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ART “4” “2”-DAY  13 February
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DEATHS: 1592 BASSANO — 1788 DROUAIS
BIRTHS:  1941 POLKE — 1791 SHCHEDRIN — 1893 WOOD
^ Born on 13 February 1941: Sigmar Polke, German Capitalist Realist painter.
— Born at Oels, Lower Silesia, he moved with his family in 1953 from East Germany to Willich, near Mönchengladbach, West Germany. After completing an apprenticeship as a painter of stained glass, he began studying in 1961 under Gerhard Hoehme and Karl-Otto Götz at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. In 1963 together with Konrad Fischer-Lueg and Gerhard Richter (who was also a student of Götz), Polke launched Capitalist Realism in response to Pop art, exhibiting the first works in this genre in Düsseldorf. In paintings such as Biscuits (1964, 80x75cm) Polke took as his motifs such ordinary food items as chocolate, sausages, or biscuits, isolating them and apparently depriving them of their tactility in order to elevate them to the status of aesthetic signs. At about the same time he began producing a series of sketched faces and stylized mannequin-like figures influenced by the work of Francis Picabia, as in Lovers II (1965, 190x142cm).

— LINKS
— Audacia — Hannibal with his Armored Elephants — Heron Painting II
— Ich mach das schon Jess (I'll Take Care of That, Jess) — Lingua Tertii Imperii
— Magnetic Landscape — Measuring Clothes — This is how you sit correctly (after Goya)
— Tischruecken (Seance) — Two Palm Trees — Woman at the Mirror

^ Died on 13 February 1592: Jacopo (or Giacomo) da Ponte Bassano, Bassano del Grappa Italian painter born in 1515.
— He was apprenticed to his father, Francesco Bassano the Elder [1475-1539], with whom he collaborated on The Nativity (1528). In the first half of the 1530s Jacopo was trained in Venice by Bonifazio de’ Pitati, whose influence, with echoes of Titian, is evident in The Flight into Egypt (1534). He continued to work in the family shop until his father’s death. His paintings from those years were mainly altarpieces for local churches; many show signs of collaboration. He also worked on public commissions, such as the three canvases on biblical subjects (1535–6; Bassano del Grappa, Mus. Civ.) for the Palazzo Communale, Bassano del Grappa, in which the narrative schemes learnt from Bonifazio are combined with a new naturalism. From 1535 he concentrated on fresco painting, executing, for example, the interior and exterior decoration (1536–1537) of Santa Lucia di Tezze, Vicenza, which demonstrates the maturity of his technique.
— He was the most celebrated member of a family of artists who took their name from the small town of Bassano del Grappa, about 65 km from Venice (original name: Jacopo da Ponte, because their workshop was close to the bridge). Apart from a period in the 1530s when he trained with Bonifazio Veronese in Venice, Jacopo worked in Bassano all his life. His father was a village painter and Jacopo always retained something of the peasant artist, even though the influence of, for example, the fashionable etchings of Parmigianino is evident in his work. He treated biblical themes in the manner of rustic genre scenes, using genuine country types and portraying animals with real intereSaint In this way he helped to develop the taste for paintings in which the genre or still-life element assumes greater importance than the ostensible religious subject. From around 1560 his work became vested with a more exaggerated search for novel effects of light, taking on something of the iridescent coloring of Tintoretto. Bassano had four painter sons who continued his style: Francesco Bassano the Younger [11 Jan 1549 – 03 Jul 1592], Gerolamo Bassano [03 Jun 1566 – 08 Nov 1621], Giovanni Battista Bassano [1553-1613], and Leandro Bassano [26 Jun 1557 – 15 Apr 1622] who was also his assistant. Francesco II (who committed suicide by throwing himself out of a window) and Leandro both acquired some distinction and popularity working in Venice.

