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ART “4” “2”-DAY  17 October
DEATHS: 1962 GONTCHAROVA — 1928 DICKSEE — 1780 BELLOTTO
BIRTH: 1859 HASSAM
^ Died on 17 October 1962: Natal'ya Sergeyevna Goncharova, Russian French Cubist painter, stage designer, printmaker, and illustrator, born on 16 June 1881.
— She founded the avant~garde Rayonist movement (1910) with Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov [03 Jun 1881 – 10 May 1964], whom she married in 1955. Both Larionov and Goncharova exhibited in the first Jack of Diamonds exhibition of avant-garde Russian art in Moscow (1910). In 1914 they went to Paris, where both achieved renown as designers for Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. During the 1920s they played a significant role within the École de Paris and continued to live and work in France until their deaths.
— Innovative painter, sculptor, and stage designer who was important as a founder, with Mikhail Larionov (her life-long collaborator-mate and late-life husband), of Rayonism (1910) and as a designer for the Ballets Russes. The daughter of an aristocratic family (great grand-daughter of Alexander Pushkin), Goncharova studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow. Pupil of Paul Trubetskoy. After an early preoccupation with sculpture (which she began to exhibit in 1900) she began to paint seriously (1904), experimenting with the Cubist and Futurist styles. Goncharova and Larionov conceived of Rayonism as a synthesis of these movements. Rayonism sought to portray the spatial qualities of reflected light in two dimensions. In 1912 Goncharova took part in Roger Fry's Postimpressionist exhibition (London) and in the second exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter (Munich). Goncharova earned a lofty reputation in Moscow for her scenery and costume designs for the Kamerny Theatre. After she and Larionov moved to Paris in 1914 she became a designer for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Her vibrant, Byzantine-inspired designs for the ballet "Coq d'Or" are especially notable.
— Natalia Goncharova was born in Nagayevo village, near Tula, Russia. In 1892, she moved to Moscow to attend school. She studied at the Moscow Art School, first in the sculpture department under Pavel Trubetskoy (from 1898) and then in the painting department under Konstantin Korovin (1900-1909). In 1900, she met Mikhail Larionov, who encouraged her to paint and became her lifelong mate (they married in 1955). The following year, she enrolled at the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture to study sculpture. Goncharova participated in an exhibition of Russian artists organized by Sergei Diaghilev at the 1906 Salon d’Automne in Paris. Her early work shows the influence of Impressionism, Fauvism, and Russian folk sculpture.
      Goncharova participated in numerous important exhibitions of new art in Moscow, including Jack of Diamonds (1910), The Donkey’s Tail (1912), and The Target (1913). Her early works were painted in Primitivist and Cubist styles. About 1912 Goncharova and Larionov fashioned a fusion of Cubo-Futurism and Orphism known as Rayism or Rayonism. Goncharova was represented at the second Blaue Reiter exhibition at Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, in 1912 and the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1913. About this time, Goncharova and Larionov began their collaboration with Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, which lasted until the impresario’s death in 1929. In 1917, they settled permanently in Paris, and the following year their work appeared in the exhibition L’Art décoratif théâtral moderne at the Galerie Sauvage, Paris.
      Goncharova showed extensively during the 1920s and 1930s, often with Larionov, in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Although she never abandoned painting, much of her creative energy was directed toward stage decoration and book illustration. She designed costumes, settings, and drop curtains for international presentations of modern and classical ballets until she was in her 70s. In 1938, Goncharova became a French citizen and in 1955 she married Larionov. The following year she was given a retrospective at the Galerie de l’Institut in Paris. Goncharova died in Paris.
