search 7500+ artists, their works, museums, movements, countries, time periods, media, specializations
<<< ART 08 Nov
ANY DAY ...IN ART ...IN HISTORY ||| HISTORY “4” NOV 09 ||| ALTERNATE SITES
ART 10 Nov >>>
ART “4” “2”-DAY 09 November
SURE
THING
abspic
4~2day
DEATHS: 1677 VAN DER NEER — 1911 PYLE — 1778 PIRANESI
BIRTH: 1883 DEMUTH
YOUNG LADY FOR A MERE $20 MILLION !
^ Died on 09 November 1677: Aart (or Aernou) van der Neer, Dutch Baroque painter specialized in landscapes, born in 1603.
— Van der Neer is famous for his nocturnal landscapes. He probably did not begin his painting career until after 1630 and then was unable to make a reasonable living from his art. In 1658 he opened a wineshop, but this venture ended in bankruptcy in 1662. He probably reverted to painting, for he is described as a painter in the inventory that was made of his few belongings at the time of his death. Apart from a number of accomplished winter scenes, such as Riverscape in Winter in the manner of Hendrik Avercamp, he specialized in canal and river landscapes seen by the light of late evening or early dawn or (most characteristic of all) by moonlight, as in River View by Moonlight . Within this limited range he had no rival among his contemporaries; his best pictures are distinguished by sensitive handling of subdued light and its reflections on water and in the windows of riverside houses. His son Eglon Hendrick van der Neer [1634-1703] and grandson Aert van der Neer the Younger were also painters.
LINKS
Fishing at Moonlight (66x86cm; 706x911pix, 138kb) _ Van der Neer was a Dutch landscape painter, influenced by the woks of Avercamp. He became a painter late in life; his later work was mainly of landscapes under snow, under strong atmospheric conditons or with dramatic lighting.
Landscape with Windmill (1649, 70x93cm; 698x924pix, 123kb) _ Van der Neer belonged to the generation of De Vlieger and Salomon van Ruysdael. His specialities (winter scenes and nocturnal landscapes) adapted well to the tonal style,as shown in this painting.
Small Town at Dusk (37x53cm; 638x930pix, 110kb) _ The artist is interested in the reflection of the light on the surface of water, like in his other works.
River View by Moonlight (1645)
Winter Scene with Frozen Canal (33x42cm; 3/4 size)
Sports on a Frozen River (495x800pix, 138kb)
Effet de Nuit (20x29cm lithograph; full size)
^ Died on 09 November 1911: Howard Pyle, US painter, author, and Golden Age illustrator born on 05 March 1853.
     Originator of the "Brandywine School" of illustration, Pyle had many students, including N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith and Frank Schoonover.
     Pyle is best known for the children's books that he wrote and illustrated. Pyle wrote original children's stories as well as retelling old fairy tales. Many of Pyle's children's stories, illustrated by the author with vividness and historical accuracy, have become classics — most notably The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883); Otto of the Silver Hand (1888); Jack Ballister's Fortunes (1895); and his own folktales, Pepper & Salt (1885), The Wonder Clock (1888), and The Garden Behind the Moon (1895).
   He also wrote and illustrated Men of Iron (1892 — historical fiction: 1400 England under King Henry IV) — The Champions of the Round Table (1905) — The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur (1910) — The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903) — Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates (1921) — A Modern Aladdin, — The Ruby of Kishmoor — Stolen Treasure — The Rose of Paradise: Being a detailed account of certain adventures that happened to Captain John Mackra, in connection with the famous pirate, Edward England, in the year 1720, off the island of Juanna in the Mozambique Channel; writ by himself, and now for the first time published (1894) — Within the Capes (1885 — the story of Captain Tom Granger, a Quaker, and his adventures in 1812, a combination of Robinson Crusoe, pirates, Quaker romance, and seafaring adventure) — Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire (1902) — Sir Launcelot and his Companions (1907) — Twilight Land
PYLE ART LINKS
Joan of Arc in prisonThe Pirate was a Picturesque Fellow (1905)
The Mermaid (1910) — In Knighthood's Day