— LINKS
— The Departure of Abraham for Canaan (600x744pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1736pix)
— A Rural Scene (600x560pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1307pix)
— A Venetian Prosecutor (600x456pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1064pix)
— The Three Magi (1562, 92x118cm; 720x924pix, 171kb)
— Madonna and Child between St James the Greater and St John the Baptist (1550, 191x134cm; 800x551, 76kb)
— The Way to Calvary (1540, 145x133cm; 600x546pix, 118kb) _ Much of the impact of the composition derives from its dynamic organization along the main diagonals. We 'enter' the scene from the bottom right corner, where Saint Veronica in her Venetian gown strains forward to wipe the sweat and blood off Christ's face; follow the lines of the wooden upright of the cross, Christ's body collapsed under the weight, the tormentor's brutal blows, to the furthest point in the upper left, where the executioner pulls on the rope around Christ's waist, urging him on to Golgotha in the distance. His windblown cloak picks up the red of Veronica's dress. Alternatively, we can scan the picture from upper right, from the mounted officers pointing to and discussing the events below; follow the wooden lance shaft to where John's green cloak, seized by a soldier, seems to flow around the head-dresses and shoulders of the Maries into Veronica's out-thrust veil. The Virgin's dark mantle isolates her as she stands, becalmed in the jostling crowd, wiping the tears from her eyes. However we read the painting, we are inexorably drawn to Christ, crowned with thorns. Although his eyes turn to Veronica, his is the only figure depicted virtually in full face, the Man of Sorrows of devotional imagery.
— Supper at Emmaus (1538, 235x250cm; 900x812pix, 162kb)
— Garden of Eden (1573, 77x109cm; 814x1175pix, 155kb) _ The Arcadian scene is dominated by the bright sky of early morning above the distant mountains, the lush vegetation, the clearings amidst the woods, verdant bushes, trees, plants, flowers, and farmyard animals: a goat, a rooster, a rabbit, lambs, and many birds above. There is even a peacock in the predominant position, turned toward the future, to the right, which undoubtedly alludes to the immortality of the first human beings before original sin, and a lizard (not a symbol of vanitas as has recently been proposed), lying in the traditional manner, with its head to the east - the sun is rising in that direction above the far-off Monte Grappa in the background. The presence of the human beings appears to be a secondary element, whose emblematic significance is left to our imagination. Nothing concrete, no attribute reveals the identity of this couple half-concealed among the trees and the rolling ground. The man, in a prominent position, bends over the woman, perhaps to receive the fateful requeSaint The delicate poetry of this "genre" - painting, whose evolution was greatly influenced by the works that Jacopo produced in the early 1570 - which is the presumed date of this painting -, was later spread widely by his studio. It is not impossible that his son Francesco may have played a part in the execution of the landscape of this painting, for which Jacopo had made a preparatory drawing in sanguine, now in Berlin, of the two figures.
— The Last Supper (1542, 650x1188, 132kb) _ This is one of the masterpieces of 16th-century Italian painting. Instead of the elegant grouping of figures in Leonardo's painting, which inspired it, this dramatic scene features barefoot fishermen at the crucial moment when Christ asks who will betray him, and the light passing through a glass of wine stains the clean tablecloth red. Recent restoration has only now revealed the extraordinary original colours, which had been heavily painted over in the 19th century, when the emerald green and iridescent pinks and oranges were not in fashion.
— St Valentine Baptizing St Lucilla (1575, 1108x750pix, 151kb)
— Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist (1570, 600x448pix, 73kb)
— Noah's Sacrifice (1574, , 634x1050pix, 145kb) _ This work is typical of Bassano's mature painting. He uses the biblical episode of Noah coming out of the ark to paint yet again a huge number of animals. This type of composition, where the subject is obviously only an excuse for painting the countryside and nature, especially animals, was a huge success in the art market of the day. Jacopo Bassano and his sons continued to produce many such scenes.
— Saint Jerome (1556, 119x154cm; 720x905pix, 125kb) _ Although he worked mainly in his native Bassano (from where he gets his name), away from the main artistic centers, Jacopo Bassano played an active role in the cultural life of the time. Student of Bonifacio Veronese and follower of Titian, Pordenone, Lorenzo Lotto, and Savoldo, and an admirer of German engravings, he was inspired by Mannerism and by Parmigianino in particular. He developed and refined a style where a polished use of color turns Mannerist preciosity into an extreme realist representation, achieving in his later works a sensibility which prefigures the 17th century. The striking naturalism of Saint Jerome belongs to the beginning of this late period. The saint is portrayed in meditation in the cave which was his refuge and behind which we can glimpse on the right the rain-swept countryside. The livid autumn twilight highlights with realistic truth every vein and wrinkle of the body consumed by a life of privation and picks out the details of the objects on the ground: the hour-glass, the leather-bound volumes, the skull rolled into the shadow. The rare patches of colour pulsate with a shimmering brightness in the play of light and shadow on the dark brown of the rock, conveying the everyday truth of the melancholy of the place and the time of day. The expressive freedom of colour and effects of light inspired El Greco during his formative years in Venice although the artistic visions of the two painters were very different. In fact, for Bassano effects of colour and light are essential to achieve a material reality, while for El Greco they are the fundamental elements of his stunning abstract precepts.
— Sheep and Lamb (1560, 604x844pix, 68kb) _ This painting anticipates a new genre in painting, which would become popular in the 17th century.
— The Annunciation to the Shepherds (1533, 700x560pix, 122kb)
— Saint Roche among the Plague Victims and the Madonna in Glory (1575, 350x210cm; 1139x670pix, 109kb) _ This work introduces a scene from life into an altarpiece, utilizing scenic devices derived from Mannerism but achieving very different results. There is an obvious kinship with Tintoretto, but Bassano has retained his own style in the impasto brushwork, the subtle taste for the picturesque and the peacefully slow movements. The novelty of this painting can be seen by comparing it with the Madonna with Saints and Members of the Pesaro Family (1526, 478x266 cm) by Titian [1490-1576]. That work is composed similarly, on a diagonal in depth, and is also connected with a given social class, though a different one. In Titian's painting the scene is solemnly ceremonial and is laid at the door of a temple out of which the Virgin has just come. It is clear that the Venetian aristocrats and the Virgin all belong to the same exclusive elite. Here, however, the Virgin is relegated to a respectful distance, like a pendant image. The figures scattered about below, who are entirely absorbed by their own daily life and humble piety, do not notice her.
— The Purification of the Temple (502x850pix, 145kb)

