Concept Art for the Early Mardi-Gras

Assuri” costume design by Carlotta Bonnecaze for the
“Myths and Worships of the Chinese” theme, Krewe of Proteus, 1885:
Carnival Collection, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University — Source

In the 19th century, concept art for the Mardi Gras celebration of New Orleans drew inspiration from an eclectic variety of religions and design traditions—everything from Chinese mythology, to South Asian deities, to dragons from European folktales.

Bat costume designed by Charles Briton for the “Missing Links”
theme, Mistick Krewe of Comus, 1873: Carnival Collection,
Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University — Source

The theme of the 1873 parade was “Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of Species,” with a gentle satire of the ideas that were circulating at the time.

Scorpion costume designed by Charles Briton for the “Missing Links”
theme, Mistick Krewe of Comus, 1873: Carnival Collection, Louisiana
Research Collection, Tulane University — Source

The teams of designers competed with each other to come up with the most creative and outlandish  creatures.

“Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of” float design by Jennie Wilde for the
“Familiar Quotations” theme, Mistick Krewe of Comus, 1911:
Carnival Collection, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University — Source 

There were also extravagant floats in the early Mardi Gras, and many of them were designed by women, such as Jennie Wilde, who drew inspiration from Art Nouveau and the Symbolists.

From the Louisiana Digital Library

A float from the Louisiana Mardi Gras parade conjures crashing waves, seabirds, and seahorses.
-----
From the Public Domain Review
The blog Lines and Colors featured the dragon paintings of carnival artist Bror Anders Wikstrom
Through April 1, the New Orleans Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition of Wikstrom's carnival art.
Books:
Mardi Gras Treasures: Costume Designs of the Golden Age Notecards
All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival

Color and Light Deal

If you were thinking of getting Color and Light, I happened to notice that it’s at a really good price on Amazon right now. The price fluctuates on Amazon by some mysterious algorithm.
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (James Gurney Art)

How Old Folks Talked in 1929

Old people were lively and well spoken a century ago. (Link to YouTube)

Some of the people in these video clips were born earlier than 1840, with one man vividly recalling an event he witnessed in the Civil War.

Previously:
Happy Old-Time Photos

Rhinecliff Dock

Rhinecliff has an active train station and was once a busy ferry terminal on the Hudson River.

Rhinecliff Dock, 8 x 10 oil

An old iron bridge lets you cross over the train tracks so that you can go from the hotel to the dock. 

Painting Across Edges

Alexandre asks:

"I heard you mention several times in Gouache in the Wild (including the painting of the liquor store sign) this idea of 'painting across' edges. What do you mean by 'the secret to gouache is to paint across edges?' Why? What does it do? Is it true with watercolour / acrylic / casein? Why or why not?"

Alexandre: Yes, good question and thanks for asking. That advice applies to any opaque paint, whether gouache, casein, acrylic or oil.

A lot of students when they're learning to paint will do a preliminary outline drawing and then paint right up to the lines. That's fine for a coloring book, but in an opaque painting, it looks weak and timid. And it's hard to get a variety of hard and soft edges that way.

The reason people do that is that they're afraid of covering up and losing their careful drawing under the opaque paint.



Instead, I want the painting to look like one form is painted actively on top of, or in front of, another.

So let's say you're painting a house in gouache. You might paint the sky first, and paint that sky a little past the edge of the roofline, feathering the paint so that you can just barely see your guidelines.

Then when the sky is done and you're painting the house, you can paint back over the line a bit. That sequence of background first and foreground second is the normal sequence for illusionistic painting in gouache. I often call it "background to foreground" or "B2F."



Alternately, you can paint the tones of foreground objects first, and then "cut in" the background second, as I did in this demo for Casein in the Wild. For this one, I painted the sun gradation first in the studio across the whole surface of the page and then painted the light sky and street tones over it on location.


(Link to YouTube)

In actual practice, most paintings are a combination of "B2F" and "F2B." But either way I'm painting across the outlines. When you paint one form positively over another, you can soften or blend the edges as you go. The end result is a sense of joyful discovery in the technique, which I sometimes call "finding it in the paint."

Check out paintings by John Singer Sargent or Anders Zorn to see this principle in action.

With transparent watercolor, it's a little different because you can't really cover up something that you laid down first. Let me save that case for another post.
-----
Downloadable video tutorials: Gouache in the Wild and Casein in the Wild.
They're also available as DVDs on Amazon.