— Men of Iron illustrations: the cover
_ Henry of Lancaster, who in 1399, as Henry IV, became England's King in the stead of the weak, wicked, and treacherous Richard II.
_ Myles, as in a dream, kneeled and presented the letter.
_ "When thou strikest that lower cut at the legs, recover thyself more quickly."
_ At last they had the poor boy down.
_ Myles pushed the door farther open.
_ They bore him away to a bench at the far end of the room
_ "But tell me, Robin Ingoldsby, dost know aught more of this matter?"
_ "Belike thou sought to take this lad's life," said Sir James.
_ Myles entertains the Lady Anne and the Lady Alice with his adventures.
_ Myles found himself standing beside the bed.
_ The Earl of Mackworth received King Henry IV.
_ Lord George led him to where the King stood
_ "My Lord," said he, "the favor was given to me by the Lady Alice."
_ Prior Edward and Myles in the Priory Garden
_ The Challenge
_ He held tightly to the fallen man's horse

A Royal Prince at prayer (etching 57x34cm; half-size; ZOOM to full size)
Early printers (etching 56x33cm; half-size; ZOOM to full size)
One of those City Fellows - a Hundred Years Ago (23x35cm; full size) p.701 from Harper's Weekly 08 Sep 1877.
— 3 illustrations (1881) for Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott: Lancelot (a different one) _ The Lady of Shalott Weaving _ The Lady of Shalott dead
Links to The Lady of Shalott pictures by other artists. — Commentary on The Lady of Shalott illustrations.
— Links to The Lady of Shalott text: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/shalcomb.htm (1833 and 1842 versions) — The next 3 with the 1842 version only:
http://charon.sfsu.edu/TENNYSON/TENNLADY.HTMLhttp://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/1106/shalott.htmlhttp://65.107.211.206/victorian/tennyson/los1.html