— Susanna and the Elders (1571, 85x125cm; 638x953pix, 106kb) _ compare:
 _ by Allori: Susanna and The Elders
 _ by Batoni: Susanna and the Elders
 _ by Cagnacci: Susanna and the Elders
 _ by Lotto: Susanna and the Elders (1517)
 _ by Altdorfer: Susanna in the Bath and the Stoning of the Elders (1526)
 _ by Tintoretto: Susanna and the Elders (1556)
 _ by Badalocchio: Susanna and the Elders (1609)
 _ by Gentileschi: Susanna and the Elders detail (1610)
 _ by Guercino: Susanna and the Elders (1617)
 _ by Reni: Susanna and the Elders (1620)
 _ by Van Dyck: Susanna and the Elders (1622)
 _ by Rembrandt: Susanna and the Elders (1647)
 _ by Ricci: Susanna and the Elders (1713)
^ Born on 13 February 1791: Sil'vestr Feodosievich Shchedrin, Russian Romantic Italianate landscape painter who died on 08 November 1830. Son of sculptor Feodosiy Shchdrin [1751-1825], nephew of landscape painter Semion Fedorovich Shchedrin [1745 – 01 September 1804]
— Sil'vestr Shchedrin, the son of the sculptor Feodosii Shchedrin, was born in Saint Petersburg and died in Sorrento, Italy. He studied at the Academy of Arts in Saint-Petersburg from 1800 to 1811. From 1818 he lived in Italy as a travelling scholar of the Academy of Arts. His early works, such as View of the Tuchkov Bridge and the Vasil'evskiy Island from the Petrovskiy Island in Saint-Petersburg, are good examples of academic classicism. When he arrived in Italy, his style changed, as he was influenced by the different light effects and nature he came to study. In his journal where he recorded observations from his travels, he condemned painters who "deal with compositions or paint from drawings." Since the middle of the 1820s, for the first time in Russian painting, he started to make oil studies from nature (en plein air) instead of sketches to be converted into finished compositions in the studio. His more mature landscapes are characterized by rich nuances of light and atmosphere and an impressive artistic unity. In Shchedrin's later works, for instance in the Moonlit Night in Naples, it is possible to notice the growing tendency towards Romantic emotionalism and more complex light effects. Despite his early death, Shchedrin was one of the foremost Russian romantic lanscape painters, and played a decisive role in bringing Russian landscape into the mainstream of European art.
— Sylvester Shchedrin was born in Saint-Petersburg into the family of sculptor Feodosiy Shchedrin [1751-1825]. His uncle, Semion Shchedrin, a landscape painter, is considered to be the founder of the Russian landscape genre. In 1800, Sylvester Shchedrin entered the Academy of Arts in Saint-Petersburg, in which he specialized in landscape. He graduated with honors and a gold medal, which gave him the right for studies abroad. But he had to wait with his postgraduate studies because of the wars with Napoleon (Napoleon's invasion of Russia started in 1812). Sylvester left for Italy only in 1818.
      In Italy, he studied the works of great masters of the past, and worked much himself. His biggest achievement of that period is New Rome. The Castle of the Holy Angel (1823). It was a great success and was imitated much. Sylvester himself was commissioned for 8-10 copies of the picture, though he never copied it, but drew different variants changing time, angle of view, details. His pension came to an end in 1823, but he decided to stay in Italy as a freelance painter. His works of the time were already so popular that he had many commissions to support himself. He lived in Rome and Naples, working much out-of-doors, drawing nature, bays and cliffs, views of small towns and fishermen villages. View of Sorrento (1826), A Terrace on a Seashore. A Small Town of Capuccini near Sorrento (1827), A Porch Twined with Vines (1828), Terrace on the Seashore (1828) are the examples of his work. He liked to draw terraces in vines with a view of the sea. In 1825-1828, he drew a lot of “terraces”, which were a great success. For him they embodied the idea of harmony between the lives of people, and nature. At the end of the 1820s, Sylvester Shchedrin started to draw nighttime landscapes full of an uneasy, anxious mood. His failing health might be the reason.
— Silvestr Shchedrin, the greatest Russian landscape-painter of the early nineteenth century, was the most striking exponent of the realist aspirations of the time. The Shchedrin family, like the Bryullov and Ivanov families, was a kind of an artistic dynasty. Silvestr Shchedrin was born in Saint Petersburg. His father, Feodosy, was a well-known sculptor, professor and assistant rector of the Academy of Arts. And his uncle Semyon, a professor of landscape painting, gave the young Silvestr his first lessons. ‘I remember being taken to the Hermitage by my uncle when I was still young’, Shchedrin recalled later. ‘I walked past most of the pictures and only stopped to look at Canaletto.’ Shchedrin’s first successful art lessons in the family were soon backed up by training at the Academy. From 1800 his teachers were M.M. Ivanov, F.Ya. Alexeyev, whose main interest at that time was in painting views of Saint Petersburg, and the architect Thomas de Thomon, who taught him the laws of perspective. In 1811 Shchedrin graduated with a gold medal. His graduation piece was the landscape View from Petrovsky Island in Saint Petersburg, which conformed totally to the classical spirit. However, the young artist’s interest in depicting concrete, rather than ‘invented’ views soon asserted itself in his first large-scale works: View of Tuchkov Bridge From Petrovsky Island (1815) and View of the Stock Exchange From the Bank of the Neva (1817).
