| ART “4”
“2”-DAY 16
October |
| DEATHS:
1649 VAN OSTADE — 1553 CRANACH |
| BIRTH: 1877 COWPER |
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Died on 16 October 1649: Isaack
(or Isack) van Ostade, Dutch artist born on 02 June 1621.
— He was the younger brother and the most talented student of Adriaen van Ostade [1610-1685], who also worked in Haarlem. As well as painting genre scenes in the manner of Adriaen, Isaack was an outstanding practitioner of the winter landscape and his early death cut short a career of great promise. — LINKS — Farmhouse Interior (1642, 50x68cm) _ Isaack van Ostade, like his brother Adriaen, depicted peasant and low-life scenes. This untidy farmhouse interior is typical of Haarlem painting in the first half of the seventeenth century, with its low-key use of color. The painting would be taken as a warning against a dissolute life. — Interior of a Peasant House (1640, 45x40cm) _ In this almost monochrome, brownish-yellowish painting a collection of objects of the everyday life of the peasants can be seen. This peasant room is warm and large like a barn and contains a collection of everything necessary for feeding men and animals. Basket, barrel, trough, broken jug, pail, ladder, tools and fodder have been hoarded by the farmer with all the collecting instinct of a hamster. He and his family are grouped round the fireplace trying to get warm, and the man's stance, though awkward, seems to indicate that he is master of his rather poor house. The colors are all different shades of brown and yellow. The painting is signed lower right: Isak van Ostade 1640. — Pig-Killing (1642, 40x54cm) _ The occupants of the one room which constitutes the peasant's home are busy as ants about the slaughtered pig. Their faces are scarcely discernible and the children can only be recognized by their smaller size and the fact that they are playing at blowing up the bladder. The adult figures are busy at the pump-well. All their world is within the confines of this one room which the artist has painted in a variety of browns and yellows, with which he has created a rather mysterious atmosphere. — The Cut Pig (42x31cm) _ The occupants of the one room which constitutes the peasant's home are busy as ants about the slaughtered pig. Their faces are scarcely discernible and the children can only be recognized by their smaller size and the fact that they are playing at blowing up the bladder. The adult figures are busy at the pump-well. All their world is within the confines of this one room which the artist has painted in a variety of browns and yellows, with which he has created a rather mysterious atmosphere. — Winter Landscape (1643, 72x114cm) _ In his short life Isaack van Ostade painted a large number of pictures, some of genre subjects like his brother's Adriaen van Ostade, but the best are of landscape, especially winter landscapes. _ detail — A Winter Scene (1645, 49x40cm) _ Isack van Ostade was the short-lived younger brother of the painter of scenes from peasant life, Adriaen van Ostade. They were both born, lived and worked in Haarlem, and Isack was a student of his brother who was eleven years his senior. Isack joined the guild in 1643. His earliest paintings — the first dated picture is from 1639 — are peasant interiors dependent on Adriaen's, but towards the end of his brief career he became more interested in outdoor scenes and produced a series of beautiful and original landscapes, often set in winter. This deliberately picturesque view, its low viewpoint serving to outline the wooden bridge against the sky, is one of his finest paintings. It is rich in its treatment of the details of peasant life, whose harsh aspects (as seen, for example, in the figure of the man labouring under his load of faggots) are relieved by the pleasure taken by the child in the anticipation of skating on the frozen river. |
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Born on 16 October 1877: Frank
Cadogan Cowper, English painter who died on 17 November
1958. — Frank Cadogan Cowper, the last of the Pre-Raphaelites, was born at Wicken in Northamptonshire, the son of an author [who did not give him his own first name, otherwise the boy might have been called “cowper son, or cow person”]. He entered St John's Wood Art School in 1896 and enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools in 1897. He was greatly influenced during this time by exhibitions of the work of Ford Madox Brown (1896), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1898) and John Everett Millais (1898). Cowper's work was first accepted at the Academy in 1899, and his first notable success was An Aristocrat Answering the Summons to Execution, Paris, 1793, exhibited in 1901. In 1902, after completing his training, Cowper travelled to Italy before working for six months in the studio of E.A. Abbey, R.A., a painter of historical subjects. In common with the earlier Pre-Raphaelite painters, minute detail and rich colors predominated in Cowper's work, and his output in early years appears to have been small (he only exhibited one or two pictures