Category: portraiture

Jan Mankes

The Artwork of Jan Mankes

Born in August of 1889 in the city of Meppel, Jan Mankes was a Dutch painter whose restrained, detailed work included self-portraits, landscapes and detailed studies of animals and birds. Although he developed a reputation as an ascetic, Mankes was well acquainted with both events and artists in the Netherlands. 

The son of tax inspector Beint Jans Mankes and Genty Hartsuyker, Jan Mankes began his initial education in 1902 at Meppel; however, after his father received a new assignment, the family moved in 1903 to Delft, a city in South Holland. Beginning in 1904, Mankes studied at the Delft workshop of painter and stained glass artist Jan Lourens Schouten. In his free time, he also trained in stained glass techniques at the workshop of Hermanus Veldhuis and often assisted Veldhuis in his work. There is evidence Mankes participated in the restoration of stained glass panels at Sint Janskerk, a Gothic-styled church in the city of Gouda. 

Mankes often traveled to The Hague where he attended evening classes at its Academy of Fine Arts and studied the painting collections in the Mauritshuis Museum. He was particularly influenced by the work of sixteenth-century German artist and printmaker Hans Holbein the Younger as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painters Carel Fabritius and Johannes Vermeer. In 1908 at the age eighteen, Mankes showed his first paintings to his friend, Delft engraver Antoine van Derktsen Angers, who advised him to leave the glass works and devote himself to a career as a painter.

After the retirement of his father in 1909, Jans Mankes moved with his parents to the village of Bovenknipe in the northern province of Friesland. Inspired by its landscapes, he decided on the main themes for his work: portraiture and depictions of the natural world’s fauna and flora. From 1909 onwards, Mankes was supported financially by his patron from The Hague, tobacco merchant and major art collector A. A. M. Pauwels. His letters to Pauwels expressing gratitude for both money and materials were published in 2012 by the Netherlands Institute for Art History; Pauwels’s letters did not survive. 

In 1911, Mankes created a portrait of Anne Zernike, a progressive Mennonite woman and Netherlands’ first female minister with a doctoral degree. This portrait is now housed in the collection of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden. In the same year, Mankes painted one of his most famous self-portraits, “Self-Portrait with an Owl”. His exposure in 1912 to the work of Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai, best known for his woodblock prints, created a lasting impression on his work, especially in regard to simplicity of composition. 

On the thirtieth of September in 1915, Mankes married Anne Sernike and the couple lived for several years in The Hague. After a diagnosis of tuberculosis, he and his wife relocated in 1916 to the city of Eerbeck in the central-eastern province of Gelderland. Two years later, the couple had their only child, a son named Beint after Mankes’s father. However by this time, Mankes’s health was steadily failing due to his tuberculosis. He died on the twenty-third of April in 1920 at the age of thirty. 

In addition to private collections, Jan Mankes’s work is housed in the Netherland’s Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, the Museum Belvedere Heerenveen, the Rijksmuseum, and the MORE Museum in Gorssel as well as other international museums.

Top Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Self Portrait”, circa 1915, Pencil and Charcoal on Paper, 21 x 17.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Zelfportret met Uil (Self Portrait with an Owl)“, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 20.5 x 17 cm, Museum Arnhem, The Netherlands

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Annie Zernike”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 34 x 32.5 cm, Museum for Modern Realism (MORE), Gorssel, The Netherlands

Michiel Sweerts

Michiel Sweerts, “Wrestling Match”, 1649, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 128 cm, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany

Born in Brussels, Michiel Sweerts was a Flemish painter and printmaker of the Baroque period. known for portraits as well as genre and historical paintings.. During his stay in Rome, he became linked to the Bamboccianti, an informal association of Dutch and Flemish artists known for their paintings and etchings of peasant subjects in Rome and its countryside.

Michiel Sweerts, the son of a Catholic linen merchant, David Sweerts, and Martina Ballu, was baptized at Brussel’s St. Nicholas Church on the twenty-ninth of September in 1618. Nothing is known of his training or any other aspect of his life before 1646 when Sweerts, at the age of twenty-eight, registered as a resident of the Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo parish. In 1647, Sweerts became an associate of the Accademia di San Luca, a prestigious artist association approved by Papal brief in 1577. 

In Rome, Sweerts painted genre paintings in the style of the Bamboccianti and a series of canvases depicting the training of painters in studios and classes. He also was the teacher of William Guglielmo Reuter, a painter from Brussels who was influenced by the Bamboccianti. Having gained a solid reputation for his work, Sweerts was invited to enter the service of Rome’s ruling papal family under the patronage of Prince Camillo Pamphilj, the nephew of Pope Innocent X. Through Prince Pamphilj’s influence, the pope bestowed upon Sweerts the papal title of Cavaliere di Cristo, a honorary title of knighthood. 

During his time in Rome, Michiel Sweerts developed a lifelong relationship with the Deutz family, one of the most prominent Amsterdam trading families. In 1651, merchant and financier Jean Deutz gave Sweerts the power of attorney to act as his representative at the local customs house and as an agent on the Italian art market. Despite these patronages, Sweerts left Rome for unknown reasons between 1552 and 1654; he is recorded in Brussels in July of 1655 at a baptism. In 1659, Sweerts joined the local Guild of Saint Luke which represented the trades of local artists. He also opened an academy in Brussels where his students could work from live models.

During his time in Brussels, Sweerts became more devout and joined the Missions Étrangères, a Catholic missionary organization that was committed to proselytizing in the Far East. Between 1658 and 1661, he spent several periods in Amsterdam where he supervised the construction of a ship for the transport of the Missions Étrangères group to the Turkish city of Alexandretta and then to the Far East. By December of 1661, Sweerts had arrived in Marseilles, France; he departed by ship for Palestine in January of 1662. 

Michiel Sweerts met the Étrangères delegation of Bishop François Pallu and seven priests in Palestine and sailed with them to Syria. In the Syrian city of Aleppo, he painted and proselytized; however, Sweerts was dismissed from the mission after only two years because of his unstable and undisciplined character. He traveled overland through Persia and eventually reached the Portuguese Jesuit community in the Indian city of Goa, According to missionary records, Sweerts died at Goa in June of 1664 at the age of forty-five. 

Sweerts’s surviving works were mostly created during his residency in Rome. As he rarely signed his paintings, the total number varies from forty to one hundred. Due to Sweerts’s popularity at the time, many copies were made by his contemporaries, both pupils and followers. None of Sweerts’s Biblical compositions, mentioned in contemporary inventories, or the work he produced after his departure from Europe are known to have survived.

Among the genre scenes attributed to Michiel Sweerts are two that reprised the popular subject of game players, the 1652 “Damspelers (Draughts Players)” and the 1646-1652 “De Kaartspelers (Card Players)”, both of which are housed in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Between 1646 and 1649, Sweerts produced a series of seven Biblical scenes, “Seven Acts of Mercy”, which display his masterly use of chiaroscuro to create dramatic lighting effects. He also developed new themes such as that of Roman street wrestlers in his 1649 “Wrestling Match”, again a strong example of his use of chiaroscuro. 

Michiel Sweerts painted the majority of his portraits in Brussels and Amsterdam between 1655 and 1661. He was interested in depicting ordinary people and explored their distinctive characters through their curious expressions and sideway glances. Among these portraits are the 1654 “Head of a Woman” with its downward gaze, the simply-dressed maidservant in the 1660 “Portrait of a Young Woman” and the 1656 pensive “Portrait of a Young Man”, now in the collection of the Hermitage. Sweerts’s most ambitious work in terms of composition and technical achievement was the 1652-1654 “Plague in an Ancient City”, a dramatic depiction in the classical style of the devastation caused by the bubonic plague. This epic work is now housed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

In July of 2023, Michiel Sweerts’s long-lost painting, “The Artist’s Studio with a Seamstress”, sold at Christie’s London for a record of 21.6 million Pounds, four times the previous auction record for an artist little known outside the Old Master world. Thought to have been painted around 1646-1649 in Rome, this signed work was discovered in untouched condition at a house in France.

Notes: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has an informative article entitled “Michiel Sweerts and Biblical Subjects in Dutch Art” written by Walter Liedtke for the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. This article can be found at: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/swee/hd_swee.htm

Top Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Self Portrait with Skull”, circa 1660, Oil on Canvas, 78.7 x 60.9 cm, Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queens University, Canada

Second Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Clothing the Naked”, 1646-1649, “Seven Acts of Mercy” Series, Oil on Canvas, 74 x 99 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Third Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Mars Destroying the Arts”, 1650-1652, Oil on Canvas, 69 x 51 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Hommes se Baignant (Bathers)”, 1655, Oil on Canvas, 109 x 164 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, France

Bottom Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Boy in a Turban Holding a Nosegay”, 1658-1661, Oil on Canvas, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Severin Falkman

Severin Falkman, “Antonio”, 1870, Oil on Canvas, 112 x 74 cm, Finnish National Gallery

Born in Stockholm in April of 1831, Severin Gabriel Falkman was a Swedish-born painter who was one of the pioneers of Karelianism, a late nineteenth-century art and literary movement in the Grand Duchy of Finland. In 1835, Finnish author Elias Lönnrot published his compilation of oral folklore and mythology from the Karelian and Finnish traditions. The cultural sections of Finland’s society became curious about the heritage of the historical, eastern province of Finnish Karelia. Gradually, this interest in Finland’s heritage  developed into the Karelian movement, a Finnish version of European National Romanticism. 

