love the gentleness of this, the delicacy of line, the ornate carpet of a caftan, the meringue of the turban, the crinkles of the magenta sleeves, the faraway look of the sitter, the exotic flimmer of it all. It lifts a parchment image from a golden manuscript and creates a whispered image. Look at the scrolls of material at his back seat — it is a blueprint for Frank Gehry’s architecture!
The sleeves remind me of Rembrandt’s caramel sleeves in his Jewish Bride in the Rijksmuseum, but this was created long before that painting. Think of this: 1480 is the time. Look at the caftan, gold patches, the white-grey designs, a ghostly image. This is 190 years before Vermeer and his patterns of thicker and more patchy rugs. It’s amazing — 190 years!
For those interested, there is a good novel, The Bellini Card by Jason Goodwin, about a Constantinople eunuch and detective being sent to Venice in 1840 to recover the vanished portrait of Mehmed.
JP
Museum of Fine Arts
4. Moonlit Landscape (1819)
Washington Allston (1779–1843)
Washington Allston, Moonlit Landscape , 1819
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
Years ago, I bought a very inexpensive but evocative, black-and-white, roughly hewn oil on board painting, called After Allston . Years later, I was in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and there it was, “the” Allston itself, tucked off in a little side gallery with other American Romantics. The full moonlight shimmering on the water under the little bridge — romantic indeed!
Washington Allston saw poetry and painting as a means of self-expression. After studies at Harvard and in New England, he sojourned abroad, meeting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of “Kubla Khan” (“For he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise”) fame. The results of which must be the lyricism in Allston’s work. On his return to the United States, Allston focused on landscape, as seen here in Moonlit Landscape .
Moonlit Landscape depicts a journey made possible by the ambient light, although at what stage, we don’t know. Who are these travellers? Are they randomly meeting? The ambiguity, often found in Allston’s work, is tantalizing. From classical landscape, Allston frequently used the same motifs: discernable figures in the foreground, water as a focal point, and mountains.
Such a pleasing work, a joy for the eye. Sadly, other Allstons are hard to find, but Coast Scene on the Mediterranean is on display at the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina.
SG
5. Watson and the Shark (1778)
John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)
John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778
Oil on canvas, 183.5 x 229.6 cm
Gift of Mrs. George von Lengerke Meyer (89.481)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
This painting is glitzy and has all the crunch and snap of Jaws , the film about a shark off the coast of Cape Cod that terrorized unsuspecting bathers, which scared the bejeepers out of me. It is by an American of average ability who went to London and became a star. London had just celebrated the unveiling of Benjamin West’s Death of Wolfe (1771, National Gallery of Canada), which tapped into the national mood of glorifying heroic messages and anticipated Romanticism by pushing melodramatic subjects of death struggling in light and shade.
At first, the work seems a striking painting, and you are drawn again and again to the teeth of the shark, the white of the body, the pose of the jabbing lad leaning over the bow, but then, after looking at the painting many times, it may become an attractive comic strip. But the flash of the shark’s teeth doesn’t go away.
It is based on a true story. Brook Watson, a cabin boy on a ship moored in Havana Harbor, was attacked by a shark and lost a leg — true. Also true, Brook Watson, with one leg, became lord mayor of London! The newspapers reported the incident at the time and the painting hit the spot.
For the rest of his career, Copley did portraits, but he never whiffed such acclaim again. He became depressed and never returned to his native United States. His name does live on, though — Copley Square in Boston is named after him.
JP
6. Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli (c. 1865)
Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
Edgar Degas, Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli, c. 1865
Oil on canvas, 116.5 x 88.3 cm
Gift of Robert Treat Paine II, 1931 (31.33)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
Because of his poor eyesight — he suffered from photophobia, a sensitivity to light — Degas was not drafted for the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Indeed, such was his sensitivity to light, he said to Monet when reviewing the latter’s water lily paintings, “Let me get out of here. Those reflections in the water hurt my eyes.”
Unable to enjoy the works of his contemporaries in their well-lit studios or the brilliant galleries in which they showed, Degas was even more at a disadvantage outdoors. As a result, he painted indoors, in a vast gloomy room. He often spoke disparagingly of the outdoor work of the other Impressionists. “If I were the government, I would have a special brigade of gendarmes to keep an eye on artists who paint landscapes from nature. Oh, I don’t mean to kill anyone; just a little dose of bird-shot now and then as a warning.”
Despite the disadvantages from which he suffered, Degas had huge talent and a particularly magnificent way of capturing French superiority and aloofness. This is a portrait of Degas’s sister, Thérèse, who married her first cousin, Edmondo Morbilli, who lived in Naples. They visited Paris in 1865 after the loss of an expected child in 1864. Apparently, the marriage was not a happy one and the contrast of the two sets a mysterious mood. Is she strong enough for this certain officious force? Is her hand on his shoulder restraint, affection, or a gesture of hope? Is she resigned?
Degas kept this picture in his home until his death fifty years later.
The painting was done at a time when Degas was examining the portraiture of sixteenth-century Italian artists, such as Bronzino.
When I see it for the fourth time, this is what I see: The colours are to be savoured. A pale slate blue runs into mustard olive — a clash; the slate blue behind the wife, the mustard behind the husband. The flittering sheets of vertical blue, a midnight northern lights, the lovely lightness of the blouse, the hint of a smile on her face, yet pancake makeup — all elation is stamped out.
Look at the know-it-all mouth of the