— Goncharova was born in Negaevo, in Tula Province on June 16, 1881 and died in Paris on October 17, 1962. A descendant of the great poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin's wife, she was the daughter of Sergei Goncharov, an architect, and Ekaterina Il'ichna Beliaeva, but grew up in her grandmother's house in the Tula Province. She attended the Fourth Gymnasium for Girls in Moscow and in 1898 entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture as a sculpture student. At the school Goncharova met Mikhail Larionov who became her lifelong companion and encouraged her to leave sculpture for painting. Goncharova was attracted briefly to Impressionism and Symbolism, but her participation in the "Golden Fleece" exhibition introduced her to the styles of Gauguin, Matisse, Cezanne and Toulouse-Lautrec whose art would influence her development. In a series depicting the favorite theme of the Russian peasants working the land, this influence is revealed in both color and the approach to form. In 1910 Goncharova became one of the founding members of the "Jack of Diamond" group but later went her separate way to establish the "Donkey's Tail" group with Larionov. In 1912 the group held their first exhibition with more than 50 works from Goncharova, executed in a number of different styles. Goncharova was a connoisseur of lubki, Russian popular prints, and the titles of her works clearly betray this influence. Her use of conventions of icon painting is particularly evident in The Evangelists.
      In 1913 she entered her most productive period, painting dozens of canvases. In her Neo-primitive works she continued to explore the styles of Eastern and traditional art forms, but also experimented with Cubo-futurism (see The Cyclist, 1913), and adopted Larionov's new style of Rayonism. Her famous Cats (1912) and Green and Yellow Forest (1912) show how confidently she was able to work in the Rayonist style, developing her own artistic idiom independently of Larionov. In August 1913, Goncharova attracted international attention exhibiting over 700 paintings in an one-woman show . During this period she was, like Larionov, associated with the literary avant-garde. In 1914 Goncharova visited Paris to make designs for Diaghilev's production of Le coq d'or. Her designs, based on Eastern and Russian folk art, took Paris by storm. She also held a joint exhibition with Larionov at the Galerie Paul Guillaume. She returned to Moscow after the beginning of the war.
      At the request of Diaghilev, Larionov and Goncharova left Russia for Switzerland in June 1915. In 1916 they accompanied Diaghilev to Spain and Italy. Spain left an everlasting impression on Goncharova. She was especially moved by the bearing of Spanish women in their mantillas. From that moment on, Espagnoles became her favorite subject. In 1919 Larionov and Goncharova settled permanently in Paris; they were granted citizenship in 1938. During the Paris period, Goncharova became famous for her theatrical designs. In the 1920s she developed her own idiom for her series Espagnoles and for many paintings with bathers. Following Diaghilev's death in 1929, Goncharova's creative powers declined only to be briefly revitalized by the public rediscovery of Rayonism in 1948. After Larionov's stroke in 1950, Goncharova's health also started to decline, and, although the couple married in 1955, their last years were spent in poverty.
LINKS
Stage set design for act 1 of the opera-ballet Le coq d'or (1914, 45x70cm; recommended half size 312kb; or see it full size 1051kb)
Stage Design for Act I of the ballet Chota Roustaveli (1946, 54x72cm; recommended half size 405kb; or see it full size 1242kb)
Chota Roustaveli: Project for the curtain (54x74cm; recommended half size 405kb; or see it full size 1242kb)
Costume for a Peasant Girl in the ballet Foire de Sorotchinsk (1940, 46x21cm; half size 60kb; or see it full size 239kb)
l'Oiseau de Feu: Costume for the first Prince (47x31cm; 1/3 size 60kb; or see it 2/3 size 239kb)
L'Oiseau de Feu: Costume for the 12 Simple Princesses (45x25cm; 2/3 size)
Costume for a Man Dancer in Ballet de Trèfle (1950, 31x20cm; full size)
Baignade (1911, 115x94cm) — Collecting Fruit
The Virgin, Costume design for the ballet La Liturgie (1915)
Costume design for Saint John the Divine for the ballet La Liturgie (624x395pix)
The Archangel Michael
— The Evangelists: Panel 1 _ Panel 2 _ Panel 3 _ Panel 4 (1910, each panel 204x58cm) _ Natalia Goncharova was one of the first Russian artists to embrace Neo-primitivism — a graphic style reminiscent of traditional folk art. She explored it with a unique energy and skill, and was influential in making icon painting a source of inspiration for 20th-century Russian artists. In addition, Goncharova's works painted in this style are especially important as examples of a "synthesis" of European style and Russian national tradition. The Evangelists are among Goncharova's first mature works devoted to a religious subject. The canvasses are remarkable for their skillful reconciliation of old and new influences in Russian art. Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of these four paintings is their effective use of color, line, and composition to create a strong rhythmic whole. Goncharova manipulates these elements with such understanding and perception that when one looks at the four authors of the Gospels there are no distractions and no weak points -- only strength and security in a modern interpretation of tradition and native style. Both line and color become here "expressive entities in their own right" and convey the sense of calm spirituality and wisdom treasured by icon painters (97). What the Neo-primitivists of Goncharova's time might have treasured most however, was an almost childish "directness and simplicity" characteristic of folk art (97), which they tried to imitate in their works. Today, the paintings of the Evangelists may be admired for many reasons, and regardless of the basis for the viewer's appreciation, they definitely are an intriguing part of the Russian avant-garde movement
Cats (rayist perception in rose, black, and yellow) (1913, 85x84cm) _ Goncharova and Larionov experimented with contemporary French stylistic trends before developing a Neo-primitive vocabulary inspired by indigenous Russian folk art. In late 1912 the two artists fashioned a fusion of Cubo-Futurism and Orphism [more] known as Rayism. Cats, painted shortly thereafter, exemplifies the new style.
      Using intersecting vectors of color to depict refracted light rays, Rayist works recreate the surface play of light on objects. This perceptual approach to painting was based on scientific discoveries concerning the nature of vision, advances that had also influenced Neo-Impressionist color theories, the Cubist analysis of form, and the Futurist emphasis on dynamic lines. The nationalistic strain apparent in Italian Futurist manifestos also pervades Rayist tracts, in which the Russian theory is posited as a unique synthetic achievement of the East. In the preface to the catalogue of her 1913 Moscow retrospective exhibition, Goncharova wrote: “For me the East means the creation of new forms, an extending and deepening of the problems of color. This will help me to express contemporaneity—its living beauty—better and more vividly.”
      Cats, which appears to represent two black felines with a tabby in between, illustrates the Rayist view that objects may serve as points of departure for explorations on the canvas. Goncharova used darts of color to suggest the effects of light on the cats’ shiny coats and the way that adjacent surfaces reflect neighboring hues. The dynamic slashes of black and white evoke the energized, machine-inspired compositions of the Futurists.
      The artist’s brilliant color recalls Robert Delaunay’s exuberant depictions of the Eiffel Tower as well as Russian woodblock prints and painted trays. Cats also suggests the richly hued integration of animals and their environment that Franz Marc was developing contemporaneously in his own synthesis of Cubism and Futurism. Yet unlike Marc and other German Expressionist painters, Rayist painters did not seek to express spiritual goals through their art.
^ Died on 17 October 1928: Francis Bernard “Frank” Dicksee, English Pre-Raphaelite painter and illustrator born on 27 November 1853.
— He studied in the studio of his father, Thomas Francis Dicksee [1819-1895], who painted portraits and historical genre scenes; he then entered the Royal Academy Schools, London, where he was granted a studentship in 1871. He won a silver medal for drawing from the Antique in 1872 and a gold medal in 1875 for his painting Elijah confronting Ahab and Jezebel in Naboth's Vineyard (untraced), with which he made his début at the Royal Academy in 1876. He also began to work as an illustrator during the 1870s, contributing to Cassell's Magazine, Cornhill Magazine, The Graphic and other periodicals. During the 1880s he was commissioned by Cassell & Co. to illustrate their editions of Longfellow's Evangeline (1882), Shakespeare's Othello (1890) and Romeo and Juliet (1884).
      Dicksee's paintings are done with textural fluidity and rich orchestrations of color. They reveal a curious blend of influences, in particular the classicism of Frederic Leighton and the abstracted idealism of G. F. Watts. His predilection for the decorative aspects of painting grew out of his studies with Henry Holiday, a designer of stained glass. He passionately championed the Victorian ideals of High Art and publicly condemned the artistic trends that emerged towards the end of his life. His work covers a wide range of subject-matter and genres, including biblical and allegorical paintings; among those derived from literary sources is Chivalry (1885). He also painted society portraits and social dramas, such as The Confession (1896; 492x700pix). Dicksee's sister Margaret Isabel Dicksee [1858-1903] and brother Herbert Thomas Dicksee [1862-1942] were also painters, as was his uncle John Robert Dicksee [1817-1905].

