Jacques-Louis David. Artist of the French Revolution

Jacques-Louis David, (born August 30, 1748, Paris, France—died December 29, 1825, Brussels, Belgium), the most celebrated French artist of his day and a principal exponent of the late 18th-century Neoclassical reaction against the Rococo style.  Here he is looking very romantic and revolutionary. 1794

David won wide acclaim with his huge canvases on classical themes (e.g., Oath of the Horatii, 1784). When the French Revolution began in 1789, he served briefly as its artistic director and painted its leaders and martyrs (The Death of Marat, 1793) in a style that is more realistic than classical. Later he was appointed painter to Napoleon. Although primarily a painter of historical events, David was also a great portraitist (e.g., Portrait of Mme Récamier, 1800).

Death Of Marat. 1793

Napoleon admired The Intervention of the Sabine Women and saw possibilities for self-aggrandizement in the talent displayed. Soon David, without acquiring political office, was again a government painter, first under the Consulate and then, after 1804, under the Empire. He was not, however, the only prominent Frenchman to move from the Jacobin left to the Bonapartist right, and he had evidently always been a worshiper of historical heroes. His most important Napoleonic work is the huge Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine on December 2, 1804 (1805–07), sometimes called Coronation of Napoleon in Notre-Dame; in it Neoclassicism gives way to a style that combines the official portraiture of the old French monarchy with overtones—and occasional straight imitation—of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. 

Napoleon in his study 

This picture was followed in 1810 by the large Napoleon Distributing the Eagles and in 1812 by The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, a sharply perceptive portrait notwithstanding its conspicuously propagandistic intention.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, David was exiled to Brussels. Cut off from the excitement and stimulus of the great events he had lived through, he lost much of his old energy. Toward the end of his life, he executed, probably with considerable help from a Belgian pupil, François-Joseph Navez, one more remarkably convincing portrait: The Three Women of Gand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Jacques-Louis_David

Tiger Tiger burning bright

Not sure how brightly burning this coloring book image is but it was a lot of fun to go back to childhood and color. The photo isn't great - I am still learning how to use the camera on my iPad.  But when I am not feeling very creative but need distraction, this has worked to help calm the stress. 

William Blake

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies	5
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?	10
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp	15
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?	20
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetr

Frans Hals 17th century Dutch portrait painter

Died (alas!) on this day (August 26) in 1666, Frans Hals of Haarlem. A truly great master of the brush. Painted people laughing and having fun, but he looks quite somber in his self portrait here.

Across the spaces of their individual paintings, Isabella Coymans offers Stephanus Geraerdts a token of her love, and he waits to receive it. Just a brilliant marriage portrait by Frans Hals, 1650

Stephanus Geraerdts

What can I get for you? Wonderful painting of a produce seller from 1630

Man reaching through his frame

Isaac Massa & Beatrix van der Laen, posing in 1622 before the garden of love

Laughing Boy 1625

Laughing Cavalier, painted in 1624. Look closely and you realize that he isn't really laughing: his mustache is just twirled up. Well, the eyes are laughing! By Frans Hals

Lots to drink and feeling no pain. Now. tomorrow will be a different story. Malle Babbe, 1633

Frans Hals was a 17th century Dutch painter whose staccato brushstrokes conveyed light, form, and texture. His portrait The Laughing Cavalier (1624), exemplifies the artist’s sophisticated technique, in its application of ribbon-like marks that perfectly abbreviate the cavalier’s embroidered silk sleeves and ornate lace cuffs. “Every cuff he painted in his paintings informs on the habitual movements of the wrist it hides,” the art historian John Berger once wrote of the artist. “The gathered, crumpled, slewed sheet, its folds like grey twigs woven together to make a nest, and its highlights like falling water, is unambiguously eloquent about what has happened on the bed.” Born in 1582 in Antwerp, Belgium, he was raised in Haarlem, Netherlands, and studied under the painter Karel van Mander I during the early 1600s. It is believed that the artist’s shift in style came about after visiting Antwerp during the 1610s, where he would have seen the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Though he was never particularly financial successful, the artist’s animated portraits of people from all walks of life, remain an important reflection of the society he lived in. Hals died on August 26, 1666 in Haarlem, Netherlands. When the Frans Hals Museum opened in 1862, taking a journey to Haarlem became an important pilgrimage for a slew of mid-19th-century painters, including Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, John Singer Sargent, and Claude Monet. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Louvre Museum in Paris, among others.

