Norman Rockwell ~ May 1921

Norman Rockwell ~ The American Magazine, May 1921

"But it is not enough to draw things as they actually are, declares Mr. Rockwell. Behind every drawing that means anything must be an ideal…"

The article explains what things in the picture may symbolize. I would like to add that each thing has an ideal, not through association, that is, each thing doesn't symbolize other things, but that each has it own qualities; structure, texture, color, rhythm, energy …the nature of the thing which the artist attempts to bring forth in an ideal form. The intelligent design of line, pattern, value and color.

or as Rockwell's drawing master said ~

Once in a life class George Bridgman said to me, "My boy, you have drawn a leg, but you have missed the design of the leg." ~ Andrew Loomis, Eye of the Painter 

Anders Zorn • Tur hos Damerna

or: Why what I first thought shouldn't surprise! (see previous post)

Photographed …Drawn …Altered …Refined …Painted

Anders Zorn: The Art of the Power Portrait

Anders Zorn ~ Portrait of Adolphus Busch - 1897 oil on canvas, 51 x 37 1/2 in.
Painted during Zorn’s second trip to the United States from 1896 to 1897.

Anders Zorn, power portraitist.

I planned this post ~

What does a traveling and much in demand portraitist do when commissioned to paint a busy executive who has neither the time nor the inclination to pose…

Anders Zorn, portrait of Adolphus Busch portrait with photo overlay.

~ but upon further study I realized that the photo was an old school photoshop. Busch's head is a photograph from life, which has been grafted onto the body in a photo of the Zorn painting. This monster was then photographed and printed!

Anders Zorn ~ Adolphus Busch portrait - photoshop/painting

old school photoshop portrait of Adolphus Busch
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Details of the Zorn painting showcase how thinly he painted but for the highlights.

Barye by Bonnat: the art of the posthumous portrait

Léon Bonnat ~ Portrait of Barye with a Wax Model of "Seated Lion" - 50 13/16 x 36 5/8 in.

Portrait of Barye with a Wax Model of "Seated Lion"

William Walters commissioned this portrait through his fellow Barye enthusiast George Lucas. Barye's having died a decade earlier, Bonnat worked from a photograph of the sculptor taken by the respected French photographer Nadar that, along with a wax model of the "Seated Lion," was provided by Lucas.

Léon Bonnat ~ Portrait du sculpteur Barye, 32.5" by 44.5"

Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon), photographer (French, 1820 - 1910)
 Antoine-Louis Barye, 1855 - 1859, Salted paper print
 Image (irregular): 20.8 x 15.7 cm (8 3/16 x 6 3/16 in.) 
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Seeing the quality of the Bonnat Barye's, one wonders what percentage of his portraits are after photographs.

Léon Bonnat ~ Portrait du sculpteur Barye (detail)

or: "Sight-sized" from Life, My Ass!

FB IPO

Pump 'n' Dump

"FB’s stock wanted to drop under the IPO price of $38 many times during its 1st day of trading…only the underwriters held it up so they wouldn’t be publicly humiliated…they won’t always be there to prop this thing up, much like promoters eventually give up on pump and dumps when they’ve sold all their shares and the stocks ALL drop in the same exact manner…" ~ Timothy Sykes

1972 "FATHER AND SON", oil on canvas, 38" by 30" Norman Rockwell

CATALOGUE NOTE

In 1972 the United States Trust Company commissioned Norman Rockwell to paint Father and Son for the cover of their annual report. In a letter dated June 14, 2002, Maureen Hart Hennessey of The Norman Rockwell Museum writes, "the original idea was to show an entire family as 'Dad' tries to explain to his family 'the instruments of wealth'...Rockwell's version is much clearer and easier to understand, simply a father and son discussing these issues in the living room, with the family dog nearby." The setting for the painting was the U.S. Trust offices at 45 Wall Street and the models were an actual father and son from Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In Father and Son, a well-dressed, man is attempting to explain the fundamental principles behind financial instruments. With an investment certificate in his hand and numerous papers strewn about the living room table, the father looks towards his son, whose attentive but anxious and somewhat blank expression suggests his naiveté.

Models posing in the artist's living room in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

"Said pot wasn’t sweetened for the unknowing public, who listened to sweet melodies of Facebook’s web dominance by the propaganda outfit known to you as CNBC. The pot was saccharined for the direct benefit of selling insiders, who put an additional 25% more shares on the market, to be dumped at the ipo price of $38– valuing the company at $104 billion. Just a few weeks prior, the company was allegedly worth just $96 billion, according to lead underwriter Morgan Stanley.

What’s $8 billion between friends, no?"

full article~ http://ibankcoin.com/flyblog/2012/05/21/the-facebook-ipo-a-national-disgrace/

"…FB dropping 15%+ or the fact that it would have dropped even more had the underwriters not supported it yet again in order to avoid the inevitable embarrassment when Facebook does indeed drop 30-40% or even more as the hype fades and their slowing growth reality sets in." ~ Timothy Sykes

Robert Fawcett in Pictures

Robert Fawcett the Orson Welles of illustration.

Unlike the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, Fawcett's appearances are not mere walk-on cameos, but are often an essential supporting character or lead.

