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Tag: art history

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Art is not a luxury

Luristan bronze griffins, first millennium BC, Museum of Ancient Near East, Berlin courtesy Wolfgang Sauber.

The Torah describes Bezalel and his assistant, Aholiab, as having decorated the Tabernacle sometime between 1400 and 500 BCE. Polygnotus of Thasos, who worked in the mid-5th century BC, was a superstar in ancient Greece, as was his student Pheidias.

All of the original work of these men is now lost; we know nothing about it except copies and descriptions.

Before them, art was anonymous, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t made. Before homo sapiens were in Europe, their Neanderthal cousins were making art on the Iberian Peninsula. Prehistoric cave art is a human universal, found worldwide. Why?

Restored griffin fresco in the Throne Room, Palace of Knossos, Crete, original from Bronze Age. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=179033

Enter the griffin

The griffin (or griffon) is a mythical beast with the body, tail, and back legs of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. By the Middle Ages, it had assumed legendary status, but the oldest known depiction of a griffin is carved into slate on a cosmetics palette, c. 3300–3100 BC.

Because people in the Middle Ages could read and write, we more or less understand the medieval bestiary, including the legends of the griffin. For ancient Egyptians, Persians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, central Asians, etc., all of whom used the griffin symbol, its meaning is less clear. All cultures, apparently, saw them as supernaturally powerful. And they were thought to be real, if the accounts of ancient naturalists like Pliny the Elder and others are to be believed. The griffin lives on to this day in heraldry, logos and mascots. It meant something to an Egyptian makeup artist, to a feudal warlord, to the Victorian art theorist John Ruskin, and even to animators of Disney movies. Even concrete hasn’t lasted that long.

Medieval tapestry, Basel, c. 1450 CE.

Art tells the story of human history

The tabernacle and Polygnotus’ paintings may no longer exist, but much ancient art does. We may not know why the unnamed painters at Chauvet Cave painted animals, but there is no question that their art evokes a response in us. For one thing, it’s highly realistic, even when the animals it portrays are extinct.

I wrote on Monday that art history is the pictorial history of mankind. It is the most powerful and enduring record of human civilization, equaling the written word in recording the values, beliefs, emotions, and daily lives of people throughout history. And in general it’s more succinct.

In its narrowest sense, art is visual documentation, and we like to say that purpose has been rendered obsolete by photography. However, if you’ve ever tried to identify a plant, you know that a good botanical illustration is often more useful than a photograph.

More than that, art reflects the cultural, social, and political contexts of its time. It is rich in symbolism, experience, meaning and metaphor. Somehow those elements speak to us even when we can’t put what they say into words.

That is because art works in universal themes, such as love, grief, death, power, or vulnerability.

A statue of a griffin on the Basilica di S. Marco, Venice

Art is not a luxury

Art is no more of a luxury than civilization itself, for the two are deeply entwined. That’s why human culture has always supported art, and that’s one of the many stories the griffin tells us.

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Top ten painters of all time

Portrait of Sir Thomas Elyot, c. 1532–34, Hans Holbein the Younger, courtesy Royal Collection, Windsor Castle. Drawing is important, especially if you’re the artist to a famously murderous king.

I’m certain that as soon as I publish this, one of my pals is going to say, “but what about ___? You love his work!” But here’s my list of the top ten painters of all time, in date order.

The ‘ten’ thing is a joke, of course. This is after I weeded it down to 33.

Jan van Eyck (1390-1441). If he’d never painted anything but the Ghent Altarpiece and the The Arnolfini Portrait, he’d still rank in the top tier of art history.

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). His engravings and woodcuts dazzle with their perspective, complexity, delicacy and religious sensibility.

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). If you love Tudor history, you’ll love Holbein. Not only did he paint the definitive portraits of Henry VIII and his movers and shakers, his painting of Anne of Cleves changed the course of history.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1528-1569). He taught me the difference between subject and focal point in a painting.

Bronzino, (1503-1572). I’m not sure which I like more, his treatment of fabric or the arrogance of his models.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Yeah, he’s the best of the Baroque tenebrists, but it’s the gritty realism of his religious paintings that slays me.

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Everyone carries on about his plump women, but I think his action paintings are the forerunner of modern comic books.

Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). Tenebrism with a saturnine Spanish twist, and oh, so human.

El Perro, c 1819-23, Francisco de Goya, oil mural on plaster transferred to canvas, courtesy Museo del Prado. Accidental or not, this was the birth of modernism.