The youngest of four children born into the merchant family of Hans Johan and Sofia Falkman, Severin Falkman relocated with his family to Finland in the 1840s. He received his initial education at the private Helsinki Lyceum and, in 1848, became one of the first students of the Finnish Art Association’s school of drawing. From 1857 to 1861, Falkman studied in Paris under French history painter Thomas Couture who taught such artists as Édouard Manet and William Morris Hunt.

After beginning an extended art study tour of Europe, Falkman studied at the University of Helsinki and the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. For a period, he was also a student of painter and printmaker Christian Forssell, who held the position of Professor of Drawing at Stockholm’s Academy of Art. Between 1864 and 1870, Falkman worked and painted in Rome, Paris and Munich. 

In 1870, Severin Falkman returned to Finland where he settled in Helsinki. He was given permission in 1872 by the Helsinki City Museum to build a studio for himself within its structure; it is now the oldest remaining artist studio in the museum and currently open for public viewing. After undertaking a photographic trip to the eastern area of Finland, Falkman published an account of its people and ethnographic objects in his 1885 “I Östra Finland (In Eastern Finland)”.

During his lifetime, Falkman painted in several genres including portraiture, still life, and scenes, both interior and exterior, that portrayed both local and medieval figures. His most important painting is the 1880-1886 historical painting “Karl Knutson Bonde Leaving Vyborg Castle for the Royal Election in Stockholm 1448”, now housed in the Finnish National Gallery. An example of the Finnish Karelianist movement, the painting conveyed the national romantic message  of Finland’s important role in the political history of Sweden. 

Severin Falkman was a recipient of the Imperial Order of Saint Anna, awarded for a distinguished career in civil service or for valor and service in the military. It entitled recipients to either hereditary nobility or personal nobility. Falkman died in the Finnish city of Helsingfors in July of 1889. His work is in both private and public collections including those of the Helsinki City Museum, the Pori Art Museum of Finland, and the Finnish National Gallery.

Second Insert Image: Severin Falkman, “Easter Procession in Rome”, 1866, Oil on Canvas, 112 x 87 cm, Finnish National Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Severin Falkman, “Nature Morte (Eurasian Woodcock)”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 41 x 32.5 cm, Pori Art Museum, Finland

 

Stephen O’Donnell

Paintings by Stephen O’Donnell

Born in the Puget Sound Basin city of Everett, Washington in 1958, Stephen O’Donnell is a self-taught artist who, in addition to other genres, often works in the style of portrait historié, the depiction of a subject in historic, biblical or mythological guise. This genre originated in the Netherlands in the latter part of the sixteenth century as a synthesis of portraiture and historical painting. The term itself, however, originated in France during the eighteenth-century. 

The son of a military family whose father served in the Air Force, O’Donnell received his initial education at various schools where he established his identity as an artist. As a teenager, O’Donnell participated in art competitions and exhibitions and accepted commissions for portraits. When he was nineteen, his father retired and the family, except for O’Donnell, settled in Portland. 

Instead of choosing a college-level art school, Stephen O’Donnell relocated in 1980 to San Francisco. During the next six years, he designed theatrical costumes for the city’s Shakespeare Festival, attended acting workshops and taught vocal performance workshops. O’Donnell’s primary focus at this time was on singing, most often done in San Francisco’s vibrant cabaret scene. It was not until his move to Los Angeles in 1986 that O’Donnell gradually started painting again, not  to market his art but to fulfill his need to make art.  

O’Donnell is not an artist who paints the world around him. He is instead an artist who paints the world of paintings. O‘Donnell doesn’t paint a tree that looks like a tree, but rather one that looks like a wonderful painting of a tree. His art training grew from his love of history and biography. O’Donnell was drawn to the art world through book illustrations and reproductions of both classical paintings and crafted artifacts; through these images, he learned the history of art and design. His interest in pre-1980 films, such as the classics shot by Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti, both masters of lighting and design, also served as inspiration for his career as a painter.

Stephen O’Donnell’s greatest artistic appreciation and enjoyment in the art world lies within its history of portraiture. Although he paints a variety of portraits and other images, his oeuvre is the self-portrait in all its many forms. A play of gender is the most recognizable thematic device in O’Donnell’s work. Identifying clearly as non-binary, he has always felt a deep connection to the concept of berdache, meaning two-spirit, a person embodying a blending of both genders. Used by some Indigenous Native American cultures, it is a term for gender-nonconforming people and the roles they fill in their communities. In his self portraits, O’Donnell appears in many historical guises, either male or female, all artistically attired but presented with a bit of whimsy. 

O’Donnell has been exhibiting his work since 1995 in both group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States, including the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. His work is housed in private collections and such public institutions as the Portland Art Museum, Oregon’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art in California, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, among others. O’Donnell is represented by the Russo Lee Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and TEW Galleries in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Stephen O’Donnell has been married since 2006 to writer and graphic designer Gigi Little. Their 2018 book, “The Untold Gaze”, is a collection of O’Donnell’s paintings paired with short fiction works by thirty-three authors, each piece inspired by a painting. In 2023, O’Donnell published “Half-Light”, a collection of ten stories that explore, in historical and contemporary settings, the issues of gender and sexuality, aging and youthful striving, resignation and resilience. Both volumes are available through O’Donnell’s website as well as major book distributors. 

“I very frequently employ the self portrait as the basis for my work. I’ve long felt that, by beginning with myself as the model, I’m able to avoid the biggest limitation of the portrait as an art form: that it’s “about” someone specific. In my paintings, because the portrait is only of the artist, the viewer, while including whatever they might perceive of the artist, still has more of an opportunity to find their own narrative in whatever visual scenario I might present.” -Stephen O’Donnell

Stephen O’Donnell’s website is located at: https://stephenodonnellartist.com/home  

O’Donnell’s blog, “Gods and Foolish Grandeur”, is located at: https://godsandfoolishgrandeur.blogspot.com

The Russo Lee Gallery in Portland, Oregon is located at: https://www.russoleegallery.com/artists/stephen-odonnell/featured-works?view=thumbnails

TEW Galleries in Atlanta, Georgia is located at: https://tewgalleries.com/artist/Stephen%20_O’Donnell/works/

Top Inser Image: K. B. Dixon, “Stephen O’Donnell”, Phto Shoot, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Stephen O’Donnell, “Le Pince-nez”, 2013, Acrylic on Panel, 30.5 x 30.5 cm (Available at Artist)

Third Insert Image: Stephen O’Donnell, “Silk”, 2023, Les Animaux Series, Acrylic on Panel, 30.5 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Stephen O’Donnell, “L’Innocence”, 2012, Acrylic on Panel, 30.5 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Claude Cahun

The Photography of Claude Cahun

Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in October of 1894 to a literary Jewish family in Nantes, Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor and author. She was the niece of avant-garde symbolist writer Marcel Schwob and the great-niece of historian and Orientalist writer David Léon Cahun. 

Cahun adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914 for its gender neutrality, Claude being a French name that can be used by any gender with the same spelling and pronunciation. After experiencing antisemitism in the Nantes school system, Claude Cahun attended the private Parsons Mead School in Ashtead, Surrey, and continued her education at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. 

Claude Cahun’s father, newspaper publisher Maurice Schwob, divorced his wife after her permanent internment at a psychiatric facility. In 1909, he met the widowed Marie Eugénie Rondet Malberbe and, after a lengthly courtship, married her in 1917. Claude Cahun had met Marie Malberbe’s daughter, Suzanne Alberte Malberbe, previously at school in 1909. They were already years into their lifetime artistic and romantic partnership by the time their parents married. 

In 1922, Cahun and Malberbe, now an established designer, illustrator and photographer under the name Marcel Moore, settled in Paris. At their home, they held salon meetings attended by Paris’s intellectuals and artists. As prominent members of the Parisian art world, Cahun and Moore would host such notables as poet and painter Henri Michaux, writer Adrienne Monnier, Surrealist leader and theorist André Breton, and American-born bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach.

Claude Cahun is known primarily for her highly staged self-portraits and tableaux that incorporated visual surrealistic elements. She began shooting her series of self-portraits at the age of eighteen while studying at the University of Paris. During the 1920s, Cahun’s self-portraits featured her attired in such various guises as an angel, doll, body builder, aviator, vampire and Japanese puppet. Some of these images, which presented a blurring of gender indicators and behaviors, are believed to have been taken with Marcel Moore behind the camera. Cahun and Moore collaborated on many projects and equally shared the credit for their collage work. 

In 1925, Cahun published “Heroines”, a series of monologues based upon female fairy tale characters intertwined with witty comparisons to contemporary women. She was active during 1929 in the experimental theater group Le Pateau for which she played Elle in “Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”,and Satan in “Le Mystère d’Adam”. In 1930, Cahun published “Aveux non Avenus (Disavowed Confessions)”, a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages by Marcel Moore. 

