Academic literature on the topic 'Portrait painting, American'

The image of Liszt at the piano has been a favorite with artists. This article examines two paintings: an 1868 painting of Liszt at a Chickering piano by G. P. A. Healy and a 1919 painting of Liszt at a Steinway piano by John C. Johansen. Due to recent publications, the Chickering painting and its story are fairly well-known. In contrast, the Steinway painting is almost unknown. Healy’s portrait (1868) was done in his studio in Rome as Liszt sat playing for him. While Healy had seen Liszt’s Chickering piano, the instrument in his studio was not that piano and, despite the name “Chickering” on the fallboard, the painting does not faithfully convey the details of Liszt’s Chickering. Johansen’s portrait (1919) was done by an artist who had never met Liszt and almost certainly had never seen his Steinway piano. Because of the Chicago connection, this article proposes that Johansen took his inspiration from Healy.

The 1599 portrait Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons, Pedro and Domingo by Andean artist Andres Sanchez Gallque (Figure 1) is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced paintings in the modern literature on colonial South America. The painting has been extensively praised, parsed, and interpreted by twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors, and heralded as the first signed South American portrait. “Remarkable” is the adjective most frequently employed to describe this work: modern authors express surprise and delight not only with the persuasive illusionistic power of the painting, the mesmerizing appearance of its subjects, and the artist's impressive mastery of the genre, but with the fact that the artist chose to sign and date his work, including a specific reference to his Andean identity.

The 1599 portrait Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons, Pedro and Domingo by Andean artist Andres Sanchez Gallque (Figure 1) is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced paintings in the modern literature on colonial South America. The painting has been extensively praised, parsed, and interpreted by twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors, and heralded as the first signed South American portrait. “Remarkable” is the adjective most frequently employed to describe this work: modern authors express surprise and delight not only with the persuasive illusionistic power of the painting, the mesmerizing appearance of its subjects, and the artist's impressive mastery of the genre, but with the fact that the artist chose to sign and date his work, including a specific reference to his Andean identity.

The article focuses on a comprehensive study of Alexander Melamid’s portraiture included in his first independent project after thirty years of collaborative creativity with Vitaly Komar. Throughout the entire thirty-year period of cooperation, the painters signed their works with the Komar and Melamid trademark making it difficult to determine the artists’ individual characters. A detailed analysis of the solo works of the 60-70s, before the beginning of collaborative creativity, is presented; it helps us to detect individual traits in the works of the duet and to better identify the artists’ personalities, to reconstruct the technical features of each artist’s painting style. In 2007, Alexander Melamid began creating a large-scale series of paintings which would become his new conceptual line of creative work; later, in 2009, the artist developed and supplemented the series with portraits of Italian clergy and Russian oligarchs. Characteristic features of the Holy Hip Hop! portrait series, exhibited at the Detroit Museum of Modern Art in 2008, are studied in the article. The artist paid special attention to the psychological characters of the portrayed, the entire series is painted in one color scheme, within one scale. The pictorial series is an integral conceptual statement. The purely plastic qualities of the paintings fade into the background. They are not so important for Alexander Melamid - he uses academic painting as a tool to convey more accurately the psychology of the portrayed whom he treats with ironic interest. It is important to note that Alexander Melamid erases the line between the classical and the marginal art, just as Francois Millet did in his time. The article succeeded in updating sociocultural issues with the help of contextual comparison with portraiture by Diego Velazquez and contemporary American artist Kehinde Wiley whose creative life has deeply integrated into the socio-political realities of the United States of the beginning of the 21st century and the African-American cultural tradition. Kehinde Wiley is known for his realistic large-scale portrayals of African-Americans in poses borrowed from works of classical European painting of the 17-19th centuries. The artist openly propagandizes, deliberately emphasizing the didactic function of his paintings. It is in the context of contemporaries’ works and the political situation in the USA of the 2000-2010s that Alexander Melamid’s work should be considered.