      In 1818 Shchedrin was among the first four pioneers to be sent to Italy. His travel notes and his letters home, written with gentle humor, reveal the artist’s lively mind and powers of observation. Having settled in Rome, Shchedrin set about painting views of the city. He was attracted by the Coliseum, his approach to which was far from classic. ‘Shchedrin wrote, ‘ordered me to paint its portrait of a building’ the real-life ‘model’, with its powerful architectural forms and distinctive stonework, was excellently conveyed. In the picture New Rome. Holy Angel Castle (1825) the artist reveals the beauty in simple and ordinary things. The grand structures of the Holy Angel Castle and Saint Peter's Cathedral become part of the general city scene. Shchedrin tried to convey the play of light on the rocks and walls, on the greenery and the boats — light which united all these objects, sometimes making them shine or sparkle, sometimes concealing or emphasizing their contours. He softened the highlights on the water and made the shadows transparent and airy. The buildings give the impression of being wrapped in air. In this painting Shchedrin passed from heavy, dark-brown shades to light silvery-greys. 'with great difficulty I have extricated myself from these dark shades,' he wrote to the sculptor S. Galberg. In a small, iridescent landscape Lake Albano in the Outskirts of Rome (1824), the water gleams with silver, while the verdure seems airy and suffused with pink sunlight. Light acts like a magician, transforming everything. This painting is one of Shchedrin's masterpieces.
      The artist's seascapes are particularly poetic. He was enraptured by Naples and its surroundings. On his first trip there from Rome, which lasted from June 1819 to the spring of 1821, Shchedrin lovingly described the colorful life on the seafronts, the merry-making and carnivals, and the scenery of southern Italy... '...Once again I am staying on the Santa Lucia Embankment — the best spot in the whole of Naples. The view from my window is magnificent: Vesuvius a stone's throw away, the sea, mountains, picturesquely situated buildings, people constantly in motion, walking and working - what better place for a landscape painter!' In View of Naples (1819) Shchedrin depicted himself among the townsfolk on the busy embankment. The artist was often to be seen with the fishermen and peasants in the coastal villages. A jolly, sociable person, he was on amicable terms with local population, and portrayed them in numerous pictures.' ... Within a few days I acquired a host of friends - farmers, retired soldiers and others ... these people were so fond of me that having discovered when I usually arrived they came ahead of time not to miss me...'
      At this time Shchedrin made friends with Karl Bryullov and Konstantin Batyushkov — it was with the latter that he stayed while in Naples. Together with Orest Kiprensky he began work on a portrait of A.M. Golitsyn. Having ultimately settled in Naples in June 1825, Shchedrin undertook trips to Sorrento, Capri, Vigo and Amalfi. His landscapes and seascapes ranked among the finest plein air paintings anywhere at that time, especially the series which included On the Island of Capri (1826), The Small Harbor at Sorrento (1826) and The Large Harbor at Sorrento (1827). Nature here accords with man, whose natural and contemplative life takes its course in the 'happy moments of being'. About Covered with Vines (1828) and Grotto at Sorrento (1829) rely on the contrasts between the shaded area and the sunlit open countryside. The midday sun penetrates the dense greenery of the olives and grapevines, picking out the people's figures and patches of vegetation amid the shadow. In his later period, Shchedrin moved away from chiaroscuro tonal painting in favour of heightened color range, as is clearly illustrated by Small Harbour in Sorrento. Evening (1826) and Moonlit Night at Naples (1828). Shchedrin gained popularity in Italy and his landscapes sold well. Meanwhile the dates of his stay abroad had long since expired. He was put off by the thought of a future in the formal atmosphere of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts. But he did not entirely abandon thoughts of the returning home: 'I am most displeased by your advice not to go to Russia,' he wrote to S Galberg. Despite a serious, progressing illness, the artist did not lose his joie de vivre and sense of humor. His last letters from Italy were full of hopes for a recovery and for a return home. But he never did return to his native country. In October 1830 he died, and a monument by S. Galberg was erected on his grave in Sorrento. Silvestr Shchedrin gave his own lyrical interpretation of the scenery of Italy — something that eluded many of his contemporary Italians. His landscapes contained that poetic affirmation of the beauty of simple things which was so characteristic of Russian portraiture and genre-painting of the first half of the nineteenth century.
— Portrait of Shchedrin by Karl Bruloff

