John Stilgoe

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Harvard professor John Stilgoe at the Thomas Cole House in Catskill, New York.

According to CBS News, which profiled him on 60 minutes, Stilgoe “teaches the art of exploration and discovering the built environment - everything from architectural history to advertising and design. He introduces his students to a method of discovering a hidden world that's always been right in plain view.

“ ‘I start by showing slides of things that they think they have seen, and it turns out they haven't seen. The white arrow that's on the side of every Fed Ex truck is a nice place to start. Almost everybody's seen a Federal Express truck, almost nobody's seen the white arrow,’ says Stilgoe.”

Mr. Stilgoe is currently teaching a seminar at Harvard called “Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871 to 2036.” Here’s the course description:

“Visual constituents of high adventure since the late Victorian era, emphasizing wandering woods, rogues, tomboys, women adventurers, faerie antecedents, halflings, crypto-cartography, Third-Path turning, martial arts, and post-1937 fantasy writing as integrated into contemporary advertising, video, computer-generated simulation, and private and public policy.”

John Stilgoe’s website, link.

CBS News article, link.

Capriccio in Art

In painting, a capriccio is an architectural fantasy that combines various buildings, ruins, or landscape elements into an extravagant juxtaposition.



The word is Italian. It means a caprice, a whim, a playful gesture. One of the masters of capriccios was Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1691-1765).


Capriccios were often decorative exercises to go over a door in a palace to lend a spirit of worldliness and erudition. Canaletto did his share of them. Many of the masters of the genre were also theatrical set painters.


Thomas Cole (1801-1848) tried his hand at a few capriccios, like The Course of Empire: Consummation (1834-36), and this one, The Architect’s Dream (1840). He throws together Egyptian, Roman, and Gothic styles into his architectural milkshake. But these exercises never really caught on in America, where at the time people were looking west toward the wilderness rather than east toward Europe.

Ernest Meissonier: 19th C's Most Expensive Artist

The votes are now tallied in the poll about the highest priced artist during the 19th century. In the voting, Bouguereau edged out Meissonier 92 to 78. Thanks to everyone for participating.

Bouguereau may be more dominant in the recent academic auction revival, and he may be better represented in American collections, and he may be more accessible to modern viewers, but the right answer is Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891).



Click the image above for a BIG enlargement.

There are at least two published sources for this claim. One is The Studios of Paris, by John Milner (Yale University Press, 1988). Mr. Milner documented the astronomical prices (see the Thursday's post) and said “Meissonier became the most expensive painter of later nineteenth-century France.”

The other book is called The Judgment of Paris by Ross King (2006). Mr. King contrasts Meissonier with Manet during the pivotal period in Paris, as the independent movement really took hold. King’s book is insightful, rich in description, and well-researched.

King says that “No artist in France could command Meissonier’s extravagant prices or excite so much public attention. Each year at the Paris Salon—the annual art exhibition in the Palais des Champs-Elysees—the space before Meissonier’s paintings grew so thick with spectators that a special policeman was needed to regulate the masses as they pressed forward to inspect his latest success.” (from Charles Yriarte, 1898)

For those of you unfamiliar with Meissonier, he produced small and exquisitely painted genre scenes from the prerevolutionary times and equestrian military subjects from the Napoleonic era. The Metropolitan Museum owns his “Friedland,” showing a cavalry charge through the tall grass, but that’s not really typical of his smaller, more intimate pieces. He disdained the modern world of the 19th century, preferring to set his scenes in the 18th and 17th centuries.

Many of his genre scenes depict gentlemen in taverns or scholars reading books. The characters seem plucked from the pages of “The Three Musketeers” —which, by the way, was the most commercially successful book of 19th century France.

There much to learn from Meissonier’s impeccable craftsmanship. For art historians there is a great deal of scholarship that needs to be done. Take note, Ph.D candidates! I hope that a museum will do a retrospective, or that an English publisher will consider producing a new book on his art.

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You can see a gallery of 27 Meissonier images at Art Renewal, link.

There are two excellent books in French: Meissonier: trois siecles d’histoire, by Philippe Guilloux (1980) and an exhibition catalog Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, 1993.

In this video, author Ross King talks about Meissonier’s dominance of his own times and his obscurity in ours, link.

Thanks to Micah of Bearded Roman, who introduced this topic, link.

