Sargent’s Painting Notes

1. Painting is an interpretation of tone. Colour drawn with a brush.

2. Keep the planes free and simple, drawing a full brush down the whole contour of a cheek.

3. Always paint one thing into another and not side by side until they touch.

4. The thicker your paint—the more your color flows.

5. Simplify, omit all but the most essential elements—values, especially the values. You must clarify the values.

6. The secret of painting is in the half tone of each plane, in economizing the accents and in the handling of the lights.

7. You begin with the middle tones and work up from it . . . so that you deal last with your lightest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.

8. Paint in all the half tones and the generalized passages quite thick.

9. It is impossible for a painter to try to repaint a head where the understructure was wrong.

PALETTE: Silver White, Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Ochre dew (English Red), Red Ochre, Vermillion, Ivory or Coal Black, and Prussian Blue.

These notes, attributed to American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), are courtesy George Pratt. Mr. Pratt is a painting instructor at Ringling College of Art and Design. He told me he found these nuggests in the library when he was a student at Pratt Institute. Thanks, George!

These notes are just the tip of the iceberg. Two of Sargent’s students, Miss Heyneman and Mr. Henry Haley, also recorded extensive first hand observations of Sargent’s painting methods. If you’re interested in this kind of material, let me know, and I’d be happy to share it with you on future posts.

Hunger for Hand-Drawn Art

Children’s book illustrator Shirley Hughes, in her memoir A Life Drawing, reflects on the importance of book illustrations in the lives of young people growing up without much other hand-drawn art around them:

“It may be that picture books offer the only drawn imagery that some children will really come to grips with. They have such good visual memories, far better than most adults. It may be someone’s only glimpse of the work of someone’s hand.”

Smile or Grimace?

In the 1980s the Newport cigarette company ran a series of magazine ads showing women and men interacting. The tag line was “Alive with pleasure! After all, if smoking isn’t a pleasure, why bother?”

One ad showed a man and a woman embracing while squeezing giant, long balloons between them.

The ad campaign continued with a woman squirting her boyfriend with a drinking fountain, spraying him with a boda bag, and a holding an icycle up to his mouth.

The Freudian overtones are pretty obvious now that two decades have given us a little more objectivity.

But what is even more interesting are the facial expressions. Are those really smiles of pleasure, or something else?


Primate social behavior expert Jane Goodall has said, “The chimpanzee's smile so often seen on TV is actually a grin of fear.” Monkeys and apes pull their lips back from their teeth in social situations to show extreme discomfort.

Sometimes the primate smile has an aggressive side. Diane Fossey, who studied gorillas, said, "The primate grimace known as the threat face tells an aggressor to back off."


Humans have two kinds of smiles. One is the genuine smile of pleasure. The other is the nervous grin. It’s the uncomfortable smile that we see at cocktail parties or in conference rooms when people are unsure of their social position.

Anthropologists call it the “deferential grimace.” It’s often accompanied by a squinting of the eyes.

Above is a painting by contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun. Time Magazine describes the expression in Mr. Minjun’s work in this way: “a laugh that isn't entirely funny; an exuberance shadowed by deep unease.”

The Newport ad campaign affects us on two simultaneous and conflicting emotional tracks. The conscious track tells us that these are happy people having fun together. The unconscious track, which the conscious mind easily dismisses, awakens uncomfortable feelings of role reversal, alienation, or jealousy.

The conscious tag line is “Newport: alive with pleasure!” But the unconscious line should read: “Newport: fraught with social anxiety!”

But why does it sell cigarettes?
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More
A study suggesting that Americans and Brits use slightly different muscles when expressing the deferential grimace, link.

Coming to Philadelphia PA and Rockville MD

Saturday, February 14, Paleopalooza Event, Philadelphia
I'm thrilled to be part of the program this weekend for Paleopalooza, a family event at the Academy of Natural Sciences, which will include live reptile shows, screenings of dinosaur movies, dinosaur drawing workshops, and me, talking about how I came up with Dinotopia and what goes into making the pictures. The event goes on all weekend, but my illustrated talk in the auditorium starts at 1 pm and is called Dinotopia: Fact and Fantasy. A Dinotopia book signing will follow the talk.



Monday, February 16, Rockville, Maryland
The Montgomery College Arts Institute in Rockville, Maryland will be hosting me on Monday, February 16 at 12:00 noon in the Theatre Arts Building, Arena. I'll give a digital slide lecture showing how to make a realistic picture of something that doesn't exist, like a fantasy subject or a historical scene. I'll cover topics like research, maquettes, perspective, color keying, and costumes. The talk is open to the public, and there will be a book signing and some original paintings to look at afterward. For more information, contact Ed Ahlstrom in the Art Department at 240.567.7639.

The little listing on the left called "Upcoming Appearances" has some of the other events this spring. I'm sorry, the botanical illustration workshop in Denver in March is sold out. I'm tentatively coming to Toronto later in March. If you live nearby, I hope to meet you at one of them.

John Stilgoe

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Harvard professor John Stilgoe at the Thomas Cole House in Catskill, New York.

According to CBS News, which profiled him on 60 minutes, Stilgoe “teaches the art of exploration and discovering the built environment - everything from architectural history to advertising and design. He introduces his students to a method of discovering a hidden world that's always been right in plain view.

“ ‘I start by showing slides of things that they think they have seen, and it turns out they haven't seen. The white arrow that's on the side of every Fed Ex truck is a nice place to start. Almost everybody's seen a Federal Express truck, almost nobody's seen the white arrow,’ says Stilgoe.”