AbstractFor more than a century the only eyewitness account of Rembrandt's Portrait of an old woman (fig. 1) was a description made by Wilhelm Bode in 1883. At the time, he was unable to decipher the date, 1632; nor did he know anything about Aeltje Uylenburgh or the history of the panel. However, the painting's provenance has since been revealed, and it can be traced back in an almost unbroken line to its commission, a rare occurrence in Rembrandt's oeuvre. A pendant portrait, now lost, featured the preacher Johannes Sylvius, who is also the subject of an etching by Rembrandt dating from 1633 (fig. 2). Rembrandt had a close relationship with the Sylvius couple and he married their cousin Saskia Uylenburgh in 1634. After Aeltje's death in 1644, the couple's son Cornelis Sylvius inherited the portraits. We know that Cornelis moved to Haarlem in 1647, and that in 1681 he made a will bequeathing the pendants to his son Johannes Sylvius Junior. For the most part of a century they remained in the family. We lose track of the portrait of Johannes Sylvius when, in 1721, Cornelis II Sylvius refurbishes a house on the Kruisstraat in Haarlem. However, thanks to a handful of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century copies, it has been possible to reconstruct the trail followed by Aeltje. In 1778, a copy from Dessau turned up at auction in Frankfurt. It was bought under the name of Johann Heinrich Roos by Henriette Amalie von Anhalt-Dessau. There is a copy of this copy in the museum of Marseilles, attributed Ferdinand Bol (fig. 3). In 2000 an article in the Tribune de Genève revealed that the original had belonged to the Burlamacchi Collection in the eighteenth century, and was then thought to be a portrait of Rembrandt's mother. Jean-Jacques Burlamacchi (1694-1748), a prominent Geneva collector, acquired major works of art, including probably the Rembrandt portrait, while travelling in Holland and Britain around 1720. It was the heirs of Burlamacchi, the Misses de Chapeaurouge, who opened the famous collection to the public. In 1790 or thereabouts, the Swiss portrait painter Marc-Louis Arlaud produced a copy, now in the museum at Lausanne (fig. 4), which for many years was thought to be an autograph work by Rembrandt. The painter Georges Chaix also made a copy, which he exhibited in Geneva in 1823. This work still belongs to the artist's family; unfortunately it has not been possible to obtain an image. After the Burlamacchi Collection was sold in about 1825, the painting was referred to somewhat nostalgically as 'Un Rembrandt "genevois"'. It was bought for 18,000 francs by the Paris art dealer Dubois, who sold it to the London banker William Coesvelt. In 1828, Coesvelt in turn sold the portrait through the London dealer John Smith, who described it as 'the painter's mother, at the age of 62'. We know that the picture was subsequently acquired from Albertus Brondgeest by the banker James de Rothschild (1792-1868) for his country house at Boulogne, as this is mentioned in the 1864 description of Rothschild's collection by Charles Blanc. Baron James's widow, Betty de Rothschild, inherited the portrait in 1868 and it was in Paris that the Berlin museum director Wilhelm Bode (fig. 5) first saw the painting. In his description of 1883 he states that the woman was not, in his opinion, Rembrandt's mother. In 1886 the portrait fell to Betty's son, Baron Alphonse (1827-1905). Bode published a heliogravure of the work in 1897, which remained for many years the only available reproduction (fig. 6). Rembrandt's portrait of a woman was a showpiece in Baron Alphonse's Paris smoking room (fig. 7). Few art historians came to the Rothschild residence and neither Valentiner nor Bredius, who published catalogues of Rembrandt in 1909 and 1935, respectively, had seen the painting. Alphonse's heir was Baron Edouard de Rothschild, who in 1940 fled to America with his daughter Bethsabée. The Germans looted the painting, but immediately after the war it was exhibited, undamaged, in a frame carrying the (deliberately?) misleading name 'Romney' (fig. 8). In 1949, Bethsabée de Rothschild became the rightful owner of the portrait. She took it with her when she moved to Israel in 1962, where under the name of Bathsheva de Rothschild she became a well-known patron of modern dance. In 1978, J. Bruyn en S. Levie of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) travelled to Tel Aviv to examine the painting. Although the surface was covered with a thick nicotine film, they were impressed by its condition. Bruyn and Levie were doubtful, however, that the panel's oval format was original, as emerges from the 'Rembrandt-Corpus' report of 1986. Not having seen the copies mentioned earlier, they were unaware that one nineteenth-century replica was also oval (fig. 9). Their important discovery that the woman's age was 62 was not further investigated at the time. Baroness Bathsheva de Rothschild died childless in 1999. On 13 December 2000 the painting was sold by Christie's, London, after a surprising new identity for the elderly sitter had been put forward. It had long been known that Rembrandt painted portraits of Aeltje Uylenburgh and her husband, the minister Cornelis Sylvius. Aeltje, who was a first cousin of Rembrandt's wife, Saskia Uylenburgh, would have been about 60 years old at the time. Given that the age of the woman in the portrait was now known to be 62, it was suggested that she could be Aeltje. The portrait was acquired for more than 28 million US dollars by the art dealer Robert Noortman, who put it on the market as 'Aeltje' with a question mark. In 2005, Noortman sold the portrait for 36.5 million to the American-Dutch collectors Mr and Mrs De Mol van Otterloo. At the time, the Mauritshuis in The Hague felt that trying to buy the portrait would be too extravagant, while the Rijksmuseum was more interested in acquiring a female portrait from Rembrandt's later period. Aeltje was thus destined to leave the Netherlands for good. A chronicle of the Sylvius family published in 2006 shows that Aeltje Uylenburgh would have been born in 1570 (fig. 10), demonstrating that she could indeed be the 62-year-old woman depicted by Rembrandt in 1632. We know that Aeltje was godmother to Rembrandt's children and that Saskia was godmother to Aeltje's granddaughter. Further evidence of the close ties between the two families is provided by Rembrandt's etching of Aeltje's son Petrus, produced in 1637. It is now generally accepted that the woman in the portrait is Aeltje. She was last shown in the Netherlands at the 'Dutch Portraits' exhibition in The Hague. In February 2008 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston announced that it had received on long-term loan one the finest Rembrandts still in private ownership.

