OK, OK — I’ll stop calling them “selfies” (grin), but I’m having way too much fun with these self-portrait posts to stop now. More to come.
(Images above, w/links to my posts: Antonio Mancini, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard , Ferdinand Hodler, Rene Magritte, Frédéric Bazille, Raphael, Ivan Kramskoy, Charles Wilson Peale)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in new York has a wonderful practice of periodically assembling small, non-blockbuster exhibitions of works on paper from their enormously deep collections.
These often go unnoticed in the press, but can surprise and delight visitors to the museum who come across them on their way to something else in the museum. Personally, I tend to seek them out, as I particularly love master drawings and the related practices of etching, drypoint and aquatint.
There is a gallery on the Met’s website that features a number of pieces from the show, and — in another wonderful practice — the Met provides easily accessible high-resolution images of works like these from their permanent collection.
(Click on “Fullscreen” under the images and then choose to zoom or use the download arrow at lower right of the zoomable image.)
I’ve provided a detail crop of each of the images above, but the high-res versions are available in even greater detail.
“Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France” runs until January 5, 2014.
There is also a catalog accompanying the exhibition.
(Images above, each with detail crop: Joseph Marie Vien, Louis Jean Desprez, Jean Honoré Fragonard, Jean Étienne Liotard)
Jamel Akib is an illustrator, gallery artist and portraitist based in West Sussex, England.
His range of style reaches from straightforwardly realistic to images composed of blazing shards of color, often with rough sketch-like elements of drawing incorporated with the more paint-like finish of key areas.
Akib takes great advantage of the properties of pastel that allow properties of drawing and painting to be employed in the same image.
His website features galleries of images in several genres, along with information about classes and demonstrations.
Still Life with a Turkey Pie, Pieter Claesz
In the Rijksmuseum.
Did the centerpiece just look at me?
OK, I know that the original joking premise of these posts has worn a little thin, but the self-portraits are as strong as ever.
(Images above, w/links to my posts: Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, Arnold Böcklin, M.C. Escher, Alice Pike Barney, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Käthe Kollwitz, Norman Rockwell, Gerrit Dou)
Latona and the Lycian Peasants, Jan Brueghel the Elder
Ostensibly, this is a scene from classical mythology, showing the goddess Latona getting pissed at the peasants who are blocking her from getting a drink and turning them into frogs.
I think it’s pretty obvious, however, that what Brueghel was really interested in was the landscape — at the time not an accepted subject for painting in itself.
In the Rijksmuseum. (See my post on the Rijksmuseum website for how to create an account to access downloadable high-res images.)