WRITINGS BY PYLE ONLINE:
Men of Iron Men of Iron Twilight Land The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood The Story of King Arthur and his Knights Book of Pirates Otto of the Silver Hand co-author of The Wonder Clock
^ Born on 09 November 1883: Charles Demuth, US Precisionist painter, who died on 25 October 1935.
— Charles Demuth was born and died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was born in a Lancaster house on North Lime Street. At age 7, he and his family moved to the King Street home where he spent most of his lifetime. He was the only child of successful business people; they were financially secure so that Demuth never had to work for a living, although he was never wealthy. Demuth's health was frail; from an early age he suffered from lameness and as an adult from severe diabetes. At sixteen, after a long, isolated adolescence, Demuth was sent to a prestigious private prep school, the Franklin and Marshall Academy, from which he was graduated in 1901. He remained at home for two more school years before enrolling at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and industry in Philadelphia, then he studied with Thomas Anshutz and William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. As a young man Demuth made several trips to Europe to study. There he became part of the avant garde scene. He was attracted by the work of Marcel Duchamp and the Cubists. As he matured he moved gradually away from illustrative art. He executed a series of watercolors of flowers, circuses, and café scenes. Impressed by his abilities Alfred Stieglitz featured his works in his New York Gallery. Later in his career, Demuth began to paint advertisements and billboards into such cityscapes as his "Buildings, Lancaster" (1930), in which bold, commercial lettering is complemented by the severely hard-edged abstraction of buildings. Demuth created most of his art in his home where he worked in a small second floor studio of the rear wing, overlooking the garden. He was homosexual and lived with his partner Robert Locher at home with his parents. In his will he bequeathed his watercolors to Robert Locher, and all his other paintings to Georgia O'Keeffe. Among Demuth's best-known works are his poster portraits such as the tribute to the poet William Carlos Williams, "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold.". Charles Demuth died of complications from diabetes in 1935, shortly before his fifty-second birthday. He helped channel modern European movements into US art and was a leading exponent of Precisionism. Less known are his pictures of flowers, Bermuda, and the homosexual navy scene.
the "real" Aucassin et NicoletteThe Figure 5 in Gold is deservedly one of the icons of US modernism, but it came almost at the end of Demuth's life and its author has always seemed a little elusive beside the heavier reputations of his contemporaries — Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler. Of them all, he was the most unabashed esthete. And the wittiest too: it's hard to imagine any of his colleagues painting a factory chimney paired with a round silo and calling it, in reference to star-crossed lovers in a French medieval romance, Aucassin et Nicolette.
      Blessed with a private income from his parents in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, coddled in childhood, lame, diabetic, vain, insecure, and brilliantly talented, Demuth lacked neither admirers nor colleagues. He was well read (and had a small talent as a writer, in the Symbolist vein) and his tastes were formed by Pater, Huysmans, Maeterlinck, and The Yellow Book; he gravitated to Greenwich Village as a Cafe Royal dandy-in-embryo. Free of market worries, he did a lot of work that was private in nature, for the amusement and stimulation of himself and his gay friends, and much of it was unexhibitable — at least until the 1980s.
      Demuth was a rather discreet homosexual, but if he could not place his deepest sexual predilections in the open, he could still make art from them. Seen from our distance, that of a pornocratic culture so drenched in genital imagery that sly hints about forbidden sex hardly compel attention, the skill with which he did this might seem almost quaint. But in the teens and twenties the public atmosphere was of course very different, and Demuth, like other artists in the avant-garde circle that formed around the collectors Loulse and Walter Arensberg — especially Marcel Duchamp, whose recondite sexual allegory The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even Demuth called "the greatest picture of our time" — took a special delight in sowing his work with sexual hints. To create a secret subject matter, to disport oneself with codes, was to enjoy one's distance from (and rise above) "straight" life. The handlebar of a vaudeville trick-rider's bicycle turns into a penis, aimed at his crotch; sailors dance with girls in a cabaret but ogle one another.
      If these scenes of Greenwich Village bohemia were all that Demuth did, he would be remembered as a minor US esthete, somewhere between Aubrey Beardsley and Jules Pascin. But Demuth was an exceptional watercolorist and his still-lifes and figure paintings, with their wiry contours and exquisite sense of color, the tones discreetly manipulated by blotting, are among the best things done in that medium by a US artist. They quickly rise above the anecdotal and the "amusing."
     About 1920 Demuth began with increasing confidence to explore what would become the major theme of his career: the face of the industrial US. It may seem odd that Demuth, yearning for Paris, should have become obsessed with grain elevators, water towers, and factory chimneys. But as he wrote to Stieglitz in 1927: "America doesn't really care - still, if one is really an artist and at the same time an American, just this not caring, even though it drives one mad, can be artistic material." Precisionism was by no means just a provincial US response to the European avant-garde - the splintering of planes from French Cubism, the machine ethos from Italian Futurism. Sheeler and Demuth were painting a functional US landscape refracted through a deadpan modernist lingo that, in Demuth's case, picked up bits of Robert Delaunay and Lyonel Feininger while anticipating some of the essential subjects of Pop art.