The article focuses on an analysis of Hart Crane’s essay “Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros.” One of Crane’s few art-historical texts, the critical piece in question is first of all a tribute to the American poet’s friend, the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. The author of a portrait of Crane, Siqueiros is a major artist, one of the leading figures that marked the history of Mexican painting in the first half of the twentieth century. While it is interesting to delve into the way Crane approaches painting in general and Siqueiros’ oeuvre in particular, an analysis of the essay with which the present article is concerned is also worthwhile for another reason. Like many examples of art criticism—and literary criticism, for that matter—“Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros” reveals a lot not only about the artist it revolves around, but also about its author, an artist in his own right. In a text written in the last year of his life, Hart Crane therefore voices concerns which have preoccupied him as a poet and which, more importantly, are central to modernist art and literature.

Abstract This article examines parallels between the exchange of miniature portraits in late eighteenth-century letters and the exchange of photographs and keepsakes in the twentieth-century correspondence of American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Drawing on theories of the miniature in Susan Stewart’s work, alongside art-historical and literary-critical accounts of the practice of exchanging miniature portraits in letters, the article builds on arguments that portraits go hand-in-hand with the genre of letter writing. I argue that previous criticism of the Bishop-Lowell correspondence has not yet adequately explored their epistolary discussion and exchange of visual materials. As in the case of their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, for Bishop and Lowell, letter writing frequently involved a literal and metaphorical exchange of portraits. The article places particular photographs in their original context alongside letters, demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between images and text and the key role played by the visual in letter writing. It provides a fresh reading of Bishop’s and Lowell’s linked poems, ‘The Armadillo’ and ‘Skunk Hour’, arguing that these poems are a means of portrait-painting in relation to the other. The poems are examined alongside descriptions of an antique miniature cameo, sent by Lowell to Bishop as a companion to his poem, which functions as an ambivalently gendered portrait of Bishop. Finally, the poets’ interlocking memoirs, ‘91 Revere Street’ and ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’, are analysed to show their origin in letters, and their shared preoccupation with portraiture, scale and framing.