Football in an Age of Illustration

American football came of age during the Golden Age of Illustration.

J.C. Leyendecker

Famous illustrators of the time were asked to visualize the game. The talent included superstar artists such as N.C. Wyeth, J.C. Leyendecker, Frederic Remington, Winslow Homer, and Edward Penfield.

How did those classic illustrators interpret the sport visually? That's the question posed by Michael Oriard in his new book The Art of Football: The Early Game in the Golden Age of Illustration.

Arnold Friberg, Rutgers Princeton Game

Many artists played up the physical dynamics on the field. Football was a game where the action was fast and brutal. At first they didn't even wear helmets.

Frederic Remington

The action was mostly far from the observer. Cameras existed, but they didn't have the modern capabilities of telephoto, color, and super-fast shutter speeds.

Frederic Remington

Remington, who had played the game in college, had a natural flair for action.

J.C. Leyendecker focused on compositions with strong poster-like silhouettes to capture the glamorous aspects of the players both on and off the field.



Football was mostly a college game until 1920, when the American Professional Football Association (later the NFL) was formed. Its popularity grew rapidly, enough to get the attention of the major magazines.

Mr. Oriard, himself a player and a historian of the sport, says: "When played, football was always a brutal slugfest; when watched, the spectators were not the cream of American society, but 'sporting men' and their tarted-up female companions."

Some of the paintings in the book by W.T. Smedley and C.S. Reinhart (above), focus on the crowd and their reaction.

The book also includes how the game was reflected in early cartoons and pen-and-ink illustrations. The story of early football is fascinating on its own terms, but what I liked most was learning how the illustrators had to figure out for themselves what aspects of the game to focus on, and how to compose pictures that captured the spirit of the game.

The Art of Football: The Early Game in the Golden Age of Illustration by Michael Oriard.

244 pages, color and black and white, published by the University of Nebraska. Currently $29.05 on Amazon.

A.B Frost's Characters

My biggest tip for character designers is don't look only at the work of your contemporaries.

If you want your style to be fresh and original, dig up other sources. You might enjoy the pen drawings of A.B. Frost (1851-1928) in his book "Stuff and Nonsense."

Big mouth, little eyes, little nose, and some knobbiness at the joints.

Squatty shapes all built around the round belly. Cross-hatch textures add interesting flavor. 

Long, flappy shoes on the old guy. Hat drawn with lots of wear. Stick legs on young makes them look fast and light, but the payoff to this joke was that the old guy beat them in a footrace.

Long legs and clear silhouette on this old codger. The opaque glasses fit with this artist who doesn't believe Muybridge's photos and still paints the hobbyhorse pose:

Said this artist 'Now don't you suppose

An intelligent man like me knows

How a horse ought to go

Yet you say I don't know

And believe what a photograph shows.

----
A.B. Frost's Stuff and Nonsense is available in a reprint edition.

Thesleff's 'Echo'

Ellen Thesleff was a Finnish artist with a feeling for lyricism. Her painting "The Echo" shows a young woman calling out in the morning or evening. 

Ellen Thesleff (Finnish 1869-1954) The Echo

Because the tones of her shirt are treated simply, the artist keeps the emphasis on the head, which is surrounded and infused with warm light.

Thesleff studied in Paris at Académie Colarossi.  Her portraits (self-portrait above) evoke the atmospheric lighting and edges reminiscent of Eugène Carrière. The photo of her is from 1890. 

Thesleff is featured in a new book Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900 from Yale University Press. 

Here's a preview of the book (Link to video) and it's available on Amazon.

The book is a catalog for an exhibition called Her Paris: Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900, which also includes Cassat, Nourse, Beaux, Bonheur, Morisot, and many more. The show just finished in Denver, but it will travel on to:

The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (February 17–May 13, 2018)

The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (June 9–September 3, 2018).

-------
Short video preview of the Museum show Her Paris

Ellen Thesleff on Wikipedia

Bouguereau in His Studio

This photograph of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French 1825-1905) in his studio shows the painter halfway up a ladder refining the line drawing for a large painting. 

Behind him on a wall are plaster casts of fragments of the human and animal figure. The casts give him reference to ideal form. On the small easel are small color studies or premiere pensée.

Bouguereau would typically develop a line drawing (often called a 'cartoon') on a separate piece of thin paper, then transfer that drawing onto his canvas, and ink it with India ink.