Francisco Goya (1746-1828). He was a bit of a misery-guts, but he depicted the horrors of war like no other artist ever.

William Blake (1757-1827). He was eccentric to the point of madness and singular in his beliefs and he gave us the words to the hymn Jerusalem.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). You could write him off as just another Romantic, except his symbolism is so deep it’s narrative.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). It’s all about the fabric, although I do think Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne is brilliant social commentary.

Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, c 1824, John Constable, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts

John Constable (1776-1837). He invented plein air, and then went to France and explained it to the Barbizon School. His field studies are as fresh as any modern painter’s.

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). Nobody could build a showstopping theatrical painting like Church.

Édouard Manet (1832-1883). Yes, his social commentary is incisive, but I’m also moved by the little still lives he did while dying.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910). He painted two of my favorite places—the Adirondacks and the Maine coast—and he taught me everything I know about diagonals in composition.

Claude Monet (1840-1926). Everything we know about optics and color can be credited to him.

Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) I love his Joan of Arc for the way it weaves visions into the landscape, but he also had a real feel for the French peasantry.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). The older I get, the more I appreciate him as a color and brushwork revolutionary. I just wish he could have been happier.

Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923). He edges past the other two greats of Edwardian-era painting, John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn. It’s the color of the light.

The Teamster, 1916, George Bellows, courtesy Farnsworth Art Museum

George Bellows (1882-1925). Whether he was painting in New York or on the Maine coast, he was a man of the people. Which is not to downplay the importance of his color or composition.

Arthur Streeton (1867-1943). He’s my favorite of the Heidelberg School painters for his ethereal depictions of the Australian bush.

David Davies, (1864-1939) runs a very close second to Streeton, particularly for his bush nocturnes.

Maynard Dixon (1875-1946) He’s on my list for the way he organizes the chaos and color of the western landscape.

John F. Carlson (1875-1947). His gloomy winter skies, flat landscapes and sweeping woods are a dead giveaway that he grew up in my hometown of Buffalo, NY. Somehow, he manages to make them look good.

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) He treats a subject I love (the woods and water of Ontario) with a raw, vital and uniquely North American version of Impressionism.

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971). He was a brilliant designer, and a painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor, and adventurer. That’s a life to emulate.

Francis Cadell (1883-1937) is my favorite of the Scottish Colourists, both for his impeccable design and for his light and lovely depictions of Iona.

Greenland Mountains, c. 1930, Lawren Harris, courtesy National Gallery of Canada

Lawren Harris (1885-1920). Of all the Group of Seven, he’s the one who took the longest stylistic and spiritual journey, and most revered the notion of the Great White North.

Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959). He was too soft to protect himself against a designing woman, but his depictions of English life, his Biblical narratives and his paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel are all moving.

Clyfford Still (1904-1980). Whether you’re a figurative or abstract painter, you can learn so much about design from him.

Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021). Everyone knows him for his pies, lipsticks, cakes and hot dogs, but he was a brilliant landscape painter.

Lois Dodd (1927-present). She’s a keen observer who knows how to simplify exactly the right amount. She never gets stuck in the weeds.

What painters have influenced you? Who did I miss on my list? Who would you have never included? And why?

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Why I write this blog

The Vineyard, oil on linen, 30X40, $5072 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The consistent top-ranked post on my blog when it was on Blogger was about folding a plastic bag to fit in your paint kit. It remains useful even with plastic bag bans in some parts of the country.

The consistent top-ranked post on this platform is Debunkery #1: No, you’re probably not a tetrachromat. Month after month, it outperforms every other post. Most visitors stay on it for an average of just 1m 16s before flitting away, either to another page on this website or to someone who humors their dreams of tetrochromacy.

I’m surprised they stay that long. Eight years after I first wrote it, there’s still no evidence for tetrachromacy in humans. The idea should be consigned to the intellectual dustbin along with things like phrenology and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. But if tetrachromacy introduces them to my blog, I’ll gladly take it.

The Wreck of the SS Ethie, oil on canvas, 18X24, $2318 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

A reader sent me this review of the upcoming Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker. It tallies with my goddaughter’s career in New York. Sandy made the error of getting her BFA and MA at prestigious schools without having a bean in her pocket. Gallerists mistook her for a trust-fund baby who could bask in their reflected glory rather than earn a living wage.

