Joseph Mallord William Turner. England's greatest painter

Joseph Mallord William Turner, (born April 23, 1775, London, England—died December 19, 1851, London),  perhaps this country's most celebrated painter was born in 1775 and thus much more a Georgian than a Victorian painter, reflecting the Grand Tour rather than the Cook's Tour (did he ever travel in a train?). If the painting "Rain, Steam" is any indication, he saw the industrial revolution and the advent of the train as a monster, destroying the countryside that he loved. 

The son of a barber and wigmaker in Covent Garden, he had little formal education, no social graces and dropped aitches all his life. He was also very short — a surviving tailor's pattern for his trousers indicates an inside-leg measurement of only 19 inches, and Charles West Cope's sketch of his adding last touches to a painting of middling size hanging low in an exhibition has him standing on a bench or table. Slim as a boy, as a man he was a portly little barrel.

Rain, steam. 

There had been English painters who could knock about as equals with the landed gentry, even the aristocracy — Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy, had made himself a gentleman and Gainsborough had perhaps been much more of one than we suppose — but not Turner. This is not to say that he had no lordly friends — the part played in his life by Petworth proves that point —

But his lordly patrons for the most part bought or commissioned his paintings because he was an unpredictable and challenging celebrity, his work expensive and fashionable in the sense less of conforming to fashion than of making and re-making it throughout a life that ended at the age of 76, more than a little mad, in 1851.

Slave Ship

He was solitary as well as eccentric. On his frequent and extensive travels across Europe he traveled alone. On these he was a working traveller rather than a Grand Tourist, a wayfarer with his eyes wide open wherever he was, noting, sketching, storing memories, dismounting from shared carriages to draw mountains while fellow travelers took lunch, disembarking on Rhine or Rhône to sketch a castle or cathedral. 

We do not know how he responded to the great sculptures of antiquity and the Renaissance that were among the objectives of the Grand Tourist and so vital to Reynolds and his ilk; instead, in thousands of sketches and a multitude of paintings, he recorded his response to the serenity of landscape and to the paintings of Poussin and Claude, Titian and Rembrandt, Cuyp, Rubens, Watteau and, occasionally, his near contemporaries.

Turner died in Chelsea in 1851 and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Apparently his last words were "The Sun is God", though this may be apocryphal. By his will he intended to leave most of his fortune of £140,000 to found a charity for “decayed artists,” and he bequeathed his finished paintings to the National Gallery, on condition that a separate gallery be built to exhibit them. As a result of protracted litigation with his rather distant relatives, most of the money reverted to them, while both finished and unfinished paintings and drawings became national property as the Turner Bequest. It was not until 1908 that a special gallery was built by Sir Joseph Duveen to house some of the oil paintings at the Tate Gallery. All the drawings and watercolors were transferred to the British Museum for safety after the River Thames flood of 1928, when the storerooms at the Tate Gallery were inundated, but they were returned to the Tate Gallery on the opening of the Clore Gallery, an addition designed by James Stirling expressly for that purpose, in 1987. A few of the oil paintings remain at the National Gallery.

Legacy

Turner was perhaps the greatest landscapist of the 19th century. Although brought up in the academic traditions of the 18th century, he became a pioneer in the study of light, color, and atmosphere. He anticipated the French Impressionists in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; but, unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes. A line of development can be traced from his early historical landscapes that form settings for important human subjects to his later concentration on the dramatic aspects of sea and sky. Even without figures, these late works are expressions of important subjects: the relationship of man to his environment, the power of nature as manifested in the terror of the storm or the beneficence of the sun. Unmatched in his time in the range of his development, Turner was also unrivaled in the breadth of his subject matter and the searching innovation of his stylistic treatment.

From an essay by Brian Seewell

https://www.william-turner.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._W._Turner

https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-M-W-Turner

Odilon Redon, born April 20, 1840, the master of the mysterious

Crying Spider, 1998

Born today  (born April 20, 1840* - July 6, 1916), Odilon Redon does not get the credit that he is due for exploring the dark side of the unconscious a long time before the Surrealists were born as well as creating some of the most beautiful works in European art. Of his own work Redon wrote, "My drawings inspire and are not to be defined. They place us,as music does, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined."  Goldwater, Robert; Treves, Marco (1945). Artists on Art. Pantheon.