Engravings of Bouguereau in his studio were published for an enthusiastic readership in the same way that behind-the-scenes videos are used today to promote movies. 

He brought a model into his studio to pose for Hemera, goddess of the day. She is lit by the same soft, indirect skylight that he has on his work. The model is able to maintain her upraised arm with the help of a dangling rope.

This photo shows the same scene that we saw in the engraving. When you see the reality of the model, you realize how much Bouguereau was enhancing or 'plussing' what he saw to match his idealized vision of the world.

----
First photo is from: "The Illustrated American," 1890

Previous posts: plaster casts, premiere pensée.

Book for color images: Bouguereau

Best book on Bouguereau's method: William Bouguereau, 1825-1905: Catalog

I cover classical methods in my book: Imaginative Realism

Curator Removes a Painting 'To Start a Conversation'

The Manchester Gallery of Art's Curator of Contemporary Art, Clare Gannaway, has removed "Hylas and the Nymphs," the 1896 painting by J.W. Waterhouse, from public view. 

Prompted by the #MeToo movement and concerns over sexual harassment, she says the purpose of the removal is to 'prompt conversation' about the Museum's collection of Victorian nudes. 

The removal of the painting was filmed and was also intended also to publicize an upcoming exhibition of Sonya Boyce. She claims the removal is temporary but hasn't set a date for the painting to be restored to the walls. The notecards have also been removed from the gift shop.

Gannaway posted a placard in place of the missing painting (read the text here), and invited museum guests to write their reactions on Post-It notes. 

There's also a comment section on the Museum's website that says "Get involved in the conversation." But it's heavily moderated, and many comments on the Museum's discussion page have been deleted. Gannaway has not answered questions posed to her in the forum, nor has she responded to my emailed request for comment.

Gannaway says the part of the museum which houses Victorian nudes "presents the female body as either a ‘passive decorative form’ or a ‘femme fatale’. Let’s challenge this Victorian fantasy!" 

She wants to re-contextualize the collection of Victorian nudes. "For me personally," she said, "there is a sense of embarrassment that we haven’t dealt with it sooner."

What strikes me first off is how profoundly she misunderstands the Waterhouse painting. Isn’t it more accurate to regard the painting as an image of female power? Hylas is a member of the Argonauts sent to fetch water, and the painting shows the fateful moment when the nymphs kidnap him into their realm. 

The nymphs are hardly a ‘passive decorative form’ but rather forceful enough to abduct one of the favorites of Heracles. Nor are they femme fatales, because they don’t kill Hylas. Dryope induces him to love her as part of Hera’s plan. 

Waterhouse's Circe

If Gannaway wants to explore art that portrays complex, confident women, she should celebrate Waterhouse rather than banning him. Take a look at his paintings of Circe, Medea, Penelope, Pandora, the Naiads, Harpies, and the sorceress of The Magic Circle. They are all very active characters from myth and legend.

"Hylas and the Water Nymphs" by Henrietta R. Rae, who 'saw herself primarily
as a painter of classical themes with a strong emphasis on the female nude' (Christies)

Or she should look at the work of women artists who painted themes similar to those of Waterhouse.

But at least she should start the discussion by putting up the paintings back up on the walls so we can look at the paintings instead of being forced to read Gannaway's views of politics and arguing via Post-it notes and tweets. 

As it stands, her action has cynically co-opted the energy of the #MeToo movement and shifted the debate to whether museums should censor works of art on political grounds.

Cartoon by Nik Scott

In the end, Gannaway may wish to ‘contextualize’ the Victorian nudes with whatever caption she likes, but why not let the public have access to a work of art that was made nearly a century was before she was born and has been beloved by the public since that time? 

People go to see original art in museums for many reasons. In the case of us working realist painters, we look to Waterhouse as a master of composition and paint technique, quite apart from the social messages that may or may not be in his work. The public has a interest in seeing its heritage in art displayed without a lot of curatorial manipulation and politicization. Gannaway needs to remember that as a museum employee she is a trustee of the public interest. What is a Museum but a haven of the muses?

---

Historical context: In 1913, artworks in Manchester Gallery of Art were attacked by suffragettes.

The Guardian initial story: Gallery removes naked nymphs painting to 'prompt conversation'

Rebuttal by Jonathan Jones: Why have mildly erotic nymphs been removed from a Manchester gallery? Is Picasso next?
Comments on Twitter: can use hashtag #MAGSoniaBoyce.
Contact Gannaway directly: via the Museum's website.