Blog post tip: James Gurney has a post on the Sorollo Museum's new exhibition of sketches by the artist.
Picturing a World
Beaux sketch
March 29, 2019
Sketches, studies, and unfinished work of any kind have an appealing immediacy. They are good for characterizing artists, and good reminders that rough drafts, false starts, and revision are all part of writing any sort of story. Cecilia Beaux's autobiography, Background with Figures, was a key source for me when I was researching Where the Light Falls. Wouldn't I have loved to have this image then! For anyone who wants a quick look at Beaux and the Breton art scene, the blog my daily art display has a good post on Beaux in Concarneau, the summer of 1888.
Ladies painting a bull
April 8, 2018
Blog post alert: James Gurney’s post on Von Hayek’s Animal-Painting Academy is the source of this photo of women artists en plein air. Besides the art-historical angle (and the clothes), I love the farmers in the distance watching. What story do you suppose they might tell?! Read More
Rembrandt en plein air
March 1, 2017
This etching on paper is the earliest image of an artist at work outdoors that I’ve ever run across. Jeanette and her friends in Where the Light Falls would have loved it!
Even though etching is a painstaking technique, Rembrandt has retained the informality and liveliness of a sketch for this Read More
Even though etching is a painstaking technique, Rembrandt has retained the informality and liveliness of a sketch for this Read More
Fanny Brate—Another one lost to marriage
February 8, 2017
In Where the Light Falls, Amy points out bitterly to Jeanette that marriage means the end of a woman’s career in art. So it was for Fanny Brate (1861–1940), a Swedish painter who entered the Royal Swedish Academy of Art in 1880 and Read More
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