Roused by the deaths of five African American transgender women in Florida in 2018, artist David Antonio Cruz intervenes in inaccurate media reports about these murders. Painting portrait of the florida girls in 2019, his diptych of significant scale and palette, confronts this senseless violence and challenges sensationalized coverage. This article centralizes his work arguing for the ways in which Cruz innovates transgender of color visibility through a queer of color critiquing of the portrait form and concerted use of a ‘blacktino’ optic. Ruminating on the combined tragedies of gun violence at Pulse nightclub and serial murder of trans femmes, Cruz’s work interrogates the posthumous transgender image with a reversal of digital source material and bodily logics in pose and countenance. By turning to the transnational crossroads shaping these communities’ shared horrors, central Florida, Cruz activates his audience with a sense of urgency in the persuasive power of pink.

Thesis (M.A. in Art History)--S.M.U.<br>Title from PDF title page (viewed Oct. 7, 2009). Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 47-03, page: 1237. Adviser: Janis Bergman-Carton. Includes bibliographical references.

Imagine a theater. Build one in your mind. I do not care if it is the largest theater in the universe or if it is the size of a shoebox. The theater can be an elaborate construction with gilded cherubs and priceless jewels. If you would prefer the theater to be a minimal design, imagine it that way. Maybe the theater is made out of glass or crystal. You can be all alone in the theater or maybe you are seated next to an alien, a cave man, or a robot. As the curtain rises an enormous pipe organ is spewing out J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The sound is colossal. The stage is designed to look like a filthy and bleak art studio. Sculptures that look like decaying flesh hang from the ceiling. Papers and dirty painting rags are scattered all over the floor. A roach crawls towards some moldy food in the wastebasket. A piece of beef jerky sits next to a pile of paint tubes and paintbrushes. Canvases are stacked against the wall. Dried paint is splattered everywhere. A woman enters stage left. As she begins to speak, the music fades… “My most recent paintings are meant to serve as gateways between daily life and an exotic utopian fantasy. These strange psychological spaces function as portals into a new frontier inhabited with the most stupendous creatures. Active volcanoes, carnivorous plants, terrible lizards, pink Chihuahuas, flesh-eating insects, unidentified flying objects, and a host of other amazing things coexist in this cruel tropical paradise. “Everything I do is a self-portrait and a disguise. I imagine the characters in my paintings to be mutant clones. The act of painting is like looking in the mirror. I like to spend most of my time doing one or the other. I am driven by an insatiable urge to see what I truly look like. I suffer from an unfulfilled desire to meet myself. I am frustrated with impressions and reflections. These confessions reveal my work as possibly the most disgusting display of narcissism in the entire history of art. “The act of painting is an absurd and self-indulgent enterprise. I paint with the ridiculous and frivolous purpose of delighting the eye. Nevertheless, my hope is that my paintings capture an important aspect of my utopian fantasy with their sumptuous surroundings embellished with rainbows, natural disasters, butterflies, exotic grasses and bizarre costumes. “My paintings can be read on many different levels from surface to deep allegory. The finished product is the result of hours upon hours of painting, pondering, and dreaming. Below the surface lies a nauseating abyss. “My work is a delicious feast for the aesthetic consumer. I am a villainous mad scientist with a hunger for immortality. My eyes are gluttonous fools. I am a mystery and a deception. Vermillion is my opulent fetish. Lemon yellow is my nemesis.” The music grows louder again. The woman begins to cackle. She then takes a deep breath and a deeper and more dramatic bow. She exits stage right--you find that you want to applaud--but unfortunately, this story is not over. I suggest that you get yourself a snack like some popcorn, chocolate, or gummy bears before reading any further. The curtain slowly and elegantly comes down.

This body of work is comprised of autobiographical narratives from my everyday experiences. The conflict in the stories comes both from without and within: awkward, frustrating situations force perplexed responses from the protagonist (me) even as I struggle to maintain internal balance between combative contradictory thoughts and impulses. I adopt many conventions from comic books. They allow me to freely incorporate text and image into the same pictorial space. Additionally, the comic book form possesses associations with \"low art\" that are valuable to my work. Comics are entertaining and non-threatening - they are perceived as childish and frivolous, and are accessible to a mass audience. I use the formal devices of comic books to raise the viewer/reader\'s expectations for a lighthearted, juvenile form of entertainment. However, once the viewer/reader examines the work more closely, I give them something else: a new way of looking at regular life that reveals the profound in the ordinary; a chance to identify with my awkward, deeply personal experiences; a quiet note of encouragement that none of us is truly alone.

