lionofchaeronea

[lionofchaeronea]

I've been trying for some years, with no real success, to write a novel. This bothered me until recently, when I realized three things:

I'm much better at writing poetry than I am at writing prose.

I enjoy writing poetry much more than I do writing prose.

The whole "writing a novel" thing was less because I truly wanted to and more because I felt I was obliged to, as if not doing so would be some sort of personal failure.

It's nice to feel free simply to write what I want to, when I want to, without the burden of unnecessary self-imposed expectations.

(Thank you for listening to me ramble. We now return to our regularly scheduled art blog.)

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: The Dreamer at the Fountain Artist: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (French, 1796-1875) Date: between 1855 and 1863 Genre: portraiture, genre art Movement: Realism Medium: oil on canvas Location: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

At the time he painted this picture, Corot had finally begun to achieve the popular success he had long sought. Scenes such as this one, reflecting his memories of the trips to Italy he took in the 1820s and 1830s, won him acclaim.

[lionofchaeronea]

Have you ever seen a googly-eyed glass squid (Teuthowenia pellucida)? There are around 60 species of glass squid in the Cranchiidae family that inhabit the ocean’s depths. Most glass squids’ bodies are see-through, which helps them stay hidden from predators. One giveaway? Their eyes, which are opaque. To avoid being detected, the squid have another trick: A light-producing organ below their eyes emits flashes, mimicking sunlight from above to camouflage them from predators lurking below. 

Photo: Gonzalo Giribet, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Cottages by a River Artist: William Linton (English, 1791-1876) Date: ca. 1845 Genre: landscape painting Period: Victorian Medium: oil on panel Dimensions: 30.5 cm (12 in) high x 41.3 cm (16.3 in) wide Location: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, USA

Liverpudlian* William Linton specialized in landscapes. Though not well known today, he was compared in his own day to J.M.W. Turner and Canaletto. His work shows strong influence from French landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain and Claude-Joseph Vernet, whose panoramas Linton copied when learning his trade.

*I note this biographical detail chiefly because I love the word "Liverpudlian".

[lionofchaeronea]

Draped terracotta figurine depicting Eros, made in Tanagra, Boeotia, Greece, in the late 4th or early 3rd century BCE. Now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France.

Eros, or Desire -- who, in Archaic and Classical Greece, had typically been visualized as a powerful, even frightening cosmic force (compare Hesiod's Theogony or Orphic cosmogonies) -- began in the Hellenistic period to be more frequently depicted as a whimsical being, the perpetually childish son of Aphrodite. His youth and fickleness are on clear display in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, in which his mother must bribe him with a golden ball to convince him to make Medea fall in love with Jason.

Tanagra became a major center of terracotta figurine manufacture in the Hellenistic period. Despite being mass-produced, Tanagran figurines often show a high degree of craftsmanship, as in the delicate drapery seen here.

Photo credit: © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic

[lionofchaeronea]

Chinese Water Dragon (Physignathus cocincinus), male, family Agamidae, Guangdong, China

photograph by Tyndall Ding

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Waldmann Artist: Edwin Landseer (English, 1802-1873) Date: 1841 Genre: animal art Period: Victorian Medium: oil on panel Dimensions: 40.5 cm (15.9 in) high x 30.1 cm (11.8 in) wide Location: Royal Collection Trust, England, UK

Waldmann, a Dachshund, was brought from Germany in 1840 to join the newly established household of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Sir Edwin Landseer's depictions of animals, often infused with great sentimentality and pathos, made him enormously popular in Victorian Britain, including with the Queen herself, who commissioned many paintings from him. A black-and-white breed of Newfoundland rescue dog that he frequently depicted is now named "Landseer" in his honor.

[lionofchaeronea]

Folio 45v from a 13th century Byzantine illuminated manuscript (Ms. Ludwig II 5) now in the Getty Center, Los Angeles. This illumination depicts the Transfiguration, as described in Chapter 17 of the Gospel of Matthew. Christ, in the center and surrounded by a mandola, is flanked by Moses and Elijah. Beneath them, the disciples Peter, James, and John react with astonishment.

Medium: tempera colors and gold leaf on parchment. Dimensions: 20.6 cm (8.1 in) high x 14.9 cm (5.7 in) wide.

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Vanitas Still Life Artist: Adam Bernaert (fl. 1660s) Date: ca. 1665 Genre: still life Period: Dutch Golden Age Movement: Baroque Medium: oil on panel Dimensions: 42.5 cm (16.7 in) high x 56.6 cm (22.2 in) wide Location: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, USA

Vanitates (sg. vanitas) were a popular genre of still life in early modern Europe, depicting the folly of worldly pursuits and the inevitability of the grave. This painting lacks the skull common to the genre, replacing it with subtler reminders of time's passage. These include an hourglass, two globes representing earth and heaven (the latter with the signs of the zodiac), and a book containing the history of the early counts of Holland before the province was swallowed up by the dukes of Burgundy. The other book is open to a map of the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia), whose spices were a source of much of the Netherlands' prosperity in the 17th century.