— LINKS
— Moonlit Night in Naples _ In this work, Shchedrin continues to explore Italian landscape. In this painting, the elements of the Romantic Movement that characterize western painting of the time are much more evident. The scene is at night with the moon shining through the clouds. Everything is touched by the ethereal light and the water shines brightly. The contours are blurred as in a dream. The only " realistic" element is the presence of some figures in the very left corner. The attention is drawn to the little fire around which the people are gathered, depicted with the only warm tone color of the whole painting. Everywhere else the color scheme is made of cold hues and shadows with the exception of the sections touched by the moonlight. It is a very peaceful scenery, and the night setting probably adds to the sense of calm. Very little space is occupied by actual physical elements, such as the buildings or the boats, while most of the composition is focused on the depiction of the sky and the water. The moon is the main character here. It is the focus of this composition. Its light touches everything as a "wash" given to the whole landscape. To emphasize the importance of the moon, Shchedrin uses lines that point to the moon itself; the clouds are a primary example, but the boats' masts and the position of the building also provide a kind of frame for the main element. Shchedrin seems to maintain once again his tendency to combine the romantic traits such as the natural elements, with the presence of few human figures as if he wanted to include a bit of real life in this predominantly Romantic composition.
— New Rome. The Castle of the Holy Angel (1823)
— View of Sorrento (1826) — Grotto in Florence (1826)
— A Terrace on a Seashore. A Small Town of Capuccini near Sorrento (1827)
— A Porch Twined with Vines (1828) — Terrace on the Seashore (1828) — Coastal Scene
^ Died on 13 February 1788: Jean-Germain Drouais, French painter born on 25 November 1763.
— LINKS
— Le Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards (1758) — Marius at Minturnae (1786) — Madame Drouais
— Jesus Driving the Merchants out of the Temple. (38cmx46cm) _ This study, painted between 1784 and 1788, was formerly attributed to the 18th-century French School. Purchased by the city of Rennes from the Fischer-Kiener Gallery in 1986. The painting's sources are from: - The Gospel according to Saint Matthew (Ch. 21): "And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves ." - The Gospel according to Saint Mark (Ch.11): "and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves." - The Gospel according to Saint Luke (Ch.19):"And he went into the temple and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought; Saying unto them, It is written, My house is the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves." - The Gospel according to Saint John (Ch.2): "And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting; And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise."
The same scene, by other artists:
_ Christ Chasing the Moneylenders from the Temple by Castiglione _ Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple (1575) by El Greco _ Christ Drives Money-Changers from the Temple (1626) by Rembrandt _ Christ Driving Merchants from the Temple (1556) by Hernessen _ Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple (1650) by Jordaens _ No. 27 Scenes from the Life of Christ: 11. Expulsion of the Money-changers from the Temple (1306) by Bondone _ Christ driving the Traders from the Temple by Cavallino _ Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple (1832) by Turner _ Christ Expelling the Moneychangers from the Temple (engraving, 1547) by Bernardi _ The Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple (1675) by Giordano —
^ Born on 13 February 1893: Grant DeVolson Wood, US Regionalist painter who died on 12 February 1942.
— Grant Wood was born in 1891 in Anamosa, Iowa. He lived most of his life in Iowa, and is known, along with Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, as the third in the Regionalist painters triad. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1912; and at the Academie Julian in Paris around 1920, and upon his return to Iowa began seriously painting. He died in 1942 in Iowa City.
— Grant Wood was one of the major exponents of Midwestern Regionalism, a movement that flourished in the United States during the 1930s. Perceptive insight combined with dry caricature make Wood's figurative paintings outstanding among the works of the US Regionalist school. His landscapes sometimes have an air of the deliberately primitive. The tension he sets up between his scrupulously veristic detail and the psychological impactof an overwhelming sense of "presence" raises his best work above most Regionalist painting to the level of truly memorable art.
      Grant Wood adopted the precise realism of 15th-century northern European artists, but his native Iowa provided the artist with his subject matter. American Gothicdepicts a farmer and his spinster daughter posing before their house, whose gabled window and tracery, in the American Gothic style, inspired the painting's title. In fact, the models were the painter's sister and their dentiSaint Wood was accused of creating in this work a satire on the intolerance and rigidity that the insular nature of rural life can produce; he denied the accusation. American Gothic is an image that epitomizes the Puritan ethic and virtues that he believed dignified the Midwestern character.
—    Born and raised in Iowa, Grant Wood became one of America's best-known Regionalists, along with Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. He trained in various crafts — woodworking, metalworking, and jewelry making — before attending painting and drawing classes at the Art Institute of Chicago (1913–16). During the 1920s Wood traveled to Europe four times, visiting Paris, Italy, and Germany. The most important lessons he brought back were from Munich, where he was impressed by the contemporary art movement known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), which rejected abstraction in favor of an orderly, realistic art. He also admired the primitive Flemish and German painters, particularly the way in which they depicted mythological or biblical stories in contemporary costumes and settings, making them more relevant to the viewer than strict history paintings. Back in Iowa, Wood applied these ideas to his depictions of ordinary life. His work, like that of the other Regionalist painters, rejected the abstract modernist currents of European art in an effort to forge a realistic style that could depict typically American subjects. Wood first came to public attention in 1930, when his painting American Gothic won a medal at the Art Institute of Chicago. Unlike his modernist contemporaries, Wood remained committed to depicting regional life in America and, he hoped, the creation of a national style.
— Grant Wood was born on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa. After his father’s death in 1901, the Wood family moved to Cedar Rapids where Grant attended school and even at an early age revealed his artistic talent. He and his friend, Marvin Cone, made scenery for plays and drawing for their high school yearbook and both were enthusiastic volunteers at the Cedar Rapids Art Association. On the night of his high school graduation in 1910, Grant Wood boarded a train for Minneapolis where he enrolled in art school. He returned home in 1911 and began teaching in a one-room country school. In 1913, he moved to Chicago to attend the Art Institute and worked in a silversmith shop. Later, after serving in the Army as a camouflage painter, Wood once again returned to Cedar Rapids and taught art in the public schools.
      Between 1920 and 1928, the artist made four trips to Europe, the first with Marvin Cone, who remained a close friend throughout his life. While abroad, Grant Wood was exposed to current trends in European painting but concentrated on the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles. In this, he was several decades behind European painters but current with most US artists. Wood’s 1928 trip abroad was to Munich, where he supervised the execution of a large stained glass window he had designed for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. While in Munich, he responded with great enthusiasm to the paintings of the northern Renaissance masters, particularly the works of Hans Memling. He was attracted to the glowing colors, smooth surfaces, carefully defined outlines and decorative repetition of shapes and patterns which characterize the works of these artists. Such elements can be found in his mature works such as Woman with Plant and Young Corn.
      In 1932, Grant Wood and others founded the Stone City Art Colony, an art school and artist’s colony near Anamosa, Iowa, His hope was that the artists who participated in the Colony would create artworks expressing the unique character of the MidweSaint “A true art expression,” he wrote, “must grow up from the soil itself.” In 1934, the artist was appointed Director of the PWAP (Public Works of Art Projects) in Iowa. A year later, Wood began teaching at the University of Iowa, an affiliation which continued until his death in 1942. During these same years, Wood also taught and lectured throughout the United States, becoming a spokesman for the concept of Regionalism in art. Grant Wood is recognized as one of America’s outstanding regional painters. His American Gothic is one of the most recognizable images in Western art. He, along with Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, shaped America’s vision of the Midwestern landscape and the people that inhabit it.