LINKS
Chivalry (1885) — YseultAn OfferingLa Belle Dame Sans MerciRomeo and Juliet
The End of the Quest 1921 — The Mirror (1896, 95x118cm) — Passion aka Leila (1892, 56x70cm)
Portrait of Elsa (57 x 43 cm) — Startled — Sylvia [detail]
Harmony (1877, 158x94cm) _ Although Dicksee was of a younger generation, the conspicuously mediaeval setting and costumes in this picture reflect the influence on him of the Pre-Raphaelites. His design for this picture originated in a sketching exercise at the Langham Sketching Club. The theme chosen for illustration by members of the club had been 'Music'. Music had been traditionally associated with the divine, but in the late nineteenth century, aesthetes, such as the writer Walter Pater, focused on its abstract qualities. Immortal ideas are perhaps alluded to in the figure of the girl, who adopts the rapt expression of depictions of St Cecilia, patron-saint of music. When 'Harmony' was exhibited for the first time it proved enormously popular.
The Two Crowns (1900, 231x182cm; 700x548pix) _ The Two Crowns of the title are the golden crown of a king and the crown of thorns worn by Christ on the cross. Dicksee invented this highly moral scene in which a medieval king, riding in a triumphal procession, is startled by the sight of a crucifix (or perhaps sees a vision of Christ) and is reminded of the transience of earthly power and success. In fact the chivalric, Christian knight had been a role model for the modern gentleman for most of the nineteenth century. This painting was bought for the UK government from the Royal Academy in 1900 for £2000.
^ Born on 17 October 1859: Frederick Childe Hassam, US impressionist painter, etcher, and illustrator who died on 27 August 1935.
— The son of Frederick F. Hassam, a prominent Boston merchant, and his wife, Rosa P. Hathorne, he was initially trained as an apprentice to a wood-engraver. From the late 1870s to the mid-1880s he made drawings for the illustration of books, particularly children’s stories. He had a long affiliation with the Boston firm of Daniel Lothrop & Co., for whom he illustrated E. S. Brooks’s In No-man’s Land: A Wonder Story (1885), Margaret Sidney’s A New Departure for Girls (1886) and numerous other books.
— Hassam was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts and educated at the Boston Art School and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Hassam was the chief US exponent of impressionism. His primary objective both in his paintings and in his etchings was to represent the effects of sunlight in city scenes and in landscapes of rural New England. His works include July 14 Rue Daunon (1910) and Church at Gloucester (1918). Hassam is remembered primarily for the sparkling effects that he achieved.
— Son of prosperous merchant and antiquarian. Studied in Boston under I.M. Gaugengigl, and at the Académie Julian in Paris under Boulanger and Lefebvre until 1883. Spent five years in France, influenced by Monet. Became of the leading exponents of American Impressionism or "luminism". Worked as a painter and illustrator after return from Europe. In 1898 helped to found "The Ten", a group of rebels against the conservative American Academy. Influenced by Whistler. Began to etch in 1898 but these plates not completed until 1915. In 1917 began to experiment with lithography, but his lithographs were not commercially successful.
Photo of Hassam
LINKS
The Etcher Self-Portrait (etching, 120kb)
Isles of Shoals (1899, 64x77cm; 1/3 size, 849kb, or see it 2/3 size, 3483kb)
— a different Isles Of Shoals (1912, 46x56cm) — yet another Isles of Shoals (34x24cm)
Beach at Newport (1891, 25x18cm; full size)
Seaweed and Surf, Appledore, at Sunset (1912, 65x69cm; recommended 3/8 size; or see it 3/4 size)
The Smelt Fishers, Cos Cob (1896, 54x45cm; recommended half size; or see it full size)
Easter Morning (Portrait at a New York Window) (1921, 94x65cm; 1/3 size, 235kb; or see it 2/3 size, 871kb)
Rainy Night (1895, 28x21cm; full size)
California (1919, 61 x 110cm; quarter size, 387kb) — The Fireplace (1912 14x21cm) — Bricklayers (1900, 26x21cm) — Houses of Parliament, Early Evening (1898, 33x42cm) — Boy with Flower Pots (1888 Oil on board 17.99 x 14.76 inches / 45.7 x 37.5 cm Private collection Added 12/27/2001 Buy a poster! Columbus Avenue 1886 Oil on panel 7.01 x 10.51 inches / 17.8 x 26.7 cm)
Le Jour du Grand Prix (1888, 152kb) — Celia Thaxter in her Garden, 1892, oil on canvas, Smithsonian Institution at Washington D.C. 170KB — Flower Girl 1888 Oil on Canvas Senator and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller IV. 146KB — At the Piano 1908 Oil on Canvas Cincinnati Art Museum. 170KB — Allies Day May 1917