      The machine emblems of this US landscape had fascinated some of the best minds in Europe (Picabia, Duchamp, Le Corbusier), who saw them either as exotic whiffs of the Future or as instruments of irony. Being from the US, Demuth took the silos and bridges rather more literally. Out of this came his Precisionist masterpiece, My Egypt (1927). It is a face-on view of a grain elevator in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Demuth's hometown, painted with such careful suppression of gesture that hardly a brushstroke can be seen. Demuth's title whimsically refers to the mania for Egyptology planted in US popular culture in 1922, when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamen's tomb. The visual weight of those twin pale silo shafts and their pedimental cap does indeed suggest Karnak.
      But Demuth may have had a deeper level of intent. His title connects to the story of Exodus. Egypt was the symbol of the Jews' oppression; it was also the starting point for their collective journey toward the land of Canaan, the forging of themselves as a collective and distinct people. An invalid in later life, Demuth was "exiled" in Lancaster, bedridden in his parents' house, cut off from the intellectual ferment of Paris and the sexual-esthetic comradeship of New York. All these were Canaan; home was Egypt. Yet he was poignantly aware that the industrial America which gave him a rentier's income had also given him a great subject which would define him as a painter. From that tension, his finest work was born.
LINKS
From the Garden of the Chateau (no garden, no chateau, 1921, 51x64cm) — Modern Conveniences (tenement back, 1921)
Aucassin and Nicolette (factory smokestacks, 1921) _ he was the most unabashed esthete. And the wittiest too: it's hard to imagine any of his colleagues painting a factory chimney paired with a round silo and calling it, in reference to star-crossed lovers in a French medieval romance, Aucassin and Nicolette.
Lancaster Buildings (with big FEED sign) — My Egypt (grain elevator)
I saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) _ Luckily or not, Charles Demuth painted one picture so famous that many of those in the US who look at art know it. The Figure 5 in Gold, is a precursor of Pop art, based on an Imagist poem, The Great Figure, by his friend William Carlos Williams:
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
"Imagist" because each line, a snap unit of meaning, is meant by its isolation to be perfectly clear, a pulse in itself, without narrative - suspended for contemplation, like elements in a painting. Obviously Demuth's rendering has something in common with Hartley's arrays of banners, numbers, and emblems, and in fact Williams later recalled that he had seen and heard the firetruck in question from the window of Marsden Hartley's studio on Fifteenth Street. Here are the streetlights, the red back of the truck and the engine company number 5, that gloss-enamel heroic heraldry of the New York Fire Department, interspersed with lettered apostrophes to Williams: "BILL," "CARLO[S]," and, at the bottom left, "W.C.W." next to his own initials, "C.D."
Incense of a new Church (abstract, 1921) — Acrobats (1919)
Vaudeville MusiciansTrees and Barns: Bermuda (1917)
^ Died on 09 November 1778: Giovanni-Battista Piranesi, Italian engraver born on 04 October 1720.
— Italian draftsman, printmaker, architect, and art theorist. His large prints depicting the buildings of classical and postclassical Rome and its vicinity contributed considerably to Rome's fame and to the growth of classical archaeology and to the Neoclassical movement in art. At the age of 20 Piranesi went to Rome as a draftsman for the Venetian ambassador. He studied with leading printmakers of the day and settled permanently in Rome in 1745. It was during this period that he developed his highly original etching technique, producing rich textures and bold contrasts of light and shadow by means of intricate, repeated bitings of the copperplate. He created about 2000 plates in his lifetime.
      Carceri d'Invenzione of about 1745 are his finest early prints; they depict ancient Roman or Baroque ruins converted into fantastic, visionary dungeons filled with mysterious scaffolding and instruments of torture. Among his best mature prints are the series Le Antichità romane (1756), the Vedute di Roma (appearing as single prints between 1748 and 1778), and the views of the Greek temples at Paestum (1777-78). His unparalleled accuracy of depiction, his personal expression of the structures' dramatic and romantic grandeur, and his technical mastery made these prints some of the most original and impressive representations of architecture to be found in Western art.
— Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an Italian graphic artist famous for his engravings and etchings. He created more than 2000 prints of real and imaginary buildings, statues, and ornaments. He contributed to 18th-century neoclassicism by his enthusiastic renderings of ancient Roman monuments, which included both accurate portrayals of existing ruins and imaginary reconstructions of ancient buildings in which alterations of scale and juxtaposition of elements enhance the sense of grandeur. One of Piranesi's earliest and most lastingly renowned collections is his Carceri d'Invenzione (1745), in which he transformed Roman ruins into fantastic, immeasurable dungeons dominated by immense, gloomy arcades, staircases rising to incredible heights, and bizarre galleries leading nowhere. These engravings became an important influence on 19th-century romanticism and also played a role in the development of 20th-century surrealism.
LINKS
Self~PortraitTemple at Paestum (1777)