In 1932, Cahun joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, a coalition of revolutionary artists and writers who eventually mobilized against war and fascism. It was through this group that she met Breton and surrealist writer René Crevel. Cahun participated in a number of surrealist exhibitions, including the London International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Gallery and the Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, both in 1936. 

With the rise of antisemitism in 1937, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore fled Europe and settled on the island of Jersey. After German troops invaded Jersey in 1940, they reverted to their original names and masqueraded themselves as being sisters. For several years, Cahun and Moore heroically risked their lives by producing and distributing anti-Nazi fliers to the German soldiers. Many of the anti-Nazi fliers contained translated snippets of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence: these BBC excerpts were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh critiques. Cahun and Moore would don their best dresses and attend German military events at which they secretly placed their pamphlets in cigarette boxes and in soldier’s pockets or on their chairs.

In 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death. Their home and property was confiscated and much of their art was destroyed by the Germans. Cahun and Moore survived, saved by the 1945 liberation of Jersey from German occupation. Cahun’s health, however, never recovered from her treatment in the prison. She died at Saint Helier, Jersey, in December of 1954 at the age of sixty and was buried in St. Brelade’s Church, one of the twelve ancient parish churches on the island. After Cahun’s death, Moore relocated to a smaller home in Jersey. She died by suicide in February of 1972 at the age of seventy-nine. Moore is buried alongside Cahun in St. Brelade’s Church. 

Claude Cahun’s work was largely unrecognized until forty years after her death. Her participation with the Parisian Surrealists, predominately male, brought an element of diversity to their creative work through her gender non-conforming photography and writings. Cahun’s work was meant to upset the conventional understanding of photography as a document of reality. Her poetry and writings challenged the prevailing gender roles as well as social and economic boundaries. 

Notes: All images, unless noted, are part of the Jersey Heritage Collections of the Bailiwick of Jersey.

An extensive article on Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, entitled “Marcel Moore, Her Life and Art”, written by the JHT Curator of Art Louise Downie can be found at the Jersey Heritage Organization’s site. This article primarily covers the life of Moore who was a successful illustrator, photographer and fashion designer. The article is located at: https://www.jerseyheritage.org/media/PDF-Heritage-Mag/marcel%20moore.pdf

The November 4th 2020 edition of the online The Art Newspaper has an extract from author Jeffrey H. Jackson’s history book “Paper Bullets” which outlines Cahun and Moore’s artistic campaign against the Germans during World War II. The article is located at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/11/04/extract-or-how-artist-couple-claude-cahun-and-marcel-moore-resisted-the-nazis-with-their-paper-bullets

Top Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Autoportrait”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Second Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait with Roger Roussot in Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”, 1929, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Third Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Color Crayon and Ink on Paper, Jersey Heritage Collections

Fourth Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait in Orchards”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore”, circa 1929-30, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Tomas Clayton

The Artwork of Tomas Clayton

Born in 1957 in Birmingham, Tomas Clayton is an English portrait painter who specializes in oils on masonite works. After his parents’ divorce early in his life, the absence of a father figure had an impact on his life that still to some extent permeates the subject and mood of his work. In the late 1960s, Clayton’s mother remarried and the family moved to Hereford where Clayton was awarded a three year Art Foundation Course at the Hereford Art College. 

Clayton returned to Birmingham where he studied graphic design and illustration at the Ruskin Hall College of Art. After leaving college, he worked as a graphic designer and animator for the British Broadcasting Company and Central Independent Television, now known as ITV Central. Several years later, Clayton became a successful freelance graphic designer and illustrator for several corporations. 

In the late 1970s, Tomas Clayton discovered a cache of vintage photographs that included formal portraits and images of family gatherings taken in the late 1800s to the early 1900s. The presence of all the lost personalities, dressed in their stiff collars and corsets, made a strong impression on the style of Clayton’s later work. Other influences were the many painters and illustrators who had captured his imagination in the early 1970s. Among these were Scottish illustrator and painter Wilson McLean, American illustrator Brad Holland, French illustrator Jean Giraud also known as Moebius, and American graphic artist Paul Davis, a Hall of Fame member of the Society of Illustrators.

Clayton’s portraits have a very distinctive style that is carefully created with great attention to detail. Inspired by the nostalgic portraits and artifacts of the First World War era, he creates highly stylized images of actors and soldiers, as well as average men and women, that blend elements of that period with contemporary imagery. The surface areas of Clayton’s portraits are textural and display a surrealistic effect through his use of monochromatic tones. While the face is central to any portrait, the eyes of Clayton’s subjects become, in many of his works, the major focus. Dates written in Roman numerals occasionally are included in his images..

From 2007 to 2023, Tomas Clayton has shown his work in many group exhibitions including regular presentations at the Royal Portrait Society, New English Art Club and Mall Galleries at Saint James, London. In 2016, Clayton won the Columbia Threadneedle Prize for both his “Après la Guerre (After the War)” and “Chère Capucine (Dear Capucine)”, a portrait of a young man playing his resonator at a Parisian night club.

Tomas Clayton is represented by The Contemporary Fine Art Gallery Eton located upstairs at The Piper Art Bar building in Windsor, Berkshire, United Kingdom. Clayton’s work can be found at: https://www.cfag.co.uk/exhibition_thumbs.php?exhibition_id=319&show_rand=0&show_biog=1

Tomas Clayton’s website, which contains contact information for commissioned work, is located at:  https://www.tomasclayton.co.uk

Top Insert Image: Tomas Clayton, “Her Name Was Magill”, Oil on Masonite, 67 x 85.1 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Tomas Clayton, “Blue-eyed Boy”, 2012, Oil on Masonite, 81 x 90.1 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Tomas Clayton, “The Serpent”, Oil on Masonite, 65 x 65 cm, Private Collection

Owen Rival

The Paintings of Owen Rival

Born in 1999 in Toronto, Owen Rival is a Canadian painter known for his highly contrasted and saturated everyday scenes. After studying both design and painting, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Illustration at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design in 2021. Rival is a recipient of the New York Academy of Art Summer Residency and the Dumfries House Artist Residency, a program delivered by Scotland’s Royal Drawing School and the Glasgow School of Art. He is also a member of the Society of Illustrators, a New York City-based professional society that promotes the art and history of illustration through exhibitions and competitions.

Through his work, Rival examines the seemingly mundane episodes of existence which include such monotonous chores as grocery shopping, washing clothes and brushing one’s teeth. Presented through the perspective of an observer, his paintings amplify these daily routines and transforms them into historic events. Married and now living as a couple with his wife and art collaborator Jenny, Rival paints scenes of domestic life that examine both the solitary moments and the interactions that occur in their Houston, Texas apartment.

Owen Rival’s paintings slowly evolve through an extensive work process: creating  thumbnail sketches of a proposed scene, staging the scene, shooting  photographs for foreground and background references, and lastly the gradual layering of color onto each drawn form on the canvas. His work is characterized by its strong lighting effects and visually complex compositions. Rival’s use of different colored LED lighting in the staged settings provides optional color highlights for the proposed work.

Rival pays particular interest in the color combinations for his work and often uses an inversion of traditional color associations to add both depth and complexity to the paintings. Instead of a realistic color palette, he chooses vibrant and contrasting tones to highlight important elements in the work and to amplify its mood, either conveying a sense of calm or injecting tension and stress.

In 2017 and 2018, Rival exhibited his paintings in group exhibitions held at Providence’s Waterman Building, the first permanent home of the Rhode Island School of Design and its first museum location. He exhibited his work in 2019 at the New York Academy of Art and, in the following year, at “The Color of My Land” exhibition at the RISD Museum Gelman Gallery. 

Rival presented five new medium and large scale works at his first solo exhibition, “Chronic Maintenance”, in April and May of 2023 at the Monti8 Gallery in Latina, Italy. He had his first New York solo exhibition entitled “Long View” in May and June of 2023 at the Harkawik, Gallery 2 on Orchard Street in Manhattan. The show consisted of five acrylic paintings and four works on paper depicting domestic scenes at the Houston apartment.

Notes: Images of Owen Rival’s work, contact information, and social media sites can be found on his website located at: https://www.owenrival.com

The creative art site It’s Nice That has an article on Owen Rival’s life and paintings written by Olivia Hingley for its July 2022 posting. It can be found at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/owen-rival-art-180722#:~:text=Gifted%20with%20a%20clear%20perception,relatability%2C%20and%20striking%20visual%20complexity

The Harkawik Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with two locations, Orchard Street in New York and Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. The gallery’s website can be found at: https://www.harkawik.com

Top Insert Image: Owen Rival, “Groceries”, 2022, Acrylic on Canvas, 91.4 x 61 x 10.2 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Owen Rival, “Toronto”, 2021, Acrylic on Canvas, 60.1 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection

Karlheinz Weinberger

The Photography of Karlheinz Weinberger

Born in Zürich in June of 1921, Karlheinz Weinberger was a self-taught Swiss photographer who over his sixty year career documented the outsider culture of rebellious male youths and working-class men. He used the pseudonym “Jim”, taken from a popular 1930 song written by German-Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, for his photographic work from 1948 to 2000.    

