalism to celebrate African American culture as a unique culture, like with Edmonia Lewis or Joshua Johnston, while they were African American artists, they were emulating a Eurocentric aesthetic and inspiration.

From Alain Locke’s inspiration, we have the Renaissance, a lot of people think that Renaissance took place in Harlem, but it was born at Howard University in the department of philosophy under the scholarship of Alain Locke. And he inspired so many artists to look toward their African past, to create amazing works of art, not just visual art, we’re talking literary arts, we’re talking music, everything that was celebrating in the Renaissance as a unique African American cultural expression can relate back to the advocacy and scholarship of Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar. And from there you have James Herring, who founded the Howard University department of art and created the gallery with Alonzo Aiden, and then they created the Barnett-Aiden collection.

And then you have the first student Alma Thomas, and you have Lois Jones, a professor at Howard, David Driskell, a student, James Wells, the professor. You know, I was looking at the early class offerings… I mean, these guys were–and women—their knowledge of art in general, not just African and African American art.

They offered classes in Asian art, European art, Latin art. They were just very much interested in the diaspora then. So this is not a new concept of African American art in the diaspora. This is something that begins in the twenties and continues down through generation from professor to student, colleague to student and Thurlow Tibbs is definitely a branch of that tree.

One of his peers of that time was Adolphus Ealey who inherited the Barnett-Aiden collection from James Herring. Again, one of the most important African American art collections in the world, now owned by Bob Johnson. I can’t emphasize how incredibly thoughtful and accomplished these men and women were in setting the foundation for the art world that we have today.

Karen: And speaking of David Driskell, you had started to mention this when we were speaking earlier, Thurlow was able to retire, as you say, and was able to turn his passion for art into another career. Can you tell us a little bit about how he managed to do that? Did he have mentors? How did he get launched down that path?

Sandy: Well, I want to emphasize that he already had a degree in art history from Dartmouth, but he also had a living degree, a life degree in art history from his family and his travels, but also being right there within steps of U Street, DC’s Renaissance location, within steps of Howard University and communication with the incredible brain trust at Howard University.

And I want to get back to that tree because they didn’t stop with Alonzo Aiden and James Herring. You know, then we had a shift. Then Jeff Donaldson came to head the department. And in his way through Africobra, doubled down on Alain Locke’s philosophy of celebrating a unique African American aesthetic. And there was a big debate, you know, what would art be without debate, right?

Karen: Exactly! Yeah, yeah.

Sandy: And there were huge, huge contradi… not contradictions, but just really arguments between like Alain Locke and James Herring. And I’m sorry, but I forgot to mention James Porter, author of Modern Negro Art. He created the textbook, literally the textbook, which is what I learned from when I went to Howard fine art on the evolution of African American art.

He literally was within steps of the center for scholarship. On African American art and culture. And not only did he have that access physically through friends and peers, but also he had it formally through his own education. So, I mean, he was definitely in the right place and the right time to create a really fabulous collection and rotation of exhibitions done in a scholarly way.

Karen: That’s amazing. That really is amazing. We’re kind of getting to the end. Let me just ask you this. Is there one other thing you would like everyone to know about Thurlow Tibbs or his collection?

Sandy: A lot of people focus on Thurlow Tibbs as an art dealer, an art gallerist. In preparing for this interview, I learned that he was a very civic-minded individual who supported politicians. He supported the gay community in Washington, DC. He had an annual event called Shirts and Shorts. He charged $5 admission and the donations went to the black gay community. The city’s first gay oriented organization, the Gertrude Stein–Langston Hughes organization, their mailing address was the Evans Tibbs home.

He was a gracious person. I’d like to share some of the comments from his friends about really the man Thurlow Tibbs outside of being a collector. I also meant to mention that he contributed to a publication called Blacklight, which was a black gay publication, and wrote articles on art and culture for Blacklight.

But his friends say this: Thurlow was not hard to like at all. He was handsome, he had the build of a gymnast, an impeccable dresser. He was gracious. He was open to conversations with people of all backgrounds. He was humble. He was funny. He loved to tell stories and he had a very embracing spirit. He just seemed to be a very civic-oriented person who not only gave so much to the art world, not just in physical collection, but also scholarship.

But he also gave friendship and he gave support and he did things that weren’t as readily accepted as they are today. And he was courageous in doing that. So I think. That’s comments from his friends, I wanted to recall, not just for Thurlow, but a little bit for the people that he loved and he wanted to support, not just artists, but people from all different different facets of society in Washington, DC, who benefited from his friendship and presence here.

Karen: Wow. That’s amazing!

Sandy: There are a few people that I would like to thank who help with Philip Pannell who’s an activist in Ward 8. And Michael, known as “Micci” Saint Andress who is a playwright and actor at Pratt who is also an art dealer who worked a lot with the Barnett-Aiden collection and Ronald King, who was a classmate of Thurlow Tibbs at Dartmouth.

Karen: Sandy, I cannot thank you enough for not just coming on the podcast today, but for this tremendous amount of legwork you did in assembling all this information and I think that is a wonderful place to kind of wrap it up. And I just want to thank you again and enjoy the rest of this very hot afternoon in DC.

Sandy: Thank you. I really enjoyed the assignment and thank you for sharing details about African American artists within the National Gallery of Art. I think that’s a beautiful thing. We really appreciate it.

Karen: I’m happy to, it’s important to share these stories And just a quick footnote, they have started to digitize the Evans-Tibbs archives. So there is some material already available online and I’ll make sure to include a link to that in the show notes.

I hope you enjoyed this introduction to Thurlow Tibbs, Jr. and I look forward to sharing with you some of the works in his collection. You can find links to more information in the show notes and as always, thanks for joining me.

The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew

Today I’m looking at The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew by Duccio di Buoninsegna.

If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

The amazing gold sky filling the background of this Biblical scene. It takes up about two-thirds of the height of this panel painting.

Jesus stands barefoot on a rocky outcropping rising behind him. The jagged formation painted in tans and browns is piled up the left side of this wooden panel, almost reaching the top. He is tall and thin, with wavy chestnut hair cascading down the back of his neck. He has a short brown beard and moustache that outline his narrow face. He wears a long crimson garment with a steel blue cloak is layered over it. The cloak loops over his left shoulder, under his right arm and drapes over his left arm. The garment and cloak are bordered with thin strokes of gold. A halo circles his head and it’s filled with a pattern lightly carved into the gold leaf. Two curved scrolling lines face each other to form a heart shape and they alternate with chevrons and diamond shapes.

Jesus stretches out his right hand, gesturing towards two fishermen standing in a short, deep, latte brown rowboat who are about to haul in their catch. They are brothers, Peter and Andrew. Peter has turned toward Jesus with his right hand raised and a startled look. When I zoom in, I can even see the creases on his forehead! His chubby face is framed by a blond beard and moustache and very short hair. It looks like a bowl cut. His sky blue, long sleeved tunic is cinched at the waist. But as I kept looking at him, I realized his belt curves down around his waist, creating the hint of a pot belly! This is one of the great, humanizing touches Duccio was famous for. Andrew stands to Peter’s left, our right. He has his back to the other two, but is starting to turn around to see what’s happening. His hands are full with the strands of their net. He’s thinner than Peter and wears a brick red garment. He’s blond, like Peter, but his hair and beard are longer, the beard almost reaches his chest. Their boat and the water it sits in take up the bottom third and right side of the scene. The strong vertical of Jesus on the rocky shore, combined with this horizontal element forms an L shape.

The sea is an unusual copper green and several fish swim in its undulating current. They’re painted in sketchy dark green outlines and here’s my favorite thing. A couple have turned to look right at us with big dark eyes and gaping mouths, like they’re saying hello!

Their unfortunate colleagues are piled into the brothers’ net. It’s woven from thin crisscrossing strokes of white and where they meet is a small white dot. It looks almost too delicate for that load!

The gold leaf sky fills the rest of the scene but I think it even extends down behind the water. I could see peeks of gold through the loose strokes of green.

So where did this panel come from? And why does Peter look so surprised?

MUSIC

The panel depicts the moment Jesus calls to Peter and Andrew to be his first apostles. Peter, feeling unworthy, raises his hand in protest. But of course, they did join him.

It was part of the astounding Maestà, an altarpiece built for the cathedral of Siena. At 15 feet wide and probably about 17 feet high, it would have towered over the main altar.

An altarpiece is an architectural framework divided into sections that would hold panel paintings depicting scenes of the life of Jesus or Mary or whoever the cathedral or church was devoted to. There were usually some saints and prophets included. Duccio’s altarpiece, resembled the exterior of a Gothic church because of its top row of narrow pointed arches and thin carved spires. Just picture Chartres Cathedral, Westminster Abbey or even St. Patricks’ in New York!

Now a little background. For centuries, Italy was a collection of independent city-states, two of which were Siena and its neighbor Florence. They were really competitive and frequently at war.

The Siena cathedral was dedicated to the Virgin Mary who the Sienese believed had aided them in defeating the Florentines in a battle years earlier. So in 1308, Duccio, the leading artist in town, was commissioned to build a new altarpiece. And he did not disappoint. He created an incredibly elaborate narrative composed of about 75 panels covering the front and back of this enormous work. It was like a graphic novel of Christianity. No one had seen anything like it!

It was such a big deal when it was finished in 1311, the city staged a formal procession of clergy and civilian leaders carrying it from Duccio’s studio to the cathedral, accompanied by musicians. The city celebrated for three days, holding feasts and giving donations to the poor.

Gold and rich colors were everywhere on this thing. Gold leaf fills the background of each scene and everybody’s got a gold halo. Unfortunately, Peter and Andrews’s halos have faded over time. But just imagine how spectacular this must have looked in candlelight or sunlight streaming through stained glass windows!

Ok, so here’s the painful part. The altarpiece remained intact until the early 1500s when someone decided to divide it up and move the pieces to side chapels. What’s worse is in 1771 the whole thing was cut apart! The original framework was lost. The fragments were displayed around the cathedral but a lot were lost or sold over the years. Many ended up in museums in Europe and the US, including the Gallery. This is actually one of two the Gallery owns.

Because of the missing panels and lack of documentation, historians have had to make educated best guesses about how the altarpiece originally looked. So here’s what historians think it looked like. The centerpiece was a large rectangular painting of Mary and Baby Jesus sitting on a large marble throne. Rows of saints and angels spread out on either side and there’s a row of more saints above them. Under this main panel was a horizontal band called a predella. This was divided into 13 sections each showing either a prophet or a scene from Mary’s life. Along the top would have been those tall pointed arches, also painted with scenes from her life. Altogether, there were 32 images on the front.

The back of the altarpiece is even more elaborate. It was divided into 43 sections, showing scenes from Christ’s life, including this panel.

But the remaining pieces, including the big painting of Mary and Christ, were eventually reassembled and are now on display in a nearby museum, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

OUTRO:

So this is what slow art is all about. You don’t have to see everything when you visit a museum. Just find a few pieces that catch your eye and let yourself really look closely. Let the art kind of reveal itself. The Slow Art website recommends 5 to 10 minutes. I hope you’ll try this out on your next museum visit and you can find more info at www.slowartday.com

Want to know where I get my information? The Gallery’s website is my main source but I use others as well. You can find links in the show notes on the show’s website, alonglook-slowart.com and in most podcast apps. While you’re there, why not subscribe and share? It’s free and that way you and your friends won’t miss an episode! You can find subscription links and social buttons near the end of each post.

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

River Landscape with Ferry

Today I’m looking at River Landscape with Ferry by Salomon van Ruysdael. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

A gorgeous evening sky almost fills this large canvas. It’s about 3 ft wide by 4.5 ft high. Puffy clouds drift in from the upper left of the azure sky and stretch back towards banks of thinner, flatter clouds receding towards the lower right. Their tops are white, illuminated by the setting sun with steel grey shadows on their undersides.

The sky hangs over a lively river scene. It’s divided roughly in half, with the river coming in from the right side and angling down to the lower left as it flows towards us. Its blue silver tone becomes a dark grey as it gets closer, spreading to fill the width of the lower edge.

A soft green spring landscape comes in from the left, paralleling the river’s angle and recedes as it reaches a town on the horizon. It takes up the lower quarter of the canvas.

In the foreground, just left of center, is a large group of people and animals packed into a wide, shallow ferry that’s just about to land on the left bank. Incredibly, there’s even an open carriage with sloped slides filled by 3 well-to-do looking couples. Imagine Santa’s sleigh with wheels and a lot less bling. It’s harnessed to two horses, one white, the other chocolate brown. The men wear olive green jackets trimmed with a vertical strip of leather down the front, studded by a row of silver dots. The women all wear black with white kerchiefs. Two have black hoods and one standing in the back, wears a wide crimson sash wrapped around her hips. Sitting behind them in the stern, a more simply dressed woman nurses her infant while her husband looks on. The bow is filled with a knot of men and even a guy on horseback! They all wear earth tones and tall, wide-brimmed hats, except for one holding the horse. He’s got a bright scarlet tunic. Some face away, others face us but the odd thing is their faces are unfinished. They’re just blobs of color with black dots for eyes.

They’re approaching a clearing next to a cluster of tall trees with thick gnarled trunks that leans over the left bank, overhanging the water. Ruysdael does this great thing with them. Their rough branches are flecked with strokes of grey and moss green, and they’re covered with layers of tiny sage and moss green leaves. The one closest to us is lighter grey with its top half broken off. These techniques make the trees just shimmer in that evening light.

At the water’s edge between us and the clearing is a group of 6 cows. Two of whom are… doing what cows do in springtime! The clearing continues behind and left of the trees, carpeted in light green and gold. It’s framed by another tall, solitary tree emerging from the shadows on the lower left, painted in shades of brown. At the back it’s bordered by tall hedges and another cluster of trees. Behind them is what looks like a small castle–two ochre yellow buildings with three pointed towers, all with slate grey roofs. Several chimney are scattered among them, silhouetted against the clouds.

There’s other activity in the clearing. Two men sit on a wooden bench with their backs to us, facing each other in conversation. One is dressed in black while his companion wears a crimson tunic tucked into black pants. He wears a large, wide brimmed hat.

Two more sleigh-like carriages filled with passengers head away from us, leaving the clearing and following the curve of the hedges. The one in front is partially obscured by a low rise right behind the trees. A young boy runs after the last one with his arm outstretched. Looks like he’s trying to catch up to his friend, who’s hanging onto the back, trying to sneak a ride! My guess is they’re heading to that distant town on the river’s edge.

They might be following a road hidden by the low blue green treeline running along the riverbank from the clearing to the town. A large white church rising over shorter buildings. We can just see their rooftops peeking over the trees and a wisp of smoke rising from one of them.

The gleaming river is bustling with ships and more ferries, some shadowed by the clouds overhead. A handful head our way, others towards the town. They all have billowing striped beige sails, topped by flags snapping in the breeze. A large Dutch flag waves from the one closest to us. Charcoal grey ducks float peacefully here and there and a couple of small birds skim the rippling water.