Tanagra (The Builders, New York) (1918, 149x149cm) _ About the time of World War I, Hassam's images become elaborate prescriptive programs requiring a lot of decoding if their deeper messages are to be read. They always continue to work also as beautiful paintings with glowing light and luscious impressionist surfaces, and this is generally how they are understood today. Hassam's occasional comments or writings are key to delving beneath these surfaces to the meaning that underpins the images.
      The title Tanagra (The Builders, New York) refers to a Hellenistic statuette a woman holds directly in front of a narrow view out a window where construction workers are raising a skyscraper. The painting is from The Window Series that Hassam began in 1899 with Improvisation and continued until the early 1920s. Each work in the series shows a refined woman in an interior, many painted in Hassam's studio, the intimate space where the artist felt most involved with his art. As always, the canvas is rigorously organized—a perfect square, with a circle on a circle defining the horizontal plane, and the vertical plane behind the figure organized into four roughly even panels, three of them filled by an Asian screen and one opening out to a window ledge and a distant view glimpsed through the open curtain. The effect is to divide the painting into zones, each containing a clue or symbol that contributes to the overall meaning.
      Hassam wrote a note (with improvised spelling corrected here) to accompany the painting when it was exhibited, explaining the two-part title by saying, "Tanagra—the blond Aryan girl holding a Tanagra figurine in her hand against the background of New York buildings—one in the process of construction and the Chinese lilies springing up from the bulbs—is intended to typify and symbolize growth—the growth of a great city—hence the subtitle The Builders, New York."
      This brief passage indicates a complex association of thoughts. One is the idea of social Darwinism which suggests that human beings evolve in the social and cultural spheres, just as Darwin taught was true of the physical evolution of species. This "new species" evolving is the American woman, destined to guard and protect civilization in what would be known as the "American Century." Like so many of his contemporaries, Hassam believed in Aryan superiority, but here genetic advantage is enhanced by associations with the most ancient Greek and Asian civilizations. In Tanagra the woman merges with the oriental screen through her gown, which mimics the swallow and chrysanthemum pattern and colors. Her figure also echoes the delicate statuette—one from a cache of graceful female figurines unearthed in the village of Tanagra in Boethia in the 1870s and immediately heralded as the pinnacle of antique art.
      The sprouted bulbs on the windowsill and the full-blown hybrid roses on the table echo the themes of growth and breeding, a reminder that Americans must be worthy inheritors of the future they are building. They must be bred and cultivated to be careful guardians of the world's inheritance of civilization.
      Coming in 1918 as the United States was fighting to defend Europe, Tanagra grows out of Hassam's feeling that the nation's values and culture were threatened. By focusing on the legacy of civilization and stressing the slow evolution required for its refinements, he encoded his fear that the spirit of America's founders was being diluted through immigration. The number of foreign-born people in America doubled between 1880 and 1930 to more than fourteen million. The polyglot populations of big cities like New York and Chicago sharply altered the nation's cultural profile, despite the desire of most immigrants to assimilate as soon as possible. The fear of cultural fragmentation and social upheaval mounted each year until the Immigration Act of 1924, which dramatically reduced the number of new people admitted. The law also froze the ethnic status quo, saying, for instance, that if 20 percent of America's population was made up of people of Irish origin, then only 20 percent of the new immigrants each year could come from Ireland. This formula guaranteed that Anglo-Saxon dominance in the United States would not be further eroded. In Tanagra, Hassam cautions that social change may happen quickly through immigration and skyscrapers, but the growth of civilization is evolutionary, requiring many generations. He subscribed to a kind of cultural Manifest Destiny, echoing the ideas of Herbert Spencer, the great British exponent of social Darwinism, who said on a trip to New York in 1882.
      The eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan race forming the population will produce a finer type of man than has hitherto existed, and a type of man more plastic, more adaptable, more capable of undergoing the modifications needed for a complete social life. . . . Americans may reasonably look forward to a time when they will have produced a civilization grander than any the world has known.
      This optimistic view of 1882 seemed to Hassam in 1918 in danger of being overtaken by the rapid pace of change.


