Rhinoceros

Pietro Longhi (Italian, 1702-85)
Rhinoceros, 1751
Oil on canvas 23x19
Ca' Rezzonico (museum dedicated to 18th c. Venice)
Image: Wikipedia

A painting that caught someone's eye in my Rococo to Revolution. Longhi was known as a bit of a truth teller in his art. Nothing fancy, nothing unique, he just painted it like he saw it which at the time in Venice was Venetians at play. As a result his people don't always mesh, they appear more as placeholders. This particular painting is interesting due to the rhinoceros of course, which while seeming odd is actually a depiction of a real rhinoceros who found herself in Venice, brought to Europe in 1741. Clara, the rhinoceros even has her own wikipedia page!

Soap Bubbles

Jean Simeon Chardin (French, 1699–1779)
Soap Bubbles 1733-34?
oil on canvas
24 x 24 7/8 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art

I've always loved this painting. I've discovered that there are multiple versions, with questions over which was executed first, so there is no definitive date on this work. I am pretty sure this is the one that I have seen, since I have yet to get myself to the National Gallery or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (a pretty sad state in my experience of art museums I have to say).

Aside from the simple beauty of the style and technique, I also tend to love any theme of children (at least in 18th c. art). This was a favorite theme of Chardin ("idle play of children). The existence of 3 versions of this painting reminds me of an interesting inquiry I had at work recently. A patron called asking about a work they had seen in our museum. She had looked for an image of it online and believed she had found it. She called to ask a few questions about the work, one being that she wasn't sure why the image she was looking at online looked so different from what she remembered. It was because it wasn't the same sculpture of course, but she had trouble wrapping her mind around the fact that an artist would create more than one version of the same subject with the same title. She asked, "did they really do that?".

Feline Marat

Cat Marat
anonymous
Cat image: http://www.dsa.unipr.it/giavelli/GATTI_arte/david.jpg

Okay, so this doesn't really fit into my interest in spreading the awesomeness and wonder of art, but in a way it does. If the original painting interested someone enough, now we have this wonderfully silly and kind of awesome cat version. Pure fun on the left (not to shabbily rendered either), art on the right. Of course the original subject is not funny, rather incredibly serious. The cat painting is rather rude in a way, absurd, yet out of a page of cat paintings, I giggled the most.

Death of Marat, 1793
Jacques-Louis David
Oil on canvas, 162 x 128 cm
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

More cat art!

Leopard Hip Ornament

Leopard Hip Ornament, 18th century
Nigeria, West Africa, Benin Kingdom
Bronze
8 1/2 x 5 7/8 x 3 1/4 in. (21.6 x 14.9 x 8.3 cm)
AMAM 1955.22
Image: Allen Memorial Art Museum website

Decorative elements reflected the ranks of those in the Benin Kingdom (15th-19th c.) The oba, divine ruler, was the only one who had the right to take human life, and the leopard was his symbol. Details of this particular mask clearly define it as being from Benin. It is fascinating that the details of the ornament, size of leopard spots, can determine its origin.

"The leopard was, and is, a widespread symbol of authority and rulership in southern Nigeria, conferring by association the animal's characteristic beauty and elegance, as well as its deadliness, speed, and surety, upon the wearer." (AMAM website)

Light-Dark

An experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768
Joseph Wright of Derby (1737-1797)
Oil on canvas
183 x 244 cm.
National Gallery, London

We got a catalog in today about Darwin, natural science and the visual arts and I started looking for art with connections to science (and started up a bibliography of it for a display at the library :). After a bit of searching, I remembered this wonderful painting by Joseph Wright (and happily remembered his name, though not the title despite its straightforwardness).

While my mind made direct connections to science, science may only serve as a cursory subject base for the painting as a whole. Everyone is watching a man demonstrate the air pump, but Wright's focus is on emotion and mood and style (the pump had been invented in previous century). The nighttime setting enables Wright to use very strong chiaroscuro (light-dark) to create dramatic affect. The people crowded around the demonstration have a wide range of reactions to the spectacle, fascination, horror, boredom, contemplation, all stemming from the same centralized source. This is the most well-known painting of Wright's, inspiring discussion of morality, science and enlightenment. Note that if you link to the image on the nga website you can access some awesome zooming capabilities.

I shared something from the fantastic Transcriptions LFS Shorts collaborative project at the National Gallery, London in a previous post and discovered Transcriptions: Animation this time around (there are also a couple of short films connected to this painting). I can't embed the animation but I highly recommend linking over to the website to see The Poison Tree inspired by Wright's painting. I get very excited when I discover all the wonderful collaborations happening between museums and schools, museums are still often a fantastic world of untapped possibilities, so much innovation still awaits!

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