From 1936 to 1939, Karlheinz Weinberger attended Zürich’s grammar school and began taking photographs with his first camera. He became a member of the Bund der Nuturfreunde (Association of Nature Enthusiasts) photography club where he developed greater skills in both photographing and processing. In 1942, Weinberger was called for military training after which he served a period of active military service. At the end of the Second World War, he gained temporary employment as a carpet and furniture salesman but also endured periods of unemployment. 

Beginning in 1948, Weinberger became an active member of Zürich’s famous underground gay club “Der Kreis (The Circle)”. He began in the mid-1950s to publish his photos in the underground gay journals “Der Kreis”, printed through the club, and “Club68” Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled Portrait, Zurich, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print, Karlheinz Weinberger Estatefounded by a small team of former Kreis members. Weinberger  published more than eighty photographs though “Der Kreis” until the journal’s last issue in 1967. It should be noted that “Der Kreis”, besides being the only gay publication to include editorial content in three languages, was the most important European journal promoting the legal and social rights of gay men at that time.

During the 1950s, Karlheinz Weinberger spent his summer holidays in the Mediterranean area where he took portraits on the coasts and islands of Italy and during later excursions into Morocco. Weinberger’s images of sailors, fishermen, beach goers, and dockworkers were later published in “Mediterranean”,  a 2021 posthumous volume, the third of a series through the Swiss publisher Sturm & Drang.

From 1955 to his retirement in 1986, Weinberger was employed in the warehouse department of the Siemens-Albis factory in Zürich; this day-time position provided the finances for his off hours’ photographic work. In 1958, Weinberger met and photographed the young rocker Jimmy Oechslin in the streets of Zürich. Oechslin introduced him to Switzerland’s growing gang culture known by the German term Halbstarker, meaning ‘half-strong’. Groups of Zürich’s young people, influenced by the many aspects of American culture, were looking for an identity of their own. They established an antiauthoritarian subculture based on American film, rock music, customized jean clothing and the riding of motorcycles. 

Intrigued by the teenagers’ edgy look as well as their attitude towards authority, Karlheinz Weinberger began documenting this post-war generation on Zürich’s streets and at local festivals. He later established an improvised portrait studio at the apartment shared with his mother. During this period, Weinberger  became the one of the first photographers granted permission to document the local chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle club. Between 1964 and 1976, he worked as a freelancer for various sports magazines and specialized in sports reporting in Switzerland and East Germany. 

Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled, Portrait from 2011 "Jeans", Swiss Institute, New York CitySince 1963, Weinberger presented his work in various group exhibitions in Zürich, Israel, Italy, Canada and the United States. In 1968, he won a prize for his sports photographs at the NIVON Holland competition. Weinberger’s first solo exhibition, entitled “The Hooligans 1955-1960” was held in 1980 at Zürich’s Migros Club School, a recreation and education center. The first institutional exhibition of Weinberger’s work to a wider audience was a major retrospective entitled “Intimate Stranger” held in 2000 at Zürich’s Design Museum. Consisting exclusively of vintage prints mostly developed in Weinberger’s home lab, the show documented his close, but still outsider, view of the Halbstarker gangs. This exhibition later traveled to Vancouver, Canada.

Karlheinz Weinberger passed away in December of 2006 in Zürich at the age of eighty-five. The Galerie Esther Woerdehoff is the owner of the Weinberger Estate which is housed in the Swiss Social Archives in Zürich. In February and March of 2011, the Swiss Institute at St. Marks Place in New York City held an exhibition of Weinberger’s vintage prints curated through the collaboration of the Karlheinz Weinberger Estate and Gianni Jetzer, Curator-at-large at Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Swiss Institute published a portfolio of fifty-four images entitled “Karlheinz Weinberger: Jeans”. 

In August of 2017 in conjunction with a large retrospective exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the German publisher Steidl released French and English editions of “Swiss Rebels”, a collection of Weinberger’s homoerotic images of rockers, bikers, construction workers and athletes. In 2018, publisher Starm & Drang released “Karlheinz Weinberger: Sports” , a collection of work discovered after the artist’s death in 2006. The volume, the second in its series, included one hundred-thirty images taken from thousands of negatives, slides and prints that documented bike races, wrestling matches and weight-lifting events.

Notes: The online magazine on contemporary culture Kvadrat Interwoven has an excellent article on Karlheinz Weinberger’s early career written by Larissa Kasper. This article can be located at: http://kvadratinterwoven.com/foto-jim-zurich

A timeline of Karlheinz Weinberger’s life is available at the Gallery Esther Woerdehoff site, the executor of his estate. This information is located at: https://ewgalerie.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Weinberger_en-2022.pdf

Second Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled Portrait, Zürich, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print, Karlheinz Weinberger Estate

Fourth Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled, Portrait from 2011 “Jeans”, Swiss Institute, New York City

Stanley Stellar

Photography by Stanley Stellar

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945, Stanley Stellar is an American photographer whose five decades of work captured the beauty and vitality of the LBGTQ community of New York City. His work followed its life through the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the first Gay Pride Parades and evolving Gay Liberation Movement, as well as the realities of the HIV/AIDs epidemic. As a participant and a documenter, Stellar produced works that have become historic and cultural references for both the young and old.

Stanley Stellar studied photography and graphic design at New York City’s Parsons School of Design, one of the oldest schools of art and design in New York City. Upon graduation, he began work as art director for the advertising agency Art Direction. Stellar’s career during the 1970s  included countless book designs as well as editorial design and art direction for numerous magazines and publishing houses.

Stellar’s purchase of a Nikon camera in 1976 began his career as a photographer. Among the artists who influenced him were fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar known for his black and white portraits, and Bruce Davidson, a regular photographer for “Life” and “Look” magazines. Stellar, however, developed his own style and began photographing unequivocally gay images of men that reflected the world he knew. 

Stanley Stellar’s work concentrated on the everyday life of gay men in New York City. He initially began taking street photographs of men with tattoos on their arms, as an inquiry about a tattoo made the request for a photograph easier. Stellar shot many images of gay men walking and gathering on Christopher Street as well as meeting at the abandoned warehouses and piers in Manhattan’s West Village.

One of Stellar’s most iconic street photographs, the first to be mass-produced on postcards, was a 1970 photo of a young man, who after having his arm tattoos photographed, lifted his shirt to show two bright bird tattoos on each chest muscle. Taken at a time when tattooing was illegal in New York City, this single shot by Stellar became a homoerotic image nobody had ever made before.

Stanley Stellar’s early design experiences, essentially photo-journalism, are apparent in all of his work; they all  display a simplicity of composition, recurrence of themes, and honest unembellished depictions of the subject. Throughout most of Stellar’s years of documentation, homosexuality was still illegal in many states; it was not until 2003 that all laws against same-sex activity were invalidated. Stellar’s photographs captured the confidence, intimacy and the energy of the LBGTQ community through all those difficult years.

Stellar’s photography has been shown in many galleries throughout the United States and Europe and has been featured in many international magazines. From May to July in 2011, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art featured an exhibition of Stellar’s work entitled “Stanley Stellar: Photographer”. This exhibition coincided with the release of Stellar’s 2011 publication “The Beauty of All Men”, curated by author and publisher Peter Weiermair. In 2018, Stellar published a second collection of photographs entitled “Into the Light: Photographs of the NYC Gay Pride Day from the 70s Till Today”, through the Bruno Gmeunder Press.

Represented by the Kapp Kapp Gallery on Manhattan’s Walker Street, Stanley Stellar had three solo exhibitions in the gallery. The first show was the 2019 “Photographs 1979-1992” which was followed in 2020 by “Night Life”, an exhibition of twenty-four images documenting New York’s queer nightlife between 1981 and 1992. Stellar’ third exhibition with Kapp Kapp was the 2022 “Stanley Stellar: The Piers (1976-1983)” which featured a suite of unseen photographs of the Christopher Street Piers. The Piers exhibition was held at the grand opening of Kapp Kapp’s Tribeca gallery. 

“When I was an editorial art director in the 70s, I used to think I wanted to design other people’s photographs graphically. Possess them in that way. Then in 1976, it became clear to me that I wanted to take my own images of what I had never freely seen, of who and what I was hungry to see, to record my existence through my individual vision of it. 