each year at the Academy until 1913). Following the example of the Pre-Raphaelite, William Holman Hunt, Cowper took immense trouble researching his subjects, travelling to Assisi before painting St Francis of Assisi and the Heavenly Melody, and having a grave dug for his depiction of Hamlet - the churchyard scene, exhibited in 1902. Cowper usually chose historical, literary or religious subjects for his pictures in which it was thought that 'he showed a good deal of invention'. as in St Agnes in Prison receiving from Heaven the 'Shining White Garment' Cowper was elected A.R.A in 1907; and was made a R.A. in 1934. In 1910, Cowper was commissioned to paint a mural for the House of Commons depicting a Tudor scene, and in 1912 completed further decorative panels there. In the 1920s he began painting numerous portraits of women, with softer effects and a 'cloying sweetness'. His major patron was Evelyn Waugh. During the Second World War Cowper moved to Jersey, but later returned to England, and settled in Gloucestershire in 1944. He continued to exhibit until 1957. He died in Cirencester the following year, aged eighty-one. [he avoided painting cows, or having anything to do with them, it seems, thus never becoming knows as a cow person] — LINKS — St Agnes in Prison Receiving from Heaven the Shining White Garment (1905, 74x45cm) Venerated as a patoness of purity, St Agnes suffered martyrdom c.AD 303 under the Emperor Diocletian. Having vowed to live a life of chastity, she refused the suit of a Roman youth, who had her stripped and imprisoned. In prison she was visited by an angel who brought her a robe, white as snow, to cover her nakedness, and when condemned to be burnt as a witch, she was again saved by heavenly intervention. Eventually she was despatched by the sword. The picture was one of Cowper's most impressive works. It dates from the end of the early period when he was attempting to revive the original Pre-Raphaelite style, and in fact seems to borrow from specific paintings. Rossetti's Annunciation of 1850 find echoes in the subject, the relationship of the figures, the pose of the Saint and the motif of flames on the angel's feet. The realistic treatment of the straw recalls Millais' Return of the Dove to the Ark and there is perhaps even a hint of Madox Brown's Take Your Son, Sir in the arrangement of the 'shining white garment'. — La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1926, 102x97cm) _ This painting is based on La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats. — The Four Queens Find Lancelot Sleeping (1954, 103x91cm) _ This painting is one of Cowper's last subject pictures. When exhibited in 1954, four years before his death, the art critic of The Times wrote: 'Mr F Cadogan Cowper, who must be the last Academician to have achieved the supreme distinction of having a rail put round his pictures to keep crowds at bay, shows another belated Pre-Raphaelite work'. It is indeed an astonishing case of Pre-Raphaelite survival. In subject, mood and technique it might belong to the 1900s. Only the features of the four Queens, who look like 1950s film stars, give a clue to its real date. The subject occurs in the Morte D'Arthur, Book 6, ch.3. Morgan Le Fay, 'Queen of the Land of Gore', the Queen of Northgalis, the Queen of Eastland and the Queen of the 'Out Isles', discover Lancelot asleep beneath an apple tree. Each wants him for her paramour, so Morgan Le Fay lays him under enchantment and has him carried to her castle where is asked to choose one of them. Faithful to Guinevere, he refuses, and eventually makes his escape. The theme had previously been treated by David Jones in a watercolor of 1941 — much more 'modern' in style than Cowper's later version. The motif of an armed knight lying full-length in the foreground also occurs in Cowper's 1926 painting La Belle Dame Sans Merci. His RA exhibits include two other Arthurian themes, The Damozel of the Lake and The Legend of Sir Percival (1953). — Portrait of Fraunces, Beatrice, James and Synfye (1919, 86x102cm) Children of James Christie Esq.— |
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Died on 16 October 1553: Lucas
Cranach Sr. (Müller, Sunder), German painter born on
04 October 1472. — He takes his name from the small town of Kronach in South Germany, where he was born, and very little is known of his life before about 1500 or 1501, when he settled in Vienna and started working in the humanist circles associated with the newly founded university. His stay in Vienna was brief (he left in 1504), but in this period there he painted some of his finest and most original works. They include portraits, notably those of Johannes Cuspinian, a lecturer at the university, and his wife Anna, and several religious works in which he shows a remarkable feeling for the beauty of landscape characteristic of the Danube school. The finest example of this manner is perhaps the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, which shows the Holy Family resting in the glade of a German pine forest. It was painted in 1504, just before Cranach went to