Ruysdael does a gorgeous job with the reflections in the water, which are incredibly realistic. The boats, trees, cows, even the sky, have these glassy rippling counterparts.

The massive sky, gorgeous light, soft shadows and colors, and everything silhouetted against those clouds makes this scene really peaceful, despite all the activity.

So where is everybody going?

MUSIC

They are out exploring their very own, brand new Dutch Republic. As I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, the Dutch had been under Spanish rule for ages and fought an 80 year war for independence. When they finally secured their freedom in 1648, they hit the road…and the waterways! They could finally travel without worrying about attacks by marauders or foreign troops. A lot of people went east to explore cities along the Rhine River that had played major roles in forming the Republic.That might be where Ruysdael got the idea to include a castle when he painted this a year later.

Ruysdael loved painting river scenes and all the lively activity taking place along them: gliding sailboats, fishermen casting nets and people crammed onto a ferry, like this. But ferries might have had more meaning that just transporting happy travelers. They were a place where people from all levels of society came together. So sometimes they were used as symbols for a united community.

Unfortunately, this happy painting does have a dark chapter in its history, involving the Nazis. A Jewish art dealer, Jacque Goudstikker, bought it in 1930. His gallery in Amsterdam specialized in Old Master paintings. Goudstikker was a big fan of Ruysdael’s and even arranged the first solo show of his work. However, in 1940, Goudstikker and his family fled Amsterdam, right before the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. The Nazis took over his gallery which contained about 1400 works. River Landscape, along with several others, ended up in the hands of Hermann Goring.

The Goudstikkers were able to escape by ship to Britain, but sadly Jacque had a fatal accident onboard.

The Allies recovered the painting after the war and gave it to the Dutch government. For some reason, the government didn’t return it to the family but ended up hanging it in the Rijksmuseum. The family fought for years for its return and finally in 2006, the government returned the painting to Goudstikker’s heirs. The family sold it to the Gallery in 2007.

OUTRO:

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

The Lackawanna Valley

Today I’m looking at The Lackawanna Valley by George Inness. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

A young man in a red vest lies stretched out on his side on a grassy hillside, looking down towards a valley below in this fairly large painting. It’s about 3 feet wide by 4 feet tall.

He’s propped on his left elbow with his back to us. Along with that cherry red vest, he wears dark blue pants, a white shirt and a straw hat pushed towards the back of his head.

We’re standing behind and to the right of him, higher up on the hill. It slopes gently down into that valley that extends back to a line of blue grey hills in the distance. This landscape takes up about three-quarters of the height of the painting and fills the width. Above it is a hazy early morning sky in faded cyan blue with washes of pale pink clouds where the sky meets the hills. The whole scene is softly lit by morning sun coming in from the upper left.

Splintered treetrunks fill the foreground and more lie scattered down the hill, ending at a curving fence in the middle of the scene.

A small clump of surviving trees stands to the left of our friend in the vest. One is so tall it almost reaches the top of the canvas. Its thin trunk rises and splits into delicate branches, all covered with dense leaves painted in shades of olive green. It towers over two below it whose darker leaves are shades of moss and sage green. Down the hill is another slender survivor.

The hill is covered in smooth areas of green grass with a few lighter patches. But a thick dark brown horizontal gash divides us and our young friend from the stump covered lower slope. Bordered by the curved fence and that gash, the lower slope resembles an arrowhead shape.

There’s a train curving left from the center of the scene. Another track curves in from the right and they form a V where they meet, just beyond the fence. The train’s steel locomotive belches smoke as it pulls a string of dark grey freight cars. I can just make out initials on the car behind the locomotive, that say D L W R.

The left curving track cuts the scene in two. Groves of trees emerge from the right in shades of emerald, sage and pine green and almost hide an L-shaped brick structure behind them. Its tall thin chimney emits a faint stream of white smoke. Beyond this, soft light green fields stretch away and up the canvas towards the mountains in the distance.

On the other side of the track a treeline stretches to meet densely packed trees sloping down from the left. A small cluster of taupe buildings fill a clearing in front of them. A shadowed church steeple stands above them, silhouetted by a white plume of smoke.

There’s a wide dirt road in front of the town running down towards us, ending at that treeline. A speck of white catches my eye and when I zoom in, it looks like there’s a covered wagon heading our way!

Behind the outbound train, the track curves back towards the center and splits as it enters a railyard across the street from the village. Narrow brick buildings rise from scraped bare earth, and line the left side of the track.The two closest have gabled roofs with deep overhangs. Across the tracks from them stands a large round structure dotted with arched windows and a two tiered slate grey roof. White smoke billows up behind it. Another locomotive exits through a taller arched opening in the front and it looks like there are two more trains approaching the main track from further back in the yard. They’re small long dark grey shapes with white smoke drifting back from their chimneys. I zoomed in here too and it looks like there might even a fifth, partially obscured by that curving train in the front. The track continues a short way past this roundhouse and ends at another cluster of smaller buildings in the distance. Faint tendrils of smoke drift up from one of them, too.

That soft morning sun highlights the roofs of the town; glints off the metal roof of the roundhouse and creates dark shadows under the gables of those buildings in the yard.

MUSIC

This is the new Scranton PA roundhouse for the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, large enough to fit several locomotives. The railroad commissioned Inness to paint a scene to commemorate and promote this new hub that would allow them to expand their service from the Great Lakes to Hoboken, NJ, right across from New York City.

George Inness was born in Newburgh, NY in 1825, the fifth of 13 children. The family eventually moved to Newark, NJ where he grew up. He suffered from epilepsy which kept him from getting a formal education but he loved art and devoured his father’s collection of art books.

He was described as a dreamer who lived in “a world of his own imaginings” and struggled to find ways to express that world. He once told his son he found his calling when he was a “very little chap” and saw a man painting in a field. Something clicked and he decided then and there to become a painter. He thought it would be wonderful to make pictures of nature–the clouds, trees, and fields he saw around him. But, being a little kid, he worried about finding a piece of paper big enough to hold it all!

Landscape became Inness’ passion. He had some artistic training, but mostly taught himself. The European Old Masters were a big influence as well as landscape painters like Claude Lorrain. By the time he was 20, he had shown at the National Academy of Design in New York and even opened his own studio.

During the 1850s, he and his wife, Elizabeth Hart traveled to Europe so he could continue his training. They ended up in France where he first saw landscapes by a group of young painters who called themselves the Barbizon School. Barbizon was a village outside of Paris and these painters were interested in making nature the main subject of their paintings, instead of the religious or historical stories the art establishment preferred. They also experimented with different painting techniques and color to evoke the effects of light on those landscapes. This had a huge impact on George. He wanted to do more than just show a place. He wanted to show how it felt to be in that place at that particular time. He said the job of the painter was to “reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him.”

George and Elizabeth eventually settled in Brooklyn where he opened a new studio. It was right after that he got the commission from the railroad.

Inness’ son, George Jr. published his memoirs and father’s letters after he passed away. In them, he describes what happened when George presented the finished landscape to the railroad committee. They were NOT happy. They insisted Inness show more trains AND include the company initials on the train in the foreground. Inness, who never took criticism well, was annoyed. He had already had to tweak the perspective to show the roundhouse from above to show off its size. But his wife convinced him to make the alterations because he now had a young family to feed!

The painting was supposed to be reproduced in ads for the railroad but there’s no evidence it ever was. One reason it might not have been used are those splintered tree stumps so obvious in the middle foreground. As bucolic as the scene is, they’re a grim reminder of the price of industrial progress, an issue that was gaining public attention. Which might be why it ended up in a junk shop in Mexico City!

Inness found it while vacationing there with his wife years later. They wandered in to a little shop and there it was, hanging on the wall! The owner said it had been part of a collection of discarded office furnishings he’d bought. George thought this was really funny, so he bought it and kept it in his studio for years.

OUTRO:

Want to know where I get my information? You can find links to all my sources in the show notes at alonglook-slowart.com and in most podcast apps. While you’re there, why not subscribe and share? It’s free and that way you and your friends won’t miss an episode! You can find subscription links and social buttons near the end of each post.

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

SHOW NOTES

“A Long Look” theme is “Ascension” by Ron Gelinas youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo

Episode theme is “Over The Water, Humans Gather” by Doctor Turtle
https://doctorturtle.bandcamp.com/album/free-turtle-archive-everything-cc-by-by-turtle

Artwork information
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.30776.html

Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr. “George Inness and the Hudson River School: The Lackawanna Valley.” The American Art Journal 2 (Fall 1970): 36-57, repro.

George Inness information
“George Inness Artist Overview and Analysis”. [Internet]. 2020. TheArtStory.org

Content compiled and written by Sarah Ingram. Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Greg Thomas.
Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/inness-george/life-and-legacy/

First published on 30 Nov 2019. Updated and modified regularly [Accessed 02 Apr 2020]

Inness, George. Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness. The Century Co., 1917. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433066280367.

Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad information
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware,_Lackawanna_and_Western_Railroad

Season 5 Begins

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how appropriate it would be to start another season of an arts podcast during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the incredibly creative work of so many museums, galleries and people around the world convinced me to join in.

Because the Gallery is closed, I’ll be choosing artworks on their site that allow for zooming and panning to see details. As always, you’re invited to do the same! I’ll include a direct link below the image in each post. The pan and zoom features work best in a desktop or tablet browser.

Looking forward to sharing new long (distance) looks with all of you and hope you stay safe and healthy.

The Mother and Sister of the Artist

Today I’m looking at The Mother and Sister of the Artist by Berthe Morisot

If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

The distant, unfocused stare of a young woman sitting on a white couch in a Victorian-era room. The couch has an undulating back and quick strokes of color suggest a pattern. Interlocking light grey rounded diamond shapes have floral and leaf motifs inside and overlapping them. She sits in the center of the canvas, wearing an ivory gown or robe with scalloped trim. Her wavy auburn hair falls past her shoulders and she wears a cornflower blue ribbon with an off-center bow at the top. Her head is turned slightly to our right, her gaze lowered to the book held by her mother sitting next to her on our right. It looks like she’s perched on the edge of the couch.

Our young friend’s hands rest in her lap but the fingers of her left hand fidget with the long blue tassel of a Moroccan style throw pillow wedged next to her. It’s decorated with fields of cranberry red, milk chocolate brown and blue divided by curved strokes of gold. The blues are the same cornflower blue as her ribbon. She wears a gold bracelet on that arm that’s a couple of inches wide and a gold wedding band on her finger.

Mom is an older woman with black hair parted in the center and partially covered by a long veil pinned to the back of her head. She’s dressed all in black, in a voluminous long dress with a stiff white lace collar filing her deep neckline and cuffs extending from her sleeves.

The women and sofa take up about 3/4 of the height of this rather tall canvas. It’s about 32 in. by 40 in. The rest is filled with a dove gray wall and the bottom half of a gold framed mirror hanging from the upper left. It’s pretty big, extending more than halfway across the canvas behind the young woman’s head and leaving just a small portion of that grey wall behind the mother’s. They’re bathed In soft light coming from the left, although Mom’s face is partly in shadow.

Mom is a solid woman. Her veil, dark hair and dress form almost a pyramid on the right side. Her enormous skirt fills the lower right corner and reaches past the center of the canvas. There’s very little detail in it, not a lot of folds, just a mass of black and there are faint red dabs of red on her pale cheek and temple. Her head is bowed slightly as she’s absorbed in the book she holds in her lap.

Part of a cherry wood table emerges from the left side. A glass vase filled with violets and a portion of a rolled up newspaper sit on its curved top and one elongated S-shaped leg is visible. It’s in front of and to the side of our young lady.

The mirror shows us a hint of the rest of the room. There’s an indistinct, quickly painted grey wall and a window on the left, hung with heavy tan drapes, parted a little to let in that pale light.

This disconnected pair raise a lot of questions. What’s going through her sister’s mind? Is she bored, preoccupied, maybe even anxious? Is her mother ignoring her? For me, it’s an unsettled mood, despite its quiet composition.

MUSIC

The young woman is Berthe’s sister Edma. At this point, Edma had married and left the family home in Paris. But she’s home now for a visit and expecting her first child. This could explain her preoccupied look. As for the mother, she might be reading to her rather than ignoring her.

Berthe and Edma were two of three sisters born into an upper middle-class family in the mid-1800s. She and Edma were both interested in art and their parents encouraged them by hiring a private art teacher. It was pretty standard for privileged young women to get art training but when their instructor saw their tremendous talent, he warned their mother, “…they will become painters. Are you fully aware of what that means? It will be revolutionary–I would almost say catastrophic–in your high bourgeois milieu. Are you sure you will never one day curse the art…that will become the sole master of the fate of two of your children?”

A big part of their training was spending time in the Louvre, copying the works of the great masters. It was one of the few places they could mix with their male colleagues, comparing techniques and ideas. The girls got to know the artist Henri Fantin-Latour and on one of these visits, he introduced them to Édouard Manet.

After a while, Berthe and Edma got bored with the constant copying and asked if they could paint outdoors, to learn how to capture atmosphere and color in real time. This was beyond their teachers pay grade, so he introduced them to an artist who eventually introduced them to Camille Corot. He was one of the most popular and respected artists at the time, specializing in landscapes. He was really interested in trying to capture the first impression of a scene, before the brain fills in all the details. So he painted quickly and with limited colors, probably for practical reasons as well as artistic. This looseness and immediacy really appealed to Berthe and was a big influence on her own work.

Another big influence on her was Manet. After meeting him at the Louvre, he asked her to pose for him, so she and her mother spent long days in his studio where she learned his experimental ideas and techniques.

Manet’s influence was important but she was very much developing her own style. She was experimenting with what we call Impressionist techniques, like quick, unblended strokes of color; creating people through just a few strokes and even the high, birds-eye view from Japanese art that everyone was so excited about. She didn’t just paint in oils, she also used watercolors and pastels, sometimes all in the same painting!

The Mother and Sister of the Artist was Berthe’s entry to that year’s Salon. Getting into the Salon was a big deal because it meant you were now a professional. She was nervous because she knew her style was pretty unconventonal. So, just before sending it in, she asked Manet to come take a look and what happened is cringe-worthy. She describes the scene in a letter to Edma. She says, “He found it very good, except for the lower part of the dress. He took the brushes and put in a few accents that looked very well: mother was in ecstasies. That is where my misfortunes began. Once started, nothing could stop him; from the skirt he went to the bust, from the bust to the head, from the head to the background. He cracked a thousand jokes, laughed like a madman, handed me the palette, took it back; finally by five o’clock in the afternoon we had made the prettiest caricature that was every seen. The carter was waiting to take it away (to the salon jury); he made me put it into the handcart… And now I am confounded. My only hope is that I shall be rejected. My mother thinks this episode funny, but I find it agonizing.”

She was so upset, her mother even pulled it back from the Salon but eventually it was submitted and displayed. Fortunately it got a good reception.