— LINKS
— An extensive illustrated commentary: Going Back to Iowa: the World of Grant Wood
— Dinner for Threshers (1934, 50x202cm) — The Perfectionist (1936)
— Stone City, Iowa (1930) — Self-Portrait (1932) — Daughters of the Revolution (1932)
— Return from Bohemia (1935) — January — Near Sundown (1933)
— 19 prints at FAMSF
— American Gothic _ American Gothic _ American Gothic (1930, 74x62cm) _ Regionalism in US painting developed at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. Exclusively Midwestern in origin, Regionalism portrayed US life as simple and rural, in direct contrast to the urban-based Realist paintings that had dominated the US art scene since the turn of the century. Unlike Realism, Regionalism left no room for social criticism. So went the theory. In reality, this may not have always been so. Since first shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930, Grant Wood's American Gothic has been fodder for speculation. In one camp were those who believed the painting was a celebration of "American" values; in the other were those who saw it as a satiric critique of the selfsame thing. The pair's dour expressions led many outside the Midwest to believe that Wood, a self-proclaimed Regionalist, was poking fun at rural life. Wood himself denied this in some interviews, but in others hinted that there were indeed some satiric elements present. (He wouldn't say which elements those were.) Wood's subjects spurred much of the debate. Was the pair a farmer husband and wife, or a father and daughter? Many Iowa farmers' wives objected to what they perceived as a negative portrayal, writing letters of complaint to the artiSaint Wood later revealed that the models were his 30-year-old sister and their 62-year-old family dentiSaint The subjects' motivations, even when considered as father and daughter, are unclear: The man may be a farmer holding a pitchfork, nothing more than a piece of farming equipment. Or he may not be a farmer at all, but a preacher, perhaps, jealously guarding his daughter from male suitors. Critics who interpret the woman as his daughter have often assumed that she was a spinster -- but just what kind of spinster is left to the imagination. Some see the stray curl at the nape of her neck as related to the snake plant in the background, each one symbolizing a sharp-tongued "old maid." Or the curl may be a sign that she is not as repressed as her buttoned-up exterior might indicate.
— The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa (1931, 75x101cm) _ The notion that anyone can grow up to become president is one of the United States' most beloved and enduring myths. Herbert Hoover rose from humble beginnings in a small midwestern town to become the 31st president of the United States. The precise linear patterns and close attention to details in this painting are hallmarks of Grant Wood's Regionalist style.
— The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) _ A year after American Gothic, Wood painted The Ride of Paul Revere, which makes no attempt at historical accuracy — for example, eighteenth-century houses surely would not have been so brightly lit. The picture has a dreamlike sense of unreality. The bird's-eye view makes the setting look like a New England town in miniature. Note the geometric shapes of the buildings and the landscape (even the treetops are perfectly round); the precisely delineated, virtually unmodulated light emanating from the buildings and raking across the foreground; the distinct, regularized shadows; and the way in which the forms in the darker background are almost as clear and visible as those in the brightly lit foreground. With his clean line and his even, unerring hand, Wood has thrown the scene into high relief, heightening reality so as to make it almost otherworldly, a quality that differentiates him from his fellow Regionalists. His precision evokes the work of eighteenth-century American limners.
— Woman with Plant (1929, 52x45cm) _ Encircled by a frame of his own making, this portrait of Grant Wood's mother is one of his first works in the Regionalist style for which he became famous. Unlike earlier works which were either locales far from his roots or locations unspecified altogether, this can only be Iowa. Gone are the visible brushstrokes and the dappled sunlight; they are replaced with an incredibly smooth surface and a new solidness to his trees, hills and figures. Wood paints his mother as a symbol for all pioneer women and tells her story through the use of painstaking details such as her weathered hands, her wedding ring and the hardy plant she holds [this plant looks to me like the plant called “Mother-in-Law's Tongue” for its sharp-pointed leaves. Was Wood aware of that?]. She is so much a part of the land behind her that her eyes are the same color as the sky, her hands are the same color as the corn and her apron is the same color as the rolling hills.
— Young Corn (1931, 60x75cm) _ Painted the same year as American Gothic, this landscape was painted as a memorial to a teacher from Wilson School in Cedar Rapids and is an excellent example of Wood's mature vision of rural Iowa. The high horizon line provides ample room for Wood to explore various textures, giving the viewer a sense of the richness and productivity of the land; the message is that Iowa is a place of peace, prosperity and order. The stylized trees and crop furrows are classic Grant Wood; a detail of this painting was used for the Iowa Sequicentennial Commemorative stamp.
— Spring Turning (1936) _ Grant Wood, along with Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, was a major US Regionalist painter. Spring Turning has been widely reproduced and is considered one of Grant Wood's masterpieces, second only in importance to his celebrated American Gothic. Grant Wood studied at the Academie Julian in Paris and made several trips to Europe. He returned to his hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa where he found the source of inspiration for his entire artistic career. Spring Turning evidences that, like artists or seamstresses, farmers make abstract art out of their fields. In Spring Turning farmers guide horse-drawn plows to fashion the earth's surface into a gigantic quilt. The vast distances suggested in this picture are a result of the immense scale of the landscape in relationship to the figurative elements, e.g. the farmer and his horse-drawn plow, the cattle on the hillside. Grant Wood explained, "The rhythms of the low hills, the patterns of crops upon them, the mystery of the seasons, and above all, a feeling for the integrity of the ground itself -- these are my deep rooted heritage."
— Arnold Comes of Age (1930, 68x58cm) _ What time of year is it--on the left side of the painting? And on the right side of the painting? There is more here than meets the eye! Arnold Comes of Age conveys quite convincingly the traditions of Flemish and late quattrocento portraiture into a US idiom. It was painted in 1930, the same year he completed American Gothic, the work which, more than any other, established the artist's style and regionalist identity.1
      Arnold Comes of Age suggests some of the lessons Wood absorbed in Europe. This work portrait of the artist's young friend Arnold Pyle places the subject in the immediate foreground, centrally before a landscape filled with allegorical detail.. Next to the right elbow of this thin, pensive young man, a moth, symbol of metamorphosis, displays patterned wings. In the landscape beyond Arnold, symbolism underscoring the principle of change continues. Beneath a tree in startling pink foliage, are two young bathers. One stands on the bank of a river that flows across the middle ground of the work; the second figure — rather like a trecento painting in which the same character is shown in sequential actions — has already entered the water.
      To the left of the canvas stands another deciduous tree, so placed that only a few of its leaves are visible. These, however, are not pink but green. Beyond this tree and across the river, two shocks of corn stand in bright sunlight. On the right side of the painting, however, the field shows only neat rows of stubble. In the background are two trees, nearly perfect oval masses of foliage; these, however, are not in fall colors, but in the greens of summer. Thus in planes from foreground to background, and in 'panels' at the right and left of the subject, the bathers and the contrast of seasons underscore the passage of time. As the title accurately reports, this work is not simply a depiction of the artist's friend, but an allegorical portrait of Arnold Pyle's transition from adolescence to adulthood. It is a rendering that is not at all satiric, unlike a number of Wood's paintings, but an empathetic representation of a young man who gazes fixedly not at the viewer but, by implication, at his own future.

