An artist at work is always a fun subject for caricature. Here are a couple of my favorites.
This one shows J.M.W. Turner on Varnishing Day, before the Royal Academy opens its doors to the public. He's a pot-bellied imp with a long-handled mop for a paintbrush. The pail of paint is marked "Yellow."
Frank Millet sketched (probably from memory) how John Singer Sargent looked when he painted "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose."
His friend Edmund Gosse described how he looked: "Instantly, he took up his place at a distance from the canvas, and at a certain notation of the light ran forward over the lawn with the action of a wag-tail, planting at the same time, rapid dabs of paint on the picture, and then retiring again, only, with equal suddenness, to repeat the wag-tail action."
Here's a photo of Sargent. The painting took him many consecutive evenings. He set up the canvas vertically in front of the flower garden, where the children posed with their paper lanterns.
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Portraits fellow artists on GurneyJourney
It's interesting how the photo of Sargent appears to have been folded several times -- and the resulting lines suggest the action of moving dynamically to the canvas.
ReplyDeleteIn one of the books I read on Sargent (Either Strapless or the biography) it said that, working on a portrait, he would charge across the room at a painting shouting, "Demons, Demons!"
ReplyDeleteI love that. I think we should all put that in to practice and frighten our spouses. :)
It is fun to make paintings and cartoons. Well I just make Aboriginal Art painting. Everyone is praising for my work. Now I am thinking to start learning oil painting.
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