As years went by, Berthe gained more confidence in her talent and that confidence led her to being represented by one of the top art dealers in Paris, Paul Durand-Ruel. She even left the Salon after being invited to show in the first Impressionist exhibition. She showed in seven of the exhibitions that followed over the next 12 years and even helped organize some of them.

Remember that warning from Berthe’s first instructor? He wasn’t wrong. Berthe defied artistic conventions through her willingness to push and experiment. She succeeded despite social restrictions about what, where and who she could paint. She couldn’t go to the bars, restaurants and clubs that inspired her male colleagues so she put her own life on display, putting women front and center. She showed real moments in the lives of real women, modern women—both upper class and working class—and helped lead the Impressionist revolution in art.

OUTRO

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

Autumn – On the Hudson River

Today I’m looking at Autumn – On the Hudson River by Jasper Cropsey

If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

Honestly, it’s a toss up between the stunning gold rays of sunlight streaming down towards a broad river and the fiery crimson leaves of the trees closest to me in the foreground.

This is an enormous painting, about 9 ft wide by 5 ft tall and it’s in a very wide gold frame that curves out towards us, carved with vines, leaves and shallow parallel grooves.

Those leaves hang from tall trees, filling the left and right sides of the painting. They glow with fall colors of russet red, dark orange, gold and that fiery crimson with green patches still visible in some branches. They’re huddled together, some with crisscrossing slim trunks and a couple of pine trees are mixed in. The painting is so tall, those trees loom over us!

We’re standing on a green hill on a sunny autumn afternoon looking down towards the Hudson River. The hill slopes down from the left and flattens out as it moves across and up the canvas. Just past center, right in front of us are tiny sheep grazing on grass that’s scattered with brown patches and fallen leaves. The hill continues down to meet a silvery stream winding in from the right where it disappears behind the hill in the center. Just to our left, broken tree limbs lie in a small pool of water surrounded by rough, grey boulders.

More low hills descend inwards from the left and right, gently cascading down to meet the broad gleaming river about halfway up the canvas. They’re also densely covered in green, gold and red trees that grow smaller with distance. The hills on the left taper off into fingers and small islets. On the right and in front of us, the hills flatten out into gold flatlands ending in a cove.

The center of the canvas is lined with tall clouds building up along the horizon. They stretch from the left to meet grey headlands reaching into the river from the right. Their rocky surface is suggested by tones of blueish white and patches of light brown. This part of the scene is bathed in hazy tones of blue grey and soft gold.

That astonishing light streams out from the upper center in a wide V-shape from the sun which is hiding behind purple clouds. It illuminates a large area of the river directly below it and a gold path ripples along the water towards a point below us.

Nature is definitely the star of the show but I slowly began to see human activity. Back up on the hill are three men to our left, stretched out on a blanket near that small pool of water. Their rifles lean up against a nearby tree and their dogs are there too. One lies fast asleep, while the other sits up, looking alert. When I get closer, I discover a small picnic basket with a bottle sticking out of it!

Over on the right side three figures are clustered on a bridge crossing the stream and it looks like there’s a dog with them too! They seem to be looking over at cows standing in the water a short distance away. Beyond that is a curving dirt road leading to a log cabin.

There’s a town built along the cove curving from the middle of the canvas around to the right. Tiny, ochre and white buildings line the shore. There’s a church steeple, a gold domed building but also tall chimneys with black and grey smoke pouring out. There’s a lot of activity on the water, too. Tiny flecks of white suggest sailboats, while larger grey ships glide near the town. A few make their way to a boathouse to the left of town.

But all this bustling human activity is just tiny compared to the stunning display of nature Cropsey’s given us.

MUSIC

Jasper Francis Cropsey was born in 1823 on Staten Island, part of New York City. When he was only 14, he was hired as an apprentice in an architecture studio. He was so good at drawing, they had him doing all the architectural renderings pretty quickly. Cropsey started taking painting lessons and his boss was so impressed with his talent, he supplied him with the paints and materials he needed and even offered him studio space in the office. Within just 2 years, Cropsey was made an associate member of the National Academy of Design.

At that point, Cropsey starts supporting himself with commissions for architectural designs while traveling around, doing really detailed studies of landscapes in the New York area. One of his favorite places was Greenwood Lake on the border between New York and New Jersey. He even met his future wife there, Maria Cooley. The couple spent some time in Britain and Rome after they married, but eventually returned to New York City. His career really started taking off and he became known as a leading painter in the Hudson Valley School. He had spent his time in Italy creating sketches and studies of landscapes and back in the States, continued that habit, spending summers sketching and painting in upstate New York, Vermont and New Hampshire.

The Cropseys moved back to London in 1856 and Jasper established a successful business painting Amerian landscapes for British clients and British landscapes for American clients. He painted Autumn while in London and it became an instant hit when it was displayed at an international exposition there a couple of years later. It was so popular he even got to meet Queen Victoria! The funny thing is, there were so many British viewers who thought he’d made up the fall colors, he supposedly displayed actual autumn leaves with the painting to convince them they were real!

Cropsey gives us more information in a pamplet he wrote to accompany the painting. He explains the view is from the west bank of the Hudson, looking south towards Storm King Mountain. It’s about 3 in the afternoon on a warm October day and that town in the distance is New Windsor. His goal was to show the vast American landscape and all its beauty and variety of color.

He was also intent on showing those foreground trees as accurately as possible and included so much detail, you can identify each species. There’s red oak, beech, birch, chestnut, hemlock and pine.

They returned to New York in 1863–permanently this time. And he once again began making his living as an architect. This time, he designed very ornate stations for the Gilbert Elevated Railway, which was on 6th Ave. He continued painting, too and his last home and studio, called Ever Rest is in Hastings-on-Hudson along his favorite river. It’s a public museum, so you can go visit!

OUTRO

Want to know where I get my information? You can find links in the show notes on the show’s website, alonglook-slowart.com and in most podcast apps. While you’re there, why not subscribe and share? It’s free and that way you and your friends won’t miss an episode! You can find subscription links and social buttons near the end of each post.

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

La Condition Humaine

Today I’m looking at La condition humaine, or The Human Condition by René Magritte

If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

We’re looking at a view of a blue sky filled with puffy clouds seen through a large window in a pretty drab room. It’s an oil painting, about 40 inches by 32 inches, so about the size of a large poster.

The window almost fills a taupe wall topped with dingy white moulding that runs left to right along the ceiling. The scene is tightly cropped, so the window is the main focus, filling most of the canvas. Heavy chocolate brown drapes hang in soft pleats from rings on a thick rod spanning the window.

The room angles away from us from us, higher on the right than left, like we’re supposed to be viewing it from the right side. So I stood there.

The top third of the window is framed in light grey wood that forms an arch along the top and a horiztonal bar divides it into top and bottom sections.

The bottom portion frames the lower part of the sky and and a green lawn. It stretches back to a dense blue green tree line that’s blurred by distance. A dirt path running left to right in the foreground divides the lawn and a little beyond is a dark green hedge coming in from the right. It’s about halfway up the canvas. The hedge tapers off as it reaches the center of the scene and there’s a slender tree with green leafy branches growing out of it. The sliver of lawn closest to us is flecked with blades of spruce blue against the green grass.

The view is lovely, it looks like a warm summer morning. But there’s something weird going on! Running right through that hedge is a thin white vertical rectangle with small black cirlces, evenly spaced from top to bottom. Then a little to the left of that I noticed a thick, upside down wooden T shape floating in the middle of the sky and three narrow wooden legs spread out like a tripod, extend down from the window sill to the yellow ochre floor inside.

The longer I looked, the weirder it got! I kept moving left and suddenly realized a sliver of the sky and lawn was overlapping the left-hand curtain! What is going on here?

I stepped closer and that’s when I saw a thin black line running from that overlapping sky to about halfway across the window where it met the floating white rectangle.

And that’s when my brain put it together. It’s a painting of the outside scene sitting on an easel! That upside down T is the clamp and the three legs are the base!

That Magritte is one clever guy! The “canvas” is aligned so perfectly with the outside, it look like an unbroken view…at first. He’s tricked us into seeing outside and inside at the same time! And makes us start questioning reality. I mean, the painting I’m looking at is real and the view out the window i supposed to look real but then part of it is a painting of that view…

Ok, this is making me dizzy!

So what is Magritte up to?

MUSIC

Magritte loved coming up with ways of turning the expected or ordinary upside down. He’d do mash ups like painting boots with human toes ; a mermaid with a fish head and women’s legs; or a daytime sky with a nighttime landscape.

Another way he’d mess with tradition is to have his friends come over to come up with the craziest titles they could for his paintings.

Magritte was born in Belgium, got his artistic training in Brussels and eventually became a member of the Belgian Royal Academy. Several years later, he married Georgette Berger and the two moved to Paris. He started hanging out with the Surrealists who were a group of writers and artisrts really intrigued by Sigmund Freud’s ideas about dreams and the subconscious. They also loved the idea of chance–of bringing unrelated things together in unexpected ways.

There’s a great book called, The Lives of the Surrealists by Desmond Morris and he gives the real dirt on Magritte.

For example, he hated painting! It drove him crazy to have to spend hours producing scenes he’d imagined in seconds! This made him cheat once. He was hired to create murals for a casino and instead of painting them himself, he projected transparencies of his paintings onto the walls and hired interior decorators to do the actual painting!

Another story is Magritte had an affair while he was in London, working on a commission. He felt so guilty, he asked a good friend back in Brussels, Paul Colinet to keep Georgette company. And he did he ever! Magritte’s affair was short lived but Gerogette and Paul stayed together for years. Which led a bigger problem. The Nazis invaded Belgium and Magritte became afraid he was going to be a target because of political comments he’d made. So, he fled to Paris. But Georgette stayed behind because she refused to leave Colinet. Morris says Magritte told a friend she was staying because she was recovering from appendicitis surgery!

He ended up in the South of France but within a few months, missed Georgette so much, he returned to Brussels. They stayed together until his death in 1967.

His moral flexibility led to other questionable behavior. Rumor has it, at one point Magritte needed to raise money to get a catalog of his works published. So he began painting fakes! He did several, copying the style of artists like Picasso, Paul Klee, even Titian! He told a friend that if they made enough money, he’d quit making his own paintings!

Maybe this was all just a Surrealist prank?

In the end, Magritte became one of the best known Surrealist painters. Paul Simon even wrote a song about him and Georgette called René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War.

OUTRO:

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

The Annunciation

Today I’m looking at The Annunciation by Masolino da Panicale. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

The unusual point of view. We’re looking at the Virgin Mary and Angel Gabriel in a richly decorated room but we’re seeing it from a really low vantage point. Not only do they loom over us, we also see the most of the ceiling. A dark stone arch with carved leaves in the corners frames the scene which creates an “outside-looking in” feeling.

This is a large painting, about 5 ft. tall by 4 ft wide. and is painted with tempera on wooden panels, a pretty common technique at the time. Tempera is a technique where you mix egg yolks with pigment. I’ll explain more later. The frame is dark gold; about 4 inches wide; with floral and beaded moldings. The top actually extends out from the wall a few inches, like an overhang.

The ceiling tilts sharply downwards and is divided by scarlet molding into three sections. Each one is filled with a repeating geometric pattern of burgundy, dark green, and navy blue squares with a gold triangle in the center. In front of the ceiling are three white arches but we only see a little of the wall above them.

Mary and Gabriel are right in the foreground, filling more than half the height of the painting. They’re both fair-haired and fair-skinned with gold halos, and face each other across a small room. Gabriel is down on one knee on the left, his hands crossed over his chest. Mary sits in a large chair on the right, positioned just a little higher than him. Thin streams of gold rain down from the middle of the ceiling, just brushing her halo. Her chair is huge with a back almost reaching the ceiling and a very tall side. Instead of a flat armrest, it’s scooped. It’s yellow ochre with thin rectangular bands of inlay on the back and side. It looks more like a throne, really.

She and Gabriel are separated by a tall thin white column with a rose pink base and capital, rising to connect to the second of those arched openings. Around them are olive green walls with thin scarlet moldings dividing it into top and bottom sections. The back walls have sage green recessed panels and there are panels behind Gabriel and Mary with more geometric inlays. Masolino really likes that style!

There’s a short hallway behind the central column running back to yellow double doors that open onto another room. The hall’s ceiling is arched and sharply tilted down like the room’s ceiling. It’s midnight blue and studded with rows of gold stars. All we see behind the open doors is a pale yellow curtain hanging from the ceiling and a short yellow chest, that’s also decorated with geometric bands.

All this ornate decoration and the odd perspective distracted me from the main event. Mary sits on her throne or chair, with her head and shoulders bowed slightly towards her unexpected visitor, who’s just told her some astounding news. She’s dressed in her traditional dark blue cloak wrapped snugly over a cranberry red gown. The cloak is trimmed with gold and has a gold star on the left shoulder.

Neither one of them is speaking. Her right hand is pointing to her chest and her delicate left hands rests in an open book on her lap. It’s tilted down towards us, so we can see some Gothic lettering on the pages.

Gabriel is a lot fancier! His gown is dark burgundy covered with a gold floral and leaf pattern. The wings extending from his shoulders start out gold at the top but become a darker, almost bronze color towards the bottom. The cool thing is, the colors shift and shimmer as I walked past to see them from another angle! Behind and above Gabriel, is an arch leading to a corridor streaked with orange and yellow. We only see a little of it. Above that is more scarlet molding and geometric inlay that divides the arch from the top of the wall which is painted gold.

So why would Masolino paint the scene with such strange perspective? And why is Mary silent?

MUSIC

Perspective was a new technique in Masolino’s day. He may have learned it from his young colleague Masaccio. They two had collaborated on the famous Brancacci Chapel in Florence. So, while he didn’t get it quite right, I give him credit for trying!

But he did have some cool techniques of his own! I found out how he did that neat trick with the wings. He painted Gabriel over a base of silverleaf. Silverleaf is similar to gold leaf, they’re both paper thin sheets of metal that can be applied to a surface. That’s why the colors shift as you look at it from different angles! And tempera is pretty tricky to work with. You make tempera by mixing egg yoke with pigments. And the pigments come from minerals, plants, even insects! There’s a shade of red that’s made from ground up beetles! The trick is, it dries really quickly, so you have to work fast to layer color on.You can’t really blend it like you do oil paints. I’ll include a link to a great video about it in the show notes.

As for Mary, it turns out there’s a whole symbolism to her poses in Annunciation paintings. Senior lecturer David Gariff explained them in his annual lecture, “The Story of Christmas in Art.” Around this time, there was an idea going around of the “laudable conditions” of Mary. The poses where she’s shown with Gabriel are disquiet, reflection, interrogation and acceptance. So what Masolino is showing is reflection. She’s absorbing the news, thinking it over before she responds. That’s why she pointing to herself, like she’s saying, “Who me?” But she’s also reading a passage in Scripture about this very moment. It’s a passage from Isaiah prophesying that a virgin will give birth to a boy called Emmanual.