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hals/hd_hals.htm

Wawiriya Burton, Australian Aboriginal artist

Wawiriya Burton is an Australian Aboriginal artist. She is known for her acrylic paintings. Her paintings are representations of sacred stories from the Dreamtime. Like other Aboriginal artists, the representations are blurred (or encrypted) for cultural reasons. The full meaning of her artworks can only be understood or deciphered by people who have been initiated. Burton is a ngangkaṟi (traditional healer), so she has more knowledge about sacred traditions than most in her community.

Wawiriya belongs to the Pitjantjatjara. She was born in outback central Australia some time during the 1920s.. She grew up living a traditional, nomadic way of life.^[6] Her family lived in her father's homeland, around what is now Pipalyatjara.

Wawiriya lives in Amaṯa, where she began working at the Tjala Arts centre in 2008. Tjala (originally Minymaku Arts) had been set up by the women of the community in 1999. She made wood carvings and baskets from spinifex originally, but later learned to paint from the other women.

Wawiriya's artworks have been displayed in exhibitions in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Alice Springs. Her work is held in the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Information from Wikipedia Google

https://horizonofreason.com/culture/aboriginal-art-symbols/

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/oct/17/the-artists-painting-their-indigenous-songlines-to-stay-healthy-and-strong

Le Nain brothers of Paris.. When talent comes in 3's.

Today's artist(s) without a (known) birthday: the Le Nain brothers of Paris. Antoine, Louis, Mathieu. The brothers three. This great unfinished work from the 1640s may (or may not) be a communal self-portrait.

The Le Nain Brothers - Their paintings are not my favorite kind of art but they are important in the art history time line. There is a lot to learn about a society, about history and even about art from an understanding of a picture’s context. Certainly, in a representational work, who or what is described; who made it, when and where; what materials and techniques were employed — these are crucial questions. But most of that we get from books. What if we bypass the books, the exhibition labels — even the titles — and simply look at the pictures? So... here we go:

Three brothers best known for their paintings of peasant life. The work of Antoine Le Nain (b. c. 1588, Laon, France—d. May 25, 1648, Paris), Louis Le Nain (b. c. 1600, Laon, France—d. May 23, 1648, Paris), and Mathieu Le Nain (b. 1607, Laon, France—d. April 20, 1677, Paris) exhibits a realism unique in 17th-century French art. Their domestic scenes of peasant life depict humble people with human dignity.

Woman with five children. From which we learn that even in 1642, Those without servants skipped on hair-combing. No servants to do the hairy work.

The resting horseman, 1630s: another incredibly solemn peasant family group

Peasant Family. Created between 1625-1648

By 1630 the Le Nain brothers had established a workshop in Paris.where they all worked together. They remained unmarried and are traditionally said to have worked in harmony, often collaborating on the same picture. In 1648 all were received into the newly founded French Academy. The “Le Nain problem” of determining which of them painted what is complicated because no signed work bears a first initial and no work completed after 1648 is dated. Evaluation of the three personalities early in the 20th century was therefore based on what was traditionally known of each brother and on the dubious establishment of three stylistic groups. Art scholars today no longer try to attribute individual works, and the three brothers are treated as a single artist. Their portraits of peasants and beggars remain their most important works.

A Blacksmith in His Forge was one of the most-admired and most-copied paintings in the Louvre in the 19th century.  The smith himself looks towards the spectator as if he has been disturbed by the artist and asked to hold the pose while a photograph is taken. The other figures look in different directions, exactly as a group of people will do today when caught unawares by the camera. Especially perceptive is the depiction of the seated old man on the right - he is staring into space exactly as many old people tend to do, particularly when they are preoccupied with something which is not part of the event in front of them. The gazes of the three children are alert but lacking the concentration of the adults. Thus the painters of this picture have observed, for the first time in French painting, a 'slice of life'.