“Art devotees spoke like they were trapped in dictionaries and being forced to chew their way out,” Bosker wrote. For any of us forced to listen to or read near-incomprehensible drivel about near-incomprehensible art, that rings true.

I was a terrible student. Voted ‘most likely to drop out’ by my sixth-grade class, I did not materially change by college. Yet I’m well-read, literate and numerate, and my unconventional education has been a blessing. My brain is cluttered up with the bad ideas of my own choosing.

Breaking Storm, oil on linen, 30X48, $5579 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

There’s a lot of dreck written about art. Art isn’t that difficult, but lard it with lashings of pompous blather, and it rolls off most normal people. Obviously, there are many excellent art scholars out there, but they’re often outmaneuvered by the bloviators. (According to Warren G. Harding, bloviation is “the art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing.”)

I hope I can say something intelligent about art without being caught up in the art-speak that drives me mad. I want to motivate people to learn to make and appreciate art, to buy it intelligently, and to understand its importance for the 99% of us who aren’t perusing it in Chelsea.

I can no longer remember why I started blogging so many years ago. In fact, I don’t have records of the first iteration of this blog on WordPress, before I went to the Bangor Daily News. I do know why I keep writing it, however.

Readers of this blog, this month.

A few years ago, I was happy to have readers in the US and Canada, with a smattering in the UK. That has grown now to a worldwide audience (see above). I teach to students from across the US and Canada and just had a student enroll from Scotland. On Monday I demoed to an art group in England. The internet is full of lots of schlock, but it also compresses distances and allows us to bypass the most egregious blowhards. As a person who could never thrive in the rigid systems of my youth, I find it liberating.

On Friday, I released Step 5, the Foundation Layer, of my Seven Protocols for Successful Painters. This is the heart of painting, where the first layer of color is applied, and it’s very useful information.

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Art is not eternal

Tin Foil Hat, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

“Art is eternal,” read yet another meme on Facebook. Not surprisingly, artists like to repeat this. But art is no more eternal than any other handiwork of man.

History is replete with examples of art that is gone. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Great Library of Alexandria and all it contained. The Great Hypostyle Hall of the Temple of Karnak. The 69 ancient Greek bronze statues of Olympic victors that once graced the sanctuary of Olympia. The menorah from the Second Temple, which was stolen when the Romans sacked Jerusalem; then it disappeared from Rome. The Imperial Seal of China.

Pinkie, pastel, ~6X8, $435 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Whole cities have been sacked, like Athens, Constantinople, or Kaifeng. Their art was destroyed with them. Insurgency and war destroy art, as in the French Revolution. Conquerors loot and lose it; Napoleon and the Nazis are just two examples.

This fall we had a massive fire in Port Clyde, ME. It destroyed several historic buildings and paintings by Jamie Wyeth and Kevin Beers. They were gone with sudden finality, and we were shocked and grieved.

There are spasms of iconoclastic fury that convulse humankind. The Beeldenstorm of the 16th century is the most well-known. The Reformation wanted to purge Northern Europe of Catholic ideology. What better way to attack it than through art? In England, 90% of religious art was destroyed. The percentages were probably similar in Germany and the Low Countries.

The Late Bus, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Occasionally, great works are saved from iconoclasm by very brave people. The Van Eycks‘ Ghent Altarpiece, is an outstanding example of Early Netherlandish painting. It was already famous in August of 1556 when the Beeldenstorm hit Ghent. The first attack on the Cathedral was repelled by guards. On the second try, the rioters used a tree trunk to batter through the doors. But by then the panels and the guards had been hidden on a narrow spiral staircase within the tower. They were eventually moved to a new hiding spot in the town hall, but the original frame, itself a work of art, was destroyed.

To put that in context, imagine trying to stop the Taliban as they blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyam.

Art isn’t even above fickle fashion. It’s easy to date paintings because every era has its tropes. Right now, we’re in a long period where color is ascendent over detail. To the next generation, that will look as old-fashioned as leg o’ mutton sleeves look to us.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I told my daughter that when I die, AI should be able to reproduce me well enough to go on teaching my classes without me. “I won’t do that,” she said. “Your paintings will go up in value when you’re dead.” That is probably, true, but I’m not painting to impress people after I’m gone. Nor should you.

Our job as artists is to speak to the living. The Beeldenstorm happened because Protestants knew how powerful art is. The Nazis destroyed ‘degenerate’ art for the same reason. That’s what motivated the Taliban.