OUTRO
So this is what slow art is all about. You don’t have to see everything when you visit a museum. Just find a few pieces that catch your eye and let yourself really look closely. Let the art kind of reveal itself. The Slow Art website recommends 5 to 10 minutes. I hope you’ll try this out on your next museum visit and you can find more info at www.slowartday.com

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

The Dancing Couple

Looking back over the past few episodes, I realized I’ve been focusing on pure and pious saints, so I thought I’d lighten things up. And who knows how to party? The Dutch! This is a long description, so make yourselves comfortable!

So, today I’m looking at The Dancing Couple by Jan Steen.

If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

A young woman stands at the center of this large oil painting that’s about 3.5 feet wide by 4.5 feet high. She faces right, looking at us with an expression like, “Oh please, not this guy!!” She’s being led out to dance by a very cocky looking guy with a sly grin on his face. He’s definitely had a few drinks and is kicking up his heels to music being played by two young men on the right side.

She wears a copper colored gown with elbow length sleeves and a white apron falling from her waist that she’s scooped up in one hand. Her hair is pulled up in a bun with a few curly tendrils framing her face. A white collar modestly fills in her neckline and a sheer black shawl is tied around her shoulders. A gleaming pearl earring dangles from her right ear. She looks rather elegant. Her partner wears an earth-toned jacket, pants and vest with a ruffled collar.

The scene takes place outside an inn on a vine-covered arbor spanning the width of the canvas. The couple are surrounded by a very festive group filling more than half the height of the scene. Now, there are a lot of people here so to keep from boring you to death, here are a few shortcuts. 1. Most of the women wear their hair pulled up on the back of their heads, covered by caps. Two cover their hair with kerchiefs or scarves. 2. Most of the men are dressed in shades of grey and black. I’ll offer more description where necessary.

Anyway, on the left is a long table that angles away from us, packed with people sitting around it. Closest to us is a mom, smiling up at the toddler standing in her lap. Mom is wearing a chartreuse jacket with large sleeves and a wide white collar spreads to her shoulders. A teal apron is tied over her coffee brown skirt. The child wears a pumpkin orange gown with a white collar, bodice and apron and an adorable matching orange and white cap. He or she (all kids wore gowns when they were little) holds a toy made of slats of wood with little figures. It looks like you’re supposed to pull it apart then push it together so the two figures take turns hammering at a stake between them.

Moving up the left side of the table is a young couple. The woman sips from a long stemmed glass held delicately in her right hand. She’s dressed all in black with white collar and cuffs. To her left, a scruffy young man in a brick red tunic smilies at her adoringly, touching her chin.

Next to these two stands an older man. He’s looking down at the feast spread on the table and his white ruff and tall black hat make him look a little more formal. Finally, at the upper end of the table is an elderly couple, gazing intently at the young woman being led out to dance. The old woman’s mouth slightly open and it’s hard to tell if she’s laughing or protesting. The old man looks very concerned, holding up a knife clenched in one hand. A wicker cage filled with birds hangs from the arbor over their heads.

On the far left, behind the group at the table are three more pairs of people. The brick wall of the inn rises up the left side of the canvas til it reaches the arbor in the top left corner. Closest to us, a maid has just come through an open door carrying a tray of food. She wears a blue and orange gown and has paused to chat with the smiling young man next to her. He’s dressed in orange with a soft peaked brown cap with two feathers curling off the side. The next duo further back are two young men leaning out a tall window with the shutters thrown open, One guy has a large hat with upturned brim, tilted at a jaunty angle, and he leans back to look at the table. His companion smiles at all the activity outside. Right outside the window, a cuddling couple exhange inviting glances.

On the right side a posh looking couple sits in the lower right with a little boy, maybe 4 or 5, standing next to them. The man holds a large glass and sits facing us on what looks like a crate. His head is turned, looking at the dancing couple with a huge grin. He’s dressed in a purple tunic, dark red vest and knee-length pants and crimson stockings. The woman is seated on what looks like a block of stone. She’s in a blue green skirt and sage green jacket. Her back is to us, showing us the gleaming beaded cap on the back of her head.

The musicians are on a wall rising halfway up the right side. The fiddler stands, leaning against a trellis connecting the wall to the arbor. He wears an olive green jacket, burgundy knee-length pants and grey stockings. His flute playing partner, in coffee brown pants and jacket, sits on the wall looking out from the painting, somewhere over our left shoulder.

The arbor frames a sunny sky scattered with fluffy white clouds. That great sky made me look closer at what was happening in the background and I discovered a row of tents or awnings alongside a church steeple, all surrounded by green leafy trees. Several small figures huddle in front of the tents.

More characters appear along the wooden railing dividing the party in the arbor from the background. A leering man leans on the rail right behind the dancing couple. His fur hat has slipped off to one side as he tries to balance a rooster in a wicker cage on his head. Further to the right, a couple appears to be chatting with another man.

Along with the baby, other kids mix with the grown ups. Just to the right of our dancing man, a little boy and girl stand on either side of the railing. She smiles as she holds up a pinwheel. A little boy stands next to that elegant couple in the lower right, his hat almost hiding his face. His head is bowed, concentrating on the silvery bubble he’s blowing into a shallow bowl with a straw.

Finally, there are random items scattered across the foreground. From left to right, a wine jug sits on a bench, and on the ground are an overturned metal pail with flowers falling out of it; a child’s shoe, several broken egg shells, a spoon, an empty keg lying on its side, some kind of clay pot with a white clay pipe resting against it, and a gleaming dark pewter jug.

So, what brings all these people together? And what’s with all the stuff on the ground?

MUSIC

They’re all here to enjoy the kermis, a festival celebrated in Dutch villages that drew crowds of city people. Visitors could wander through those tents in the background, maybe picking up a toy for their little one or watch theatrical performers. But the main attraction was the opportunity to cut loose, dance, drink, eat, maybe even cross social boundaries to find romance. That’s what our man has in mind with our delicate maid. Aside from the grin, those feathers in his cap are cock feathers, so his intentions are pretty clear! And the caged rooster represents a slang term for sex.

There’s a great lively energy to this painting and one way Steen makes you feel it is everybody’s looking in different directions. Some look at the poor girl being dragged to the dance floor but also, couples gaze at each other and that flute player makes us part of the scene by looking past us. Fun fact, Steen includes himself and his wife! He’s the guy lovingly touching the chin of the elegant woman sipping wine.

But you can never escape moralizing in his work. Some of those objects along the ground have meaning. The eggshells and the little boy’s bubble remind us of how short-lived pleasure can be. And the empty barrel represents a saying that, “a full barrel doesn’t resound.” Basically, it means ignorant people fill the air with empty words. Since it’s right in front of our dancing fool, it’s pretty clear it’s about him. The English version could be, “He’s full of hot air” or full of something… But the caged birds over the old couple represent the saying, “instead of freedom, safety” meaning love gets stronger when lived within limits.

OUTRO:

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

Breezing Up

Today I’m looking at Breezing Up by Winslow Homer. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

What drew me to this painting was the warm light of the setting sun, backlighting three boys who sit along the side of a small wooden catboat. This is a small sailboat with a deep oblong open cockpit surrounded by a narrow deck. It’s built from coffee brown planks with the word Gloucester painted on the stern facing us. The mast and lines are caramel brown and dark green against the tan main sail.

The painting is about 24 in high by 38 inches wide, about the size of a large poster and is framed in a simple gilded wood frame about 3 in. wide.

The boat races across the water from right to left, starting at the center of the canvas. It’s moving away from us and the sail is so full, it curls back in and casts a shadow on itself. It’s so close to the foreground the mast and sail reach up and off the upper left corner. The boys are positioned about halfway up the canvas.

They’re going so fast, the right side is tilted about 30 degrees above the churning water while part of the left side is submerged. The boys look like they’re about 12 years old. Homer painted this between 1873 and 1876, so they’re dressed in Civil War era clothing–trousers, loose collarless white shirts and vests. The closest boy sits on the stern, looking away from us. His brown pantlegs are rolled up and a broad brimmed straw hat sits high on the back of his head. His bare feet rest on the deck as he works the tiller. A second boy sits about halfway to the bow, with his legs dangling into the cockpit. He wears a brown shirt, dark blue pants and a round hat with a short upturned brim. The last boy is lying stretched out in the bow, next to the mast. His rust color pants and vest look a little more formal than his companions’ and he’s kept his boots on but he still looks pretty relaxed. His slouched cap shades his face and his left arm stretches out behind the middle boy. One foot rests on the sheet, the line that runs back from the main sail to the tiller. These two gaze off to the left to a point somewhere off the canvas.

As I got closer, I noticed a couple of other things. The first was an older bearded man sitting in the cockpit. He’s so low, his head is behind the knee of the boy in the stern, which is why I missed him at first. He’s in profile, gazing towards the left side of the canvas and wears a scarlet coat with a mustard yellow fisherman’s hat. It has a shallow upturned brim that becomes deeper and longer as it extends past the back of his head. The second thing I saw was a silver gleam in the bottom of the cockpit and realized it was the eye of one of several fish piled up! So, they must be heading home after a successful afternoon!

The roiling water around the boat is dark teal with white streaks and dots evoking the spray and choppy wake as they speed along. There’s a gap between the bottom of the sail and the bow where you can see the spray thrown up by their speed. The dark teal becomes steel blue as the water rises towards the horizon, which is about a third of the way up the canvas. It provides a cool contrast to the warm earth tones of the boat and crew, Homer does a great job of making you feel that churning wake with short wide strokes of white impasto curling around the rudder.

You might remember from the Sargent episode, impasto is when an artist thickly layers on paint so it stands off the surface of the canvas to catch the light. Imagine frosting on a cupcake. It’s not quite that heavy here, but you get the point.

Between that choppy water and the boat being so large, right in front of us, Homer makes it easy to almost feel like you’re there! You can almost hear the slap of the water against the hull and feel the wind on your face.

Banks of ivory and steel grey clouds rise up from the horizon. There’s a light lavender tint to them and they fill the top two-thirds of the canvas. There are breaks here and there, with some peeks of blue sky. The sunlight illuminating the boys must come from a break in the clouds in the upper right.

On the right side of the scene, back in the distance is a large three-masted ship called a schooner. Its four sails billow in the wind and it also travels right to left just below the horizon. It’s painted in shades of grey and silhouetted against the sky.

A single seagull flies across the upper right. He’s suggested by just a V-shaped stroke of white that really stands out against the dark clouds. Below him is an another short white stroke. Based on how it’s the same angle as the sails of the ships, it could be another vessel beyond the horizon.

So, who might these boys have been?

MUSIC

Winslow Homer was born in 1836 to a well-off family in Boston. His father made his money in shipping and trading but he lost a lot during the California Gold Rush and couldn’t afford to pay to send Winslow to college. So Winslow got a job as an illustrator for a commercial lithography printing company.

Lithography is a printing process where you draw an image with a grease pencil on a specially prepared stone. The stone gets wet down and then ink is applied. The ink sticks only to the greasy areas. You put paper on top, run it through a press and the ink transfers to the paper. Commercial printers like this technique because it was easier than other methods. This is a simplified explanation, so I’ll include a link in the show notes to a video showing the whole process.

He eventually moved to New York and got a job as a freelance illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, a popular magazine at the time. When the Civil War broke out, he was assigned to cover the Army of the Potomac. He the front a few times, but mostly focused on illustrating the hardships of camp life and the emotional impact of war on the soldiers.

Homer spent the summer in Gloucester in 1873, making watercolor sketches of the people and activity along the water. One hangs right next to the painting. So this crew may well have been local kids!

He finished Breezing Up in 1876, the centennial of the United States. But it was also only 10 years since the end of the Civil War. It was incredibly popular when it was exhibited because visitors felt he had captured the wave of optimism spreading through the country. Making the kids the main subject, especially the kid on the stern, looking away from us toward the horizon, points to a focus on a better future.

I took a great tour at the Gallery called American Stories and the docent explained that in an earlier version of the scene, Homer originally had four boys but replaced one with an anchor, a symbol of hope and redemption. It’s at the foot of the mast, next to the boy who’s stretched out in the bow. I COMPLETELY missed that! It’s a good reminder to take a second look!

It turns out Mark Twain was a contemporary of Homer’s and published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer the same year Breezing Up was finished. They both celebrate youth and freedom but remind us of underlying grown-up realities. As the docent pointed out, having the scene feature boys and a grandfather-like figure hint at a lost generation of fathers who didn’t come back from the war.

OUTRO:

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

Her Appeal to the Dauphin

Today I’m looking at Her Appeal to the Dauphin, part of a series of the life of Joan of Arc by Louis Maurice Boutet de Monvel. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice? This incredible oil painting is a riot of color. Scarlet, burgundy, indigo, powder blue, Kelly green, chartreuse, browns, blacks, pinks, reds. You name it, it’s in there. It’s a scene of a huge group of people crammed into an elaborately decorated room. They take up most of the middle of the canvas and it’s so crowded some of them spill off the left and right sides.

Everyone’s dressed in brilliant medieval clothing–like you see in all those Robin Hood movies. Women wear elaborately patterned gowns trimmed with white fur and tall hats with white veils floating down from the pointed tops. Older men wear heavy robes–also elaborately patterned– with headdresses winding around their heads. A few young men are scattered in the crowd, wearing hip length tunics over tight leggings and soft cone-shaped hats. De Monvel used gold leaf in the garments’ patterns, building it up in some places to make them even more glittering and sumptuous. These are definitely the one percent… or at least the ten percent.

All these people look very flat. Under that heavy, detailed clothing, you don’t get a sense of a real body. You really see this in the legs of the young men. There’s no muscle definition! After a few minutes I realized the other thing adding to this flatness is that each figure is outlined with a thin black line, like you’d see in a drawing.

But the faces are something else. They’re much more detailed and realistic, but they also look like they’re drawn with pencil, not painted.The old men even have jowls and faint five oclock shadows.

The whole crowd is looking down with curiosity–or skepticism–towards the center of the room, some craning their necks. At the center of this psychedelic scene is Joan of Arc.

She’s down on one knee in front of the crowd. She’s in profile, facing left, wearing a simple grey tunic, taupe leggings and black pointy ankle boots. Her blond hair is cut in a pageboy–chin length with bangs cut straight across her forehead. Joan’s right arm is fully extended, pointing to a young man in front of her. He wears a cobalt blue robe with orange lapels layered over a purple tunic. A large gold chain and medallion hang from his neck and a smaller gold band surrounds the crown of his soft peaked grey cap.

Behind the crowd is a densely patterned wall with a motif that repeats along the top of the painting. Here what it looks like. The background is burnt orange and in the middle is a coat of arms surrounded by a circle of green leaves and small blue and white flowers. On either side of this are small clusters of leaves and green stems, topped with delicate flowers. These alternate with a logo of sorts. It’s an interlocking c and k in medieval lettering topped with a gold crown. Like I said this repeats across the wall except for one section, near the left that has a stylized mauve vine pattern over a soft pink background.

