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Fitz Hugh Lane, early and late Contemplate the tranquility of this late piece by Fitz Hugh Lane (1804 – 1865).   It’s painted in glazes (thin, transparent layers). Oil paint grows increasingly transparent as it ages, which sometimes reveals details about how a work was executed. Here, for example, the background was painted first, then…

Harnett and Peto Last week’s post included pieces by William Harnett (1848-1892) and John F. Peto (1854-1907). Here we take another look. For many years their unfashionable work was thought to be by the same person, but there are lively differences between them.  Detail decisions make a huge difference in results. Harnett aims for the…

Newer and Older I don’t know whether in the pairings below the more recent artists were  influenced by the earlier ones, or whether it is simply that there are engaging subjects all around us that don’t change much from century to century. These aren’t the Great Themes (The Three Graces, the Last Judgment) in which…

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art currently has a exhibit of early Diane Arbus photos—from 1956 to 1962. According to the wall labels, this was an exploratory period for her. The variety of work shown make it clear how wide she spread her net at first, before zeroing in on her own singular vision.  A…

A Wonderful Bosch Searching Google Images for something else, I came across this wonderful Hieronymus Bosch, “Witches’ Sabbath.” The economy  of the modeling is astonishing: the figures and fish look fully 3-D, but the shapes are almost flat, with deftly chosen descriptive bits like the eye of the fish, or the shadow shape of her dress.  …

A Favorite Merian The requirements of factual description tend to override artiness and the transient fashions of expression. Soldiers’ narratives of the American Civil War, for example, are often hard to distinguish, in point of style, from the prose of the present day. Still life painting, which appeals through the appreciative observation of interesting objects,…

Happy Discoveries Two delightful surprises in the current show at the Berggruen gallery in San Francisco: The first is “Arthur’s Woman,” below, by Willem de Kooning. I think of de Kooning’s women as rather formulaic and busy busy busy, as in “Woman V,” right. But “Arthur’s Woman” is quite different—wonderfully relaxed and sprawling. I have no idea who the…

Abstract and Not All art begins with a design for the purpose of setting up some narrative. In abstract art the narrative is inferential rather than explicit, but it’s still there. In some pieces the dividing line is blurry. The abstract Kline and narrative Turner below sit very comfortably together. In the Turner, the artist’s delight is clearly…

THIS TIME, PARMIGIANINO  On November 5th I discussed a fake Frans Hals which cried fake to me, even without the testing that revealed that it included pigments that were not invented until the 20th Century. Just the look of the thing was wrong—too cool, too modern. Then last week this image of St. Jerome, supposedly…

AGAIN We don’t do politics on this blog—but we came across these Calvin and Hobbes cartoons from January 4 and 19, 1995. The more things change, the more they stay the same, etc. from The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book Three. 2005