Holbein's "Portrait of an Unknown Woman"

This is a photo of my studio wall and I would like to point out the image centre right of the woman in white fur tippet and cape holding a squirrel and with botanical detail of plant tendrils on a flat blue background. I have lived with this image among the others as inspiration for a good while now. So imagine my delight to find a novel written about it.

I have just finished reading this novel by Vanora Bennett ( Harper 2007) and I can highly recommend it to lovers of art and of portrait painting in particular. It is set in 1527 when the artist Hans Holbein is in London to paint the family of Thomas More. As an artist I find such novels gleefully inspire me, filled as they are with the minutiae of the artists' life. There is always something to glean about how these great paintings were put together even if it comes from the imagination of a novelist. Dwelling on these little snippets does find its way somehow into my own practice.

This is the completed painting of the family and circle of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein. Although there are a couple of versions, the one at the top has an extra figure at the left and Bennett's novel revolves around the notion that this woman Meg Griggs is also the woman in his famous painting "Portrait of an Unknown Woman".

This is also known as "Woman with squirrel and starling". It does look amazingly like the figure in the group portrait and Bennett invents a plausible narrative to explain all the symbolism and inclusions.

I have admired Holbein's portraiture for many years. His sheer skill is laudable and he used all the technical resources of Renaissance naturalism that were at his disposal. The textures of skin, hair, fabrics and fur etc. have a high degree of verisimilitude. Also there is an unusual stillness, precision and clarity about his work and an objectiveness and dignity about his subjects. There is never any emphasis on the fleeting or captured expression. His work is far too serious for that. He reserves any sense of playfulness for symbolic inclusions.  His faces are quite flat though which I suspect is the result of working from his portrait drawings as source material for his paintings. It seems to me that he "filled in" with colour in the absence of his models.

This image of Thomas More is a tour de force and there does exist a drawing also exactly the same of the face.

To get back to the novel, the whole plot revolves around the circle of Thomas More. Bennett even rewrites her own version of what happened to the princes in the tower. She also introduces some interesting theories about Holbein's famous painting The Ambassadors" (The French Envoys) 

There has of course been a lot of scholarship about this painting and a book on my shelves called "The Ambassadors' Secret" by John North (Phoenix 2002) is as yet unread by me. ( I am promising myself to get to it soon especially after this book.) Bennett's theory about the memento mori of the distorted skull in the foreground is that it actually means "Remember More" (as in Thomas)!

Baby Portrait

This beautiful little boy was only three months old when he (unbeknownst to him) sat for his portrait. I usually work from life but in this case had to use photography for source material for the oil on canvas painting. In cases such as this I always take my own photos. I took 83 photos in this case. We had morning coffee with the parents and I just snapped away, hoping I was capturing what I was looking for.

What I was looking for was an alert and happy engaging expression but not a smile and subtle lighting to give the head some three dimensionality. Baby's Dad is behind him and that is Mum's coffee on the right.

Such a beautiful little boy, I had some some anxiety about doing him justice. I must also say this is one of the most difficult things I have ever done. In such a young subject everything is subtlety. There are no strong bones or features at this age on which to "hang" a likeness. We are pretty happy with it though.

Portrait Studies in Oil

I thought I would post these portrait studies I did  few months ago. I am having a tidy up of my studio drawers and I realised I had not even photographed these. They are all just studies done in about 2 hours each, all done alla prima from the model. There is nothing particularly special about any of them but looking back at them now, I think they are better than I thought they were. Certainly worthy of a blog post.

Art Book Discoveries at the Lifeline Book Fair

Here is a photo of my latest acquisitions for my Art Book library. The piece de resistance is the 4cm thick volume of Leonardo's anatomical drawings, many of which were borrowed from Queen Elizabeth's collection. The book was published in 1952 and I can honestly say I have never seen anything like it before. Only a few of the images were familiar. The same ones that are always shown but there is is a wealth of riches in this book.

 I will probably do some drawing copies from it. I am really getting more into anatomy and going to life drawing a couple of times a week. In fact, I am devoting this year to such studies.

Another amazing find is a book of etchings and engravings called "The School of Fontainebleau" by Henri Zerner. It contains graphic work by Fantuzzi and Jean Mignon in a Mannerist style. They were working for François 1 in France from about 1530. These works are both ultra sophisticated and yet naive.

Here are a couple of pages.

I also scored a copy of "The Spirit of Britain - A Narrative History of the Arts"  by Roy Strong who has been a Director of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert in London.

Another more obscure discovery was a book about an Estonian artist called Malle Leis. A Google search didn't reveal much but there is some synchronicity with my own work so I will keep looking for more of her.

Plenty of looking and reading fun ahead. And lots of tea drinking on my studio couch...

"Portrait of Madame X"

There are many painters for whom John Singer Sargent's "Portrait of Madame X" is the ultimate in sophisticated society portraiture. Shown at the 1884 Paris Salon it created a sensation in its day and notoriety for its subject.

The story is well known.
I have just finished a book however, a novel called

"I am Madame X" by Gioia Diliberto published by Scribner in 2003 which presents a fictionalised account of the story from the point of view of the painting's subject -  American beauty Virginie Gautreau. The amazing and very clever thing about the book is that you truly forget you are reading a novel. It seems rather that  this is Virginie's own true account of events. and you are lulled into believing you are reading facts.

For artists and art lovers the book can be devoured for its descriptions of the Paris of the Belle epoque and the details of fashionable salons and artists' ateliers. There are characterisations of several real people, Sargent of course and Carolus Duran his teacher and Dr Pozzi who was also immortalised by Sargent in paint. Also a couple of female artists are included. Filomena Seguette is loosely based on the artist Rosa Bonheur, although she reminded me of an painter version of novelist George Sand with her male attire.

Diliberto has apparently used the sketchy facts of Gautreau's life as a blueprint but the whole thing is just so believable.

I enjoyed the sections about the Salon itself about works "on the line" or being "skied" with work hung so high it was barely visible. These anecdotes provide authenticity and I simply soak up anything about the daily lives of artists from that period.

Just for interest I have taken these photos from my other Sargent book by Carter Ratcliffe which shows some of the preliminary drawings Sargent did of Virginie.

This one juxtaposes the two finished paintings. The one on the right with the wine glass is a bravura piece of painting and the novel weaves the circumstances of its creation cleverly into the story.

I highly recommend  the book for fellow artists.

Portrait of Tom finished

My portrait of Tom finished. There are progress shots in an earlier blog post. It was painted Alla Prima in about 5 sittings of about an hour each. It is a good likeness and he is very happy with it. It is just a practice piece really. I wanted to have a go at the Rembrandt triangle of light on the left cheek. It is just on a loose piece of canvas, unstretched  so it will be cropped a bit when it is stretched or framed. 

The other challenge I set myself was to paint a dark head against a light background which is the opposite of the tried and tested old master look of a light head and collar against a very dark background. I have two other portraits I am working on and the results will be posted soon.

"Storm in a Teacup" finally finished

Several weeks ago in my  blog post called "Work in progress - Studio tea set" I posted progressive images of this painting which is now finished.

I have decided to call it "Storm in a Teacup". It has taken a while to finish. I wanted the looseness of the background to indicate wind or a storm, hence the floating petals. The tea set is the studio one I use every day. I am going to frame it in an elaborate gold traditional frame. The most ornate one I can afford.