Died on a 09 November:

1980 Marie Cerminová Toyen, Bohemian painter, draftsman, and illustrator born on 21 September 1902. She attended the School of Fine Arts in Prague (1919–1920). In 1922 she met the painter Jindrich Styrsky with whom she collaborated until his death in 1942. In 1923 the couple joined the avant-garde Devetsil group in Prague. The group numbered artists, photographers, writers, and architects among its members. During a three-year stay in Paris from 1925 to 1928 Toyen abandoned the Cubist syntax of her early work and began a series of impastoed semi-abstract paintings. Fjord (1928), along with other works of those years, attempted to realize visually the doctrines of poetic Artificialism in which impressions, feelings, and images leave their imprint in abstract traces and vibrating color sensations. Work of this type was given its label by Toyen and Styrsky to differentiate it from their earlier work and from other abstract forms of contemporary art. They exhibited their first Artificialist compositions in Paris at the Galerie de l’Art Contemporain in 1926.

1884 Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, French artist born on 03 April 1815. — {Wouln't it have been simpler to name him Philippe Otto Philippoteaux?:-}

^ 1807 Augustin de Saint~Aubin, French artist born on 03 June 1736. Brother of Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin [17 Jan 1721 – 06 Mar 1786] and Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin [14 Apr 1724 – 14 Feb 1780]. Augustin was trained first by his brother Gabriel and then under the reproductive engravers Etienne Fessard [1714–1777] and Nicolas-Henry Tardieu. He also studied under Laurent Cars. He was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in 1771, but, because he failed to submit his morceau de réception, never became a full academician. He nevertheless exhibited drawings and prints at the Salon from 1771 to 1793. He produced numerous portraits, armorials, book illustrations and religious, mythological, allegorical and genre subjects, some of which he both designed and engraved himself, some of which were engraved by others, and some of which were engraved by him after drawings by such artists as François Boucher and Charles-Nicolas Cochin (ii). Bocher recorded more than 1300 prints by or after him. — Antoine-Jean Duclos and Antoine-Louis-François Sergent-Marceau were students of Augustin de Saint-Aubin. — LINKSJacques Necker, Banker to Louis XVI (engraving).

^ 1601 Giovanni-Battista Ramenghi “Il Bagnacavallo”, Italian painter born in 1521. — LINKSVirgin and Child (drawing 30x20cm; full size, 585kb) — Virgin and Child with Saints and Child (drawing 29x21cm; full size, 575kb)


Born on a 09 November:


^ 1877 Adolf Dietrich, Thurgau Swiss artist who died on 04 June 1957. — Selbstportrait (1932, 63x55cm) — Der Untergang der Rheinfall (1935; 456x640pix, 64kb) _ This shows the 20 December 1869 sinking, near the Berlingen landing, of the paddle steamboat Rheinfall which had been put into service on 15 May 1865, and worked on the Rhine the route between Schaffhausen and Constance. This was due to an explosion of the boiler. Seven persons and some cattle died during that accident. The ship was raised and put back into service in 1871 under the name Neptun. It sank again in the night of 23 to 24 March 1922 in Constance, due to the failure of a riveted joint. Again it was raised and put back into service until it was retired and scrapped in 1939. — Sonntag im Garten (1923, 46x38cm; 600x495pix, 47kb) — Strauß mit Bettagsblümchen und Goldrauten (1953, 65x64cm; 600x576pix, 40kb)

1854 Hugo Muhlig, German artist who died on 16 February 1929.

1653 (baptism) Jean-Baptiste Belin (or Blin, Blain) de Fontenay, French painter who died on 12 February 1715. The son of Louis Blin, who may have specialized in flower painting, he is recorded from 1672 as being trained in the Paris studio of Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, whose daughter he later married. As a Protestant he was affected by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and he made a prudent public recantation of his faith before being presented at the Académie Royale in 1685. His morceau de réception, the Buste de Louis XIV, is a supremely confident painting. Over 1.8 m high, it shows the bust set on a plinth between two columns, overlooking a vase cascading with flowers, with fruit and armor heaped together below; it brings a new spatial coherence to the genre of the ‘table-top’ still-life as represented by the work of Jacques Linard, Sébastien Stoskopff, and Lubin Baugin.