Hotel Continental, Tangier, Morocco

The couryard of the Hotel Continental in Tangier, Morocco is wedged between the the busy harbor and the crowded medina. It is the “dream at the end of the world,” inhabited by the ghosts of the Beat expatriates.

The American Paul Bowles lived there for 52 years. He attracted his eccentric friends William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Timothy Leary, and Jack Kerouac. Their wild adventures found their way into works like America by Allen Ginsberg, Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles, Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac, and The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet.
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P.S. There's still time to guess the Mystery Artist (see post below and poll at left).

Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts has just announced the formation of the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, a reseach institution devoted to the study of the history of American Illustration.

Art Info reports that the Center will "provide stipends to scholars exploring illustration art, house a database of illustration-related materials, establish a network of like-minded institutions to share information about artists, and develop a collection of illustration art of the past 150 years."

Joyce Schiller, who served for seven years at the Delaware Art Museum as curator of American art, was named the Center's first curator. She said,

“The formation of the Rockwell Center is an exciting and extremely important development within the field of illustration art. The art of illustration has informed America’s visual culture throughout the country’s history. It’s essential to bolster research in the field, as well as preserve these fragile works of art—these cultural snapshots—for future study and appreciation."

Rockwell Museum press release, link.
Art Daily article, link.
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Photo of the museum courtesy T.S. Amarasiriwardena /Boston.com

Mystery Artist

The critics universally respected his work. One of them said: “His presence will be assured in the museums of the future.” Another called him, “One of the uncontestable masters of our epoch.”

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany called him “One of the greatest glories of the entire world.”

He was a friend of Eugene Delacroix. “All of us will be forgotten,” Delacroix said. “But he will be remembered.”

In the 1880s, when Van Gogh was secretly hoping to sell a painting for 50 francs (about the price of a three day’s stay in Paris for a tourist), our mystery artist sold a canvas for 840,000 francs. His paintings were by far the most expensive in France in the later part of the 19th century.

Who was he? Please vote in the poll at left. Answer and results on Saturday.
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Thanks, R.K., J.M. and M.C.

Google Ocean

Google has just pulled back the veil of mystery about the ocean bottom. Using the Google Earth model, you can now explore the details of the sea floor, study coastline erosion, and watch old Cousteau clips. This video talks a bit more about it.



New York Times story, link.

The Hard Road to Dreams

Arnold Böcklin (1827 - 1901), the 19th century artist famous for his canvases of centaurs and mermaids, once said,

“Nothing in art is created without effort, and the painter’s ideas don’t come to him on wings while he dreams, either. The one may be more talented than the other, of course; but without untiring diligence, single-mindedness and a combative spirit, there can’t be any good result. All this talk about ‘inspiration’ is nonsense.”

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ArnoldBocklin.com
Musee d'Orsay article about him, link.

Synthetic Flats

Synthetic-filament brushes come in a variety of shapes: flats, filberts, and rounds. Flats are especially useful for painting architecture and machines because they can lay down rectangular shapes easily. You can also turn them sideways to paint a fine line.


Here I'm using a Winsor and Newton Series 995 Golden Taklon ½ inch flat to establish the dark shape of a crypt door.

The finished watercolor painting shows the chunky half-inch stroke module in the stonework and the big shadows. I also used a #4 sable round travel brush for some of the fine line work.

You can use ¼ inch nylon flats with oil or acrylic. For opaque media they come with longer handles. They’re inexpensive, but they don’t last long. Eventually lose their chisel-sharp edge.

Premiere Pensee

The premiere pensee is a small, rapidly executed sketch, which captures the first thought of a composition. It is usually painted in oil, or the same medium as the finished work.

Here’s an example, the first idea for “Lion Hunt” by Eugene Delacroix. The swirl of strokes conjures the intertwined bodies of lions and horses.

The painted sketch was a crucial step in the French academic tradition. The goal was originality, spontaneity and sincerity. The painter Arsenne said that the painted sketch should be “the embryo of what the artist has in his mind.”

Diderot said that the premiere pensee should be “a work of fire and genius,” while the finished picture should be the result of patient study, long toil, and consummate experience.

Art historian Albert Boime argued in his landmark book “The Academy and French Painting in the 19th Century” that the aesthetics of the sketch as practiced by artists of the Ecole des Beaux Arts played a role in giving birth to the later independent painting movements, which put such a large emphasis on freedom and spontaneity.