An Artist in His Studio, John Singer Sargent

Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Many, if not most paintings are not named by the artist, but by subsequent buyers, sellers or scholars. If Sargent named this one (and I have to think he did), it was with tongue firmly in cheek.

Sargent painted his friend, Italian painter Ambrogio Raffele, on a vacation in the Alps; the “artist’s studio” is clearly a corner of a cramped hotel room, a desk corner and part of the bed serving as his easel.

The bravura brushwork which which Sargent is praised (or damned, if the speaker is a modernist looking down on the “facile” skills of 19th century painters), is clearly in evidence here, though more casually and briefly applied than in his more formal work.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing this painting in person, and it’s just a wonder and a treat. The handling of the bedsheets should be in the dictionary as the definition of “painterly”.

This was obviously painted for Sargent’s own pleasure, like an Olympic-level runner going for a morning run just to enjoy a beautiful spring day.

The Feast of the Gods, Giovanni Bellini and Titian

Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the National Gallery of Art, DC, which also has downloadable files (the larger of which requires a free login account).

Venetian Renaissance master Giovanni Bellini‘s last great painting was uncharacteristically a mythological scene — a departure from his lifetime of religious subjects — painted two years before his death.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which has the painting in its collection, describes The Feast of the Gods as “one of the greatest Renaissance paintings in the United States”. (Since they also have Leonardo’s stunning portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in their collection, they should know.)

The painting was commissioned by Duke Alfonso d’Este as one of a series of works to decorate his study. Some years after Bellini’s death, the duke commissioned changes to the painting, first by Dosso Dossi, who revised the landscape at upper left and added the pheasant in the tree at the upper right, and then by Bellini’s brilliant student, Titian, who painted over Dosso’s landscape changes (but left he pheasant) and created the landscape at left and the dramatic mountainscape in center that we see in the the painting’s current state.

There is an article on the painting on Wikipedia, and an analysis of the work on WebExhibits, including an exposition on the pigments used, gleaned from an investigation of the painting carried out during a restoration conducted in 1985. There is a more recent continuation of the WebExhibits description of the pigments on ColourLex.