E.H. Shepard meets E.A. Abbey

Pen illustration by E.A. Abbey 

When Ernest H. Shepard (1879-1976) was a young, aspiring artist, he dreamed of meeting the reigning king of pen-and-ink illustration, Edwin A. Abbey (1852-1911).

E.H. Shepard, illustration for A.A. Milne

Shepard first met Abbey while a student at the Royal Academy Schools, but he also went to meet the master painter and pen draughtsman in his studio:

"Abbey was already one of the world's most distinguished artists, but it was his incomparable illustrations in line to Old English Songs, and the Comedies of Shakespeare, which made him the outstanding idol of all young illustrators of his time. Shepard acknowledges his deep gratitude to Abbey, who showed him what black and white work really meant. All of us knew Abbey's enchanting work can easily understand the influence which it had on Shepard's own graceful talent. That influence has remained. Shepard's line has always been delicate and sensitive, and his feeling for atmosphere especially notable. Abbey was most generous in his encouragement, and, selecting one of the young man's drawings, insisted on sending it to Punch, with a strong recommendation. That drawing was accepted, and Shepard began to add a very pleasant chapter to the history of illustration."

Shepard would later become the beloved illustrator of Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

Wikipedia on E.H. Shepard and E.A. Abbey 

Quote from The Artist Magazine, May 1941 (Thanks, James W.) 

Books: The Drawings of E.A. Abbey and The Work of E.H. Shepard

The Architect

The architect stands above us, framed by soaring arches, holding his plan for the structure that is being built by workers scurrying among the scaffolding. 

Henri Marcel Magne, L'Architecte, 1910 Musée d'Orsay

The architect gestures upward with his cane. He grips the plans against the tug of the wind, and his assistant holds onto his hat. The billowing clouds behind him appear weightless, while in the foreground rope lifts a heavy block against the pull of gravity.

Everything in the composition speaks to the lofty ambitions of the architect during an era of optimism.

A Cottage Garden

 

A Gardener in a Cottage Garden by Helen Allingham, 

watercolor, 28 x 37.5cm (11 x 14 3/4in)

Learning by Sketching

Quick pencil and gray-wash study thumbnails of compositions are a helpful way to “train your mental model with an optimized dataset.”

The composition on the lower right is "Cinderella," 1880, by Valentine Cameron Princep (British, 1838-1904).

Charles Léandre

Charles Léandre (1862-1934) was a French artist best known for his comic drawings and caricatures.

When he drew caricatures, he knew just what features to exaggerate, and how much to exaggerate them to convey the character.

But he was much more than a caricaturist, painting scenes that were true to nature. This one is in pastel.

He often portrayed children and women, doing so with remarkable sympathy.

Charles Léandre on Wikipedia

Herbert Olivier's Spring Scene

Herbert Arnould Olivier, Summer is Icumen in, 1902, oil on canvas

In 1902, English painter Herbert Arnould Olivier painted a charming image of a young woman beside a flowering tree and exhibited it at the Royal Academy.

Sotheby's says: When the picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1902 it was given the title of "Summer is Icumen In," being the first line of a traditional English song known from a thirteenth century manuscript at Reading Abbey:

Summer is icumen in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow blooms
And the wood springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!

"The song describes the approach of summer and the glories of the reawakening of nature after the somnolence of winter. Olivier therefore used the symbolism to create a painting imbibed with the symbolism of abundance, fertility and rebirth. The subject of Primavera and of Persephone, the Greek Goddess of Spring was popular in the twentieth century as an allegory of rebirth, of the optimism for a new century."

More at Sotheby's. Thanks, James W. 

Gericault's Prelims for 'Raft of the Medusa'

 

Gericault's famous painting Raft of the Medusa is a complex composition, with a lot of figures in dramatic poses. How did he get there?

His early sketches show the seed of the idea, with the figures in the group going in and out of shadow. 

Another sketch shows the stricken mariner's making a more direct appeal to the rescuers.

Jean Louis Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), Study for The Raft of the Medusa (1819), 

oil on canvas, 36 x 48 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. 

As he brought the idea along to a painted sketch stage he worked out some of the key figures, such as the man caring for the dead or dying figure in the lower left.

Each figure needed careful study from models, and the ensemble had to work as a whole and parts.

Finally, this drawing appears to be a record of the finished painting, made after the fact.

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Read more online about the story the painting illustrates and how he developed the composition.

Two Interpretations of Night

The deep darkness of a moonless night has to be painted from memory.

Here are two such interpretations, the first a scene in Warsaw in 1892, by Polish artist Józef Pankiewicz, with dim lamplight and a horse-drawn carriage coming or going in the center left.

 This one by Isaac Levitan is very dark too, with the tree masses painted very softly and full of mystery. 

Using Milk as a Fixative

I've heard of using bread as an eraser, but this one was new to me: using skim milk as a fixative for charcoal drawings. 

Apparently Van Gogh did it, and the milk solution can be applied either with a brush or a spray. There are also recipes for using gelatin, hairspray, shellac, PVA glue or acrylic matte medium.

The main reasons for trying these alternatives are to reduce cost, to lessen fumes, to help the environment, or just to experiment. If you aren't worried about such issues, you can just go ahead and buy some commercial spray fixative.

As with any experimental technique, always test various mixtures and formulas first on a scrap.

Using Skim Milk as a Drawing Fixative 

The Mona Lisa Sprinkler Incident

When the Mona Lisa was borrowed by the USA in 1963, and made its way under heavy protection to Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But there it almost met a catastrophe. According to The Art Newspaper Art Newspaper, on February 7, "a sprinkler malfunctioned, splashing water on the Mona Lisa for several hours."

When curator (and later director) Thomas Hoving arrived at the museum early one morning, "he rushed to the secure storeroom where the painting was locked up at night."

“I dashed to the [storeroom] to study my gorgeous acquisition, only to find that Murray Pease, the head of the conservation studio, and his assistant Kate Lefferts, [and] the officials from the Louvre in charge of the Leonardo portrait were rushing around with towels,” writes Dr Hoving.

“No one ever discovered why, but some time during the night one of the fire sprinklers in the ceiling broke its glass ampoule and the masterpiece of painting had been…rained upon,” he adds.

Guards monitoring the Mona Lisa on a black-and-white monitor outside the storeroom could not see the water on their grainy screen.

“The Mona Lisa, according to the Louvre official, was okay…He told me that the thick glass covering it had acted like an effective…raincoat. The rainstorm was never mentioned to the outside world.” \

Henry Gentle, a London based private picture restorer, said damage to the painting could have been serious if it had not been protected by glass. “The paint could have swelled off [the panel] and become unstable. It really would have depended on the painting itself, whether it was protected by a strong varnish or not, and how long the water was dribbling on the surface.”

Read the full story; How the Mona Lisa almost came to a watery end at the Metropolitan Museum of Art