A combination of masculinity, detail, individuality and human vulnerability catches my eye. Men who are at home within themselves, alive in their ability to share some spark of their humanity with me. Men who have an inner life and an inner light that I recognize within me, within both of us.” —-Stanley Stellar

Notes: Stanley Stellar’s website with archived images and contact information is located at: https://www.stellarnyc.com

Kapp Kapp Gallery’s article on Stanley Stellar’s exhibitions can be found at: https://www.kappkapp.com/artists/stanley-stellar/media

David McGillivray’s 2023 article entitled “Six Pictures by Iconic Photographer Stanley Stellar that Captured Male Beauty in All Its Glory” is located at the Attitude section of Yahoo News: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/6-pictures-iconic-photographer-https://uk.news.yahoo.com/6-pictures-iconic-photographer-stanley-130415741.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIwNAmykxGP71NvJgEczfNbjN6iGpmJ3cDlrIaDDOBhi0Wq4U-

New York-based writer Miss Rosen has written a short article about Stanley Stellar on her photography site Blind located at: https://www.blind-magazine.com/stories/new-york-queer-love-on-the-west-side-piers/

Tony Wilkes’s January 2022 article on Stanley Stellar for the online art magazine AnOther, can be found at: https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13813/a-lost-utopia-stanley-stellar-s-portraits-at-new-york-s-gay-piers-kapp-kapp

Top Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Portrait of Stanley Stellar”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “Late Afternoon”, 1980, The Piers Series,  Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, Untitled, circa 2000s, Color Print

Fourth Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “Danny, September”, 1982, The Piers Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “At a Pay Phone on the Corner of Christopher and Bleecker Streets, NYC”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print

Konstantin Somov

Konstantin Somov, “The Boxer”, Portrait of Mikhailovich Snejkovsky, 1933, Oil on Canvas, 54.8 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Born in Saint Petersburg in November of 1869, Konstantin Andreyevich Somov was a Russian artist and founding member of the artistic movement Mir Iskusstva, World of Art, that became a major influence on Russian artists of the early twentieth-century. Konstantin Somov was the second son of Andrei Somov, an art historian and senior curator at the Hermitage Museum, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna, a talented musician and well-educated daughter of the Lobanovs nobility. 

Konstantin Somov attended the Karl May School in Saint Petersburg where he became close friends with classmates Dmitry Filosofov, later author and literary critic, and Alexandre Benois, future historian and influential designer for the Ballets Russes. At the age of twenty, Somov entered the Imperial Academy of Arts and studied from 1888 to 1897 under Ukrainian-born historical and portrait painter Ilya Repin. While at the academy, he developed lasting friendships with Sergei Diaghilev, the future founder of the Ballets Russes, and Léon Bakst, a painter who became an influential costume designer for Diaghilev’s company.

In the summer of 1895, Somov and Alexandre Benois stayed at a dacha in the village of Martyshkino near the coastal city of Oranienbaum. The landscapes he created and exhibited became his first major success with praise from both critics and artists. Somov graduated from the Academy in 1897 and continued his education at the Académie Colarossiin Paris. From 1897 to 1890, he worked on a portrait of Elizaveta Martynova, clothed in an old-fashioned dress, entitled “Lady in Blue”. Martynova was a painter, a graduate of the Imperial College of the Arts, who died at the age of thirty-six from tuberculosis. In this portrait finished four years before her death, Martynova’s delicate and trembling figure, frail with yellowish skin, stands alone in a park facing spectators with a face full of sorrow.

After the founding of the Mir Iskusstva in 1898, Konstantin Somov served as an editorial board member and contributed illustrations and designs to its magazine edited by Sergei Dlaghilev. During the 1910s, he created a series of harlequin scenes and illustrations for a poetry volume by Alexander Blok. Somov’s work was now exhibited in the United States and Europe, particularly in Germany where a 1909 monograph on his work was published.

In 1910 at the age of forty, Somov met the eighteen-year old Methodiy Lukyanov who became his close longtime companion and part of the Somov family. Lukyanov helped in the household, organized exhibitions and became Somov’s trusted advisor and critic. Somov painted many portraits of Lukyanov, among which is a large 1918 portrait which depicted Lukyanov seated on a sofa in pajamas and robe; this work is now housed in St. Petersburg’s Russian Museum. Somov and Lukyanov’s relationship would continue for twenty-two years until Lukyanov’s death from tuberculosis in April of 1932.

Konstantin Somov had a penchant for drama and was drawn to the elegant but bawdy nature of French erotic writing of the 18th century. From 1907 to 1919, he worked on illustrations, some suggestive and others explicit, for “Le Livre de la Marquise”, an anthology of eighteenth-century erotic French poetry and prose by Lachos, Casanova and Voltaire. Somov’s work became more erotic as time progressed. The most explicit of these was an eight-hundred copy edition published in 1917 at St. Petersburg’s R. Golike & A. Vilborg & Company. 

Although initially greeted with enthusiasm, the Russian Revolution from 1917 to 1923 created a deterioration in living conditions. Shortly after the government nationalized his apartment, Somov was evicted; he did however manage to retain the rights to his own artwork. In December of 1923, Somov became part of the Russian Exhibiton and, as a member of the delagation, traveled to the United States where he represented the city of Petrograd. He never returned to to his homeland. After leaving the United States in 1925,  Somov settled in Paris where he reunited with his old friends Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and Benois’ niece, the painter Zinaida Serebryakova. 

Konstantin Somov, in terms of his artistic influences, felt closer to the Old Masters rather than the work of his contemporaries. He was particularly drawn to the work of eighteenth-century Rococo painter François Boucher known for his idyllic pastoral scenes. While in Paris, Somov predominantly painted miniatures and portraits. The still life became one of his favorite subjects and would perform an important role in his portraits as it added additional information on the sitter.

Even though established as a well-known artist, Somov continued to live a reclusive lifestyle. In June of 1930, he met Boris Mikhailovich Snejkovsky. Born in Odessa in July of 1910, Snejkovsky was the son of a captain of the Russian Volunteer Fleet and traveled frequently with his family until they settled in Paris. During the 1930s, Snezhkovsky would model, both clothed and nude, for many of Somov’s works including illustrations for an edition of “Daphnis and Chloe”. In February of 1923, Somov painted a portrait of his model entitled “The Boxer”, a half-length nude oil-portrait with boxing gloves on the wall. Snezhkovsky also served as the model for Somov’s 1937 “Obnazhennyl Iunosha (Nude Youth)” now in the State Russian Museum.

Konstantin Andreyevich Somov died in May of 1939, at the age of sixty-nine, in Paris, France. He is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery, south of Paris. In 2016, Russian art historian Pavel Golubev founded the Somov Society to preserve and study the life and works of Konstantin Somov. Goluvev curated the 2019 “Konstantin Somov, Uncensored” at Ukraine’s Odessa Fine Arts Museum and sponsored the 2019 colloquium “The Lady with the Mask: Homosexuality in the Art of Konstantin Somov” at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Top Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Self Portrait”, 1921, Pencil Watercolor on Paper, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Vladimir Aleksandrovich Somov”, Konstantin Somov’s Nephew, 1925, Oil on Canvas

Third Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Lady in Blue”, Portrait of Yelizaveta Martynova, 1897-1900, Oil on Canvas, 103 x 103 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Fourth Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Boris Snejkovsky with Cigarette”, 1938, Oil on Canvas, 46.4 x 38 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Daphnis and Chloe”, 1930, Watercolor Illustration, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, United Kingdom

 

 

Ernst Neuschul

Ernst Neuschul, “Messias”, Self-Portrait, 1919, Oil on Canvas, 95.5 x 55.5 cm, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, East Midlands, England

Born in 1895 in Aussig, North Bohemia now the Czech Republic, Ernst Neuschul was a painter of the German Expressionist movement. He was the eldest of three sons born to ironmonger Josef Neuschul and Jeanette Feldmann, members of the town’s prestigious and influential Jewish community. Neuschul received his primary education at Auseig’s State Gymnasium but left without graduating. 

Neuschul wanted to study at the Academy of Arts in Prague; however, his parents refused to financially support his attendance. He worked in Prague as a painter and attended courses at the Academy as an extern participant. Neuschul then went to Vienna, attended the K.K. Graphische Lehranstalt, and became captivated by the paintings of Austrian artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, as well as those by Oskar Kokoschka whose theories on vision played an important role in the development of Viennese Expressionism. 

At the outbreak of World War I, Ernst Neuschul avoided conscription by relocating to Kraków, Poland in 1916. He continued his studies at Kraków’s Art Academy studying under Art Nouveau artist Józef Mehoffer. In the summer of 1918 Neuschul went to Prague, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Franz Thiele. In Prague during August of that year, he met Lucie Lindermann, a Dutch-Javanese dancer raised in Berlin who performed under the name Takka-Takka, When the war ended, Neuschul entered Berlin’s Academy of Art where he was awarded the Rome Prize in 1918. 

In July 1919, Neuschul had his first solo exhibition of 39 works at Weinert’s salon in Prague. He and Lindermann took an apartment in Berlin and embarked on a series of trips to Java and the East Indies. Upon his return, Neuschul became involved with East Indian dance, wrote scripts for experimental films based on Asian myths, and designed dance costumes for his wife, who performed with them in theaters in Lucerne and other cities. On the twenty-fourth of July in 1922, Neuschul and Lucie Lindermann were married in Berlin; in the following years she became his most important model.

In 1926, Neuschul became a member of Berlin’s November Group, a collective of expressionist artists and architects who shared socialist values and sought a greater voice in the organization of art schools and new laws surrounding the arts. An important breakthrough came to Neuschul in 1927; for the first time, he was noticed by a broad public in Germany. Neuschul successfully participated in eight exhibitions, six of them in Berlin with his work praised in multiple press articles. In the same year Neuschul received a contract with Berlin’s renowned Neumann-Nierendorf Gallery, which now ensured the artist a regular income. In the following years he also participated in exhibitions in many German cities. 