The floor is a relief from this blast of color. It’s tiled in geometric patterns of grey, beige and coral with pink and white flowers scattered across it. The final element is an Oriental rug in the lower left corner designed with green, rose, blue, white and lilac.

So who is this crowd of one percenters Joan’s addressing? And how did a Montana Senator known as the Copper King end up with a medieval style painting of a French saint?

MUSIC

The story of Joan of Arc is a long one but the gist is, by the early 1400s, France had been ravaged by the Hundred Years War in which the British had invaded Northern France to gain control of the throne. The English beat the French forces and the dauphin, the heir to throne, went into exile. Northern France became overrun with invading armies and the situation was grim.

Joan was a young peasant and when she was about 14, started hearing voices and seeing visions she belived to be the Archangel Michael and Saints Catherine and Margaret. At first they encouraged her to lead a pious life but as she grew older, the voices told her she would lead the dauphin’s army to victory against the English. They instructed her to cut her hair, dress as a man and go to the Dauphin to convince him of her mission. The story says that when the Dauphin found out she was coming, he hid in the crowd but she was able to identify him anyway. That’s the scene depicted here. The dauphin is the young man in the blue and orange robe.

She was just 17 years old but convinced him to believe in her divine mission by repeating things he had prayed for privately. He had her interviewed by a panel of clerics and they signed off on her too. So he gave her armor and a horse and put her in charge of the army. Incredibly, she was successful, driving the invaders out of Northern France and kicking them out of Orléans, an important city. In just a few weeks, the English had been forced to retreat and Charles VII was crowned King of France.

A year later, Joan is again in battle, this time against the Burgundians. It was a fight Charles declined to get involved with. During the fight, she’s wounded and captured and turned over to the British. They were still smarting from their defeat, so they held a completely bogus trial accusing her of witchcraft and heresy because of her voices but what really upset them, believe it or not, is that she dressed as a guy. Finally, poor Joan is burned at the stake. She was just 19 years old. Years later, Charles decides to have her case investigated and ends up declaring her not guilty on all charges. Even better, she’s canonized by the Church in 1920 and made France’s patron saint.

William A. Clark was a wealthy man from Montana who made his money in copper and served as a US Senator from 1901-1907. His wife was French Canadian and they had two daughters. They had several homes but his wife and daughters settled in Paris.

There was a big Joan revival in the late 1800s and early 1900s. de Monvel had written and illustrated a children’s book telling her story. He also created a set of watercolors of his illustrations and the first of what was supposed to be several murals of key events in Joan’s life.

He apparently had seen de Monvel’s work at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris and commissioned the artist for a series of six paintings.

In 2018, the Gallery held a symposium about these works and a couple of theories were suggested. Nora Heimann of Catholic University describes Clark’s palatial home and the odd fact that the Joan paintings were to be displayed in his billiards and smoking room! Her theory is, this is where Clark wanted to show off to visitors. She talks about how French art at the time was the epitome of taste and owning them showed the world you had made it. As Heimann says, Clark was determined to show “he had come a very long way away from being a copper miner in the hills of America.”

Another theory is offered by Elizabeth Emery of Montclair State University. She speculates he might have been inspired to commission his own set of Joans because his two young daughters were huge Joan of Arc fans!

OUTRO:

By the way, I barely scratched the surface of the amazing stories of Joan, deMonvel and Clark so I really encourage you to check out the links in the show notes. I listed the sources I used and additional ones I found but didn’t have time to dive into. As usual you can find the show notes on the website, alonglook-slowart.com and in most podcast apps.

While you’re there, why not subscribe and share? It’s free and that way you and your friends won’t miss an episode! You can find subscription links and social buttons near the end of each post.

I’d especially thank Dr Heimann and Anne Halpern in the National Gallery’s Curatorial Files for their help with today’s episode.

Have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

Saint George and the Dragon

Welcome back for Season 4! I’ve got some great works to share, so let’s get started.

Today I’m looking at Saint George and the Dragon by Sodoma. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice? I first see the broken lance in St. George’s hand. It looks like he’s holding a broken bat after a home run. (Thanks to my colleague, Charlotte, for that great analogy!) The other half of the lance, wrapped in the flag of St. George, is embedded in the body of a dark green dragon, lying curled up on the ground in front of him. Blood spits out of its gaping mouth.

George and his large, chestnut horse are right in the center, charging from left to right. His scarlet cape flutters upward with the speed of their attack as he and the horse glare at their enemy. His right arm (on our left) is bent into an L shape and his mouth hangs open. He’s leaning way over the horse’s neck, gripping his shield in his right hand. The horse partially hides the shield, you can just see the top half of it.

The horse wants some of this action too. Its mouth is wide open, ready to take a bite while his front hooves are just about to trample the beast.

George’s shield and the pennant wrapped around that broken lance are decorated with his coat of arms, basically a red cross against a white background.

Geroge is dressed like a Roman soldier but in brilliant colors. Form-fitting purple armour called a curiass protects his torso while his muscular arms are bare. He wears a bronze colored belt and layers of a pleated violet skirt or tunic extend down a few inches from the bottom of the armour. Under them is a longer olive green tunic that just about reaches his knee. Even his saddle is colorful! It’s bluberry blue! Like his cloak, the saddle blanket and his tunic ripple with force of his attack. And his helmet is fancy too. It’s bronze with jewels embedded around the rim and winged figures attached to the front and side.

The dragon is positioned very oddly. Its kind of curled up in a ball, with its head bending backwards onto its body. I can see a small wing on the side facing me and it looks the tail is kind of sticking up on the right side. Its gaping mouth and tongue are dark red and its sharp teeth are white, a really strong contrast against its dark green skin.

Bits and pieces of the dragon’s previous victims lie scattered around its body in the lower right. There’s a head, a foot, and an arm. Behind the creature, a little further up the right side of the canvas, is a body lying in the grass alongside the road.

Opposite the dragon, on the left side of the canvas is a woman wearing a cranberry red gown. Smart lady, she’s got George and his horse between her and the dragon. She faces us, half kneeling, half standing. Her gold cloak is draped over her right shoulder (our left) and wraps around her back to fall in soft folds over her left leg. A delicate gold crown rests on her dark blonde hair. Her hands are raised and she’s turned slightly to gaze adoringly at George.

A small pond lies at her feet, almost filling the lower left corner. It’s filled with blue water and clumps of reeds that also line its edge. A thin broken tree trunk sticks up on our side of the water. It’s dark grey, as if it had been burned. As I keep looking at this blasted tree, I suddenly seen another head submerged in the water!

All of takes place against the backdrop of a city that rises up from a harbor or river. Stone white buildings climb a hill that’s topped by an large multi-level structure, maybe someone’s villa. Clumps of tiny dark grey figures gather on its roof terrace waving their arms. The hill itself is sort of terraced with each level having its own roadway. And down the roadways, some on foot, others on horseback, more small figures race downhill to see the vanquished dragon. A few sport bright red garments. More clusters of figures are scattered down in the harbor and two ships appear to be under sail on the sky-blue water.

Between George and the city is a screen of tall trees, most of which run off the top edge. Single trees running off the left and right frame the scene. Behind George a twisted trunk stretches up, sprouting delicate brankches and light green leaves. And behind the horse and dragon are two clumps of very tall, thin trees with layers of densely packed pine green leaves.

So what is the story and who is this young woman?

MUSIC

St. George was a Roman soldier from Cappadocia, the ancient name for an area in central Turkey. His story is told in The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine. De Voragine was a monk back in the MIddle Ages who compiled all the stories he could find about saints into this book. Anyway, the story is that George was a deeply devout Christian. Not sure how he could be a Roman soldier and a Christian but this is what the story says. One day George is traveling near a city called Silena in Libya. He runs into a very upset young woman on the road. He asks her what’s the matter, why are you crying? And she tells him, please get on your horse and flee or you’ll meet the same terrible death that awaits me. He refuses and asks her again, why are you crying in front of all those people watching from the city walls?

She finally explains the city was being terrorized by a dragon living in a lake nearby. It carried plague and used to come up to the city walls to poison everyone with its breath. And it killed everyone who tried to destroy it. The residents, trying to appease it, started offering it 2 sheep a day. Well, of course, they end up running low on sheep. So the king decrees, we’ll give it one sheep and one person. The victim would be chosen by lottery. Well, finally, the lottery loser was her, the king’s own daughter. Her father had desperately tried to save her by offering the people all his wealth and half his kingdom but they said no way. You made this law and we sacrificed all our children to it, so now, it’s your daughter’s turn. If you don’t we’ll burn you and your house down. So he sadly blesses her and sends her on her way, which is when she meets George.

When she finishes, George says don’t worry about it, I”ll protect you. But while they were talking, the dragon emerged from the lake, so George blesses himself, mounts his horse and charges the dragon. And with one mighty blow from his lance, injuries it so badly it collapses on the road. Then he turns to the princess and tells her to put her girdle around its neck, which she does. In those days a girdle was a ornate beaded belt that looped around the waist and hung down the front of a gown. The dragon gets to its feet and she, George and his horse march back to the city, the dragon following like a dog on a leash. When they see them approaching, the p eople freak out and hide. George convinces them to come back out by saying, if you all promise to believe in Christ and get baptized, I’ll kill the dragon for you. So, more than 20,000 people–king included–get baptized and George, good for his word, kills the dragon. I just want to know where he found enough priests or did one do the whole lot?

Another version, which I think is what Sodoma is showing, just has George killing the dragon as it’s about the consume the princess.

Sodoma was born Giovanni Antonio Bazzi around 1477, the son of a shoemaker in Vercelli, a town in northern Italy. He began his career training locally and eventually went out on his own. His career really took off when he got to Siena. There wasn’t much local competition, so he quickly made a lot of money doing portraits and commissions.

He was apparently quite a character. He was thought to be gay because he surrounded himself with boys and young teens and because of his flamboyant lifestyle. He enjoyed filling his home with a menagerie of exotic animals and dressing in over-the-top style and generally being outrageous. He was given the nickname Il Sodoma (the sodomite) by a writer named Georgio Vasari, who was not a fan. The name stuck. But, Giovanni robbed the insult of its power by adopting it for himself!

OUTRO:

By the way, do you have any comments or questions? Let me know! There’s a comment link at the end of each post. And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

Farmhouse in Provence

Today I’m looking at Farmhouse in Provence by Vincent van Gogh. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

A solitary man stands with his back to us knee deep in a green and gold field. He wears a cerulean blue jacket, mauve pants and a small black cap. His head is turned right to look at a tall stone wall running alongside the field. He’s about halfway down the left side of the canvas which is 18 inches high x 24 inches wide, about the size of a poster.

A short distance above him, the wall slopes down to meet a butter yellow farmhouse built in three sections, each with a sharply peaked yellow orange roof. It has three narrow teal windows. The house is surrounded by trees and bushes, some forest green, some navy blue. And to its left (our right) are 3 tall ochre mounds that I’m guessing are haystacks.

The house, field and wall are all part of a warm sunny landscape filling about two-thirds of the canvas. The wall runs left to right getting taller as it reaches just past the center where it meets a tall stone column. At the column, the wall suddenly curves sharply back towards us and ends in the foreground. In front of it are rose bushes with deep red blooms rising out of the field and running along its right side.

Now, this wall is an unusual combination of lilac and lavender with short stokes of blues, ochres and mauve in a kind of crosshatch pattern. Just opposite is a matching stone wall and column. This wall, with some green grass growing along it, emerges from the right side of the canvas along with a white road or path. The wall and road extend a short distance from right to left but the road curves back slightly to the right and ends abruptly at what looks like a blue?? Gate. Past the gate is another long streak of violet and mauve angling up and back to the right, with more areas of green and gold on either side. I’m guessing it’s a continuation of that wall.

The green and gold continue upwards until they hit a low line of blue hills spanning the width of the canvas. The top third of the painting is filled with a bright teal sky with circular swirling clouds.

After several minutes, I didn’t see anything else but I felt something. The powerful contrast of the cool lilac, lavender and blues next to the warm greens, gold and ochres creates an energy. It might have been the coffee I had at lunch, but those tightly packed vertical strokes in the fields, the sketchy cirrus clouds and those bright colors made me feel…restless, a little fidgety. After my 10 minutes of looking, I had to walk away, it got a little too intense!

MUSIC

Van Gogh is famous for his bold use of color, which he picked up in part from the Impressionists. As a matter of fact, Pissarro, who we looked at a while ago, is the one who taught him the trick of using strong color contrasts. The Impressionists liked this technique because it energized their paintings. Van Gogh even explains in one of his letters that instead of trying to reproduce what he sees, he uses color arbitrarily, to express himself forcefully.

Another big influence on him were Japanese woodblock prints. I’ll include one in the post. By 1888 when this was painted, Japan had been trading with the West for about 30 years after being a closed society for almost 200. It had been forced to open its harbor when American naval commander Admiral Perry showed up with warships and demanded they open up. Because of their isolation the Japanese were unaware of how powerful other nations’ military and technology had become. So when Perry showed up, they realized they were outgunned and finally opened up their ports for trade.

But they quickly adapted. They began to exhibit things like ceramics, kimonos, lacquerware, and fans at Worlds Fairs and international expositions all over Europe and people just went crazy for them. Plus, they started exporting goods to European dealers so their popularity spread even further. There was even a name for this craze, Japonisme. It was especially popular in Paris when van Gogh moved there to live with his brother Theo. Woodblock prints were starting to enter the market and he and Theo actually collected a lot of them! There’s actually a story that the artist Eduoard Manet discovered them being used as packing materials in a spice shop! Kind of how we pack boxes with newspapers when we ship stuff!

Artists like Vincent loved these works because of how different they were from everything they’d been taught. The prints had these oddly cropped views, bold colors, and strong black outlines instead of shadows. The scenes were kind of titled and flattened with no perspective like in Western art. They also loved how these scenes showed everyday life and especially nature.

Van Gogh was so smitten by these prints that he determined to experiment painting the same way. The other inspiration was a romanticized idea he had that Japan was a simpler, more beautiful place, where they managed to avoid the pollution and problems created by the Industrial Revolution. He believed that Arles in the South of France was the “Japan of the South,” and would provide the same bright colors and pre-industrial lifestyle he admired so much in the prints he collected. So he moved there and in a little over year ended up producing hundreds of paintings and drawings, some of which are among his best-loved works, including this one.

And by the way, if you want to see the kind of art that influenced van Gogh, the Gallery has a great exhibition on, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art. There are gorgeous prints, clothing, and statues and it’s definitely kid friendly! It runs through August 18 in the East Building. I’ll include a link in the show notes.

OUTRO:

Thanks for joining me!

Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle)

Today I’m looking at Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle) by Wassily Kandinsky. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice? Strong colors and dark lines explode out from the center of this large vertical canvas. Blotches and patches of color are scattered all over the place and fill three corners. The upper left is filled with mustard yellow with a broad rectangular patch of a darker yellow ochre. The upper right is filled with crimson red. The lower left is filled with a thinly applied mix of crimson and orange. But the lower right contains a shape that looks kind of like a half moon with a face in profile with a tendril trailing from the top. It reminds of those old man in the moon illustrations. Underneath is a stack of five crescent shaped lines.