Adam Bernaert is a somewhat nebulous figure who based many of his compositions on those of the better-known Evert Collier. This painting echoes a 1663 Collier work now in a private collection.

[lionofchaeronea]

I know regrets are fruitless, but I do sometimes wish I had more of an academic background in art history. I'm not completely untrained -- I had an absolutely phenomenal professor for Hellenistic and Roman art when I was in grad school -- but I still feel as though I'm badly lacking in knowledge even of European art, to say nothing of all the rich artistic traditions beyond Europe's borders.

Ah, well. At least a decade or so of running this blog has given me a heightened appreciation for fine art. ...Even if my own artistic skills are roughly on par with a potato's.

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: The Kitchen Maid Artist: Joachim Wtewael (Dutch, 1566-1638) Date: ca. 1620-25 Genre: portraiture, genre art, religious art (Christianity) Movement: Northern Mannerism Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 13.1 cm (5.2 in) high x 10.1 cm (4 in) wide Location: Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands

Behind the maid can be seen Jesus with the sisters Martha and Mary. Martha is busy with her chores, while Mary sits listening with rapt attention to Jesus.

Joachim Wtewael was one of the last major exponents of Mannerism in the Netherlands, as his contemporaries moved toward the more naturalistic style characteristic of the Dutch Golden Age. Also unlike many of his contemporaries, he was wealthy (a successful flax merchant) and could paint chiefly for his own satisfaction, without being tied to the demands of the hectic Dutch art market. Many of his best-known works are small oil paintings on copper plates depicting episodes from classical mythology.

[lionofchaeronea]

Reading Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology. On a related note, I'm still making progress in Spanish. I'm a long way from fluent, but at least I've moved past the "making a complete fool of myself" stage, and that's got to count for something.

[lionofchaeronea]

"They rose up in the air," illustration by Stephen Reid for The High Deeds of Finn and Other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland by T.W. Rollason (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1910).

The illustration depicts the heroine Étaín, protagonist of The Wooing of Étaín from the Irish Mythological Cycle, and her husband Midir of the Tuatha Dé Danann, on the cusp of their transformation into swans to return to the Otherworld.

Stephen Reid (Scottish, 1873-1948), trained as a painter at the Royal Scottish Academy in Aberdeen, illustrated several books of Irish mythology.

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Odalisque Artist: Charles Louis Müller (French, 1815-1892) Genre: portraiture, odalisque Movement: Orientalism Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 130.5 cm (51.3 in) high x 89 cm (35 in) wide Location: private collection

Charles Louis Müller, nicknamed Müller de Paris, was a successful and highly prolific painter in 19th-century France. His specialties were historical painting, including a series of emotionally fraught works depicting scenes from the French Revolution, and illustrations of Shakespeare. His frescoes today decorate several galleries of the Louvre.

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Harvest in Tuscany Artist: Angiolo Tommasi (Italian, 1858-1923) Date: 1903 Genre: genre painting Movement: Macchiaioli Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 32 cm (12.5 in) high x 50 cm (19.6 in) wide Location: private collection

Angiolo Tommasi, originally from Livorno, lived and worked for much of his career in Florence. He was prominent in the Macchiaioli movement, which rejected academic formality in favor of painting rural scenes en plein air, similar to the French Impressionists.

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Guanyin Riding a Dragon Artist: Harada Naojirō (Japanese, 1863-1899) Date: 1890 Genre: religious art (Buddhism) Period: Meiji Movement: Yōga Location: National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan

Guanyin is the Chinese name of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. She is known in Japanese as Kannon/Kwannon.

Harada Naojirō was a master of yōga, Western-style Japanese painting. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Apollo, at the Behest of Zeus, Restoring Hector to Health and Exhorting Him to Engage the Greeks in Combat Artist: attributed to Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée (French, 1724-1805) Date: ca. 1790 Genre: mythological art Movement: Rococo, Neoclassicism Medium: pen and black ink, bistre wash, white gouache, and graphite Dimensions: 42.5 cm (16.7 in) high x 58.1 cm (22.9 in) wide Location: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN, USA

The scene depicted occurs in Iliad Book 15. The Greeks have temporarily prevailed on the battlefield due to Hera's deception of Zeus, but upon Zeus's waking up, he sends Apollo to rally Hector (whom Ajax struck in the chest with a stone). The Trojans then resume their offensive and come within a hair's breadth of seizing the Greek camp and burning their ships.

This work was formerly credited to Jacques Réattu before being reattributed to Lagrenée. (Both artists were Italian-trained and frequently depicted mythological subjects.)