| ART “4”
“2”-DAY 13
October |
DEATHS:
1678 VAN EVERDINGEN — 1759 IBBETSON |
BIRTH:
1474 ALBERTINELLI |
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Died on 13 October 1678: Cesar
Boetius (or Bovetius)
van Everdingen, Dutch painter born in 1617 (1616?), brother
of Allaert
van Everdingen [bapt. 18 Jun 1621 – 08 Nov 1675 bur.]. They were
the sons of Pieter van Everdingen, a notary and solicitor in Alkmaar; their
mother, Aechte Claesdr., was a midwife in the city. The noticeable influence
of paintings by Utrecht artists on Cesar van Everdingen's work suggests
that he may have served his apprenticeship in that town, possibly under
Jan van Bronchorst. Moreover, the van Everdingen family had long-standing
ties with Utrecht, and Allart also eventually was trained by a painter from
Utrecht. Caesar is best known as a history painter who worked in the classicizing
style that became fashionable in Haarlem in the mid-17th century, while
Allart made his name as a landscape artist. — Cesar van Everdingen painted portraits and historical pictures, was attracted by the south not the north. Although he never went to Italy, he captured the spirit of Italian art better than many of his countrymen who crossed the Alps: witness his beautiful Four Muses with Pegasus (1650), part of the decoration of the royal villa Huis ten Bosch in The Hague. — Cesar van Everdingen entered Alkmaar’s Guild of Saint Luke at a very early age. There are a number of unsigned but dated works by him from the 1630s. The earliest signed and dated painting is the group portrait of The Officers of the Orange Company of the Alkmaar Civic Guard (1641), both the execution and the composition of which are rather weak. From 1641 to 1643 Caesar lived in Amersfoort, where, under the supervision of the painter and architect Jacob van Campen, he worked on a modello for the exterior decoration of the organ shutters of Alkmaar’s Grote Kerk. The size and shape of these shutters, as well as the great height at which they were to be placed, forced the artist to make allowances for possible distortions of perspective. The highly successful finished result, representing The Triumph of Saul after David’s Victory over Goliath (1644) was partly executed on panel and partly on canvas. The figures forming the procession and the women playing music behind the balustrades have much in common with figures that appear in paintings by the Utrecht Caravaggisti. — LINKS — Young Woman Warming her Hands over a Brazier (1650) — Bacchus with Two Nymphs and Cupid (147x161cm) — The Four Muses with Pegasus (1650) _ Besides Flemish masters (among them Jacob Jordaens), eight Dutch artists were selected to participate in the decoration of the royal villa — the Huis ten Bosch — at The Hague. All of them were either familiar with classicistic trends or had close contact with Flemish art. Among them, the most attractive and original was Caesar van Everdingen, brother of the landscapist Allaert van Everdingen. The refined, generalized forms, clear outlines, and sensitivity to the effects of light of his Four Muses with Pegasus shows what sets him apart. Everdingen acquired his interest in representing idealized female and male nudes and classical subjects from his connections with artists in Utrecht and Haarlem. — Count Willem II of Holland Granting Privileges (1654, 220x200cm) _ Corporations of the Dutch Republic commemorated their histories with representations of significant past events. In 1654, the water management board of Leiden, for example, commissioned Caesar van Everdingen to paint the granting of its charter by the Count of Holland in 1255. By clothing the Count in seventeenth-century royal dress and setting the event in a classicizing space that evoked the latest style in public architecture, van Everdingen underscored the theme's relevance to water control in his own day. |
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Born on 13 October 1474: Mariotto
Albertinelli di Biagio di Bindo (di Bianchi?), Florentine
painter who died on 05 November 1515. — Albertinelli was trained by Piero di Cosimo and by Cosimo Rosselli, in whose studio he met Fra Bartolomeo. The two went into partnership in 1508, their paintings appearing to be the product of a single hand. Not long after this Albertinelli temporarily abandoned painting to become an innkeeper, saying (according to Vasari) that he was fed up with criticism and wanted a 'less difficult and more cheerful craft'. Vasari also says he was a 'restless man, a follower of Venus, and a good liver.' [It is not known whether he took regularly liver pills, but it is known that, if he did, they were not Carter's little ones]. His paintings are elegant but rather insipid. His artistic independence is revealed in certain paintings that are eccentrically archaic and in others