Of course, art can reach across the centuries to speak to us. Consider paleolithic cave art and its makers. We know almost nothing of their culture: we have no dishes, spears, firepits, foods, dwellings or traces of language. All we have is art: figurines, bone carvings, a few decorated tools and lots of cave paintings from all over the world. These speak to us powerfully but wordlessly. I don’t care if my own painting lasts 500 years, let alone 35,000 years, but I’m sure glad their art has.

Until the first of the year, you can use the discount code THANKYOUPAINTING10 to get 10% off these or any other painting on my website. Shipping and handling are always included within the continental US, but I’m afraid I’ll no longer be able to get them to you by Christmas.

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Art without religion

Painting of Gaṇeśa riding on his Indian rat or bandicoot, c. 1820, courtesy British Museum

It has always baffled me that an art historian is required to learn German, French, or Italian but not to study religious history. Religious paintings comprise the bulk of art through the ages, from the shamanistic cave art of paleolithic man right up to the 18th century. That’s not just true for Christendom, but for every culture worldwide. Art is a primary way people have explored the meaning of their existence, and that is the fundamental question of religion.

I can only speak for my own culture, but my own grounding in Christianity makes reading western paintings easy. I do not need stories and symbols explained to me; even deeply buried allegorical references make sense without a lot of clarification.

Ladder of Divine Ascent, 12th century, icon, courtesy Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Egypt

(That’s also true, by the way, for paintings based on Greco-Roman myth, because we learned those stories in school. Today I wonder why they spent so much time on them, but apparently there was a lot more time in the school day back before STEM. Peter Paul Rubens had it right when he painted those fat gods and goddesses as cartoon characters.)

I’ve often wondered how students of art history read the symbols in religious art when they don’t have a grounding in the thinking underlying them. Art historians are famous for their capacity to pontificate. In the post-church era, how can their students discern what in all that blather is reasonable and what is nonsense?

Thangka Depicting Vajrabhairava, ca. 1740, courtesy Sotheby’s

Go back in time with me to my first visit to the Rubin Museum of Himalayan and central Asian art. Tibetan art is overwhelmingly religious and conservative and, I suspect, cautionary. The Tārās are, like the Greco-Roman gods, partly personifications, or representations of abstract ideas in the form of personages. Looking at the work totally divorced from its religious underpinnings, all I saw were five floors of ferocious figurines.

I suppose my response was like a non-Christian’s reading of a crucifixion painting. They can be frightening, especially in a culture as divorced from death as we are. However, crucifixion was an historical reality running from pre-Roman times to the modern world (it’s still a rare but legal form of punishment in parts of the world). To the Christian, the crucifixion of Jesus represents the absolute low point of the story, but it also points to the ultimate redemption of humanity.

My art-historian goddaughter was raised in a traditional Chinese household, so Tibetan house shrines don’t seem that strange to her. She was able to explain the rough outlines of the Tārā permutations to me. I still wouldn’t want any of it in my house, but, then again, I wouldn’t want The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus by Dieric Bouts in my house, either.

Tiles from the courtyard of the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, c. 1557

I’m not an art historian, just a simple painter who loves paintings. And I think it’s important that I understand those works from the viewpoint of the artist. So when I read Breaking a taboo: religion is being invited into three major museums, my first reaction was, “it’s about time.” Art should never have been divorced from its cultural underpinnings in the first place. Its absence reflects a longstanding, anti-religious bias on the part of academia.

We’ve had a century or more of sneering at religion and the faithful. Are there any art historians left who are qualified to interpret art in the language and culture in which it was made? Where’s Sister Wendy when we need her?

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Talk about a frustrating commission

American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with Great Britain (unfinished oil sketch), c. 1783-84, Benjamin West, courtesy Winterthur Museum

On Wednesday, I mentioned that Norman Mailer finished the first volume of a planned trilogy right before his death at age 84. Sometimes things just don’t go as planned.

Benjamin West was a British-American painter best known for historical scenes, including the highly-romanticized The Death of General Wolfe. West was born in Springfield, PA, near Philadelphia, the youngest of ten children. He was entirely self-taught as an artist, but even from his youth, he attracted the interest and admiration of collectors.

Perhaps it was the persona in which he cloaked himself. Later in England, he reminisced that as a child, he was taught by Native Americans to mix paint using clay and bear grease. Today, that story would get you laughed right into Congress; the indigenous people had been pushed out of the lower Delaware River before he was born.