Just like Welles, Fawcett seemed to have relished the chance to play a part in the drama, and like Welles he knew no one else could play the role as well.

"I posed for the man on the edge of the bed myself, not to save a model's fee, but because I am convinced that most artists pose better than any models they can hire. I tried to get the feeling of his agony in the hands rather than by the usual mugging. Of course, I may get to be the bane of my own illustrations eventually." ~ Robert Fawcett  (from, Illustrating for The Saturday Evening Post)

Fawcett didn't just appear in his own productions. Here he is the star of an Austin Briggs!

From the "Pyrite Age of Illustration"

The Decline of Illustration, by Thomas Craven, from American Mercury Magazine September to December 1927

"For fifteen years illustration enjoyed unprecedented popularity and the income of the artist in many cases exceeded that of the author."

"in an excess of phrenetic greed, soon departed from the decent standards of  the old school, and so debased drawing into the cheapest form of mechanical ingenuity—slippery, sentimental stuff designed for an audience which was, a few years hence, to feed its imagination upon the movies and the radio."

"The prices for heads in water-color, oil and pastel mounted to incredible figures.  …all of them stupidly drawn an offensive to readers of any taste."

"American publishers have been known to encourage authors and to nurse them to fame through several failures, but under no circumstances will they foster anything but the lowest pictorial talent."

"today the bottom has dropped out of the market. The leading American magazines have discarded illustration; most novels are published without pictures; most political cartoons resemble comic strips"

"In the first place, photography. The camera has debauched the appreciation of drawing and provided a swift and inexpensive means of pandering to the growing demand for literal scenes, portraits and naked surfaces."

"With photography I would, of course, include the moving picture and its attendant insanities—the mania for pictorial fodder of all sorts, but always in an unimaginative form—, and the tabloid newspapers, with their displays of domestic crimes and lubricities. The tabloid germ has spread to the baser magazines, some of which are illustrated with old "stills" purchased from the moving picture companies."

file under: Same as it ever was…

Tableau vivant? Pictorialism? Cosplay? …?

You decide!

The desire to re-create paintings and drawings in the flesh can be found everywhere;

J.C. Leyendecker, 1918 Weapons for Liberty

at a photographers studio,

Washington, D.C., circa 1918. "Robert Hall, group"

The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19,  Théodore Géricault

and another photographers studio,

El Jaleo, 1882 John Singer Sargent 1856-1925

at the cinema,

The Alamo, 1960 - John Wayne

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863 - Manet

crate diving

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe - The New Jazz Orchestra

at a K-1 event

Yuichiro "Jienotsu" Nagashima

'i' for Instantaneous

or: Sorolla Painter of Snapshots

The cheekily titled Instantánea, Biarritz depicts Sorolla's wife with her folding pocket Kodak.

INSTANTÁNEA, BIARRITZ  (1906)

(The Sorollas first met in 1881 when Joaquín, aged 18, took a job in the photography studio of his future father-in-law Antonio Garcia. The young Sorolla was employed colouring photographs.)

Folding Pocket Kodak ad, 1901

'It has been said that Sorolla made free use of photographs in his canvases depicting action. Although he showed me many snapshots of beach scenes, I never saw him use them while painting.' ~ Gordon Stevenson (student of Sorolla)

Kodak No 2 folding brownie Model A

Made by the Eastman Kodak Company in the USA, between April 1904 and June 1907, 76,000 of these beautiful cameras were sold worldwide. It had a Meniscus Achromatic lens mounted behind a shutter which has I (Instantaneous) B and T speed settings and apertures of 1, 2 or 3. Kodak 120 roll film was used which produced an image 2¼ x 3¼ inches. 

Black imitation leather covered its wooden body and baseboard and the lens was mounted on a polished wood lens panel. A plated reversible reflecting view-finder was mounted on the baseboard and the lens was focussed by moving it forwards/backwards on sliding rails before locking it into position. 

The appearance of the camera was dominated by delightful Ruby-red leather bellows. Most cameras of the period had red bellows but in 1912 Kodak changed these to black which was thought to be a more fashionable colour.

'Sorolla's works are mere chromolithographs, his paintings of children racing on the beach are but copies of instantaneous photographs'  ~ New York Evening Post of 12 June 1909 

'I have always remembered with amusement what happened when I went with Boldini to the Sorolla exhibition at the Georges Petit Gallery in Paris. As we progressed from picture to picture Boldini seemed suddenly to get into the grip of some hidden excitement and for a time hesitated about telling me just what was the matter. At last he could stand it no longer. "This man must work with a camera", he said. "They look like so many snapshots." ~ Royal Cortissoz in Scribner's (May 1926)

It has often been assumed that Sorolla's success in capturing light and movement was aided by referring to photographs, as Sargent is said to have reported. (see- The World, 14 Feb. 1926)

Through the nineties and into the first decade of the twentieth century, commissions came from wealthy collectors in Santiago (Chile), Buenos Aires (Argentina), and Montevideo (Uruguay). Portraits--of necessity based on photographs--were requested, as were genre scenes and decorative projects.

Franzen the photographer by Sorolla

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863 – 1923)