Tag Archive: painting
By Philip Mould
I should never have risked it. Looking back now I would never try it again. But put yourself in my position, a hunter of paintings who had recently realised the consummate joy of being able to surf the worlds auctions without even having to move from my desk. In the mid 1990′s EBay was amongst the first to offer good enough digital images to make decisions from a screen, and I had just managed to buy a highly exciting portrait which, now unwrapped, was blinking at me from under the bright lights of my gallery easel.
I decided to restore it myself – something I always leave to the professional restorers, but this new arrival was different. Firstly I had managed to pick it up from an American seller for the paltry sum of $180 as an early 19th century American portrait by an unknown artist . More compellingly, I could see clearly what had happened to it and how it might be reversed with the help of a bottle of acetone I had at the ready.
The face of the portrait, that of an eighteenth century gentleman, gazed at me with ironic formality, a look that befitted its age, but in this instance, possessed an unusual authority. The paint strokes were honeyed, fluent and applied by a master of glazing – a paint technique which, if done well as it was here, allows one colour to shine through another with seductive brilliance. The gentleman’s jacket on the other hand was embarrassingly bad: the construction was wooden, anatomically confusing, and painted with about as much skill as a jobbing pub sign painter on his first assignment. The urge to remove it myself overcame my normal professional judiciousness.
Bit by bit I began to apply swabs of acetone-drenched cotton-wool. His lumpy shoulders began to melt, the swabs became saturated with dissolving paint, and from beneath began to emerge another form, altogether different from his straight jacket of later paint. Working now at a feverish pitch, holding my breath with every application of a new swab, over the course of an hour I revealed a new coat and body, as subtlety and lyrically painted as the head.
What had happened was that a ham-fisted restorer had decided to repaint the body in order to disguise a tear in the canvas that ran across his coat. A properly trained restorer would simply have attended to the scar with careful in-painting. The painting that had emerged was an Ipswich work by the greatest portrait painter at work in England in the 1750′s – Thomas Gainsborough. It was also worth in excess of $35,000.
Philip Mould, author of The Art Detective: Fakes, Frauds, and Finds and the Search for Lost Treasures
(Viking Adult), appears regularly on the BBC’s The Antiques Roadshow, owns an art gallery in London, and is the art adviser to the British House of Commons and House of Lords, and even sold a painting to the Queen of England. He lives in London.
IMAGE: Portrait of a Gentleman by Thomas Gainsborough (1727 – 1788), circa mid 1750s
By Stephanie Cowell
In 1860 Paris, the lovely models strolled around the famous fountain at Pigalle, hoping an artist would approach to hire them for a few hours or longer. In the winter perhaps they waited in a café, nursing a coffee or an absinthe.
They were not cheap for a poor artist such as the struggling Renoir or Monet; a woman could expect four or five francs for a three-hour session, though that was less than the cost of one of the more expensive new tubes of oil paint. The women were paid more than male models because the height of their beauty had a shorter season but an artist had to buy coal for his stove to warm her and often endure the presence of her mother as chaperone.
Sometimes the young male artists fell in love with their models. Aline Charigot was a seamstress when she met Renoir, but Claude Monet’s lovely Camille Doncieux was of good family and was largely disowned by them when she took off to live in poverty with Claude without so much as a wedding ring.
Edouard Manet had several models. He painted his wife nude but he soon was painting his exquisite artist colleague Berthe Morisot; conjecture varies to this day whether she did more than model for him. His most famous model was likely from the Pigalle professional models. She was Victorine Meurent who posed as Olympe lying nude on a sofa which so enraged the public when it was first shown that men tried to ram umbrellas through it. Manet loved women and who knows what may have occurred between him and the red-haired Victorine?
The years passed and by 1880 the group of men now known as the impressionists slowly became better known. Claude Monet’s love would die tragically young and Renoir’s Aline grow old, fat, a mother of sons, and greatly loved. And Victorine?
Ah, Victorine! Edouard Manet promised to leave her something when he died and she wrote a wistful note to his widow reminding her and saying that she was in need. As far we know, the request was never answered.
And the wintry days waiting for a job at the Pigalle fountain? In 1885 one of the models opened an agency for his colleagues in the boulevard de Clichy and painters and sculptors came there to make their choice not from the models themselves but their photographs. By then the womens rate was ten francs an hour, more if she were very pretty.
Stephanie Cowell, a former classical singer, is the author of five books, including her most recent, Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet
. She lives in New York, with her husband, a poet and reiki practitioner, not far from all the impressionist paintings at the Metropolitan Museum.
IMAGES: Monet’s first painting of his love Camille
Congratulations to the following winners:
Frances, Michelle, and Hannah
We’ll be in touch real soon!
By Elizabeth Kostova
Béatrice de Clerval (1851-1910), Impressionist painter, is known for relatively few canvases, many of which are housed in the Musée de Maintenon in Paris, and some of which are held in private collections. A native Parisian who painted intimate family scenes in her suburb home in Passy, as well as landscapes in the nearby Bois de Bolougne and on the coast of Normandy, she apparently ceased her career at the age of twenty-nine.
Her work has been compared to that of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot in its feel for the lives of women in their domestic settings, and to that of Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro in its skillful rendering of landscapes, particularly gardens. Like Claude Monet and many others, Clerval was also drawn by the changeable Channel coast, with its various moods of water and sky and its dramatic cliff formations.
Although Clerval excelled at painting people, particularly the female servants who sat for her portraits, she also displayed an affinity for swans, which she observed and sketched in the Bois de Boulogne.
Elizabeth Kostova is the author of the international best seller The Historian
and The Swan Thieves
. She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress.
IMAGE:Woman at Her Toilette, c 1875/80 by Berthe Morisot, Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago
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