In 1800, Gilbert Stuart began three paintings of his friend, republican writer, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton--the Worcester, Winterthur, and Boston portraits. While Morton has been remembered more for a tragic personal family scandal than for her literary endeavors, Stuart's provocative images acknowledged her as both a poet and an intellect. His portraits presented a progressive and potentially controversial interpretation of his sitter--the lovely and learned Morton--by prioritizing the writer's life of the mind rather than her socially prescribed life in the world. This study reconstructs the circumstances by which Stuart composed the group of Morton paintings that culminate in his unorthodox Worcester rendering through which he ultimately depicted Morton as the first woman of ideas in American art. Supported by close readings of her work, this dissertation illuminates both the course and depth of the exceptional personal and professional relationship between Morton and Stuart. The paths of the two republican figures crossed at several historic junctures and is highlighted by the interconnectivity of their work. Most significantly, the Stuart portraits represent an ideal lens through which to view Morton's life and work as well as to follow the Boston native's transformation into one of America's earliest women of ideas.<br>text

Chapter 7 picks up Mai’s story after his arrival in Britain and marries it with Reynolds’s story through the momentous years of 1774 to 1776. First, we focus on Mai. The First Admiral, Lord Sandwich, arranges for him to meet George III within days, before being taken over by the Pacific enthusiast Joseph Banks. Among the many personalities he meets is Charles Burney, father of a fellow Pacific voyager and one of Reynolds’s greatest mates. It is likely at a Burney-hosted dinner that Reynolds first encounters Mai. Reynolds exhibits his portrait of Mai at the Royal Academy in April 1776. The difficulties Reynolds had encountered when painting Ostenaco are now clearly resolved. The chapter closes amid the escalating tension preceding the American declaration of independence. Reynolds, as ever, weathers the storm through art and affability. Mai determines to head home by any means necessary, having by now gathered as much as he can from the British for his own personal plan of launching political action back home.

Chapter 2 focuses on mid-century Philadelphia’s burgeoning art community through the figure of travelling English portrait painter John Wollaston, who visited the city in 1752 and 1758/9. Wollaston’s presence encouraged the young student Francis Hopkinson to write a poem about the artist in the new periodical the American Magazine. By tracing the aesthetic responses that Hopkinson and the fellow students in his circle (including Benjamin West) had to Wollaston’s portraits the chapter charts Philadelphians’ engagement with the aesthetic debates raging in London over the role of the artist and the power of the portrait to civilize. Hopkinson embraced the new model of connoisseurship being popularized in the British art capital of London but recast it to argue that the portrait could civilize the sitter. Reading Wollaston’s portraits through the model of physiognomy reveals how viewers understood his paintings to improve sitters’ civility and how his paintings forged social connections between sitters.

The introduction provides an overview of the abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865. It explores how Americans and Russians of diverse backgrounds responded to emancipation through cultural production. They created textual and visual representations of African Americans and Russian peasants in fiction, poetry, illustrated periodicals, oil paintings, and advertisements. A comparison of these depictions reveals striking similarities and differences that show how people remembered or sought to portray serfdom, slavery, and the post-emancipation era.

This chapter studies a series of portraits of young women dressed for the masquerade, completed by English artist John Wollaston in Charleston, South Carolina. Although Wollaston painted the sitters in historic costume appropriate for a public masked ball, no masquerades were held in the British North American colonies. Instead, these fictional portrayals allowed colonial women to vicariously participate in the sexually riotous assemblies. For male colonists, the paintings underlined the need to contain women’s sexuality. In a colonial environment, many feared women’s proximity to native Americans would spur savage behaviors and compromise civil society. Most of the portraits feature young women about to be married, connecting their masked visages with the metaphor of a woman in courtship who masked her affections to attain the best husband. Wollaston’s adoption of mask iconography also resonates with the tumultuous 1760s, marked by the growing political crisis between Great Britain and her American colonies, when colonists questioned the nature of their identity as imperial subjects and feared British duplicity.