The depiction of the better-off peasantry is interesting from a sociological point of view because there are so few renderings of that class, but, even more important, it showed that masterpieces could be produced from humble material. This realistic treatment of 'low' subjects was not to be found again in French art until Courbet in the nineteenth century

https://legionofhonor.famsf.org/exhibitions/brothers-le-nain-painters-17th-century-france

Aubrey Beardsley.. Born August 21, 1872

Aesthetic artist and writer Aubrey Beardsley was born August 21, 1872. He rose to prominence in the 1890s alongside artists such as James McNeill Whistler and writers like Oscar Wilde. His bold artworks were inspired by Japanese prints, and his work influenced the opulent style of Art Nouveau in the early 20th century. 

Beardsley died of tuberculosis in 1898 at the age of just 25, but in the short span of his career he revolutionized the art of illustration, combining an elegant linear style that defined art nouveau with a morbid sexuality that shocked late Victorian society. This self-portrait, showing a gaunt young man with a concentrated expression, was completed in his 20th year.

In 1893, Beardsley was commissioned to produce 16 illustrations for the English version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Published the following year, these exoticising and erotically charged depictions of the macabre story brought Beardsley notoriety as the standard bearer for artistic decadence in Britain. The Climax, in which Herod’s daughter Salome kisses the severed head of John the Baptist, remains his most famous work.

The Yellow Book was a short-lived literary quarterly in London, which published the likes of Max Beerbohm, Henry James and W.B. Yeats. Beardsley was made its art editor from its first issue (pictured) in 1894; he’s credited with the yellow cover, evoking explicit French novels – of the sort that corrupt Wilde’s Dorian Gray – while he also published illustrations by artists as distinguished as William Rothenstein, John Singer Sargent and Walter Sickert.

In her terrific 1968 treatise Black and White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (public library), British novelist, critic, music scholar, and social reformer Brigid Brophy calls Beardsley “the most intensely and electrically erotic artist in the world” and “perhaps the only artist of any kind practicing in [that period] who was never sentimental.” She writes:

Live (love) now: die sooner or later.

That, classically, is the purport of lyrical art. Aubrey Beardsley was above all a lyrical artist — but one who was pounded and buckled into an ironist by the pressure of knowing, which he did virtually from the outset, that for him death would be not later but sooner.

A scholar of Mozart and an astute cross-pollinator of the arts, Brophy — a lyrical genius herself — writes:

Beardsley is lyrical by virtue of his gift of line, which resembles the gift of melodic invention. Sheerly, Beardsley’s lines, like great tunes, go up and down in beautiful places… A Beardsley sequence is like a sonnet sequence. Yet it is never the literary content of an image that concerns him. His portraits, including those of himself, are less portraits than icons. He is drawing not persons but personages; he is dramatizing not the relationships between personalities but the pure, geometric essence of relationship. He is out to capture sheer tension: tension contained within, and summed up by, his always ambivalent images.

And yet Beardsley’s images are very much a sacrificial offering to tension, to the contradictory forces by which the human heart is pulled asunder — loneliness and longing, dread and desire, sadness and sensual delight. His stark black-and-white aesthetic — like his life, like all life — is one of violent and vitalizing contrasts, nowhere more so than in his drawings for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. (Brain Pickings) 

Story in Five Artworks:  https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/aubrey-beardsley-716/story-aubrey-beardsley-five-artworks

Updates to SFMUNI service - beginning August 22.

Beginning Saturday, August 22, several targeted bus routes will be restored or extended and frequencies improved on some routes to continue to support essential trips and physical distancing. Temporary modified Muni Metro service will also be returning. 

 J Church: Surface-only route between Balboa Park and Church; 

Market LK Taraval-Ingleside: Combined, surface-only route, between SF Zoo and Balboa Park. 

Transfer required to/from downtown at West Portal. 

 L Bus Construction Shuttle: Bus substitution between SF Zoo and Sunset Boulevard related to L Taraval 

Improvement Project construction. Express bus service between Sunset and West Portal. 