Back in the center, I see two parallel heavy tall black strokes sitting far apart. They’re angled left to right and other, thinner lines branch out from them. Some are perpendicular, others hang at a slight angle and they all vary in thickness and shades of grey. I decided to follow these lines and discovered that some of them intersect to create shapes. And those shapes evolved into angled squares of different sizes that bow slightly at their centers.That’s when I realized they’re billowing sails and the taller lines are masts! Given the title, it makes sense but it was still pretty amazing when my brain made that connection. Now I started looking for the rest of the ships. I followed the line of the right-hand mast down to a bottle green shape that’s curved on the bottom but has a squiggly top line. Above that was a smaller lumpy red shape. This must be the boat and the crew?? This ship sits above center and fills a good amount of the right third of the canvas. The other ship sits lower down in the left third of the canvas and is built around that other parallel vertical line. You can see a couple of sails, even rigging. But this one has a dark horizontal stroke coming off its right side with thinner scribbled lines emanating from it. There are a couple of similar shapes nearby, all aimed at each other. Broads patches and washes of cobalt blue, grey, bottle green, olive green, yellow ochre, red, pumpkin orange and peach are scattered within and around the ships and a roughly oval shape filled with a red orange takes up a large space below them. This is kind of underlined by a long thick bottle green shape that looks kind of like a snake. Finally, there are looped shapes flying outwards from the ships. They look like what you get when you trace your open fingers on a piece of paper.

This is a challenging work to describe because a lot of these shapes are really ambiguous and there are random black strokes here and there. Color is built up with thin washes in some places and thick swipes in others. Even the background is layered with shades of grey and white.

So what is this battle and why did Kandinsky paint it in such an abstract way?

Wassily Kandinksy was a Russian artist in the early 1900s. He was born in Moscow and studied to become a lawyer but decided to become a painter when he turned 30 so he moved to Munich to study painting. But before he left, he saw an Impressionist exhibition that had a profound effect on him. In it was one of Monet’s Haystacks. These are vividly colorful paintings Monet did of sort of squat, cone-shaped piles of harvested wheat sitting in a field. He was so overwhelmed by the powerful colors he couldn’t see the shape of the haystacks. That strong response made him start to question whether or not objects were even necessary for a painting. He also discovered works by artists like Henri Matisse who were experimented with wildly different ways of using color, like using green paint on someone’s face!

He started using their bright colors in his work and developed his own visual language to illustrate his ideas for a series of paintings he called Improvisations. They were influenced by the Biblical stories of the Apocalypse but also reflect his belief that the world was on the verge of an era of great spirituality. Improvisation 31 is the last in the series and depicts two battleships battling big waves and each other. They pitch wildly in the heaving water while firing cannons. The red orange of the water refers to the description in Revelations of the sea becoming blood. But Kandinsky uses the battle to represent the end of the materialistic world and the dawn of a more spiritual one. He painted these in the years before WWI so he was partly right that the world was about to enter a new era, just not the one he anticipated.

Kandinsky is considered a pioneer of abstract art and Improvisation 31 is an early example. His visual language is a collection of simple, almost child-like shapes. So for example, he represents waves with that shape that looks like a traced hand. Boats are just crescent shapes with two parallel angled lines coming off the side; and horses and riders are represented by two connected squiggly lines. Those short angled lines with scribbles coming out them? They’re probably the cannons!

Kandinsky would draw his cryptic shapes on the canvas and then apply washes and patches of color to hide the drawing.In his own words, he explained he “abstracted [them] so they would only slowly become legible to an observer.” The original long look! He believed that viewers would get a deeper understanding and connection to his themes if they had to work to see them.

Music was also a big influence on him and other artists experimenting with this style. They wanted to break the rules of existing ways of painting that said paintings had to be about something or show something. They wanted to make paintings that were just about…painting. Instead of relying on external scenes or objects, they turned inward to spirituality and the unconscious. In an audio on the site, Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern art says, “They looked to music to be inspired to paint, almost with their eyes closed.”

Kandinsky described this series as being most unconscious and spontaneous but the paintings weren’t quite as spontaneous as he claimed. His mistress donated her collection of his works to a German museum and in them were several sketches of these compositions. But they do show him improvising as he re-worked them.

Kandinsky left Munich during WWI and returned to Russia. After the war, he went back and became a professor at the Bauhaus, an avant-garde art and design school that recently opened. The Bauhaus was eventually closed by the Nazis later and his work in German museums was confiscated as being “degenerate.” He fled to Paris where he spent the rest of his life.

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

Today I’m looking at Little Dancer Aged Fourteen by Edgar Degas. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice? What drew me to her is her expression. It’s part defiance, part fatigue, part concentration. Her head is tilted back, her chin sticking out and she stands with her hands behind her back, with her fingers interlaced.

She’s a slim young girl dressed as a ballerina in a close-fitting bodice and tutu. She’s only about 3 feet tall and her feet are spread wide with the left foot back and turned out slightly to her left. Her right foot extends forward and is turned at a 90 degree angle to her right. If you know ballet, it looks like a wide fourth position.

Her skin and hair are a glossy chocolate brown and her eyes are almost closed. Her long, thick hair is pulled back into a braid wrapped in an off-white ribbon and straight cut bangs brush her eyebrows.

Her gold cotton bodice has 6 buttons and sits off the shoulder and the tutu bells out from the waist and falls to about mid thigh. It’s made from cotton and silk but looks like tarnished gold. They’re both kind of worn and ratty, ripped in some spots. and her thin linen ballet slippers are a russet red.

He made her face, legs and chest pretty smooth but her arms are kind of lumpy. And when I walked around to her back I was amazed to see he gave her oversized hands! They’re way bigger than they should be.

Finally, he stood her on a square wooden base that’s almost the same chocolate brown color and enclosed the whole thing in a tall glass case.

So who is this girl? Is she warming up for rehearsal? Or is she taking advantage of a quiet moment to stretch her tired shoulders?

Edgar Degas was a founding member of the Impressionists, a group of artists working in Paris in the 1870s and 80s who wanted to depict the modern world around them in inventive ways rather than the accepted tradition of depicting only religious scenes, or stories from history or mythology.

He made the Little Dancer for the one of the Impressionist exhibitions and it was the first sculpture he ever showed. Degas modeled her in wax on top of clay instead of carving her from marble or casting her in bronze. Modeling is when you build your form up in clay or wax often over a support called an armature. This can look like a stick figure made out of wire or metal rods. Now Degas’ armature has rods for the legs and back and a crosspiece for the arms. But the piece has been x-rayed and shows he also used wood, rope and padding to bulk out the form. He even used paint brushes for her arms! So he built her in clay on top of this. Then he applied layers of colored wax and modeled her features painting a little red on her lips.. He even added a wig made out of dark blond human hair!

The reaction to her was…bad. Critics called her ugly and one reviewer wrote, “The bourgeois admitted to contemplate this wax creature remain stupefied for a moment and one hears fathers cry: ‘God forbid my daughter should become a dancer.’” The site says it was variously described as “repulsive,” “vicious,” and “a threat to society.”

Why was she so reviled? Well, the idea of creating a sculpture of a lower class “opera rat” as these students were called was just scandalous. At the time, a lot of working class young girls tried to escape poverty by becoming students at the Paris Opera ballet school. While some of them became successful dancers, many didn’t and all of them had to deal with the harassment of older men who hung around backstage. They were young, beautiful and poor which made them targets for these guys. Some of the wealthy subscribers even paid to watch the girls rehearse.

Degas was fascinated by the Ballet. Here was this beautiful setting that offered an opportunity to see and record all kinds of contemporary social scenes and the chance to study the human body in motion. Eventually he was allowed to go to the dancers’ classes and rehearsals where he made loads of sketches while they worked and when they took a break. He even kept ballet props in his studio and paid dancers to come model for him. He once said, “…my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.”

Our dancer was a girl named Marie van Goethem whose father was a tailor and mother was a laundress. We know it’s her because Degas made a note on a drawing he did preparing for this sculpture.

The link with poverty, dance and the potential for corruption by older men even influenced Degas’ modeling of her. There was an idea at the time that your physical traits reflected your character, your morals. So he exaggerated some of her features, basically to make her look kind of rough, anticipating the potentially sordid life ahead of her.

Sadly, he was right. Marie did make it into the ballet corps a year after Degas sculpted her but was soon dismissed because of too many missed rehearsals. In a Smithsonian Magazine article, writer Paul Trachtman says her mother apparently was prostituting her. We don’t hear much more about her after this. But her sister, Charlotte, who also modeled for Degas, did end up a successful ballerina and teacher.

The reaction to the piece was so bad, Degas never showed it again. Although some critics did give him credit for breaking with the tradition of sculpture only showing goddesses and heroes. One writer said, “The terrible realism of this statuette makes the public distinctly uneasy, all its ideas about sculpture…are demolished.”

The site says it was forgotten until it was rediscovered in his studio after his death in 1917. Bronze casts were made of her and there are reproductions all over the world, including one right across from her! As a matter of fact, there are several of his studies of dancers displayed nearby. Since her rediscovery, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen has become one of the best loved of Degas works.

And she even plays a key role in the Masterpiece mystery series, Endeavour! I’ll include a link in the shownotes.

The Conversion of St. Paul

Today I’m looking at The Conversion of St. Paul by Jacopo Tintoretto. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice? Well, EVERYTHING! This is a huge, wild, complicated scene so hang in there with me. It’s an enormous painting, about 5 tall by almost 8 feet wide.

The scene takes place in a landscape that starts with tall mountains that almost fill the height of the left side, then descend abruptly towards a road in the foreground that curves from center right to lower left.

In the middle distance, two sand-colored headlands extend like fingers into a churning blue green sea. Beyond and above them blue mountains and hills march across the canvas in the background.

But on that foreground road is complete pandemonium. Men dressed as Roman soldiers are thrown across the canvas. Their uniforms are a kaleidoscope of knee-length butter yellow, forest green or coral tunics and some wear gleaming silver helmets with cranberry red body armor. In the lower left, a soldier sits on a rearing horse, gripping his bare head in his hands, ignoring the slack reins on the horse’s neck., His head is bowed and he seems oblivious to the chaos his horse is causing. Soldiers pinwheel out in a circle from his flying hooves, running with outstretched arms, some twisting to look back. One poor guy lies face down trampled on the ground and another falls backwards off his horse There’s a horse and rider above and behind this tightly packed group taking all this in and the horse has an expression like, “WHAT is happening??”

Meanwhile, past this frenzied knot of men and horses is another disaster. Towards the center of the scene is a stairway carved into the face of the mountain and horses and the bodies of men cascade down it, some sprawled on their backs, some almost naked, arms flung wide, and others lying upside down. They’re scattered all the way down to the road.

And the chaos continues. In the middle foreground, right at eye level, a bearded man is splayed against a large grey rock. His arms are flung wide and his head turns to our left with his mouth hanging open. A bronze shield is propped against the rock beside him. He’s also dressed as a soldier in a dark blue tunic with his rose pink cloak flung out underneath him.

This figure kind of divides the scene in two with almost all the men and horses fleeing in opposite directions away from him. On the right side a terrified chestnut brown horse plunges into the water, almost on top of several men struggling to keep from drowning. More soldiers with arms flung wide, running, while one fights to control that chestnut. Further to the right, climbing up the right side of the canvas, is a stone bridge arching over the water where two more riders try to control their rearing horses and another guy runs like mad behind them. These horsemen hold enormous pale pink and yellow pennants that stream and snap behind them in a strong wind. Under the bridge a tightly packed group of white horses seem to emerge from the churning water. Their heads are swiveled towards us but look weirdly disembodied. But then again this whole scene is weird.

I got so caught up in taking all this in, I almost forgot to look for the cause of all the turmoil. But after another minute of looking, there he was. Jesus bursts from threatening clouds in the upper left corner, his hair, rose pink robe and denim blue cloak streaming back, just like those pennants. We see a peek of heaven glowing gold behind him as he strains forward from left to right, his hands extended. The clouds are a strange taupe color and stretch across the top quarter of the scene.

So what is going on here? What has gotten the good Lord so upset?

The focus of divine wrath is the guy in the foreground. He is Saul of Tarsus and for some reason, Saul really hated Christians. He went around Jerusalem, arresting them wherever he could find them. He even asked the high priest for permission to travel to Damascus to find and arrest any Christians there and drag them back to Jerusalem. As he gets near the city, Jesus confronts him with a burst of light, asking “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Saul is so freaked out, he falls to the ground asking, “Who are you, Lord?” and Jesus identifies himself. Saul responds, “What do you want me to do?” and Jesus instructs him to enter Damascus and wait for instructions. Saul discovers he’s been struck blind and his men are just dumbfounded, They hear a voice but they don’t see the light. They have NO idea what’s going on. This is the start of Saul’s conversion into Paul the apostle.

Tintoretto takes a lot of creative liberties in how he portrays this story. The Biblical accounts just say there was flash of light and Jesus’ voice, not the bomb blast he’s portrayed here. But Tintoretto lived to break the rules. The chaos and violence he shows were shocking to viewers. Even his painting style was avant-garde. For example, he painted some figures in the distance so faintly, they’re barely visible. One of the horsemen on the bridge has a head that’s suggested by a quick round stroke. Even the way he suggests the waves is with quick strokes of thin white paint. And the ghostly disembodied heads of some of the drowning men and those white horses are equally unsettling. This was all super experimental!

Tintoretto lived and worked in Venice during the Renaissance and was mostly self-taught.In this piece, he borrowed from the great painters who came before him or who were contemporaries. For example, Saul is based on a design by Raphael, and the battle scene come from one of Titian’s works. Titian was THE leading artist in Venice at the time and Tintoretto actually started out as his apprentice, but it didn’t work out. He was an impatient young man, determined to prove himself better than the rest, and hell-bent on success.

Fun fact: Tintoretto’s real name was Jacopo Robusti but he made up his professional name which means “little dyer” because he father dyed textiles for a living. The Italian word for that is tintore.

About those clouds… Why are they such an unnatural color? Thing to remember is this painting is hundreds of years old and paint changes over time. So, the paint in the clouds has kind of eroded, which could explain their odd, patchy, discolored appearance.

The Conversion of St. Paul is part of an amazing exhibition about Tintoretto going on through July 7. Try to get here to see it because it’s the first big show about him in the US and includes works that have never been seen here before.

And don’t forget to look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Thanks for joining me!

A Pastoral Visit

Today I’m looking at A Pastoral Visit by Richard Norris Brooke. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice? A little girl, maybe about 3 years old rests her head on her folded arms on her father’s knee. It’s one of those really endearing things kids do! She stands between his knees, in the middle of the painting and is one of six people around a table. It’s funny, almost everyone who came up while I was looking said the same thing, “Oh, look at that little girl!”