On November 13, 1928, Ernest Neuschul and Lucie Lindermann divorced. In 1929 he became a member of the Reich Association of Visual Artists in Germany. Two years later, Neuschul took over the chair of drawing and painting at the Charlottenburg Municipal Art School. In 1933, Neuschul became the last chairman of the November Group before it was banned by the Nazis. At his last exhibition in February 1933 at the “Haus der Künstler” on Schöneberger Ufer in Berlin, his works on display were confiscated and many of them destroyed. Immediately after these events, Neuschul fled to Czechoslovakia. Lucie Lindermann and Neuschul’s later second wife Christl Bell saved the works in his Berlin studio and brought them to Aussig.

In mid-1935, Neuschul received an invitation to Moscow from the Moscow Artists’ Union. In September of1935, he and his wife Christl traveled to Moscow with forty works created between 1929 and 1934. The state newspaper Pravda reported very positively on his solo exhibition at the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow; as a result, Neuschul subsequently received a number of commissions. Among others, he was commissioned to paint portraits of Josef Stalin and Georgi Dimitroff. On January 1, 1936 Neuschul became a member of the Moscow Union of Artists and the Union of Soviet Artists. Shortly before the beginning of Stalin’s second purges, Ernst Neuschul received advice from Andrei Bubnov, the People’s Commissar for National Education, to leave Moscow as soon as possible.

In February 1936, Neuschul gave a lecture on the Soviet Union in Aussig. The Prague press’s June 1936 pictorial supplement “Die Welt am Sonntag” reported in detail on Neuschul’s stay in the Soviet Union. In 1937, his last exhibition took place in his hometown of Auseig. In this exhibition two of Neuschul’s works were cut up and smeared with swastikas. On the third of November in 1937, Neuschul left his hometown of Aussig for good and moved with his family to Prague before the Czechoslovak borderlands were annexed by Hitler’s Germany in 1938.

Neuschul became a member of the Oskar Kokoschka Club and gave lectures on Degenerate Art, a category that was given to his own work. In 1938, Neuschul was on the Nazi blacklist and, as a Sudeten German, was threatened with extradition to the Third Reich by the Czech authorities. On March 10, 1939, Neuschul deregistered with the police and continued to live as an “illegal” in Prague. Through a connection to the British Labour Party, he was able to prepare his family’s emigration to England. The German Wehrmacht, not yet connected to the Gestapo, issued the exit permit, and on March 24, 1939, the Neuschul family left for England via Holland. Neuschul’s mother, who stayed in Prague to care for Neuschul’s sick brother, was later murdered in Auschwitz with those family members still in Prague.

On May 19, 1939, Neuschul became a member of the Free German Artists Association in England. As a rejection of the past, he changed his name from Neuschul to Norland. Neuschul lived in the family house in London-Hampstead until the end of his life. On September 11, 1968, Ernest Neuschul died at the age of 73.

At the beginning of Ernst Neuschul’s artistic activity, expressionism was in vogue, with intense colors in abstract forms. For his own work, Neuschul transformed this style into the more concrete style of New Objectivity. Gradually socially critical themes found their way into his range of motifs. Neuschul depicted the fringe groups of society; he painted drunkards, women on the streets, and workers in the fields or at their machines. During his time in Moscow, Neuschul was given to understand that he should paint the workers in the style of Socialist Realism that expressed the ideal state. He rejected this idea and continued to paint what he saw and not what he was supposed to see. After the war, Neuschul continued to abstract his style, but like other émigrés who had left Germany, he was unable to match the success he had enjoyed before he fled. Neuschul was rediscovered in Germany in 2001, when the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, in cooperation with the Czech Republic, organized a four-week retrospective of his paintings in Regensburg.

Notes: The University of Birmingham, England, has a short article on Ernst Neuschul’s 1931 painting “Black Mother”, painted at a time in which the Nazi Party was making significant gains in elections. The article can be found at: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/lcahm/departments/historyofart/research/projects/map/issue3/arts-trail-pages/ernst-neuschul-black-mother.aspx

In 1924, Ernst Neuschul painted his biblical scene “Samson II”. An interesting article on its creation process can be found at Berlin’s Jewish Museum website located at: https://www.jmberlin.de/en/ernest-neuschul-samson-II

Top Insert Image: Helen Craig, “Ernst Neuschul”, circa 1960s, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Helen Craig

Second Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Black Mother”, 1931, Oil on Canvas,  100.5 x 65.5 cm, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, England

Third Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Laundress”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvass, 100.3 x 65.1 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Woman ironing”, circa 1930, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 46 cm, Staattiche Museen, Berlin

Bottom Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Meine Drei Frauen”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 81 cm, Private Collection 

Angus McBean

The Photography of Angus McBean

Born in the Monmouthshire city of Newbridge on the eighth of June in 1904, Angus Rowland McBean was a Welsh photographer and set designer associated with the Surrealist movement. He went through two main creative periods in his forty-year career: pre-World War II in which he experimented successfully with surrealist images and post-war when his portraiture photography became more conventional and focused on theatrical and entertainment artists.

Angus McBean was the eldest and only son of Clement McBean, of Scottish descent, and Irene Sara Thomas, of Welsh descent. His father, after his military career in the South Wale Borderers, became a surveyor in the mining industry which necessitated frequently moving his family. McBean had his primary education at the Monmouth School for Boys and later attended the Newport Technical College where he developed an interest in photography. At the age of fifteen, McBean bought his first camera and created sets, props and costumes for the amateur dramatic productions at Monmouth’s Lyceum Theater.

In 1925, McBean’s father died from tuberculosis which he had contracted while fighting in the trenches during World War I. After his fathers death, McBean relocated to London where he worked in the antiques department of Liberty’s, London’s luxury department store on Regent Street. In his free time, McBean engaged in photographing his friends, making masks, and attending theater performances in the West End. He left Liberty’s in 1931, grew a distinctive beard, and began a career in photography. McBean served as an apprentice at the New Grafton Street Studio owned by photographer Hugh Cecil who taught him photographic techniques. After a year, McBean established his own studio on Belgrave Road in Victoria, London.

The turning point in Angus McBean’s career came in 1935 when Welsh actor and dramatist Ivor Novello asked him to create masks for playwright Clemence Dane’s adaption of author Max Beerbohm’s “The Happy Hypocrite”. Pleased with the masks, Novello commissioned McBean to take portrait photographs for the production. In 1937, McBean received a commission from the British weekly illustrated journal “The Sketch” for a photograph of actress Beatrix Lehmann in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra”. This portrait was inspired by the surrealist art of the era. McBean, in collaboration with artist Roy Hobdell, produced a series of surrealist-styled portraits of leading actresses for a weekly series which ran until the beginning of World War II. 

After the war, McBean established a new studio on Endell Street in London. One of his first commissions was to photograph the American actress Clare Luce who was appearing in “Anthony and Cleopatra” at Stratford-on-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theater. McBean next produced a series of portraits that incorporated notable objects from the lives of his sitters: Ivor Novello is shown with bound editions of his musicals and Cecil Beaton is surrounded by pages from his scrapbooks. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was the most important photographer of theater and dance personalities. Among his many sitters were Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Margot Forteyn and Robert Helpmann. 

Angus McBean’s career took a new direction in the 1950s and 1960s as he began shooting color photographs for album covers. He photographed Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Shirley Bassey and the Beverley Sisters, and Spike Mulligan for his album “Milligan Preserved”. McBean also was responsible for the 1963 cover art of The Beatles album “Please, Please Me” which showed the group leaning over the balcony at the EMI offices in London. Six years later, he was to recreate the shot for the the proposed “Get Back” album; however, the recreated shot later appeared on the two retrospectives of the group’s work “1962-1966” and “1967-1970”. 

In the 1960s, McBean purchased Flemings Hall in Bedingfield, Suffolk and undertook a major renovation project; this estate would be his home until his death. In this period, he gradually reduced the number of commissions he accepted but continued to work on selected projects. In 1984, McBean appeared as a special guest in musician-composer David Sylvian’s music video “Red Guitar”. Sylvian, who has a strong interest in McBean’s work, was directly inspired by McBean’s 1938 surrealistic portrait of cinema and theatrical actress Flora Robson. 

Over the course of his career, Angus McBean produced two hundred and eighty portrait photographs; he was also produced seventy-nine self portraits. In 1990, McBean fell ill on a holiday in Morocco and, after returning to England, died at Ipswich Heath Road Hospital on the 9th of June in 1990, eighty-six years after his birth. His work is in many private and public collections including London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Mander & Mitchenson Collection at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal National Theater Archive, and the Shakespeare Center Library and Archive in Stratford-on-Avon. 

Note: In the spring of 1942, Angus McBean’s career was temporarily ruined when he was arrested in the city of Bath for criminal acts of homosexuality. He was sentenced to four years in prison; however he was released in the autumn of 1944. After the end of the second World War, McBean was able to successfully resume his career. In the late 1940s, he formed a close, yet brief, relationship with male model Sebastian Minton. McBean helped Minton, who had ambitions of becoming an actor, put together a photographic portfolio for studio presentations.

Note: If anyone knows the identity of the actress in the fourth photo of the header photo array, please send me that information via the contact page. Thank you.