^ 2000 At an Impressionist and modern art sale at Sotheby's, the expected highlight of the Sotheby's sale, Manet's Jeune fille dans un jardin which the auction house had estimated could set a record at $20 million to $30 million, just managed it low estimate, going to an anonymous telephone bidder for $20'905'750 including commission. The painting of a young woman in a garden who is wearing a bright blue coat and matching hat, which is among the artist's better known works, was the evening's top lot.
[Image: Manet's Jeune Fille à l'Entrée d'un Jardin à Bellevue which I hope is the same one referred to above >]
     It was Manet's decidedly Impressionist ambition, towards the end of his life, to paint open-air pictures in such a way that `the features of the characters would melt into the vibrations of the atmosphere'.
      In 1880 his poor state of health caused him to spend the summer at Bellevue, on the outskirts of Paris, where he rented a house and while undergoing hydropathic treatment he contrived to paint several pictures according to his plein-air intention, in the garden of the house.
      They included one view of the garden without figures, a painting of Madame Auguste Manet seen in profile and the work reproduced here, all giving a sunlight effect.
      The brilliant result in the picture of the girl reading is obtained by a development of Manet's personal style of oil sketching in which he concerned himself with the general opposition of light and dark areas to the exclusion of half-tones.
      This was not exactly Impressionism as Monet came to understand it though Monet had passed through a phase in which he adopted Manet's technique. But if Impressionism strictly meant the translation of light into color irrespective of light and shade, Manet was still working to a more traditional recipe.
      What he meant by features melting `into the vibrations of the atmosphere' would seem equivalent to creating an envelope of surrounding light but the figure of the girl reading is more of a silhouette against the sunny background than a form sharing the same source of light. The picture, however, has the verve that was Manet's individual gift.
. — Manet was a painter and printmaker. Made the transition from the realism of Gustave Courbet to Impressionism. Born into a prosperous middle-class family, Manet spent a year in the navy before entering the studio of Thomas Couture in 1850, where he stayed until 1856. Couture encouraged strong modeling through light and dark contrasts, and copies Manet made at the Louvre, after Velázquez, Titian, and Rubens among others, nurtured a painterly style of rich color and bold brushwork. Like the realist painters, Manet chose his subjects largely from modern life. His Déjeuner sur l'herbe ( 1863) and Olympia ( 1863, exhibited 1865) created scandals both for their unconventional subject matter and their broad handling. A series of paintings on Spanish themes culminated with a trip to Spain in 1865 and firsthand study of works by Velázquez and Goya. At the 1867 Universal Exposition, Manet held a private exhibition, which helped solidify his leadership within the avant-garde. Charles Baudelaire, Theodore Duret, and Émile Zola supported him critically. During the 1870s he worked outdoors like the impressionists, and his work became lighter and more colorful, but he maintained hope for acceptance at the official Salons and never contributed to the impressionist exhibitions. Success came in later years with numerous commissions and portraits. By about 1879, however, he began to feel the effects of a debilitating disease that would eventually cause his death.
LINKS
Tête du Christ (1865, 47x39cm) — Chez La Modiste (1881) — Bateaux de Pêche sur la Plage, St. Pierre-en-porte, Normandie (1873, 48x64cm) — Charles Baudelaire, Full Face (1865)
TO THE TOP
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO WRITE TO ART “4” NOV
http://www.jcanu.hpg.ig.com.br/art/art4nov/art1109.html
http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/all42day/art/art4nov/art1109.html
http://www.safran-arts.com/42day/art/art4nov/art1109.html

updated Thursday 06-Nov-2003 0:19 UT
safe site
site safe for children safe site