This chapter marks a period in Arthur Szyk's life which was spent in increased travel, usually due to exhibitions of his work. However, the worldwide economic crisis that followed the 1929 crash drastically reduced the market for elaborate, deluxe illustrated books, and speculative printings like that of the Statute of Kalisz were no longer feasible; consequently, most of Szyk's projects, for some time to come, were self-motivated rather than commissioned. Yet he did undertake some of his major projects during this period. His interest in America, for instance, was realized on a grand scale in his next major project — an extended series of miniature paintings devoted to the history of the American Revolution. In addition, motivated by his belief in the goals of the organization, Szyk began an illuminated version of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Like the manuscript of the Statute of Kalisz, this work employs historical scenes and portraits as well as allegorical and symbolic motifs.

No person better defined the collaborative gestalt of queer Chicano art practices than Joey Terrill. As a principal figure in the Escandalosa Circle, he bore witness to his friends’ HIV infection and eventual demise. This chapter examines the queer visual testimonios engendered by his scene paintings and portraits. As it follows his excursions between coasts, it shows him rendering sights of contagion, whether on a Fire Island beach in New York or a hazardous garden in Beverly Hills. Terrill’s retrospectively eyes his HIV transmission in self-analytical portraits tempered by a pathogenic time stamp, creating what is arguably the most consistent visual account of AIDS in American art. The implications of his queer visual testimonios on canvas and paper have profound meaning for collectors rearticulating their domestic environments with traces of Terrill’s retrospective examinations of HIV infection and terminal illness.

This chapter examines one way in which the Indies mentality was reproduced at an institutional level: through the practice of rotating officials between postings in India and the Americas. It is a case study in colonial lives, which have become a crucial hermeneutic for imperial history in recent years. The chapter focuses on Maria Nugent, whose diaries and letters record her time in Jamaica and India, where her husband was governor and commander in chief, respectively. Though a woman's diaries might seem to offer only a limited perspective on imperial institutions, it argues that what Lady Nugent calls “the business of society” actually represents a crucial — but largely overlooked — arena of colonial governance. By painting a portrait of empire whose backdrop is a ballroom instead of a boardroom, the chapter restores British women to the stories about imperial rule.

The name for rheumatoid arthritis was provided by Alfred Baring Garrod in the late 1850s. Before this period there are descriptions of patients who seem to have had the disease which appeared from the late 1700s onwards, with more descriptions appearing after 1800. Analysis of portraits from the Flemish school of painters have suggested some of these showed features indicative of rheumatoid arthritis. However, the interpretation of the findings in these paintings is highly subjective. There is also some evidence from palaeopathological studies that skeletal remains from several thousand years ago in North America showed features suggestive of rheumatoid arthritis. As with the interpretation of art, this is a relatively subjective field and the findings remain controversial. The key points made in this chapter are that rheumatoid arthritis was definitely present in the nineteenth century and may have been present before them. Whether it is a modern disease or has a long history remains speculative.

The primary focus of this chapter is the fixed-form mask in its many manifestations, beginning with ‘Death Masks Re-membered’. The difference between performance masks and death masks is theorised, including a discussion of photographs of the death masks of notable figures. The fascination of modernist painters with African masks in British, French and German museums is discussed with reference to the Picasso Primitif exhibition (2017) and to the history of anthropological exhibitions of the ‘savage’ during the early years of Modernism. Indigenous masquerade is further explored by commentary on photographic portraits of the ‘other’, with consideration of the rapport between subject and photographer. Painted images of the mask object and disguised individuals by Paul Cézanne, James Ensor, Émil Nolde and Pablo Picasso are contrasted with Edward Sheriff Curtis’s photos of Native American masking. Modernist innovations in masquerade, like the dance scenography of Loïe Fuller, highlight alternative methods of changing the body image, as well as transforming the human figure into a part-object form (an aspect exhibited also in a painting by Margaret Macdonald Mackinstosh). Modernist Pierrots in Berlin, Copenhagen and St Petersburg, for example, suggest that playful disguise was an almost-universal impulse in Modernism across Europe and the United Kingdom.