that show a preference for conventions more typical of the early Renaissance. His best work is the Visitation (1503). Franciabigio, Innocenzo da Imola, and Jacopo da Pontormo were students of Arbertinelli. — LINKS — Visitation (1503, 232x146cm) _ Mariotto Albertinelli, the student of Cosimo Rosselli, ran a workshop with Fra Bartolomeo, and like him shared an interest in the painting of Perugino, whose illuminating example is apparent in this work, unanimously considered to be his masterpiece. However, we cannot fail to notice also the monumentality of the figures and the geometrically divided landscape, influences, these, of Fra Bartolomeo. The spatial breadth is still characteristic of Perugino, but the narrative content is more vigorous. — Annunciation (1503, 23x50cm) — Birth of Christ (1503, 23x50cm). — Circumcision (1503, 23x50cm) The predella of the altarpiece with the Visitation shows three stories from the life of Christ: the Annunciation, the Birth of Christ and the Circumcision. Despite the small size of the three compartments, Albertinelli succeeds in constructing austere, essential spaces which display a great formal balance. The small, full figures are firmly and vigorously placed in scenes which respect the most rigorous perspective laws of the Florentine Quattrocento. |
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Died on 13 October 1817: Julius Caesar Ibbetson
the elder, English painter, printmaker, and writer, born on 29 December
1759. — He specialized in fairly small landscapes with figures and animals. Benjamin West called him 'the Berchem of England'. Ibbetson worked mainly in his native Yorkshire, but also for a time in London and the Lake District, and he visited Java (1789). He worked in watercolor as well as oil and also made etchings. In 1803 he published a treatise on painting. Like his friend Morland, Ibbetson is said to have been given to dissipation, but his work did not obviously suffer because of this as Morland's did. — His unusual Christian names were given to him because of his Caesarean birth. The son of a clothier, he was apprenticed to John Fletcher, a ship painter in Hull; in 1775 Ibbetson became a scene-painter there. In 1777 he moved to London, where he worked as a scene-painter and picture restorer. He married about three years later. From 1785 he exhibited landscapes, genre scenes and portraits at the Royal Academy. In 1787–1788 Ibbetson was personal draftsman to Col. Charles Cathcart on the first British Mission to Beijing, a voyage that included visits to Madeira, the Cape of Good Hope and Java. His watercolor False Bay, Cape of Good Hope, made on this journey, shows a picturesque roughness of foliage and rustic staffage adapted from his English landscape style. Cathcart’s death forced Ibbetson to return to England; he exhibited an oil painting of The Burial of Col. Cathcart in Java at the Royal Academy in 1789; thereafter he lived by painting landscape oils and watercolors, the subjects culled from his frequent tours. He painted occasional portraits throughout his career (e.g. Young Man) and contributed to John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (e.g. Scene from ‘The Taming of the Shrew’). In 1789 he stayed with John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, at Cardiff Castle and visited the Isle of Wight in 1790. In 1792 he toured Wales and the surrounding area with the painter John ‘Warwick’ Smith and his companion Robert Fulke Greville, resulting in the publication of his book of engravings, A Picturesque Guide (1793). His oil painting of Aberglasyn: The Flash of Lightning evokes the sublimity of the mountainous Welsh terrain; the drama of the storm over Aberglasyn is conveyed by thick impasto and strong chiaroscuro, a way of handling paint that Ibbetson learnt from copying 17th-century Dutch masters while working for a London dealer named Clarke during the late 1770s and early 1780s. He was also an accomplished figure draughtsman and social observer: he showed four humorous paintings of sailors at the Royal Academy in 1800, a topical theme at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1789 he illustrated Modern Times, a moralizing tract by John Trusler, and about 1790 painted pastoral scenes on plaster for the library ceiling at Kenwood House, London. From 1793 to 1800 he produced illustrations (engraved by J. Tookey) for John Church’s folio A Cabinet of Quadrupeds (1805). — LINKS — Going to Market (1785) — Returning from Market (1785) — George Biggins' Ascent in Lunardi's Balloon (1785, 50x61cm, 807x987pix, 103kb) _ In addition to an ironic and self-critical attitude of British painting to modern technology, there was an objective documentation of technical innovations in the second half of the 18th century, as in this painting. — A Beached Collier Unloading