Queen Elizabeth I

Queen Elizabeth I
"The Darnley Portrait", c. 1575.
by Unknown artist
oil on panel, circa 1575
44 1/2 in. x 31 in. (1130 mm x 787 mm)
© National Portrait Gallery, London.
image: http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/elizface2.htm

Ah, Queen Elizabeth I, the subject of many a wonderful portrait. I discovered this wonderful website full of portraits of this historical figure in her early, mid and late years. I wandered through all of them trying to pic a favorite. "The Darnley Portrait" won out. Looks like I have a good eye, as this is considered one of the best portraits of Elizabeth and one of the few thought to be painted from life (which might have something to do with the richer element of realism in her face).

The attribution, "The Darnley Portrait" is after a previous owner of the painting.

The Ladies

Elizabeth Vigee le Brun
Self-portrait in a straw hat, after 1782
National Gallery, London

In honor of Women's History Month, a week of works by fantastic women. Vigee le Brun was one of the most successful women artists of her time as well more successful than many of the male counterparts of her day. Primarily self-taught due to the exclusion of women from art schools, Vigee Le Brun painted her way into the French Court at the age of 20. She was commissioned to paint portraits of inflential people of the time, including Queen Marie-Antoinette. She was admitted (one of only 4 seats reserved for women) to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris.

While marriage and children often ended the artistic careers of women, Vigee Le Brun supported herself and her daughter with painting. Her self-portrait focuses on her status as a professional artist, her palette showing the colors with which this portrait is painted. (NG London/Painting of the Month). She was revered by both critics and fellow painters alike. When coming across this painting in the National Gallery (I wandered its halls often while studying in London) I always stopped to spend some time with Elizabeth.

Oddly, a lover of both bats and Vigee Le Brun dedicates a site to her... I don't exactly understand it but it offers much in the way of text and images. http://www.batguano.com/vigee.html

The Librarian

Librarian, 1570
Guiseppe Arcimboldo (Italian, 1527-1593)
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorische Museum
Image courtesy of wikimedia commons

I am indulging myself a little bit today. Guiseppe Arcimboldo is the brilliant painter of an array of bizarre heads concocted of oodles of gorgeous fantastically rendered objects, usually from the natural world. He is famous for his anthropomorphic paintings, when I hear his name I always think of a head made of fruit.

His work The Librarian "would have been recognised by its first audience as a cruel portrait of Wolfgang Lazius, court historiographer to Maximilian and a passionate book collector."(Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, Saturday April 26, 2007) His work is witty, but in order to be taken seriously it could not simply be an assemblage of objects. These paintings live as portraits, with a depth and interest one might not perceive at the outset.

Arcimboldo was embraced by the Surrealist movement and appears surprisingly modern when remembering that he worked out of the 16th century (same feeling I've always had about Hieronymous Bosch as well). I am only just learning about Arcimboldo but I highly recommend The Guardian article as it touches upon his variety of work, the influence of Leonardo da Vinci and the affect of the history of scientific discovery.

Check out a gallery of his work.

Celebrity Portrait

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rob Besserer, Cumberland Island, Georgia, 1990
Annie Leibovitz
chromogenic print, photograph
http://www.corcoran.org/leibovitz/index.htm

In the process of cataloging a new volume on Annie Leibovitz I was dismayed to discover that this was the first book to be placed under Leibovitz's cutter number (just in case you wanted to learn a little about where those pesky numbers on library books come from :). Since this is the first significant volume to go into our collection dedicated to Leibovitz (and it's a rather short volume too) I wanted to give today's Art Dose to Leibovitz.

Leibovitz is well-known for her unique celebrity portraits as well as her documentary photography. This photo of Baryshnikov is one of the over a hundred that are part of the internationally travelling exhibition, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, organized by the Brooklyn Museum and currently at the National Portrait Gallery in London.