^ Died on 17 October 1780: Bernardo Bellotto, Italian Rococo painter born in 1721. — [Is it because of him that Alexander Graham Bell's parents did not name him Otto?]
—      Bernardo Bellotto, student and nephew of Canaletto, had a highly successful international career. Canaletto, whose name Bellotto sometimes illegally adopted, especially during his stay in Poland, was his uncle on his mother’s side and had trained the young artist for many years. By 1738 Bellotto was already a member of the Venetian Painters’ Guild. Still under Canaletto’s guidance, the young Bellotto traveled extensively in Italy. He went to Rome, Florence, Turin, Milan and Verona. In each city he left memorable images, giving a precocious demonstration of his ability to capture not only the architectural or natural features, but also the specific quality of the light in each place he visited. View with the Villa Melzi d'ErilView of the GazzadaArno in FlorenceSignoria Square in Florence.
      After returning briefly to Venice, in the summer of 1747 Bellotto accepted an invitation from Augustus III, the Elector of Saxony, and moved to Dresden. During the ten years the artist spent there he produced a remarkable series of wonderful views of the city and its surroundings. He repeated these paintings for the Prime Minister, Count Brühl, who eventually sold his collection to Catherine the Great into Saint-Petersburg. With the purchase of the collection, Catherine the Great bought many of Bellotto’s finest topographic works. The Old Market Square in DresdenThe New Market Square in DresdenPirna Seen from the Right Bank of the Elbe are not only convincing in and for themselves, but also remind us of what happened to all that beauty after Dresden was firebombed to rubble in the Second World War during the night of 13 to 14 February 1945.
      Bellotto had an enormous success and his reputation spread throughout the whole of Central Europe. In 1758 the Empress Maria-Teresa summoned him to Vienna, where he painted views of the capital’s Gothic and Baroque monuments. His next stop was Munich where, from 1761, he worked for the Elector of Bavaria. After five years there Bellotto returned to Dresden. In 1764-1766 he was a teacher at the Dresden Academy.
      In late 1766 he went to Warsaw. He had hoped eventually to reach Saint-Petersburg and work for Empress Catherine II but he stayed permanently in Warsaw at the urging of the recently crowned king, Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski. His views of Warsaw are nearly all collected in the city’s Royal Castle. Because of their poetic quality was combined with faultless accuracy, they were used as a draft for rebuilding Warsaw after its near-total destruction in the Second World War.
      Bernardo Bellotto died in Warsaw in 1780.
LINKS
Capriccio with the Colosseum (1744, 980x865pix, 134kb) _ — Capriccio of the Capital (1744, 1030x896pix, 161kb) _ These two paintings are part of a cycle of four canvases which are similar in shape and subject matter. The young Bellotto painted them during a seminal visit to Rome. Gradually, he was to move away from the faithful view of glimpses of Roman monuments. Instead he favored the freer capriccio or imaginary view. This still included real buildings (which were truthfully reproduced) but they were set in an eclectic combination of invented architecture which in turn was given an evocative setting. Such capricci were very popular at the time.
New Market Square in Dresden (1750, 800x1148pix, 167kb) _ Zwinger Waterway (1750, 780x1169pix, 149kb) _ These two paintings are part of an exceptional series of views of Dresden commissioned by the Elector of Saxony. A number of things are of interest: the large size of the paintings; the unfailingly splendid light; the clarity of the views; and finally the variety of different angles from which Bellotto framed the city. They supply fascinating views of a great Baroque city in its prime.
The Ruins of the Old Kreuzkirche in Dresden (1765, 780x1097pix, 180kb) _ This is one of Bellotto's later works, painted during his second stay in Saxony. It demonstrates his quite extraordinary, perhaps unique, capacity to capture the spirit of an event. In this case it was the demolition of the Gothic church of the Holy Cross in Dresden's New Market Square. The church had been damaged during a war and was rebuilt in Rococo style a few years later. This image of ruin, bordering on an anatomical dissection of the mortally wounded church, was to reappear two centuries after Bellotto's day with the devastating bombing of Dresden during the Second World War.
The Scuola of San Marco (1740, 42x69cm, 651x922, 140kb) _ A nephew and follower of Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto applies the clear reporter's vision of the master to a slower and more intimate exploration of reality. And from his earliest works, Bellotto softens the formal rigor of Canaletto into natural, simple, concrete observations, and his brilliant, kaleidoscopic palette into a dense range of colors, tending towards the coldly bright. In the Rio dei Mendicanti the buildings of the left bank lie partly in shadow and partly in full sunlight. And beyond the bridge standing between light and shade, the dome of the Emiliani chapel in the church of San Michele in Isola can be seen in the distance. On the opposite bank the corners of the Scuola of San Marco and the seventeenth century building in the foreground are darkened as the shadows of the hour before sunset gather. The density of the chiaroscuro and the paint itself lend the view a fascinating concreteness with every detail assuming an undramatized presence.
View of Verona and the River Adige from the Ponte Nuovo (1748, 750x1184pix 142kb) _ The campanile of Santa Anastasia and the ancient Scaliger castle seem to protect the quiet flow of the river. For once, Bellotto opted to capture the ordinary life of the people and the everyday look of the city. He included the small houses built along the shores of the river which were to be demolished at the end of the nineteenth century to make way for flood protection embankments.
View of the Villa Cagnola at Gazzada near Varese (1744, 100x65cm, 800x1220pix, 147kb) _ This view and the next were painted while the young artist was traveling in Lombardy. They manage to combine poetry with faithful realism in the way they capture the feel of the climate and season. He succeeded in catching the movement of the early fall wind which was pushing the clouds along and drying the washing on the line. He painstakingly and lovingly portrayed the simple colors of the stones, the roof tiles, the clothes people wore, and the way the leaves are just beginning to turn color. All this makes these paintings perhaps the most heartfelt portraits ever painted of the region.
View of Gazzada near Varese (1744, 770x1184pix, 166kb) _ One of the great Venetian view painters, Bellotto can be compared to Canaletto and Guardi. Canaletto's abstract poetry was dependent on a visual rediscovery of the historic landscape, while Guardi gave it a lyric vibrancy by means of atmospheric effects. Bellotto's views, however, present specific and impressive images of reality. He is thus the major representative of the objective view, obtained by the use of the camera obscura. Bellotto's purpose in utilizing the device was not to give a photographic order to things, nor to exalt their atmospheric emanations; his aim was rather to seek out the nature and inner truth of the landscape, whether urban, rural or marine. His intuition anticipated Romanticism.
View of Vienna from the Belvedere (1760, 135x213cm; 650x1028pix, 180kb)
Vue du Roc, et de la Forteresse de Koenigstein du coté de l'Occident, et de la Montée, aïant de l'autre coté le Lilienstein, au de-la de l'Elbe, et en distance, les Montagnes de la Lusace (1765 etching 42x64cm; quarter size, 115kb; or see it half-size 592kb, or full size 1416kb)