Top Insert Image: Angus McBeam, “Self Portrait”, circa 1951, Bromide Print, 29.4 x 26 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Surrealist Beach Scene with a Male Figure”, circa 1949, Hand-Colored Silver Print, 50.5 x 67.0 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Vivien Leigh ‘Twelfth Night’ Old Vic Tour”, 1961, Bromide Print, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Choreographer and Dancer Berto Pasuko”, 1947, Gelatin Silver Print, 37.5 x 28.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Binkie Beaumont, Angela Baddeley and Emlyn Williams”, 1947, Bromide Print, 38 x 29.7 cm, Harvard Theater Collection, Harvard University, National Portrait Gallery

Johan Rudolf Bonnet

The Artwork of Johan Rudolf Bonnet

Born in March of 1895 in Amsterdam, Johan Rudolf Bonnet was a Dutch artist who immersed himself in the culture and landscape of the Indonesian province of Bali. Particularly interested in the subject of portraiture, he took great care that his subjects were represented to the highest classical standard. Bonnet was keenly aware the colonial Dutch East Indies’ indigenous populations faced a fragile future in the twentieth-century world. 

In the 1920s, Bonnet traveled around Europe and spent a substantial amount of time in Italy, particularly Florence where he learned the art of fresco painting. Inspired by the work of the Italian Renaissance, he sought to capture the emotions and expressions of Balinese life as seen through European eyes that cared deeply for the richness of life the island offered. Bonnet’s body of work draws parallels with the art of Renaissance painter Michelangelo Buonarotti, whom he considered one of his greatest examples, not in the least because they were both trained as mural painters.

Rudolf Bonnet used his draftsman training to create works with a subtle palette and clean lines. His work showed both his keen observation as well as his deep respect for his subjects and their culture. Influenced by the Art Nouveau movement in the early twentieth-century; Bonnet was used to stylizing his model’s faces, often elongating them. Yet, they would never become caricatures; they would always remain dignified and autonomous. It was Bonnet’s way of emphasizing the beauty he perceived.

Born to descendants of a Dutch-Huguenot family, Johan Rudolf Bonnet attended Amsterdam’s State Academy of Fine Arts and its National Arts and Crafts School. In 1920, he traveled to Italy where he produced a collection of drawings depicting village scenes, local people and landscapes. Bonnet rented a studio for several months in Rome and, during his stay in the city, met Dutch painter and printmaker Wijnand Otto Jan Nieuwenkemp. As the first European artist to visit Bali, Nieuwenkemp persuaded Bonnet to explore that country which had so impressed him. Bonnet first traveled to North Africa; the paintings exhibited and sold on this trip enabled him to continue his voyage to Bali.

Rudolf Bonnet arrived in Balit in 1929 and met German artist Walter Spies and the Dutch musicologist Jaap Kunst. With Kunst, he made a trip to the Indonesian island of Nias, which lies off the western shore of Sumatra. Upon his return to Bali in 1930, Bonnet was invited to live in town of Ubud by Cokorda Gde Raka Sukawati, an elected member of the Volksraad, the People’s Council. In 1936, Bonnet, along with Walter Spies, Cokorda Sukawati, and painter and sculptor I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, formed the Pita Maha (Great Spirit, Guiding Inspiration) artist association to select artists whose work could be exhibited and sold throughout the Indies, the Netherlands, and the United States. 

After the outbreak of the war in Europe, Bonnet remained free in Bali until 1942 when the Japanese invaders ordered him sent to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. He spent the remainder of the war inside internment camps in Bolong, Para-Para and Makassar. Walter Spies was arrested as a German national and was interred by the Dutch authorities in Bali as an enemy alien. In 1942, he and four hundred seventy-seven other German internees were deported by the Dutch to Ceylon. Their ship was bombed by Japanese planes; Spies and most of the other prisoners died at sea. 

In 1947, Rudolf Bonnet returned to Bali where he built a house and studio in the Campaun area of southeastern Bali. Although the Dutch and Indonesian governments were in a period of worsening relations, he was able to reside in Bali due tohis relationship with President Sukarno, who had collected fourteen of Bonnet’s paintings. Bonnet founded the Golongan Pelukis Ubud (Ubud Painters’ Group) and created designs for Bali’s Museum Puri Lukisan, the Royal Museum of Paintings.

In 1957, Bonnet was expelled from Indonesia after he refused to finish President Sukarno’s portrait. He did not return to Bali until 1972, two years after Sukarno’s death. Upon his return, Bonnet assisted in the Royal Museum’s expansion and organized its opening exhibition. He died in Laren, Holland in April of 1978 after a long illness. Johan Rudolf Bonnet was cremated and the ashes brought to Bali. These ashes were combined with the ashes of his long-time friend Cokorda Gde Agung Sukawati, who had died in 1967, and were burnt together in a great cremation ceremony. 

Rudolf Bonnet’s work is housed in many private collections and the collections of the Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller in Amsterdam, the Neka Art Museum in Bali, and the Singer Museum in Laren, Holland. Founded in 1980 and supported by donations, the Rudolf Bonnet Foundation Netherlands supports Balinese artists and brings their work to the Netherlands for exhibitions. 

Second Insert Image: Johan Rudolf Bonnet, “Self Portrait”, 1927, Pastel on Paper

Third Insert Image: Johan Rudolf Bonnet, “Male Torso”, Date Unknown, Color Pastels and Watercolor on Paper, 63.5 x 50 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Johan Rudolf Bonnet, “Self Portrait”, 1976 , Crayon and Pastel on Paper

Hans Holbein the Younger

Hans Holbein the Younger, “An Unidentified Man”, circa 1535, Black and Colored Chalks, White Gouache, Pen and Ink, Metapoint, Royal Collection Trust, England

Born in 1497 in the city of Augsburg, Hans Holbein the Younger was a German-Swiss portraitist and printmaker who worked in the Northern Renaissance style that occurred in Europe north of the Alps. The culture and influence of the Italian Renaissance was brought to northern Europe’s local art movements by the trade and commerce between Italy and the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Considered one of the greatest sixteenth-century portraitists, Holbein also produced religious art, Reformation propaganda, and book designs.

Hans Holbein the Younger was the second son of painter and draftsman Hans Holbein the Elder. He and his brother, Ambrosius, trained at their father’s Augsburg art and craft workshop until 1515 when they, as journeyman painters, traveled to Basel, the Swiss center of education and the printing trade. Apprenticed to Basel’s leading painter and printmaker Hans Herbster, they found work as designers of metal cuts and woodcuts for the city’s printers. In 1515, the Holbein brothers received a commission from theologian Oswald Myconius to create  margin drawings for that year’s edition of scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Latin essay “In Praise of Folly”.

In 1517, Holbein traveled to Switzerland’s central city of Lucerne where he worked with his father on murals for merchant Jakob von Hertenstein; he also created designs for stained glass works. In the winter of that year, it is suspected Holbein journeyed to northern Italy where he studied the fresco works of Andrea Mantegna, a painter who had experimented in the art of perspective. Holbein, upon his return to Lucerne, painted two panels at Hertenstein’s house with copies of Mantegna’s large egg tempera canvases.

Hans Holbein relocated to Basel in 1519, joined the Painters’Guild, and became a citizen of the city. In this productive period, he created internal murals for the Council Chamber at the Town Hall, a series of religious paintings and designs for stained glass windows. Working in book design through publisher Johann Froben, Holbein created woodcut designs for the “Dance of Death”, a late Middle Age allegory of death; illustrations of the Old Testament; and the title page of Martin Luther’s Bible. He also designed twelve alphabet fonts ornamented with depictions of Greek and Roman gods, and the heads of Caesars, poets and philosophers. 

While in Basel, Holbein painted a series of portraits, among them the portrait of the young scholar Bonifacius Amerbach, son of the printer Johannes Amerbach, and a double portrait of Basel’s Mayor Jakob Meyer and his wife, Dorothea. Sent to the Court of England by Antwerp’s secretary Pieter Gillis, Holbein painted two portraits of Sir Thomas More, one with his family; a portrait of William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury; the German astronomer and mathematician Nicholas Kratzer, a member of Thomas More’s scientific circle and tutor to More’s children; and courtiers such aa Lady Anne Lovell and Comptroller of the Royal Household Sir Henry Guildford and his wife, Lady Mary. 

In England circa 1536-1537, Hans Holbein officially entered the service of King Henry VIII. One of his first commissions was a 1537 mural for the Palace of Whitehall. It was the first life-size full-length portrait of a monarch to be created in England. A fire in the seventeenth-century destroyed the mural; however several copies of the section depicting Henry VIII survive. Holbein was often sent to Europe to sketch portraits of potential brides for the king due to his skill at rendering faces. A series of his drawings dated between 1526 and 1543 were  bound in a book and are kept within the Royal Collection, a majority of these portraits being housed at Windsor Castle. 

In most of his drawings, Holbein tended to concentrate on the face of the sitter and left more abstract lines to delineate the clothing. Depending on the part of the portrait he was sketching, he would often change mediums. Scholars believe he began his portraits with red chalk and then worked on subtle shading for facial contours. Holbein next applied fine lines of colored chalk for the features and finished with dark black ink for blocks of flat tone on the hats. Due to the darker handling of key facial features, the changing mediums created a more complex rendering of the face. 