Her head’s turned away from us and she wears a tan dress with white stripes and she’s barefoot.

The painting is pretty big, about 6 feet wide by 4 feet high and it’s in a simple gold frame about 4 inches wide.

We’re looking at an African-American family and their pastor seated around a long wooden table covered with a white cloth.

The pastor is the guest of honor, so he’s sitting at the head of the table on a pine green ladderback chair with a woven seat. He’s a distinguished looking elderly gentleman, dressed all in black. His hair and beard are sprinkled with grey and his frameless glasses are suggested by short strokes of white above his eyes. Very clever trick! His tall black hat is on the floor next to him with a book resting on top. Maybe it’s his Bible?

The little girl and her father sit on our side of the table. Her dad wears a short sage green jacket, mustard yellow pants and work boots. His clothes and boots look dusty, he could be a farmer or a craftsman. His right elbow is propped on a cigar box and he cradles his chin in his hand while his left hand holds his lapel. He’s sitting on a stool, facing the pastor. Between them is another low stool with a banjo lying on it.

A spotted grey cat sits next to dad’s feet, staring at the empty tin plate in front of it and a gnawed bone lies nearby.

Behind dad, on the right side of the scene, is a little boy maybe around 10 years old kneeling on a wide bench, looking intently at their visitor. He’s dressed in a denim blue shirt and brown pants and he’s barefoot like his little sister. A bundle of fruit tied up in a yellow and red cloth lies next to him. A large grey brick fireplace arches behind him and there are several objects on the wooden mantel overhead; a wooden coffee grinder, a couple of large painted ginger jars and an iron.

Another sister and the mom are on the other side of the table. The sister looks about his age and she sits straight up in her dark orange calico dress with a ruffled collar and she has a green bow in her hair. She’s facing us but glances sideways at the pastor. Her mother stands to her right, our left. Mom is dressed in a blue and white checked shirt and yellow grey apron with a red bandana covering her hair. She is all business, her shirt sleeves are rolled up and she’s looking down while calmly spooning dumplings into the pastor’s outstretched plate.

The dinner takes place in a rustic cabin with a worn wooden floor and greenish brown walls. Half of the wooden front door is visible on the left side and it fills about ⅔ the height of the canvas.

A large brick red cupboard stands against the opposite wall, behind the mom and daughter. One door is open wide and inside are shelves full of plates and bowls. A straw hat hangs on the side closest to the front door.

The corner of the room between the cupboard and the fireplace has a small window high up and next to it hangs a bunch of red onions or peppers. There’s some kind of image on the other wall that’s partially blocked by the open cupboard door. It looks like a figure emerging from a dark blue oval and underneath there’s a word cut off. All I can see is “ircus.”

Along with the cigar box, the table is scattered with a large grey ceramic bowl, a clay pipe, a large tin cup and a tin coffee pot. A biscuit with a piece broken off sits on the table near the pastor and the broken bit lies on the floor below.

So what’s the story with the cigar box and what is that thing behind the open cupboard door?

So it turns out, this was a real house! Richard Norris Brooke lived in Warrenton, VA, a small town about an hour and half west of Washington DC. And the people are real too, they were his neighbors, George Washington, Georgianna Weeks and Daniel Brown. The site says the image on the wall is a poster advertising a circus and those are chilis hanging next to the window. The cigar box dad leans on contains that week’s contributions from the congregation which he’ll give to the pastor after dinner, along with the bundle of fruit. The banjo hints there might be some music too.

Brooke painted this in 1881 and he was inspired by the freedoms and rights African-Americans gained during Reconstruction. He spent a year studying art in Paris and was influenced by painters like Jules Breton who depicted peasants in the French countryside with newfound respect. Brooke wanted to do the same thing for the scenes of African-American life around him. In a letter to the Corcoran Gallery, he said he wanted to elevate this domestic scene, “to that place of sober and truthful treatment which, in French art, has dignified the Peasant subjects of Jules Breton and should characterize every work of art.”

After finishing A Pastoral Visit, Brooke moved to Washington DC to the Vernon Row studios at 10th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. It was one of two large studio buildings in downtown DC that offered space for artists to work, teach and exhibit. Another studio building was built by William Wilson Corcoran, a prominent banker and art collector. He actually tore down one of his office buildings to build one twice as large, providing space for several artists. That was located at 15th and F Streets, right near the White House.

Corcoran was a big fan of American art and an early collector of it. In 1869, he founded the Corcoran Gallery of Art, donating his extensive collection and a building to house it. This was the first art museum in the country and Corcoran spelled out its mission when he said, “it is not the design of this institution to purchase old works, but for the encouragement of American genius.” To help foster that genius, he donated money to establish the Corcoran School of Art but unfortunately, he didn’t live to see it open.

The original Gallery was built across from the White House and is now the Renwick Gallery, part of the Smithsonian. About 30 years later, after Corcoran’s death, the trustees built a larger building down the street to accommodate the growing collection and art school.

Brooke became very active in the DC art scene, getting involved with almost every arts organization in the area, like the Washington Art Association. He also helped launch the Washington Art Students League. He ended up selling A Pastoral Visit to the Corcoran and later became an instructor at the art school, eventually serving as its vice principal.

Wivenhoe Park, Essex

Today I’m looking at Wivenhoe Park, Essex by John Constable. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

Brilliant sunlight fills this wide scene of a summer day on the grounds of an English estate. Groves of trees stretch across the middle of the canvas and in the center sits a large coral red house, kind of peeking out between two clusters of trees.

The canvas is about 2 feet tall by 3 feet wide and it’s in a latte brown wooden frame carved with vines and leaves with shells in each corner.

We’re standing on a lawn sloping down to a narrow lake. The right side is in shadow while the left side is a vibrant grass green rising up to the middle left of the canvas. A split rail fence divides us from the sunny side of the lawn and just on the other side are four cows, scattered across the lawn and down to the water. Way past the cows, a small clump of red, white and black dots catches my eye. As I look closer I realize it’s two women in an open carriage being pulled by a donkey! I can see their little bonnets, the wheels of the carriage and the long ears of the donkey. Constable just suggests them with these dots and quick strokes of color. Reminds me of the Pissaro we looked at.

They’ve just crossed the lake over a bridge that’s also a dam. It divides the lake into upper and lower sections. The lake starts in the far distance on the left where it’s crossed by a small stone bridge, then flows to the right til it hits the dam. The silvery green water pours through a pipe to the lower level, and ripples all the way across the canvas. And there’s a lot going on! A row of ducks paddle along from left to right. On the right side, two swans glide, one with its head close to the water, like it’s looking for food. On the far right two men lean out of a rowboat. They look like they’re about to haul up the large fishing net that forms a semicircle behind them.

The green lawn continues on the other side of the lake, rising up to a low hill, which the house sits on. There a couple of cows lying in the shade along the lake edge. Next to them are more ducks, some sitting on the grass, others skimming over the water. And all the way to the right stands another group of figures suggested by quick strokes of black and white.

We’re only seeing one corner of the house but there’s a lot of detail. It has little windows, green shutters, even a red curtain blowing out. Constable seems to really like using these touches of red! It has a slate grey roof dotted with several chimneys.

Rippling strokes of white, coral and green reflect the trees, house and sky onto the lake.

Constable does an incredible job with light and shadow in this painting. That brilliant sunshine creates broad areas of green grass that darken into shadows under the trees and there’s a really strong contrast between them. It’s part of what makes this sparkle.

Arching over all of this is an incredible sky. It’s light blue and filled with dramatic, puffy clouds. They’re bright white on top but a bluish grey underneath and they span the width of the canvas. It takes up the whole upper half so it’s overwhelming. Scattered beneath those clouds is a flock of birds flying left to right, again just suggested by shallow V-shaped strokes of black.

You can just imagine the cool breeze rippling the water and that warm sun beaming down. But despite its peaceful appearance, it must be pretty noisy! You’ve got pouring water, ducks quacking, cows mooing, the rattle of carriage wheels, those guys in the boat pulling up the net…

So whose peaceful, prosperous estate is this? And who is in that carriage?

Wivenhoe Park belonged to Major General Francis Slater–Rebow. He was a close friend of Constable’s father and his first major patron. Years earlier, Constable had painted a full–length portrait of the Rebows’ daughter Mary. Turns out, she’s the one driving the donkey cart!

Rebow hired Constable to paint his estate and invited him to stay there while he worked.

The general wanted specific elements to be shown, so Constable had to fudge parts of the scene to fit everything. For example, the house and lake weren’t part of the same view. He moved trees around. He even had to add 3 inches of canvas to both sides of the painting–after he’d started–to fit all the extra elements the general kept asking for! I couldn’t see them but supposedly there are seams behind the fishermen and an an extra cow down near the water.

Constable loved the countryside of Suffolk where he grew up, not too far from Essex. It inspired his fascination with landscape painting. He really believed in the power of landscapes to open people up to something bigger than themselves and wanted to get nature right. So he’d paint outside, long before the Impressionists, trying to make his scenes look as real as possible. He spent so much time in the park that Mrs. Rebow teased him about how unsociable he was being! But that attention to detail is how he could make even a cobbled together landscape look natural.

This was a really important commission for Constable. He needed the money so he could marry his longtime fiancée, Maria Bicknell.

Maria was 21 and John was 33 when they fell madly in love, Her grandfather and father despised the match because John wasn’t making much money with his painting and the grandfather considered the Constables beneath him. Constable’s mother tried to win over the old man for years but it was no good. Sadly, in the middle of all this, John’s parents die, just a year apart. So now he has his inheritance and his fee from the Rebows so he proposes and she accepts. Dad and Grandpa still aren’t happy with this and they STILL work to convince him. Then, out of the blue, John writes to Maria asking if they could postpone the wedding! He says he’s got some big commissions to finish and he wants to start his new painting for the Royal Academy show. The show was a big deal for an aspiring artist, it got you one step closer to getting professional credentials that would help get new clients. But still… To make things worse, he asks her to not buy a wedding dress in order to save money. Maria replies, well maybe we should take my father’s advice and wait! But finally they married in October 1816, just a month after he finished Wivenhoe Park.

When Constable died in 1837, his seven kids sold the family home and the thousands of prints, drawings and paintings (his and others) in the studio. They held a series of auctions at Christie’s auction house that unfortunately didn’t make much money. Then, a few years later, forgeries start flooding the market!

It turns out the main culprit was a friend and patron of Constable’s, a guy named George Constable (no relation). A longtime friend of John’s, Robert Leslie wrote the family that his father bought paintings supposedly done by John years before except…the paint was still soft!! And these paintings could be traced back to… George Constable.

Cape Cod Evening

Today I’m looking at Cape Cod Evening by Edward Hopper. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice? A dark spooky grove of blue green trees fills the upper left half of this large canvas. It’s roughly 3 feet wide x 4 feet tall and is framed in bleached wood with geometric carvings.

The trees seem about to encroach on the white house which fills the upper right side. One branch reaches towards a bay window jutting out from the front of the house.

Outside are a man, woman and large collie bathed in warm evening light coming from the left. The woman stands, leaning against the house, while the man sits on the doorstep. The collie is in the middle foreground, far from them but closer to us. Yellow grass with hints of green reaches up from the bottom of canvas, It surrounds the collie and creeps up towards the house and into the woods. It’s tall enough to brush the belly of the dog and almost reaches the woman’s knees.

Those pale washes of green scattered through the yellow grass build up into dark shadows under the trees.

The woman wears a snug fitting teal dress,. She has a wide, strong, face with fair skin. Her blond, chin length hair, is severely brushed back off her forehead. Her piercing blue eyes look down, ignoring the man and dog. Her arms are crossed tightly across her chest and her mouth is set in a straight line. She does not look happy.

The man she’s ignoring is also blond but his face and arms are sunburned. He’s in a white t-shirt and black pants. He leans forward with his right hand stretched out like he’s calling the dog.

The collie has an auburn coat with white belly, chest and tip of his tail. He looks alertly off into the distance, away from the couple. His head is swiveled to our left, with his ears pricked up and his tail raised.

The house has clapboard siding and we can see three windows. One is to the right of the door and two are part of the bay window jutting out behind the woman. There’s a corner of an upper window visible too. All of them are trimmed with red, including the roof of the bay window. The foundation is a burnt orange.

The door has two Victorian style frosted glass panels and there’s a small corbel roof with scrolled carvings above it.

All this encroaching nature, the disconnection of the three figures and those ominous trees create a very tense feeling and the dog’s alert pose doesn’t help.

So who are these disconnected characters and what is that dog staring at?

Edward Hopper and his wife Jo rented a cottage in South Truro on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the summer of 1930. By that time, South Truro had become a small village popular with artists and writers. It was quiet, peaceful and uncrowded, which provided a great environment to work in.

By 1934, the Hoppers liked it there so much, they built a studio house where they spent 6 months every year.

The scene is actually made up of bits and pieces of the surrounding area rather than representing a specific place. Hopper said, “It is no transcription of a place, but pieced together from sketches and mental impressions of things in the vicinity.” For example, those menacing locust trees were based on some near his studio. The dry grass could be seen through his window in late summer and autumn. The doorway was one he saw in Orleans, a town 20 miles away. The couple were basically made up, based on the Northern Europeans he came across on the Cape. The unhappy looking woman is supposed to a Finn and the lean, muscular man is a Swede.

Hopper had a basic idea of the scene but experimented with different positions for the people. He alternated between working in his studio and working outside, even lugging the canvas outdoors when the light and time of day were right.

Fortunately, Jo kept copious notes about his work. She writes that the painting was going to be called “Whipporwill.” after the bird. Whipoorwills were named after their unique calls. They were widespread on the Cape, living in the edges of forests like in the painting. They feed on insects at dusk, so the twilight setting would make perfect sense. According to her notes, the dog is reacting to the call of the bird.

Funny story about the dog. Hopper wasn’t actually sure he knew what a collie looked like and apparently, there were no collies in Truro. So he and Jo went down the library where he could check the encyclopedia. Hopper wasn’t able to find much information but incredibly, after leaving the library, a collie jumped out of a parked car right in front of them! He was with a boy whose mother had gone into a nearby shop. Jo chatted with the boy and kept the dog still by petting him. Edward grabbed his sketchbook and now had his collie.

As for the dog, Hopper confirms Jo’s notes in a later interview. He says, “The dog is listening to something, probably a whippoorwill or some evening sound.” He was often influenced by popular culture and might have been thinking of the opening line of the song “My Blue Heaven”: “When whip-poor-wills call and evening is nigh.” I’ve included a link in the show notes where you can listen

Hopper was famous for creating mysterious, unsettling scenes like this. There’s always something I find lonely about his work.

In the gallery’s online edition, Robert Torchia explains that “Hopper was an introverted individual who was notoriously secretive about the meaning of his paintings” and that the psychological distance between the couple “reflects Hopper’s penchant for mysterious, quasi-narrative subjects that imply dysfunctional sexual relationships.” He also suggests the painting’s “sinister ambience may have been influenced by contemporary film noir.”

