Guy (American, 1824 – 1910) made a career of painting popular sentimental narratives with preadolescent girls as the protagonists. In this canvas, a girl reads the titular story to two little boys, presumably her brothers. Her menacing shadow on the attic bedroom's wall and the boys' wide eyes suggest that she is recounting the story's most frightening moment. Fairy tales were appreciated for their moral content at this time, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears was valued as warning children not to wander off on their own. Later interpreters of the tale, including the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, have read in it a girl's fraught search for identity as she makes the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Guy's girl presents this very paradox - she creates a foreboding mood as she exudes calm and purity, which foretells her future success as a mother. Her doll is tucked into the box on the chair, which implies that she is ready to put away childhood games and assume an adult role.
[Oil on canvas, 86.4 x 71.1 cm]
Friday, January 7, 2011
Seymour Joseph Guy - Making A Train [1867]
In the same attic room that Guy (American, 1824 – 1910) portrayed in Story of Golden Locks, a girl turns her bedtime preparations into a flight of fancy as she imagines herself in the womanly splendour of a long gown. The narrative reflects the new belief that play and leisure were good for children, rather than wicked, and confirms feminine stereotypes at a time when womanhood seemed to be under attack by militant feminists. Reformers of the day, who worried about dirty and delinquent street children, may have appreciated the depiction of a clean, healthy, white girl in a modest home. The red, white, and blue triad, in the quilt and in the girl's dress, chemise, and headband, signals the subject's national implications. The commingling of sexual allure and girlish innocence was prevalent in Guy's era, as seen in photographs by Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron.
[Oil on canvas, 46 x 61.3 cm]
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Alfred Morgan - An Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly (Mr Gladstone Travelling with Ordinary Passengers) [1885]
Alfred Morgan - An Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly (Mr Gladstone Travelling with Ordinary Passengers) [1885], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.
Alfred Morgan was an English painter. He exhibited from 1862 to 1904, at the Royal Academy from 1864 until 1904, British Institution, Suffolk Street, Grosvenor Gallery and elsewhere. His son Alfred Kedington Morgan was a painter.
William Ewart Gladstone (Liverpool, December 29, 1809 – Hawarden, May 19, 1898) was a British Liberal statesman. In a career lasting over sixty years, he served as Prime Minister four times. The Gladstone bag, a light travelling bag, was named after him.
Gilbert Stuart - Anna Dorothea Foster and Charlotte Anna Dick [1790-91]
Gilbert Stuart - Anna Dorothea Foster and Charlotte Anna Dick [1790-91], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.
Seeking to enliven their portraits, some painters reiterated their sitters' real-life parlour behaviour and polite accomplishments. Responding to a commission from Dublin's distinguished Foster family, Stuart (American, 1755 – 1828) enlisted the pastime of embroidery to help tell a story. He puts on display the teenaged Anna Dorothea, a marriageable aristocratic girl in want of a good match, perhaps even love, and lets her expert sewing skills carry the narrative. He shows her working on a tambour frame, which indicates that she has graduated from mere samplers to significant projects suitable for framing or use in upholstery. In contrast, he portrays her cousin Charlotte Anna Dick in profile, as befits a younger not-yet-marriage-age lass who serves merely as an accomplice to Anna Dorothea's dual tasks of embroidering and of finding a husband.
[Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 94 cm]
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Ilya Repin - The Volga Barge Haulers [1873]
Ilya Yefimovich Repin (Chuhuiv, Russian Empire, August 5, 1844, – Kuokkala, Finland, September 29, 1930) was a leading Russian painter and sculptor of the Peredvizhniki artistic school. An important part of his work is dedicated to his native country, Ukraine. His realistic works often expressed great psychological depth and exposed the tensions within the existing social order. Beginning in the late 1920s, detailed works on him were published in the Soviet Union, where a Repin cult developed about a decade later, and where he was held up as a model progressive and realist to be imitated by Socialist Realist artists in the USSR.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Johannes Vermeer - The Little Street [c.1658]
In a cobblestone street are two houses with a gate opening onto the passageway between them. A woman sits in an open doorway, busy sewing; two children are playing on the stoop. Soapy water is washing down a small runnel between the paving stones - probably the woman in the passageway has just scrubbed her part of the stoop. Vermeer has recorded this everyday scene with apparent casualness. Although world-famous, not much is known about Vermeer's Little Street. In fact the original location has never been identified, and indeed may never have existed. But more significant is the atmosphere of the picture. The women are diligently employed while the children are absorbed at play. The scene emanates tranquillity and security.
In this picture the sky is cloudy and the colours are muted. Besides brown and red there are touches of blue in the sky, the garments of the woman who is furthest away, and the plant at the left. When first painted the ivy was greener, but the yellow pigment in the paint has faded. Nevertheless, the painting appears fresh, thanks to the white plasterwork. Against this, the figures stand out in pleasing contrast. At the left is Vermeer's signature - also on a white wall. The figures appear convincingly real, even though, like the bricks or the cobblestones, they are not rendered in detail.
[Oil on canvas, 54.3 x 44 cm]
Monday, January 3, 2011
Vincent van Gogh - Portrait of a Restaurant Owner [1887]
Van Gogh painstakingly built up this portrait in subtle colours rendered with fine brushstrokes. While the background and the man’s clothes are subdued, the face consists of stripes painted in all manner of colours.
The man depicted here is possibly Lucien Martin, the owner of a restaurant where Van Gogh and his friends showed their work in November 1887. Vincent’s paintings were often shown at Parisian cafés, restaurants and art dealers. However, they failed to sell.
[Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 54.5 cm]
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