Died on a 13 February:

^ 1916 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Danish painter born on 15 May 1864. He attended the Kongelige Akademi for de Skønne Kunster, Copenhagen, under Frederik Vermehren, between 1879 and 1884. He also studied under Frederik Rohde [1816–1886], Vilhelm Kyhn, and Peder Severin Krøyer. His style matured early in his life and did not change much during the 30 years of his career. He was the brother and teacher of Svend Hammershøi [10 Aug 1873 – 27 Feb 1948]. — LINKS — Sunlit Room (1905; 600x472pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1101pix) — A Lady Reading In An Interior (48x42cm) — A Woman Reading By A Window (45x49cm) — Interior, Strandgade

^ 1821 Jean-Jacques Lagrenée “le jeune”, Parisian painter, designer, and engraver, born on 18 September 1739. He was a student of his brother Louis Lagrenée “l 'aîné” [21 Jan 1724 – 19 Jun 1805], with whom he went to Russia, where he stayed from 1760 to 1762. Although in 1760 he had only obtained second place in the Prix de Rome competition, he received permission to stay at the Académie de France in Rome, where he spent the years 1763 to 1768. In Rome he discovered the works of antiquity and followed the example of Giovanni Battista Piranesi [1720-1778] in drawing and engraving antique sculpture. He also painted a ceiling in the Palazzo Senatorio ‘in the arabesque taste’ (since destroyed). He was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in 1769. He exhibited regularly at the Salon between 1771 and 1804 and he was as prolific as his brother. — LINKS — Helen Recognizing Telemachus, Son of Odysseus (1795; 575x771pix, 53kb _ ZOOM to 951x1541pix, 104kb)


Born on a 13 February:

1921 Wou-Ki Zao (or Chao Wu-chi; Zhao Wuji), Chinese French painter, draftsman, and printmaker. He studied at Hangzhou National Academy of Art, Zhejiang Province, from 1935 to 1941 and taught there from 1941 to 1947. The teaching was partly in the old Chinese tradition and techniques and partly in academic Western styles; his early works included small landscapes in the Chinese manner, but he was more attracted by the works of Matisse and Picasso, which he knew only from reproductions. In 1948 he settled in Paris, where he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and soon began to meet many other artists, including Henri Michaux, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró and Maria Elena Vieira da Silva. His works of 1949 to 1955, such as Piazza (1950), owed much to the example of Paul Klee, with spidery imagery of figures, ships, mountains and buildings combined with misty, almost monochromatic color. As early as 1954, however, in much larger paintings such as Riven Mountain (1956, 130x195cm), he developed a fusion of traditional Chinese landscape painting and Western lyrical abstraction. Instead of legible images, his pictures, done with calligraphic brushstrokes or a palette-knife and washes of color, suggest a state of flux and evoke impressions of mysterious landscapes, space, clouds, fire and water, light and darkness, calm and tumult.

^ 1889 Georg Schrimpf, German painter and graphic artist who died on 19 April 1938. — {He must've hated it as a kid if they called him “a little Shrimp”} — He was self-taught; a legacy allowed him to travel widely through Europe and to devote himself to painting. From 1909 he was in Munich where he developed a decorative Expressionist style. His first designs were published in Franz Pfemfert’s politically motivated arts periodical Die Aktion. During World War I Schrimpf was in Berlin, where he was encouraged by Herwarth Walden. He continued to work in an Expressionist style comparable to that of Heinrich Campendonk, providing designs for influential periodicals such as Walden’s Der Sturm, Der Anbruch and Kunstblatt. He married the German painter Maria Uhden [1892–1918] in 1916, and her premature death in childbirth was to have a striking effect on his subsequent artistic work, which was more lyrical and precise, and which most often featured young women, for example Young Girl Seated (1923) and Girl by a Window (1937). He participated in the brief period of Communist government in Munich (1919), but his encounter with the Italian primitives and the artists associated with Pittura Metafisica on a trip to Italy in 1922 confirmed a tendency towards a timeless, poetical realism that places his post-war work firmly within the more romantic trends of the Neue Sachlichkeit. He taught at the Staatliche Kunstschule in Munich from 1926, and in 1933 was appointed a professor at the Staatliche Westenriede-Gewerbeschule in Berlin-Schönberg by its National Socialist director, the German painter Alexander Kanoldt [1881–1939]. He received official commissions from the Third Reich until shortly before his death. Despite this his work was also included in the notorious exhibition Entartete Kunst which the Nazis opened in Munich on 19 July 1937 to stigmatize what they called “degenerate art”, where Schrimpf found himself in the company of such artists as George Grosz [26 Jul 1893 – 06 Jul 1959], Ernst Ludwig Kirchner [1880-1938], Max Ernst [1891-1976], Karl Schmidt-Rottluff [1884-1976], Max Pechstein [1881-1955], Paul Klee [1879-1940], Otto Griebel [1895-1972], Ernst Barlach [1870-1938], and other Expressionists, Impressionists, Dadaists, Neo-Objectivists, Surrealists, Cubists, and Fauves.

1869 Hugo Ungewitter, German artist who died possibly in 1944.

^ 1847 Victor-Gabriel Gilbert, French artist who died in 1935. — LINKS — Le Marchand de chansons (1903)

1793 Henry Bryan Ziegler, British artist who died on 15 August 1874.

1792 Lucie-Marie Mandix Ingemann, Danish artist who died on 15 January 1868.

1785 Johann Baptist Pflug von Biberach, German artist who died on 30 May 1855.

^ 1755 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, French painter and printmaker who died on 22 September 1832. Debucourt was trained as a painter at the French Academy and exhibited pictures at its official Salon throughout his career. In the 1780s he began experimenting with color intaglio prints that reproduced his own compositions representing the elegant lives of the French nobility in the years before the Revolution. Most of the prints he made later were reproductions after the designs of other artists.— LINKS — La Promenade Publique (1792, 47x65cm; full-size 839kb — or see it half-size, 231kb) _ The Public Promenade was inspired by Vauxhall Gardens, a print made in London in 1785 by Thomas Rowlandson, which was an instant success on both sides of the channel. Partly society fashion plate and partly gossipy caricature, that large color aquatint depicted the celebrities and the upper crust of cosmopolitan London parading themselves at the city's most famous night spot. By the time Debucourt produced this, his own French version, seven years later, he had become interested in new printmaking techniques that simulate the look of watercolor paintings. His achievement here is the last and perhaps the greatest French color print of the eighteenth century. Engaging in its satire, the print is also provocative in foreshadowing the massacres of the French nobility in September 1792.