Wittenberg as court painter to Frederick III (the Wise), Elector of Saxony. — Lucas Cranach the Elder was a German Renaissance painter and graphic artist who excelled in portraits and in female nudes. Cranach, whose original name may have been Lucas Müller or Sunder, was born in Kranach, Franconia, from which town he took his surname. It is believed that Cranach (Kranach) studied painting with his father. From about 1501 to 1504 he lived in Vienna, and his earliest known works date from this period. They include a portrait of a humanist, Doctor Reuss and a Crucifixion (1503). His work at this time, lyrical and spirited with landscape setting, was influenced by that of Albrecht Dürer. In 1505 Cranach became court painter to the electors of Saxony at Wittenberg, a position he held until 1550. He was a prominent citizen in Wittenberg, received a title, and became mayor in 1537. In 1508 he visited the Netherlands, where he painted portraits of such royalty as Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and the young prince who succeeded him as Charles V. For his electoral patrons he painted biblical and mythological scenes with decorative sensual nudes that were new to German painting. These works include many versions of Adam and Eve, The Judgment of Paris (1529), and Venus and Amor (1531). Cranach was a friend of Martin Luther, and his art expresses much of the spirit and feeling of the German Reformation. Cranach propagandized for the Protestant cause in many portraits, woodcuts, and engravings. His portraits of Protestant leaders, including many versions of Luther and Duke Henry of Saxony (1514), are sober and meticulously drawn. Cranach ran a large workshop and worked with great speed, producing hundreds of works. He died in Weimar, on October 15, 1553. Cranach's sons were both artists, but the only one to achieve distinction was Lucas Cranach the Younger, who was his father's student and often his assistant. — Born Lucas Müller. Leading painter of Saxony, and regarded by some as one of the most important and influential artists in 16th-century German art. His vast output of paintings and woodcuts includes altarpieces, court portraits and portraits of Protestant Reformers, and many pictures of women (paintings of elongated female nudes or fashionably dressed ladies with titles from the Bible or mythology). Taught by his father, painter Hans Müller, with whom he worked from 1495 to 1498. Known to have been in Coburg in 1501, but the earliest of his existing works date from about 1502, when he was already 30 and living in Vienna. There he dropped the surname Müller, naming himself Cranach after his hometown (now spelled Kronach). Made important contributions to the painting and illustrations of the Danube school, (the art of the Austrian Danubian region around Vienna). Also came in contact with the Humanists' teaching at the university and did portraits of scholars Johannes Stephan Reuss (1503) and Johannes Cuspinian (1503). Received appointment as court painter to the elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony; he was already a famous artist, given two and a half times the salary paid to his predecessor. In spring 1505 he arrived in Wittenberg, a university town on the Elbe River and seat of the electors. Stayed for 45 years, until 1550, as court painter. Became a prominent citizen, serving on the town council in 1519-20 and as burgermeister three times from 1537-44. Through Cranach, who received important commissions from three successive electors and attracted many young artists to town, Wittenberg became an art center. The Protestant Reformation began in 1517. Cranach was on friendly terms with Martin Luther, who had taught at the University of Wittenberg since 1508. Cranach painted portraits of Luther, his wife, Katherina von Bora, and his parents. These and other portraits help form today's image of Luther. — LINKS — Self-Portrait (1550; 1379x1030pix, 402kb) — Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John the Baptist and Angels (1535, 120x73cm) — Paradise (1530) — Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1530, 87x56cm; 1/3 size 1142x750pix, 137kb — or see it half-size 1752x1148pix, 502kb) _ The robe of Judith is in the fashion of the 1530s, known from other portraits of Cranach. — Dead Duck (1530; dead but life-sized: 3294x1391pix; 1059kb) _ Really a duck... not a failed politician. — a different Dead Duck (1530; 3293x1615pix) _ long dowload perhaps, but then you get to examine the texture of the canvas and all its various stains and tears. — Dead Pheasant (1530; 3194x1879pix; 1794kb) _ A pleasant pheasant may be alive rather than dead, but it is much more difficult to make it stay still while you paint it. — A Pair of Dead Partridges (1530; 3327x1990pix; 1476kb) — Three Dead Partridges (1530; 3037x2169pix; 1572kb) _ The title is Zwei tote Rebhühner, but there are 6 legs and one can plainly see the tail of the third partridge, the rest of which is hidden behind the first two. — View of Wittenberg (1537; 763x1595pix; 558kb) |
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