some Practical Hints

for Art Students, by Charles A. Lasar

Charles Lasar was born in 1856, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The landscape painter studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, with Gérôme. 

He exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1885-87 and in 1908; at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Annual four times from 1885 to 1903; at Salons of the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts, Paris, in 1890; and at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1902 and 1908. 

Lasar was a popular and influential expatriate teacher. Active in Paris, he was affectionately known as “Shorty.” He attracted many students, many of who were women, to his studio in the Montparnasse neighborhood. He taught landscape painting en plein air, and his classes traveled around the French countryside, from Auvers to Normandy to Belgium, Holland, and Salisbury, England. Among his notable female students were Minerva Chapman, Cecilia Beaux, and Violet Oakley. He even formed an American baseball team in Paris. 

His instruction book, Practical Hints for Art Students, was published in 1910. 

The artist died in 1936, in Neuilly (Paris), France.

Fortuny/Millet(?)

Mariano Fortuny, Idyll

BONUS HINT~
'The Individual who is well drawn in his parts lacks a total sense of movement; he is immobile, as if he were fixed on the water; his position I believe is not pushed far enough forward–that is, to the extreme limit of movement in rowing, an infinity of rapid phases, and an infinity of points from his upper body back as far as it will go. There are two moments of action, either when the rower is leaning forward, the oars back, or when he has pushed back, with the oars ahead; you have taken an intermediate point, that is the reason for the immobility in the work.' ~ Gérôme, from a letter* to Eakins, in response to the latter seeking advice regarding an early version of John Binglin in a Single Scull.  *(May 10, 1873)

John Buscema, page from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way