Want to know where I get my information? The Gallery’s website is my main source but I use others as well. You can find links in the show notes and on the show’s website, alonglook-slowart.com. While you’re there, why not subscribe and share? It’s free and that way you and your friends won’t miss an episode! You can find subscription links and social buttons near the end of each post. And look for me on Instagram @alonglookslowart!

Madame du Barry

Today I’m looking at Madame du Barry by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov.

So what do you first notice?

An opulently dressed woman stands against a dark, dramatic background. She stands in a glowing silver satin gown, looking right at us with her head tilted a little to our left. She has a heart shaped face, with grey eyes, high thin arched eyebrows, rosy cheeks and a little cupid’s bow mouth. That sumptuous gown is trimmed with very delicate sheer lace around the wide, plunging neckline and sleeves and she wears a pink sash around her waist. Her expression is very sweet, almost too sweet.

Her luxurious long grey hair is piled high on her head with loose curly tendrils brushing her shoulders. Her up do is topped with a wreath of pink flowers and ostrich feathers that curl over the top.

She leans causally against a broad stone pedestal with her left elbow resting on it and she dangles another wreath of flowers in her left hand. They’re blue, yellow, red, and pink and are woven together with strands of ivy. Her right hand is empty and hangs loosely by her side. The pedestal looks like brown stone. It gleams softly and there’s a carved garland with a bow on the side facing us.

Madame du Barry takes up most of the center of the canvas with a shadowy landscape behind her. On the left a tree with a thick trunk rises at a sharp angle from behind her to the upper left corner. A smaller sapling grows just in front of it. On the right, are dimly seen lilac bushes. Dark clouds fill most of the top third of the canvas but right behind her head, the clouds part to reveal a peek of soft blue sky.

It not just her shimmering gown that makes you look at her. I realized the leafy limbs of that gnarly tree and the branches of the lilac bushes reach towards her from either side to form a kind of frame around her. Combined with that twilight sky, they kind of point you to her face. Pretty cool technique!

So who is this sweet faced, elegantly dressed woman?

Madame du Barry was the last mistress of the king of france, Louis XV.

According to Wikipedia, she started out life as Jeanne Bécu the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress and possibly a friar. At one point, a friend of her mother’s moved them to his mistress’s home in Paris where her mother became the cook. Jeanne began her education and at 15 years old, was sent to a convent school to finish her schooling. She ended up working in a haberdashery shop.

Jeanne was beautiful with thick gold hair and delicate blue eyes. She caught the eye of Jean-Baptiste du Barry, who the article describes as a high-class pimp. Du Barry moved her into his home, made her his mistress and launched her career as a courtesan. Jeanne became immensely popular, taking several members of the king’s court as lovers. She moved up the ranks, so to speak, and while visiting Versailles was noticed by the king himself, Louis XV. Jeanne was beginning to have very influential clients in the court but she couldn’t be the king’s official mistress because she didn’t have a title. Du Barry took care of that by marrying her off to his brother, Comte Guillaume du Barry and gave her a fake noble family history.

It took a while for Jeanne to be presented publicly as Louis’ official mistress but when she was, she took off. She spent incredible amounts of the king’s money on increasingly over-the-top fashions and as a result, found her popularity tanking. She sounds like she was a nice enough woman but her extravagance was just too much. She was constantly in debt.

Nonetheless, she remained Louis’ mistress from 1768 until his death in 1774. She was thrown out of court by Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI and she eventually settled in the town of Louveciennes. Her life there became much simpler. By the time Élisabeth met her, she wore only simple cotton dresses, went for brisk walks in her park, and helped the poor who lived in the area.

Élisabeth painted Madame du Barry at Louveciennes years after Louis death. Mme du Barry was 45 by that point and Le Brun describes her as beautiful but says, “She received me with much courtesy; and seemed to me very well behaved, but I found her more spontaneous in mind than in manner; her glance was that of a coquette for her long eyes were never quite open, and her pronunciation had something childish which no longer suited her age.”

During the French Revolution, Jeanne was accused of helping aristocrats fleeing the violence. She was imprisoned, tried and guillotined, along with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Things went a little better for our artist, Élisabeth.

Élisabeth was the one of the most famous and sought after portrait painters in Europe and became incredible successful painting the wealthy and powerful, including royalty. She lived and worked in Paris in the late 1700s and early 1800s. She had a few teachers early on but was mostly self-taught, although her father Louis was an artist too.

She was so good she began having portrait clients while still a teenager.

Her early success put her on the radar of Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun, the most prominent art dealer in Paris and the two were married in 1776. Her talent developed even further by copying works in his gallery. Copying from old masters is a time-honored way for artists to improve their skills. And it goes on today! The Gallery has a program for artists who want to copy and you can watch them in action. I’ll include a link in the show notes.

Anyway, a few years later, Élisabeth gave birth to her daughter, Jeanne Julie Louise. There are some beautiful self-portraits she of the two of them. I’ll include one in the blog post.

By 1778, Élisabeth had caught the attention of Marie-Antoinette. She hired her to paint her portrait and was thrilled at the result. So thrilled she made Élisabeth her official court painter.

Late in life, Élisabeth published her memoirs called Souvenirs and they are amazing. They’re her first hand accounts of life at court, the bloody French Revolution and her years of exile.

Élisabeth’s close ties with the nobility became a liability in the days leading up the the French Revolution.

She made plans for her, her 5 year old daughter and the governess to escape Paris but it almost didn’t happen. The day before they were supposed to leave, a mob of drunken guardsmen broke into her house and warned her not to go. After they left, two came back, told her they were neighbors and urged her to flee as soon as possible. To avoid detection, they traveled by public stagecoach instead of their own carriage and had to wait a nerve wracking 10 days to leave. She had to leave behind her jewels, her work and her money, which her husband promptly spent. However, that worked to her advantage. One of their fellow passengers was a thief who bragged about all the things he’d stolen and the people he hanged from lampposts. But he left them alone, since they didn’t look rich.

They fled to Rome, and when she got there, she had a to find a way to support herself and her daughter. So she immediately did a self-portrait for a prominent gallery which served as an ad of sorts and quickly got commissions to paint members of the court.

But portraits were not always an easy way to make a living. While painting one young woman in a mythological scene that included an eagle, she decided she wanted to paint the eagle from life. So she borrowed one and almost got attacked by it because it was so freaked out at being in her studio, it tried to fly at her!

Another great story is about Countess Potocka who showed up at the studio with her husband. After he left she calmly explained, “He is my third husband but I am thinking of taking back my first, who would suit me better, although he is a drunkard.”

From Rome, she went to Naples, where she painted a Russian countess, and wife of the British Ambassador, the woman who became the infamous Lady Hamilton. From Naples to Turin, then Vienna. During her travels she kept hearing the terrible news from home– of friends and acquaintances guillotined.

While in Vienna she did a portrait of the Princess Lichtenstein, who she portrayed as Iris, the goddess of the rainbow. She painted her in mid-air, arms extended upward with bare feet.

The royal grandparents were so scandalized by the bare feet, the Prince, thinking fast, had a pair of slippers placed on the floor beneath the painting and explained that they had slipped off her feet.

From there she went through Germany to Russia where she lived in St. Petersburg and Moscow painting members of the Russian court.

After 12 long years, Élisabeth returned to Paris. Her home was intact and her husband, brother and his family had survived the Revolution. Her daughter remained in St. Petersburg, stuck in a bad marriage she’d gotten into impulsively. But she also eventually returned to Paris. Élisabeth reunited with old friends and picked up where she had left off, painting the rich and powerful of Paris society.

Woman Holding a Balance

Welcome back for Season 3! The hiatus went on longer than expected because of the shutdown but the Gallery is back to full speed with loads to see and do. And on a personal note, I’d like to congratulate Kaywin Feldman, the Gallery’s new director!

Now, let’s get started!

I’m starting off with a favorite, Woman Holding a Balance by Johannes (also known as) Jan Vermeer. If you want to follow along, you can find it on the gallery’s website, www.nga.gov. For this episode, it’ll be really helpful if you pull the image up so you can zoom in and pan around.

So what do you first notice?

Gleaming strands of pearls and gold spill out of a small chest sitting on a table with its lid open. More jewelry lies in front of the chest, mixing in with coins that are piled up and scattered across the tabletop. The pearls are a luminous dark grey. The gold chains are painted with shades of dark yellow with light yellow highlights making them shine.

The table sits against a wall under a small framed mirror next to a window and in front of it stands a beautiful young woman. She ignores the mirror and window And instead tilts her head to look down at a small jeweler’s balance held delicately in her raised right hand. Her pinky is extended and its pans are still and even. She’s just right of center and takes up most of the right side of the canvas. The painting is only about 16 x 14 inches, so not that big.

Her left hand rests on the table. Nearby is an azure blue cloth bunched up on the corner closest to us. She looks lost in thought.

The young woman wears a loose long white cap that frames her face and a hip length denim blue velvet jacket. It has three-quarter sleeves and is trimmed with white fur. Vermeer does such a great job with that fur, you can almost feel it. Her jacket parts at the bottom to reveal a long orange skirt. Her stomach seems to protrude, like she might be pregnant.

The room is bathed in cool, soft light coming in through the window high on the upper left which is framed by orange drapes. The walls are medium grey and dark shadows fill the space under the window and around the table. The light streaming in illuminates her, the jewelry and the painting hanging right behind her, which looks like a Last Judgement scene. You can see Christ surrounded by a gold aura with several figures lined up on either side. There’s kind of a mountainous landscape below them and in front of it are people standing or milling about, some with their arms reaching up to Christ. The painting which is in a black and gold frame takes up the top right quarter of the canvas.

The scene is incredibly still like it’s frozen in time.

It’s also so mysterious. This isn’t just an image of a woman in her home, there’s definitely more going on here. So who is she and what is she weighing?

MUSIC

This gorgeous painting has provoked a lot of speculation about its meaning. There’s the religious symbolism of the Last Judgement painting, the overflowing chest of pearls and gold chains, that rich fabric draped over the corner and even the mirror. All of these things had meaning in Vermeer’s society. The Dutch had developed a visual language many years before that served as kind of a shorthand for different ideas. The fun part is figuring it out!

The woman stands between symbols of the earthly world–those gleaming pearls–and judgement in the afterlife, literally illustrated on the wall behind her. The mirror in front of her could represent self-reflection or vanity.

Different interpretations seem to focus on the idea of her weighing something in the balance, although it’s almost impossible to see if there’s anything actually in the pans. When you zoom in really closely, you can see highlights on the pans but to me, they appear empty. But earlier writers were convinced she was weighing pearls or gold. The painting was even referred to as the Goldweigher or the Girl Weighing Pearls. That whole question of whether or not there’s anything there has actually been debated for ages.

However, the Gallery’s site says that microscopic examination shows that what appear to be objects in the balance are painted with different paints and techniques than the gold and pearls on the table. So their interpretation is that the pans are empty and what we’re seeing are just the reflections on the metal of light coming in through the window. And speaking of painting technique, the way Vermeer gets those pearls to gleam so beautifully is he paints them in two layers–a round thin grey layer on bottom with a white highlight on top.

The other question that’s been debated for ages is whether or not she’s pregnant! One theory says she’s dressed in the latest fashion–a thickly padded skirt under a short jacket. But Arthur Wheelock, the retired curator of Northern European art at the Gallery, writes that he came round to the idea that she probably is pregnant based on her posture and because the model was probably Vermeer’s wife Catharina. Given that she had 11 children, it’s entirely possible! How does that affect the meaning of the painting? Well, one theory is she could be considered a secular version of the Virgin Mary. There apparently were well known ideas about Mary contemplating scales as anticipating Christ’s life, crucifixion, and the foundation of the Church.

An essay on the site explains that the religious overtones could be related to the teachings of St. Ignatius of Loyola. He wrote a series of spiritual exercises recommending that before meditating, people need to “examine their conscience and weigh their sins as if facing Judgment Day. Only such introspection could lead to virtuous choices along the path of life.”

Vermeer had been Protestant from birth but when he married Catharina Bolnes, who was Catholic, he converted, probably at the insistence of his new mother-in-law. So he would have known about the writings of St. Ignatius through contact with the Jesuits.

So the painting could be a reminder to live our lives in balance and moderation. She could be weighing her life choices. But her calm expression may reflect her acceptance of self-knowledge, of finding balance in her life.

The surprising thing I learned was that when the painting was first done, it wasn’t framed and hung on a wall, it was placed in a kind of cabinet that hung on the wall. You had to open two doors to see it. The idea was you wouldn’t just glance at it walking down the hall, you had to choose to view it. Looking in this deliberate way was meant as a kind of meditation. Just imagine that experience! The doors swing open and here’s this serene, glowing scene.

There’s a great story about how the work became part of the collection. Woman Holding a Balance was donated to the Gallery by the Widener family. P.A.B. Widener was one of the first donors to the Gallery, handing over a large collection of Dutch art.

He started out working in a butcher shop selling meat to the Union troops during the Civil War. Later on he got into street cars and transportation around Philadelphia, where he lived, and became very wealthy.

Widener was collecting in the late 1800s around the time of the US centennial and America was becoming fascinated with the Dutch and their history. An historian named John Motley had written a history about the Dutch revolution against Spain called The Rise of the Dutch Republic. He describes how the brave, Protestant, hard-working Dutch had fought off a distant, tyrannical king to start a new self-governing nation. Sound familiar? Motley even equates the leaders of the revolutions, William the Silent and George Washington. So it’s no wonder Americans just loved this book and felt a great connection to the Dutch. And Dutch art celebrated their independence and the prosperity that followed. So all these scenes of people enjoying themselves in their homes and taverns and celebrating their luxuries would have definitely appealed to Widener.

Despite all these high-brow principals though, Widener was able to buy the painting because of a very down to earth opportunity… changes to tax laws in England and the US. The English government instituted a death tax which meant a lot of aristocratic families had to sell their artworks and other luxuries to pay it. At the same time, the US government eliminated an import tax on art. So Widener jumped at the opening and bought several important works, including Woman Holding a Balance.

The Christmas Episode

The Thanksgiving Episode

End of Season 5

Quarry by Edward Loper

Still Life by Margaret Burroughs

The Good Shepherd by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Autumn Drama by Alma Thomas

Correcting the Canon: The Evans-Tibbs Collection

The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew

River Landscape with Ferry

The Lackawanna Valley

Season 5 Begins

The Mother and Sister of the Artist

Autumn – On the Hudson River

La Condition Humaine

The Annunciation

The Dancing Couple

Breezing Up

Her Appeal to the Dauphin

Saint George and the Dragon

Farmhouse in Provence

Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle)

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

The Conversion of St. Paul

A Pastoral Visit

Wivenhoe Park, Essex

Cape Cod Evening

Madame du Barry

Woman Holding a Balance

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