1682 (12 Dec?) Giovanni Battista Piazzeta, Venitian painter and drafstman who died on 28 April 1754, son of Giacomo Piazzeta. Most of G. B. Piazzetta's works are of religious subjects, yet he also painted genre scenes and occasional portraits; especially famous are his portrait heads in black-and-white chalk. His somber art, dependent on chiaroscuro and on a limited, almost monochromatic palette, is intense in feeling and deeply realistic, in contrast to the virtuoso performances and brilliant high-keyed palette of his Venetian contemporaries. Domenico Maggiotto was an assitant of Piazzetta, whose students included Giovanni Battista Casanova, Georges Desmarées, Franz Anton Kraus, Giuseppe Nogari, Johann Heinrich Tischbein I, Paul Troger.

^ 1652 Antonio-Domenico Gabbiani, Italian painter who died on 22 November 1726. He was first trained by the Medici court portrait painter Giusto Suttermans and then with the painter Vincenzo Dandini. On 20 May 1673 he arrived in Rome, where he studied for three years under Ciro Ferri and Ercole Ferrata at the Accademia Fiorentina. He responded in particular to the paintings of Pietro da Cortona and Carlo Maratti who were both to be important influences on him. Though not precocious, Gabbiani became one of the most noted painters from the Accademia. After a period in Venice (1678–9) with the portrait painter Sebastiano Bombelli, he was in Florence in 1680. By 1684, the year in which he executed an Annunciation (destr.) for the Palazzo Pitti, he was an independent painter. His first important public commission, the Saint Francis de Sales in Glory (1685) for the church of Santi Apostoli, Florence, shows the influence of Maratti in its grandiose composition and that of Dandini in the treatment of figures. In Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici Gabbiani found a particularly loyal patron, and he painted his portrait, Ferdinando de’ Medici and his Musicians (1685). One of the works executed for Ferdinando was possibly a portrait of his sister, which Chiarini has identified with the painting of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici (1685). Further works from this period are the group portrait of Three Musicians at Ferdinando’s court and a Group of Courtiers (1690) — The students of Gabbiani included Giovanna Fratellini, Ignazio Enrico Hugford, Benedetto Luti, Giovanni Battista Ranieri del Pace, Tommaso Redi.
— The Abduction of Ganymede (1700; 451x700pix, 78kb) _ The Iliad (Book XX, 232-235) of Homer mentions "...Ganymede, handsomest of mortals, whom the gods caught up to pour out drink for Zeus and live amid immortals for his beauty's sake." and says that Tros, king of Troy and Ganymede's father, received in compensation for the loss of his son "under the Dawn and under Helios the finest horses in the world". According to the version favored by artists through the centuries, either Zeus sent an eagle, or else assumed the form of an eagle himself, to carry the young man off to Olympus. Zeus immortalized Ganymede by making him into the constellation Aquarius, next to the constellation Aquila. The abduction of Ganymede has been seen as an allegory referring to the flight of the intellect, liberated from earthly desires, toward the heaven of contemplation.
 _ See also the pictures:
— The Abduction of Ganymede (1532, 163x70cm; 800x331pix, 72kb) by Correggio
— The Abduction of Ganymede (1575; octagon 800x798pix, 172kb) by Mazza
— The Abduction of Ganymede (1635, 171x130cm; 1090x780pix, 127kb) by Rembrandt van Rijn _ A mirror-image of most of this picture appears on a postage stamp of Gambia (722x497pix, 98kb)
— The Abduction of Ganymede (1000x453pix, 106kb) by Peter Paul Rubens
— by Campagnola [1482->1514] Jupiter and Ganymede above an Extensive Landscape (1500 drawing, 15x12cm; 390x306pix, 53kb)
— by Michelangelo [1475-1564] The Abduction of Ganymede (1533 drawing, 19x33cm; 529x800pix, 50kb)
— by Corinth [1858-1925] Legends of Mythology: Ganymede and the Eagle (1920 color lithograph; 615x728pix, 97kb) from the series The Loves of Zeus.
— by Mignard [07 Feb 1606 – 20 Mar 1668] Ganymede and Eagle (etching 1667, 14x20cm)
— by Annibale Carracci [1560-1609] Ganymede and Eagle (etching).
— by Benoît Louis Henriquez Enlèvement de Ganymède (engraving; 1246x1058pix, 775kb) _ Ganymede is shown as Zeus' cup bearer, holding the cup, and awaiting two winged figures to fill it in. Zeus is shown as the eagle, and one can see the gods' banquet in the background opening of the clouds.
— by Aimee Francesca Cummings Ganymede and the Eagle (2002; 618x514pix, 85kb)
— Punch 06 Oct 1915 cartoon Ganymede and the German Eagle (etching; 827x600pix, 411kb gif) _ The eagle, wearing a German WWI spiked helmet, is carrying a terrified old mustachioed Turk; the legend reads: Sultan: “Of course I know it's a great honour being ‘taken up’ like this: still, I'm beginning almost to wish the bird had left me alone.” Turkey was allied with Germany in World War I.
— Mosaic in Bignor Roman Villa, Sussex, England: [Ganymede and the Eagle] (227x350pix, 81kb)
— Links to mostly ancient images of Ganymede

1647 Pieter van der Leeuw, Dutch artist who died on 11 September 1679.

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