"In the prints and drawings he made beginning in the 1860's, Redon created macabre and cryptic images inspired in some cases by the writings of Poe and Baudelaire, in others by the paintings of Goya. His renditions of flowers sprouting skulls and of skeletons with antlers, and his references to Hindu symbols for death and to mythical creatures like Pegasus and the Sphinx, prompted the Parisian critics to label him as a purveyor of ''le fantastique reel,'' ''that desolate region which exists on the borders of the real and the fantastic - a realm populated by formidable phantoms, monsters, monads and other creatures born of human perversity,'' explained the critic Emile Hennequin in an 1882 review of Redon's lithographs." (NYTimes) 

Cyclops

His mother had an unusual background - she was a Creole born in Louisiana, where his father met her - a lonely childhood and highly atypical training all helped to exacerbate his originality. He studied watercolor painting in Bordeaux, spent a year architectural studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which he did not enjoy, and another year in the studio of Jean-Léon Gérome, the academic painter whose teaching and brusqueness he loathed. At the age of 25, he was back in Bordeaux, studying engraving with Rodolphe Bresdin. In the late 1860's he produced a series of small masterpieces, a charcoal landscape, dark still life works mixed with his carefully painted scenes, inspired by medieval poetry. His work was produced in a bewildering variety of styles, sometimes verging on kitsch, except for his brilliant color. A Symbolist phase followed his macabre etchings and works in charcoal, predating Dali by a century. Inspired by Gustave Flaubert's temptation of St. Anthony, Redon created three lithograph albums. 

In the early 1900's, he painted some of the most beautiful flower still lifes in European painting, moving his visionary art from the darker side of the human psyche into the light.

Ophelia among the flowers

Arbres sur un fond jaune, one of the panels painted in 1901 for the dining room of the Château de Domecy-sur-le-Vault

In 1899, his commissions from Baron de Domecy to create decorative panels for the dining room of his chateau marked Redon's transition from ornamental to abstract painting and increased his popularity. Although he remained a very private person, he received the Legion of Honor in 1903 and his increased popularity led to greater financial security by the end of his life. 

*April 22 according to another source. 

http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/redon/about/childhood.html

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-redon-odilon.htm

http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/around-redon.html

In honor of Paolo Veronese

Self Portrait

Veronese's house in Venice

The Feast in the House of Levi

One of the problems with trying to write a post on an artist's birthday is that we don't HAVE the birthday's for many pre-19th century artists. In Paolo Veronese's case (also known as Palo Callari), we have his date of death which is today, April 19, 1588). Born in Verona in 1528, his father was a stonecutter and apprenticed his son Paolo at the age of 14 to a local artist. Paolo soon began to develop his own style of using lighter colors in a wider range. 

In 1543, he had moved to Mantua and worked on frescos in the city's cathedral. Ten years later he arrived in Venice where he was to produce his most memorable works of art. He specialized in large format paintings of works from mythology and the Bible. He became part of the great artists- Titian, Tintoretto - who dominated 15th century art and that of the late Renaissance. "His most famous works are elaborate narrative cycles, executed in a dramatic and colorful style, full of majestic architectural settings and glittering pageantry. His large paintings of biblical feasts, crowded with figures, painted for the refectories of monasteries in Venice and Verona are especially famous, and he was also the leading Venetian painter of ceilings. Most of these works remain in situ, or at least in Venice, and his representation in most museums is mainly composed of smaller works such as portraits that do not always show him at his best or most typical." Wikipedia

An exceptionally well-dressed Hercules flees into the protecting arms of Virtue to protect him from the dangerous allure of Vice. Such a weakling! Couldn't manage to resist by himself.

Inquisition: Heretic, nowhere in the Bible does it say there were jesters at the Last Supper! Veronese: Look, I have retitled this painting Feast in the House of Levi, and feasts have jesters! Painters know these things.

Twenty years after his arrival in Venice, Inquisitors challenged Veronese, asking him to account for the presence of "buffoons, drunkards, dwarfs, Germans, and similar vulgarities" in his painting of the Last Supper for a monastery in Venice. Veronese defended himself by invoking the artist's right to creative freedom. By the end of his life, Veronese's paintings were in such high demand that his brother, two sons, and a nephew had to carry out the remainder of his numerous commissions after his death.