Died on a 17 October:


^ 1892 Paul Peel, Canadian painter, active also in France, specialized in children, born on 07 November 1860. He was born of English parents who had settled in Canada in the early 1850s, and his early artistic ambitions were encouraged by his father, a stone-carver and drawing instructor. From 1877 to 1880 he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, learning particularly from the progressive Thomas Eakins. He was elected a member of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1880, and later that year he left for Europe, possibly stopping in London on his way to France. He spent the first part of 1881 in Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he produced the religious work Devotion (1881). — LINKS

1918 Luigi Nono, Italian artist born on 08 December 1850. — [Was his personality affected because, as a child, he was always told by his mother: “Luigi, no no!” and when she saw his first picture, she said: “That is a Nono!”?] [Is this also why I cannot find on the Internet any reproduction of his artwork?]

1823 Johannes-Christiaan Janson, Dutch artist born in 1763.

1638 Jacob Isaacszoon van Swanenburgh, Dutch artist born on 21 April 1571. — [Did he specialize in pictures of swans in cities?] — After being trained in the studio of his father Isaac Claeszoon van Swanenburg [19 Aug 1537 – 10 March 1614], he left his native Leiden about 1591 for Italy, where he worked successively in Venice, Rome and Naples, returning to Leiden only in 1618. The small body of his surviving works can be divided into two groups: a few views of Rome, produced long after his return to Leiden, which are somewhat old-fashioned, and several representations of Hell (e.g. Charon’s Boat), which are related to other works from the international painters’ colony active in Naples in the first decades of the 17th century, and which, in turn, probably influenced younger painters such as François de Nomé. Rembrandt was one of Jacob’s students, about 1602–1603, but his work shows little evidence of van Swanenburg’s influence. — Painter Claes Isaacszoon van Swanenburg [1572–1652] and engraver Willem Isaacszoon van Swanenburg [29 Jan 1580 – 31 May 1612] were brothers of Jacob Isaacszoon van Swanenburg.

