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Category: Mona Lisa

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Monday Morning Art School: why copy a masterpiece?

Think of it as getting a painting lesson from the masters.

Great Springs of the Firehole River, by Thomas Moran, 1871, is one of the paintings my students will be copying this week. Courtesy National Park Service.

If you visit art museums regularly, you may have seen students set up to copy masterpieces. Or, you’ve seen copies made by great artists of other artists’ work. What were they trying to accomplish?

Vincent van Gogh admitted himself to the Saint-Paul asylum in May, 1889. He painted around 150 canvases there, including the iconic The Starry Night. He also made about thirty copies of masterworks of others.

“I started making them inadvertently and now find that I can learn from them and that they give me a kind of comfort,” he wrote. “My brush then moves through my fingers like a bow over the strings of a violin – completely for my pleasure.”

The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), by Thomas Eakins, 1871, is one of the paintings my students will be copying this week. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum.

Copying masterworks is a time-honored way of learning, both in western traditions and in others. Transmission by Copying is one of the six principles of Chinese painting laid down by the Chinese art historian Xie He in 550 AD.

“Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying,” wrote Austin Kleon.

The Pine Tree at Saint Tropez, by Paul Signac, 1909, is one of the paintings my students will be copying this week. Courtesy Pushkin Museum.

Copying is a way to study and evaluate a painting that’s far more immersive than simple looking. It enables us to understand another artist’s process. It forces us to consider what we find admirable in art in general. And it teaches us brushwork.

Most importantly, it sets aside our own need to tell a story. That liberates us from the frustration of our own limitations. We can concentrate on composition and color instead of being fully engaged in the problem-solving of unique subject matter.

It makes sense to copy works you admire. If you’re drawn to the paintings of the Canadian Group of Seven, don’t copy a Titian. You’re going to be paying a lot of attention to the painting you copy. It should be something you really love.

Today, we have a technical advantage over Van Gogh, locked up as he was. We can easily retrieve high-quality images from the internet. Many museums even have scalable images on their websites.

You must be able to see the brushwork to fully immerse yourself into the work. (Of course, if you’re copying a linear painter like Bronzino, there may not be much visible brushwork to copy.)

Woman with a Parasol, Turned to the Left, by Claude Monet, 1886, is one of the paintings my students will be copying this week. Courtesy MusĂ©e d’Orsay.

What you can’t see on the internet is the dimensionality of the painting, its impasto, so that is one area where you’ll have to interpolate.

“I was surprised at how small the Mona Lisa is,” is a common sentiment about one of the world’s most-copied paintings. It’s important to know how large the work you’re copying is, even if your copy is going to be very small. The brushes appropriate to a massive painting are not appropriate to a miniature, and that will affect your interpretation.

Mona Lisa shows that paintings can undergo significant changes through restoration, fading, or the appearance of pentimenti. She once had eyebrows and eyelashes and was lighter in color; all those changes have occurred in the 500 years since Leonardo set down his brush. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn from copying her, but it’s something we should be aware of.

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This week’s meme is a particularly pernicious one

You may as well look at a photograph. No, you’re better off looking at a photograph.

Constable’s The Hay Wain is accessible without being kitschy, sentimental without being mawkish. It has been voted the second most popular painting in Britain (after Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire). Last week it was assaulted by a protester from Fathers4Justice, who stuck a picture of a child to its surface. The painting is not believed to be permanently damaged but has been removed for repair.

This comes on the heels of another assault on a painting, by a member of the same group. The painting in question—Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee portrait—is by no means in the same class as The Hay Wain, but the damage it sustained is more serious. Tim Haries spray-painted it in an action characterized as a desperate plea for help for a father wrongly separated from his two daughters.
I’m in no way diminishing the anguish of fathers who lose custody of their children, but these two men seem to suffer from a lack of impulse control that is at cross-purposes with parenting.
There are works of art which for all practical purposes can no longer be seen in person: Michelangelo’s Pietà and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa are two famous examples. Both are behind bullet-proof glass in niches specially designed to keep viewers from any kind of contact.
Laszlo Toth being wrestled to the ground after attacking the PietĂ . From a strategic standpoint, his subsequent history was instructive: he was confined for just two years.
Both paintings have been vandalized repeatedly. However, the art vandals of an earlier age tended more toward mental illness, not activism. For example, the PietĂ  was attacked by geologist Laszlo Toth, who screamed, “I am Jesus Christ!” while chipping away at the Virgin Mary with his rock hammer. (That wasn’t universally true:  in 1914, militant suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, protesting the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst. Still, the nutters significantly outnumbered the activists.)
That has changed, and so have the consequences. The Little Mermaid sat undisturbed on her perch in Copenhagen Harbor until 1964, when her head was sawed off and stolen by members of a group called Situationist International. They’ve been consigned to the dustbin of history, but their violence toward the Little Mermaid lives on—in subsequent beheadings, paintings, and one memorable explosion that blew her right off her perch. She has been assaulted so many times that city officials have broached the idea of moving her farther out into the harbor.
The first time the Little Mermaid was attacked, in 1964.
And that gets to the root of the problem. Already, gallery visitors in many countries find their access to paintings more and more restricted by alarms, glass, and security guards who intervene instantly if you get too close to the work. Of course they have no choice, because our artistic heritage is the very heart of our patrimony, and its protection is their first priority. But immeasurably important things can be learned from looking at paintings up close, things that can never be understood from photographs. I’ve never seen—nor will I ever see—the Mona Lisa or PietĂ  in anything resembling “real life.” I had the awesome good fortune to have closely studied The Hay Wain a few years ago, but I doubt I ever shall again.

Sometimes I think about art, and sometimes I paint, and sometimes I teach painting. There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.