Susannah and the Elders

Women messing with men's heads du jour: Judith, Abra, & the head of Holofernes, 1584.

He has always been appreciated for "the chromatic brilliance of his palette, the splendor and sensibility of his brushwork, the aristocratic elegance of his figures, and the magnificence of his spectacle", but his work has been felt "not to permit expression of the profound, the human, or the sublime", and of the "great trio" he has often been the least appreciated by modern criticism.^[ Nonetheless, "many of the greatest artists ... may be counted among his admirers, which include  Rubens, Watteau, Tiepolo, Delacroix and Renoir".

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Veronese

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

Filippi Lippi, Early Italian Renaissance painter

Demonstrating the benefits of early childhood education: gorgeous Madonna and Child, 1484, in an elegant although 20th-century frame. Painted by Filippino Lippi

Begone! Saint Philip drives sweet little dragon out of v. well-decorated open-air temple of Hieropolis. Strozzi Chapel, Sta. Maria Novella, by Filippino Lippi

Some impressive attention to footgear

 Sly little look from this angel drummer by Filippino Lippi in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome

Filippino Lippi. Son of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi, & destined to follow in his father's artistic footsteps. Here by himself as a young man, 1485.

 Angel of the Annunciation, 1483

Filippino (' little Filippo') was probably born in Prato in 1457 following the elopement of his father Fra Filippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti. Filippino was a leading Florentine exponent of the tradition of great fresco cycles, as well as an accomplished painter on panel. Filippino's father died in 1469 and he was soon in the workshop of Botticelli, who worked with Filippino on one Adoration of the Kings. A Milanese agent in Florence reported in about 1490, 'Filippino: a pupil of Botticelli and son of the most outstanding master of his time'.

Filippino's fame spread throughout Italy and he painted major series of frescoes in Rome as well as Florence. He was also a renowned painter of altarpieces, receiving commissions from Milan, Bologna and Genoa.

Perhaps through the historical misfortune of being eclipsed by the next generation, in particular by Raphael and Michelangelo, Filippino's contemporary success, greater than even that of his teacher Botticelli, is now forgotten. His sacra conversazione influenced High Renaissance artists and he can be seen as a link between the achievements of the 15th and 16th centuries.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Filippino-Lippi

Jan Davidsz de Heem. One of the greatest painters of still lifes during the Dutch Golden Age

Faith, vanitas, and flowers: what a combo! Here from Jan Davidsz de Heem, born OTD 1606.

Blue ribbon! Swag of fruit, a few flowers, and carefully positioned insects, by Jan Davidsz. de Heem in the 1660s

Entering from the bottom, a butterfly.

Starring the lobster, looking yummy among all the precious & delectable things arrayed on a table, 1670s, by Jan Davidsz de Heem

The lobster, red among all the golden goodies on Jan de Heem's table.

Scholar dreams of taking up a sword & having mighty adventures. Will soon return to his books for better adventures! By Jan de Heem, born OTD in 1606.

Books, books, & more books! Can't get enough of them, in 1628 or ever. Thank you Jan de Heem, born on this day 1606. And kudos for your signature on first page of the unbound quire.

De Heem was one of the greatest painters of still lives in the Netherlands, combining a brilliance and harmony of color along with an accurate rendering of objects: flowers, in all their variety; European and tropical fruits; lobsters and oysters; butterflies and moths; stone and metal; snails and sea shells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Davidsz._de_Heem

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jan-Davidszoon-de-Heem

Happy Cerealia

Happy Cerealia - This Roman Festival ran from 12th-19th April, for the Goddess of the Grain, Ceres. Women in white ran around with torches, representing Ceres searching for her daughter Proserpina. 

 Ovid mentions that Ceres' search for her lost daughter Proserpina was symbolized by women in white, running about with lighted torches. 

The painting is Spring by Alma-Tadema. 1894

Statue of Empress Vibia Sabina as Ceres. From Ostia Antica, Italy.Statue of Empress Vibia Sabina as Ceres. From Ostia Antica, Italy.

In this scene, a Dionysiac scene plays out with dancing, nudity, and veneration of the grape. The scene is thought to date from the 220s CE.

How the Romans celebrated Spring:  https://alison-morton.com/2014/04/17/how-the-romans-celebrated-spring-2/

https://www.vindolanda.com/blog/how-did-the-romans-celebrate-spring