 N Judah: Full route between Ocean Beach (La Playa) and Embarcadero S Shuttle: New subway-only route between West Portal and Embarcadero 

TM Third-Oceanview: Full T Third and M Oceanview routes, combined between West Portal and Embarcadero 

 7 Haight-Noriega: Full route restored between Ortega at 48th Avenue and the Salesforce Transit Center using longer 60-foot buses 

 14 Mission: Line will be served by 60-foot electric trolley coaches instead of motor coaches. 

 12 Pacific Community Shuttle: Modified route extended between Jackson/Van Ness and Sansome/Sutter 

 28 19th Avenue: Weekend service added for modified route between Daly City BART and California/7th Avenue 

 30 Stockton: Route extended to Crissy Field/Mason in the Presidio between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. daily. 

All other times, the 30 Stockton terminal will be Divisadero/Chestnut 

 37 Corbett: Modified route restored between Twin Peaks and Market/Van Ness via Market Street 

 38 Geary: 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. daily, buses will alternately terminate at Geary Boulevard/32nd Avenue or Fort Miley VA Hospital. 

All other times, the 38 Geary will terminate at 48th Avenue/Point Lobos. Buses to Fort Miley VA Hospital will layover then continue inbound servicing all existing stops. 

 44 O’Shaughnessy: Full route restored between Hunters Point and California/6th Avenue 

45 Union-Stockton: Full route restored between Townsend/4th Street and Lyon/Greenwich 

 48 Quintara-24th: Modified route restored between 20th Street/3rd Street and West Portal Station 

 49 Van Ness-Mission: 60-foot buses will replace the 40-foot buses 54 Felton: Full route restored between Hunters Point and Daly City BART 

 67 Bernal Heights: Full route restored between Ellsworth/Crescent and 24th Street BART Station 

The following routes will have more frequent service: 8 Bayshore, 9 San Bruno, 9R San Bruno Rapid, 12 Pacific Community Shuttle, 14 Mission, 19 Polk, 22 Fillmore, 24 Divisadero, 25 Treasure Island, 28 19th Avenue, 29 Sunset, 43 Masonic, 44 O’Shaughnessy 

Muni Metro bus substitution during weekend early morning hours (5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m.): To align with BART’s weekend station opening schedule, Muni Metro will not operate in the subway until 8:00 a.m. on weekends. 

Buses will substitute service between approximately 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. on weekends. Visit our Rail Recovery page to see more details about weekend early morning Metro bus service. 

Please refer to individual route pages for detailed routing and stop locations. Enhancing cleaning methods and restoring Muni Metro enables us to restore additional bus routes and put more buses in service on high ridership routes to provide greater connectivity and more room for physical distancing. The temporary changes to rail are necessary to reduce chronic delays in the subway and improve rail reliability. 

 These Muni service updates are likely to be the last major changes tied to San Francisco’s reopening plan. The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply affected the SFMTA’s budget, limiting our ability to put more vehicles into service. We may make some additional adjustments to service in the fall but making major service changes or restoring more routes will depend on securing additional revenue and relaxation of vehicle capacity restrictions.

https://www.sfmta.com/blog/muni-brings-service-changes-both-bus-and-rail-august-22

https://www.sfmta.com/projects/covid-19-developments-response

California Summer, green & gold

Hans Rottenhammer

Excellent study of a dromedary w/ lots of curly hair, in its landscape

Hans Rottenhammer imagines a statue of Bacchus in 1592. Party on down.

Diana & her friends espied by, I believe, an extraterrestrial Actaeon. Painted in 1600 by Hans "I did 7 women and that was enough" Rottenhammer

Minerva attempts to attract Paris's attention by doing an interpretive dance. She also has a dog. Should have won the contest

Who me? Really, little me, the most beautiful? Venus doing her false modesty thing while other goddesses stalk off in irritation, in Judgment of Paris by Hans Rottenhammer. I think that's Athena giving Paris the finger. Next.. The Trojan War. Never offend a goddess although with three in the mix, hard to win

Doing a little light Renaissance erotica: Danae, looking suspiciously welcoming of that shower of gold

Venus & Mars, their little tryst exceedingly well attended by Venus's chums & assorted putti. Not exactly private,1604

http://www.brueghelfamily.net/person/hans-rottenhammer-1564-1625

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/rottenhammer_hans.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rottenhammer