Still, West taught himself to paint, and he did so very well, being widely acclaimed as the first Colonial artist of serious skill. He began to attract the interest of wealthy collectors. At age 22 he set off for a Grand Tour, paid for by two sponsors. At the time, anyone with pretensions to be a gentleman or serious artist went to Italy to moon over the art and architecture. West used his time productively, making copies of Renaissance paintings and expanding his network of friends.

Self-portrait of Benjamin West (c. 1763, copy), courtesy National Gallery of Art

A detour

Three years later, West stopped in England for a short visit on his way home. In fact, he never moved on. After pottering about in Bath and Reading, he settled in London, eventually sending back to Pennsylvania for his fiancée. West went on to become one of the founders of the Royal Academy, and earned the patronage and custom of King George III himself.

That didn’t mean he didn’t consider himself a Colonial. He frequently revisited North American themes for his grand-scale history paintings, including the bizarre General Johnson Saving a Wounded French Officer from the Tomahawk of a North American Indian. When the British and Americans came to hammer blows in 1776, he maintained a careful neutrality.

The Death of General Wolfe is West’s most famous painting. Courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

Peace breaks out

Perhaps his idea behind The Treaty of Paris was, “never mind that, we’re all friends again.” However, it didn’t work out as planned. It was intended to be the first in a series on the American Revolution, in the same vein as his cycles of historical paintings at Windsor Castle. It was intended to commemorate the commission that negotiated the end of the American Revolution. On the American side, that was John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin (Benjamin Franklin’s grandson).

The Americans were easy. All but Benjamin Franklin agreed to sit for him, and Franklin’s likeness was easy enough to find. West drew him from an engraving; once you realize that, you can see how he was slotted in to the composition.

The British representatives were a Scottish merchant and slave trader called Richard Oswald and his secretary, Caleb Whitefoord. Whitefoord was a beautiful young man, judging by his portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Oswald flat out refused to sit. He said he had a bad eye, and a previous portrait made him look ugly.

We don’t have the pictorial evidence to judge, but I’d like to believe that a slave trader with sharp business practices was ugly, inside and out. However, there also must have been a fair amount of bad feeling on the part of the British envoys at that moment. Who really wants to commemorate losing a war?

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c. 1816, Benjamin West, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

“As I very strongly expressed my regret that this picture should be left unfinished, Mr. West said he thought he could finish it,” John Quincy Adams later wrote in his diary. “I understood his intention to be to make a present of it to Congress.”

Instead, it languished, and West’s Revolutionary War painting cycle never got off the ground. Still, it’s more accessible and interesting in its half-finished state than it ever would have been had it been finished and presented to Congress.

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The Feast of the Bean King

The Feast of the Bean King, Jacob Jordaens, c. 1640-45, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum

For Americans, today marks the end of the Christmas season, since we all go back to work tomorrow. In anticipation, we're talking diets and exercise and generally mistaking January for Lent.

Historically, Christmastide ended on Epiphany, January 6. The Monday after Epiphany was called Plough Monday. It was the day poor English soaks went back to work. That shortened Christmas season is one indication of how modern life is not always better.

The night before Epiphany was Twelfth Night, which was the last big shindig of Christmas. About the only custom we retain from it is the King Cake, in which a fève (‘bean’) is hidden. Whoever finds it gets a prize.

That’s an anemic celebration, compared to our ancestors. The bean in a King Cake has given us the English expression ‘beano’, which mean a blowout party. The person who found the bean was the Bean King, the Low Countries’ version of the English Lord of Misrule. He or she presided over the last remaining debauchery of Christmastide.

The Bean Feast, Jan Steen, 1668, courtesy Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Who's boozy now?

Blame it on the water, if you must, but our ancestors drank a lot more alcohol than we do. A 16th century German averaged three-quarters of a liter of beer a day, along with whatever wine he could afford. Nuns, those models of probity, got by on an allotment of eight glasses of ale a day.

A sailor's ration of alcohol in the British navy was originally a gallon of beer daily. After the Napoleonic Wars, it changed to half a pint of spirits, since rum doesn’t go bad. The so called ‘rum ration’ was quartered by 1850 to the traditional amount, and lasted in that form until 1970.

Beer Street and Gin Lane, William Hogarth, 1751, courtesy Wikimedia.