^ before 18 Oct 1533 Jacob Corneliszoon van Oostsanen d'Amsterdam, Dutch painter born before 1477. — LINKSSelf~Portrait (1533) — CalvarySalome with the Head of John the Baptist (1524) — Saul and the Witch of Endor (1526) — Triptych of the Adoration of the Magi, Donors and Saints (1517) — Triptych with the Last Supper (1525) — St. James and St. Catherine The attention with which he draws his lines, as well as the tendency of repeating patterns, reveals to us in the author of the painting a trained goldsmith or wood-carver. In Saint Catherine's crown and sword, decorative treatment of drapery, secure lines shaping the body (compare with Saint James's foot), the hair and the landscape we may discern a skilled draftsman.

^
Born on a 17 October:


1895 Ernst Nepo, Austrian artist who died in 1971. — [If he benefited from nepotism, it did not get his artwork onto the Internet, as far as I can discover]

1864 Marie Aimée Eliane Lucas~Robiquet, French artist who died in 1959. — [She had nothing in common with Elie-Annelou Carreau-Bicais, nor did anyone else.]

1860 Roderic Anthony O'Conor, Irish painter and etcher, active also in France, who died on 18 March 1940. Born into a branch of the O’Conor family descended from the last kings of Ireland, he was educated at Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire. He studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and at the Royal Hibernian Academy (1879–1883), before attending the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp (1883–1884). He returned to Ireland but soon moved to Paris, where he studied with Carolus-Duran, exhibiting a portrait in the Salon of 1888. In 1889 he showed three paintings in the Salon des Indépendants, and he continued to exhibit there until 1908.

1814 Friedrich Bamberger, German artist who died on 15 August 1873.

^ 1786 François Edouard Picot, French painter and lithographer who died on 15 March 1868. He was a student of François-André Vincent and of Jacques-Louis David. He received the Second Grand Prix de Rome in 1811 and then continued his studies in Rome. On his return from Italy he received the commission to paint The Death of Sapphira (1819) and at the Salon of 1819 he exhibited Love and Psyche (1817), which was admired for its graceful and naive figures and was bought by the Duc d’Orléans (later Louis-Philippe, King of France). At the Salon of 1827 Picot exhibited The Annunciation, a richly painted work that shows the influence of Raphael. Working within the Neo-classical style, he specialized in history and genre subjects and portraits and continued to show at the Salon until 1839. — The students of Picot included Theodor Aman, Léon-Adolphe-Auguste Belly, Jean-Achille Benouville, François Léon Benouville, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, Philip Hermogenes Calderon, Théophile-Narcisse Chauvel, François-Barthélemy-Michel-Edouard Cibot, Jules-Georges-Victor Clairin, Charles-Alexandre Crauk, Félix-Henri Giacomotti, Gustave-Achille Guillaumet, Jean-Jacques Henner, Jozef Israëls, Jules-Eugène Lenepveu, Louis Hector Leroux, Émile Lévy, Henri Léopold Lévy, Henry Stacy Marks, Gustave Moreau, Victor-Louis Mottez, Alphonse Marie-Adolphe de Neuville, Isidore-Alexandre-Augustin Pils, Claudius-Marcel Popelin, Elihu Vedder.

^ 1603 Frans de Momper, Antwerp Flemish painter and draftsman who died in 1660. — [S'il avait des enfants, est-ce qu'ils l'appelaient “Monsieur Momper” ou est-ce qu'ils préféraient “Monsieur mon père”?] — Nephew of Joos de Momper II [1564 – 05 February 1635]. In 1629 Frans de Momper became a master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke. He left Antwerp for the northern Netherlands, working initially at The Hague; by 1647 he was in Haarlem and the following year Amsterdam, where he married in 1649. In 1650 Frans returned to Antwerp, where he painted numerous monochrome landscapes in the manner of Jan van Goyen. Paintings such as the Valley with Mountains (1650) prefigure the imaginative landscapes of Hercules Segers. The impression of vast panoramic spaces in Frans’s work is adopted from his uncle’s art. Frans made a number of variations on the theme of a river landscape with boats and village, including . pen-and-ink drawings. In the late painting Landscape with a Château Encircled by Doves, the low horizon and light-filled sky are adopted from the new Dutch school of tonal landscape painting, while the delicacy of the figures, feathery trees and buildings are features of the Italo-Flemish tradition exemplified by his uncle. Similar qualities of refinement and luminosity characterize the Winter Landscape (1650), a favorite theme. The stylistic blend in these paintings builds on the success of Paul Bril and Jan Breughel the elder, both active in Italy at the end of the 16th century and in the first quarter of the 17th.

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