Saturday, December 20, 2008

Merry Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas (Yuletide Revels), ca. 1910
William Glackens, American, 1870-1938
Black conte crayon, ink, transparent and opaque watercolor, graphite, and paper attachment on cream, thick, smooth pulp board
Illustration for Collier's, The National Weekly, December 10, 1910.

24 3/8 x 18 1/2 in. (61.9 x 47 cm)

I will be signing off for the better part of 2 weeks (you might get a post here and there, my internet access will be intermittent) for the holidays. I wanted to leave you a with a fun Christmas image. I realized how hard it is to find Christmas art, a lot of it is horribly cheesy (but sometimes cute and sweet), much of it is illustration (which is surely often art but I was trying to find something a little more "fine"), and much of it is of course religious (not a bad thing, but was seeing if I could find fine, secular holiday art).

There is only so much time in a day so I've picked this fun drawing by William Glackens. Glacken was associated with "The Eight", Ashcan School of Artists, based in nyc. Glackens was a painter and worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines. Glacken's illustration was part of the Brooklyn Museum's 2006 exhibition: Urban Views: Realist Prints and Drawings by Robert Henri and His Circle.

Happy Holidays to all my Art of the Day readers! Thanks for reading :).

1 comment:

johnh said...

The reason for most Christmas art being illustration (aside from pre 1800-s nativity type scens) is that Christmas as we know it was largely conceived as an advertising promotion.