into Carts (1790, 31x42cm) _ This narrative depicts a collier brig lying aground on a beach in shallow water, at low tide. Coal is being 'whipped' out of her hold in baskets, using the large iron pulley suspended from a jeer or whip footed on her deck, and tipped down a chute over her side into a cart waiting in the water below. A man mounted on a cart-horse in the central foreground carries a metal bucket of coal in his right hand and a long horse-whip over his shoulder (possibly a visual pun on the process being shown), from the ship towards the cart on shore to the right, which is waiting its turn to be loaded. The horses are all have colourful ruff-like padding of some sort behind their working collars, in blue yellow or red. The ridden horse also has a red cockade on the headband of its bridle. Other shipping has been depicted in the distance, the vessel to the right apparently being another brig, though over-scaled for the type. The scene shown is a frequent subject in coastal marine art of the late-18th and early 19th centuries, especially in watercolors and drawings. The north-eastern, cat-bark brigs employed in the coal trade were capacious, flat-bottomed and solidly built precisely for the purpose of 'taking the ground' to load and unload in this way, in places without deep-water quay installations. — Sailors Carousing in the Long Room at Portsmouth (1802, 432x584cm) _ A scene in an unspecified tavern at Portsmouth after one or more ships have been paid off. The painting may be a retrospective celebration of the Battle of the Glorious First of June 1794 since, although executed much later and after Ibbetson had moved to the north of England, it reuses elements of a watercolor by him showing a similar scene and dated 03 July 1794. The room is crowded with sailors and men and women carousing. The ceiling, floors and walls enclose the action and a single lamp hangs from the ceiling to the right. The outline of a carriage, with several revellers alighting or departing frames the door on the right. The opening to the left shows a seaman wearing a hat and chain, with a boatswain's whistle, borne aloft on a chair. Two bare-headed women are highlighted in the foreground: the one to the right has two men paying attention to her, and the woman on the left sits on a sailor's knee. Impropriety is implied in their conduct. Although sailor's pay was low and often in arrears, prize money provided welcome bonuses after victorious actions, but it was rarely saved. The narrative indicates a group of three seamen in the foreground to the left of centre both pretending to fry their watches or play 'conkers' with them. This refers back to a celebrated incident in 1762 when, after capturing a Spanish galleon, seamen of the Active and Favourite were so loaded with prize money that they were recorded as frying watches, as shown. One of the women in the foreground wears a watch around her waist. In the Dutch 17th-century tradition, the artist incorporates a still-life in the foreground, with a clay pipe, discarded playing cards showing each of the four suits, coins and bottles. Sailors, several with their arms around women, sit on low benches around a table to the right. This bears a china punch bowl and drinking mugs, with a sailor boy dancing on also dancing on it. To its left, a group are dancing to the music of the two fiddlers on the far left. Some of the dancers are in couples and others are groups of men carousing (including a sailor dancing with a Jewish pedlar, a class well-known as purveyors of frippery to seamen). In the foreground on the right a woman attends to a sailor lying on the ground. An empty bottle to the right indicates that he has had too much to drink, and the young woman is attempting to revive him. The painting, which hovers at the interface of celebration, disorder, chaos and disruption, was regarded as a fine example of Ibbetson's work in his own time. It was engraved as a mezzotint by William Ward RA in August 1807, with the title given here, and when sold at Christie's on 19 March 1808 fetched the highest price of the sale, an extraordinary £79. The catalogue on that occasion described it as 'Sailors Carousing, treated with infinite humor and spirit. The pencilling is delicate, and the colour clear and brilliant.' It has sometimes been called Sailors carousing in the long room at Portsmouth, which is indeed likely, but this appears to be a later conflation from a different image, though one possibly influenced by it; George Cruikshank's caricature of Sailors carousing, or a peep in the Long Room (1825). Many inns had 'long rooms', meaning simply their largest public space, but those shown by both artists are not identifiable. The painting is signed and dated October 1802. |
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