Cheap gin in the 18th century and cheap whiskey in the 19th century brought on periods of intense drinking. These were balanced by periods of sobriety, including the early years of the Industrial Revolution. There’s nothing like watching someone lose a hand in a mill to convince you of the virtues of abstinence, during the workday at least.

The 20th century was another period of lower alcohol consumption, although it’s on the rise again. But this is perhaps why the drunkenness recorded by artists like Jacob Jordaens and William Hogarth seem so marked to our modern eyes.

In Jordaens’ The Feast of the Bean King, everyone is drunk, from the grandfatherly ‘king’ to the child in the foreground. Behind her, a woman vomits; there is lust and a man so drunk he can’t lower a fish into his mouth. Some of the faces seem to swirl in and out of focus as if we, the viewers, are also drunk.

The inscription on the wall reads, “None is closer to the fool than the drunkard.” That’s our hint that this isn’t merely a disinterested look at local custom.

By the 17th century Puritans in northern Europe strongly condemned the celebration of Christmas, considering it a Papist abomination. In England, it became a point of conflict between the established church and the radical Roundheads. Christmas was banned in 1647, during the English Civil War.

The Abbot of Unreasons, 1837, George Cruikshank, courtesy Collection MAS Estampes Anciennes. These monks look none too happy about the Lord of Misrule and his minions.

Charles I may have lost his head, but Christmastide did not go gently into that good night. Rioting broke out in several cities and clandestine celebrations continued. Christmas was reinstated with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but the Calvinists north of the border were slow to have it back. It wasn’t until 1871 that Christmas was designated a holiday in Scotland.

In America, the Puritans pointedly stuck their noses in the air and worked through the Christmas season, while their southern cousins followed the Cavalier tradition of feasting. It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that Christmas became fashionable in Boston.

The Feast of the Bean King was the last gasp of Christmastide celebrations, in an era when people partied more than we do now. As for us, well, we'll be back at work on January 5.

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Monday Morning Art School: Four masters show us how to use scale

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Édouard Manet, 1882, courtesy the Courtauld

We don’t know why prehistoric man created the 360 ft.-long prehistoric Uffington White Horse in Britain, but every generation is both amazed and moved by it. Conversely, miniatures dazzle us with their meticulous craftsmanship. In very large or very small works, we’re immediately transported out of the ordinary. That is why The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church must be seen in person—the scope is lost in photos.

The scale of the figures within a painting can make its message more powerful. Here, four masters show us how it’s done.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1817, courtesy Hamburger Kunsthalle

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is by the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. He doesn’t spell out the identity of the model; in fact, the man is turned away from the viewer. He is an Everyman with whom we are meant to identify. He is centered in the canvas (saved from being static by the S-curve of his body) and is larger than the landscape itself. Friedrich wants us to focus on our human responses and not the landscape itself, as symbolic of uncertainty as it is.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1884-1886, courtesy Art Institute of Chicago

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat is one of the most famous paintings in art history. It’s the seminal work of Neo-Impressionism. It was birthed with some difficulty, as Seurat labored over it for three years. Observe the scale of the figures. They range from the monumental couple on the right with their weird little monkey to the distant figures in the background. Using figures of various sizes, Seurat deftly created depth without atmospherics or modeling. Compare this painting to its companion piece, Bathers at Asnières, which takes a more conventional approach to creating depth.

The Oxbow: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, Thomas Cole, 1836, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Many Hudson River School paintings are sermons on canvas, and Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm is no exception. You are meant to see the American landscape as an Arcadia where man and nature live in harmony. There’s also nascent American myth here, celebrating our story of discovery, exploration and settlement just as they began to fade into history. Cole hammers this home with the Hebrew lettering in the logging clearcut. It spells either “Noah” or “Shaddai” (the Almighty) depending on whether you’re reading it right-side-up or from the God’s-eye-view.

Cole painted himself into The Oxbow. He’s so tiny it will take you a moment to find him. Look in the ravine to the left of his kit and umbrella. By making himself so small he drives home the point that we are mere specks in Creation.

Much has been written about the ‘impossibility’ of the reflections in Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (at top). The gentleman at the far right is enigmatic; he’s both transactional and nightmarish. Note the feet of the trapeze artist at the far left and the Bass Pale Ale bottle, which hasn’t changed in 140 years.