Mr. Stilgoe is currently teaching a seminar at Harvard called “Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871 to 2036.” Here’s the course description:

“Visual constituents of high adventure since the late Victorian era, emphasizing wandering woods, rogues, tomboys, women adventurers, faerie antecedents, halflings, crypto-cartography, Third-Path turning, martial arts, and post-1937 fantasy writing as integrated into contemporary advertising, video, computer-generated simulation, and private and public policy.”

John Stilgoe’s website, link.

CBS News article, link.

Capriccio in Art

In painting, a capriccio is an architectural fantasy that combines various buildings, ruins, or landscape elements into an extravagant juxtaposition.



The word is Italian. It means a caprice, a whim, a playful gesture. One of the masters of capriccios was Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1691-1765).


Capriccios were often decorative exercises to go over a door in a palace to lend a spirit of worldliness and erudition. Canaletto did his share of them. Many of the masters of the genre were also theatrical set painters.


Thomas Cole (1801-1848) tried his hand at a few capriccios, like The Course of Empire: Consummation (1834-36), and this one, The Architect’s Dream (1840). He throws together Egyptian, Roman, and Gothic styles into his architectural milkshake. But these exercises never really caught on in America, where at the time people were looking west toward the wilderness rather than east toward Europe.

Ernest Meissonier: 19th C's Most Expensive Artist

The votes are now tallied in the poll about the highest priced artist during the 19th century. In the voting, Bouguereau edged out Meissonier 92 to 78. Thanks to everyone for participating.

Bouguereau may be more dominant in the recent academic auction revival, and he may be better represented in American collections, and he may be more accessible to modern viewers, but the right answer is Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891).



Click the image above for a BIG enlargement.

There are at least two published sources for this claim. One is The Studios of Paris, by John Milner (Yale University Press, 1988). Mr. Milner documented the astronomical prices (see the Thursday's post) and said “Meissonier became the most expensive painter of later nineteenth-century France.”

The other book is called The Judgment of Paris by Ross King (2006). Mr. King contrasts Meissonier with Manet during the pivotal period in Paris, as the independent movement really took hold. King’s book is insightful, rich in description, and well-researched.

King says that “No artist in France could command Meissonier’s extravagant prices or excite so much public attention. Each year at the Paris Salon—the annual art exhibition in the Palais des Champs-Elysees—the space before Meissonier’s paintings grew so thick with spectators that a special policeman was needed to regulate the masses as they pressed forward to inspect his latest success.” (from Charles Yriarte, 1898)

For those of you unfamiliar with Meissonier, he produced small and exquisitely painted genre scenes from the prerevolutionary times and equestrian military subjects from the Napoleonic era. The Metropolitan Museum owns his “Friedland,” showing a cavalry charge through the tall grass, but that’s not really typical of his smaller, more intimate pieces. He disdained the modern world of the 19th century, preferring to set his scenes in the 18th and 17th centuries.

Many of his genre scenes depict gentlemen in taverns or scholars reading books. The characters seem plucked from the pages of “The Three Musketeers” —which, by the way, was the most commercially successful book of 19th century France.

There much to learn from Meissonier’s impeccable craftsmanship. For art historians there is a great deal of scholarship that needs to be done. Take note, Ph.D candidates! I hope that a museum will do a retrospective, or that an English publisher will consider producing a new book on his art.

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You can see a gallery of 27 Meissonier images at Art Renewal, link.

There are two excellent books in French: Meissonier: trois siecles d’histoire, by Philippe Guilloux (1980) and an exhibition catalog Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, 1993.

In this video, author Ross King talks about Meissonier’s dominance of his own times and his obscurity in ours, link.

Thanks to Micah of Bearded Roman, who introduced this topic, link.

Hotel Continental, Tangier, Morocco

The couryard of the Hotel Continental in Tangier, Morocco is wedged between the the busy harbor and the crowded medina. It is the “dream at the end of the world,” inhabited by the ghosts of the Beat expatriates.

The American Paul Bowles lived there for 52 years. He attracted his eccentric friends William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Timothy Leary, and Jack Kerouac. Their wild adventures found their way into works like America by Allen Ginsberg, Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles, Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac, and The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet.
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P.S. There's still time to guess the Mystery Artist (see post below and poll at left).

Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts has just announced the formation of the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, a reseach institution devoted to the study of the history of American Illustration.

Art Info reports that the Center will "provide stipends to scholars exploring illustration art, house a database of illustration-related materials, establish a network of like-minded institutions to share information about artists, and develop a collection of illustration art of the past 150 years."

Joyce Schiller, who served for seven years at the Delaware Art Museum as curator of American art, was named the Center's first curator. She said,

“The formation of the Rockwell Center is an exciting and extremely important development within the field of illustration art. The art of illustration has informed America’s visual culture throughout the country’s history. It’s essential to bolster research in the field, as well as preserve these fragile works of art—these cultural snapshots—for future study and appreciation."

Rockwell Museum press release, link.
Art Daily article, link.
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Photo of the museum courtesy T.S. Amarasiriwardena /Boston.com

Mystery Artist

The critics universally respected his work. One of them said: “His presence will be assured in the museums of the future.” Another called him, “One of the uncontestable masters of our epoch.”

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany called him “One of the greatest glories of the entire world.”

He was a friend of Eugene Delacroix. “All of us will be forgotten,” Delacroix said. “But he will be remembered.”

In the 1880s, when Van Gogh was secretly hoping to sell a painting for 50 francs (about the price of a three day’s stay in Paris for a tourist), our mystery artist sold a canvas for 840,000 francs. His paintings were by far the most expensive in France in the later part of the 19th century.

Who was he? Please vote in the poll at left. Answer and results on Saturday.
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Thanks, R.K., J.M. and M.C.