The barmaid’s face is life-size, and she is assessing us straight-on. Whether we’re looking at exhaustion, sadness, or resignation is hard to say. By making her life-size, Manet hammers home the power of her straightforward gaze. This painting isn’t just a mirror in a bar; it’s a mirror on our own souls.

Manet was dying of syphilis when he painted this, suffering severe pain and paralysis. Controversy has raged about the identity and character of the model, known only as Suzon. That hardly matters, because what we see in her eyes is a reflection of Manet’s, and by extension, our, thoughts.

If you’ve ever thought about taking one of my workshops aboard schooner American Eagle, here’s a lovely account from writer Georgette Diamandi, who joined us this past September.

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Seven things you should know about the Group of Seven

The Tangled Garden, 1916, JEH MacDonald, courtesy National Gallery of Canada

No, not the G7—that’s the forum of world’s biggest economies. They’re politically important, but nowhere near as important as the Canadian painters by that name.

The Jack Pine, 1916–17, Tom Thomson, courtesy National Gallery of Canada

  1. The death of Tom Thomson is one of art’s enduring mysteries. Although the Group of Seven didn’t formalize until after his death, he was one of the painters who gathered at the design firm Grip, Ltd. He was arguably the most famous of them all.A dedicated woodsman and fisherman, he loved heading into the wilds of Algonquin Provincial Park to paint, as he did one July afternoon. He was found drowned eight days later, a four-inch bruise on his temple. Did he capsize, did he commit suicide, or was he murdered by a jealous husband? We’ll never know.

    Red Maple, 1914, by AY Jackson, courtesy National Gallery of Canada
  2. The Group of Seven were realists in the age of abstract art.They passionately clung to plein air in defiance of a world culture that was veering off toward abstraction. They felt the spirit of Canada was best understood by painting in direct contact with nature. Instead of huddling in Toronto studios massaging their angst, they rode the rails to some of Canada’s most desolate and difficult-to-reach spots.

    Winter comes from the Arctic to the Temperate Zone, 1935, Lawren Harris
  3. They invented the idea of the Great White North.Lawren Harris believed the desolate north was the seat of Canada’s economic and spiritual power. His scenes of the cold, majestic, and empty northland defined Canada’s essential self-image. This was a land of black spruces, isolated peaks and dark water, lit by fantastic skies.This started out as nationalism, but transformed into a more universal paean to the power of nature. As much as he abstracted the landscape in later years, he always told this story.

    Gas Chamber at Seaford, 1918, by Frederick Varley, courtesy Canadian War Museum
  4. The Great War temporarily derailed them.The First World War had a profound effect on Canada. Out of an expeditionary force of 620,000, 39% were casualties. AY Jackson, Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley enlisted as official war artists. Jackson served in France and was seriously injured. Lawren Harris enlisted in 1916 and was discharged in May 1918 after a nervous breakdown. Tom Thomson’s death in 1917 was another blow to the group.

    Lake Wabagishik, 1928, Franklin Carmichael, courtesy McMichael Canadian Art Collection
  5. In the early years, the group was supported in part by tractor money.Lawren Harris was the son of Thomas Harris of A. Harris, Sons & Company Ltd., farm machinery merchents. This merged with the Massey company and later became known as Massey Ferguson. Harris's share of his family fortune enabled him to partner with James MacCallum to build the Studio Building in Toronto, where his fellows could rent studio space cheaply. Together the two men bankrolled the Group of Seven during lean periods. Harris took them on boxcar trips to  Algomaregion north of Lake Superior and elsewhere.

    A Northern Night, 1917, Franz Johnston, courtesy National Gallery of Canada
  6. They developed a distinctive Canadian style.Group of Seven paintings are instantly recognizable by the fusion of graphic design and Impressionism. However, they were always driven by what was actually there. The screen of trees and the view down into the deep woods are recurring motifs. This is not a grand, golden view in the style of the Hudson River School painters, but a deeply honest view of what the northeastern part of North America looks like. It requires embracing chaos in a totally new kind of composition.

    RMS Olympic in dazzle at Pier 2 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Arthur Lismer, courtesy Canadian War Museum
  7. The Group of Seven is not without controversy.They’ve been criticized for depicting northern Canada as a no-man’s-land, or terra nullius, when it’s been lived in for centuries by indigenous people. However, the goal of plein air has primarily been to capture the landscape, not human activity.Having painted across Canada myself, I can say that much of it seems empty a hundred years later. In any case, they’re among the best painters North America has produced, and that’s the real reason to study their work.