Hans Holbein utilized a colored ground in his portrait sketches. He had a range of prepared drawing papers ready for use and selected the tone most apt for the complexion of his sitter. Using this method, Holbein quickly established the color accuracy of his sitter’s face; this also became the established practice later used by watercolorist William Turner for his open-air landscape paintings. Holbein used touches of watercolor or gouache to further extend the value range and to enhance a particular feature, such as the eyes or beard. He also employed a method known as silverpoint, drawing fine lines with a silver stylus on a prepared ground; the effect of which are marks that tarnish into warm brown tones through oxidization over time.

After entering King Henry VIII’s service, Holbein altered his paintings’ portrait style. He focused more intensely on his sitter’s facial features and largely omitted props and settings. Holbein applied this clean technique to the miniature portraits of Princess Christina of Denmark and Jane Pemberton Small, the wife of a London cloth merchant. At Burgau Castle, he later painted the portrait of the prospective bride of King Henry, Anne of Cleves. For this portrait, Holbein decided to paint her full-faced and elaborately attired. Aside from his official duties, Holbein continued to paint many private portrait commissions of merchantmen and courtiers. 

Hans Holbein the Younger died, at the age of forty-five, in London near the end of 1543. Although Flemish art historian Karel van Mander stated in the early 1600s that Holbein died of the plague, it is more likely he died from an infection as friends attended his bedside. Holbein, in October of 1543, had made a signed and witnessed will; however it was not witnessed by a lawyer. John Antwerp, a goldsmith and friend, legally undertook the administrations of Holbein’s last wishes, settled the debts, provided for Holbein’s family, and dispersed his remaining effects. Holbein’s gravesite is unknown. Not one note or letter from his hand survives. 

Top Insert Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, “Portrait of Unidentified Woman”, circa 1532-1543, Black and Colored Chalk, Pen and Ink on Pale Pink Prepared Paper, Royal Collection Trust, England 

Second Insert Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, “An Unidentified Man”, circa 1535, Black and Colored Chalks, Pen and Ink, Brush and Ink on Pink Prepared Paper, 27.2 x 21 cm, Royal Collection Trust, England

Third Insert Image: Hans Holbein, “John More, Son of Thomas More”, circa 1526-1527, Black and Colored Chalks on Prepared Paper, Royal Collection Trust, England

Foourth Insert Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, “Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey”, circa 1532-1533, Black and Colored Chalk with Pen and Ink on Pale Pink Prepared Paper, Royal Collection Trust, England

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Holbein, “Lord Thomas Vaux”, Date Unknown, Detail, Black and Colored Chalk, Pen and Brown Ink, Black Was and White Opaque Watercolor on Pink Prepared Paper, Royal Collection Trust, England

Scipione Pulzone

Scipione Pulzone, “Portrait of Jacopo Boncompagni”, 1574, Oil on Canvas, 121.9 x 99.3 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1544 at the coastal city of Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples, Scipione Pulzone, also known as Il Gaetano, was a Neapolitan painter of the late Italian Renaissance. He painted many important religious works; however, he excelled in portraiture with exceptionally rendered artistic details. One of the most celebrated artists in Rome, Pulzone was also one of the most original portraitists of the Counter Reformation, that period of Catholic resurgence that was initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation in Europe.

Scipione Pulzone is believed to have been a student of Jacopino del Conte, an Italian Mannerist painter active in both Rome and Florence. His portrait style was influenced by the works of Raphael and the international style of work from the Hapsburg court in Austria, particularly the portraits done by Anthonis Mor. Mor’s formal style of court portraits, with grandiose and self-possessed ostentation, was extremely influential on court painters throughout Europe.

Many of Pulzone’s paintings, particularly his religious scenes, show the strong influence of painter Girolamo Siciolante de Sermoneta’s latter works, which were executed in the reformist naturalist style. Pulzone painted his “Mater Divinae Providentiae”, an image of Mary and the Child Jesus, around 1580. In 1664, the painting became the possession of the Barnabite Fathers who placed the art piece in a small chapel at the rear of Rome’s San Carlo ai Catinari church where it continues to draw many religious followers.

In 1593, Scipione Pulzone finished his 1588 commissioned altarpiece “The Lamentation”  for the Passion chapel on the right side of the Chiesa del Gesù, the mother church of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Intended to complement the austere interior space of the church, this painting rejected popular stylistic motifs and avoided narrative anecdotal details to create a meditative, devotional icon. Finely rendered details such as the tears of the Virgin, the crown of thorns held by Saint John, and the pallor of Christ’s body are presented to the viewer for contemplation.

Pulzone worked in both the Florentine and Neapolitan courts, as well as, in Rome, where he was commissioned to paint the portraits of two Popes, Pius V and his successor Gregory XIII known for commissioning the Gregorian calendar. While in Rome, Pulzone painted two major works: the 1585 “Our Lady of the Assumption” for Rome’s church of San Silvestro al Quirinale and “Christ on the Cross” for Rome’s Santa Maria in Vallicella. 

Scipione Pulzone died in Rome on the first of February in 1598 at the age of fifty-four. 

Notes: Scipione Pulzone’s “The Lamentation”, originally at the  Chiesa del Gesù, was anonymously gifted to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984 (Accession Number 1984.74). It is currently listed as not on view.

At the online Artsy, there is an article on Scipione Pulzone’s 1574 “Portrait of Jacopo Boncompagni”, which includes the history of the painting and Boncompagni’s life, as well as, the two men’s close personal relationship. Pulzone named his first-born son Giacomo (Jacopo is a variant of the classical name Giacomo) and Boncompagni was selected to became Giacomo’s godfather. This article is located at: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/scipione-pulzone-called-il-gaetano-portrait-of-jacopo-boncompagni-three-quarter-length-in-armor

Top Insert Image: Scipione Pulzone, Portrait of Unidentified Noblewomen, circa 1580-1589, Oil on Canvas, 119 x 91.2 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland 

Second Insert Image: Scipione Pulzone, “Self Portrait”, 1564, Oil on Canvas, 43.5 x 34.5 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands

Bottom Insert Image: Scipione Pulzone, “Portrait of Urban Vii”, circa 1590, Oil on Canvas, 131 x 99 cm, Private Collection

Curtis Holder

The Artwork of Curtis Holder

Born in 1968, Curtis Holder is an English artist based in London. He works primarily in colored pencil and graphite to create large-scale figurative works and portraits on paper. Raised on an estate in Leicester in the 1980s, Holder majored in Graphic Design at the prestigious Kingston University and completed his postgraduate studies in Character Animation at Central Saint Martins in London.

Curtis Holder’s multi-layered drawings emerge through an unpredictable series of energetic lines that reveal the form, as well as, the emotional state of his subject. He works briskly, layering pencils and graphite for their dynamic effect. Holder does not alter any marks after they are laid on the paper. All pencil marks, including preparatory ones, remain on the paper in the finished work. The complexity of the lines, the pose of the sitter, and the graphic quality of the work combine to form images of great insight.

A prolific artist, Holder has entered his work in many group exhibitions. Among these are the Society of Graphic Fine Art’s 2021 Centenary Exhibition “Unlocked” in London; the 2021 United Kingdom Colored Pencil Society’s 20th Anniversary Gala Exhibition at Oxo Tower Wharf in London; the 2022 Portrait Artist of the Year at Compton Verney, Warwickshire; and the 2023 Royal Society of British Artists Annual Exhibition in London. 

Curtis Holder’s debut solo exhibition “Something Unspoken” was held from November of 2021 through January of 2022 at the 45 Park Lane Gallery in London. His solo exhibition “The Makers: Portraits from Backstage” opened at the National Theater, South Bank, London in January and continues to the 4th of November in 2023. These multilayered pencil portraits depict those valuable theater people who work backstage at the National Theater. In 2022, Holder was awarded the honor of being the National Theater’s first artist in residence.

Holder is a member of the Contemporary British Portrait Painters and an Associate Member of the Society of Graphic Fine Art. His work is held in private and public collections including London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Soho House, and the National Theater in London.

Curtis Holder and his partner, Steve Goggin, a digital content manager for the Historic Royal Palaces, reside in a midcentury house in south London. Holder holds summer drawing classes in the garden for neighbors and also teaches part-time at the local primary school.

“What prevents people from breaking into that (art) world is visibility. If you don’t see yourself represented, you’ll think there’s no way in. I’d like to take my story to as many children as possible and say, you can survive as an artist. It’s like any other job, you have to work hard. But it’s as real as becoming a doctor. I want to show others that art can be a career, and a way of life.”  —Curtis Holder, December 2020, The Guardian, London

Note: Curtis Holder’s website contains information on current exhibitions and the commission of work, as well as, available original drawings and limited edition prints. His site is located at: https://www.curtisholder.co.uk

A podcast interview between Curtis Holder and Alyson Walsh can be heard at Alyson Walsh’s “That’s Not My Age” on Spotify: https://thatsnotmyage.com/age/thats-not-my-age-podcast-portrait-artist-of-the-year-curtis-holder/

Second Insert Image: Curtis Holder, “Gaylene”, 2021, Colored Pencil on Paper, 90 x 66 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Curtis Holder, “One Man and His Dog”, 2022, Colored Pencil and Acrylic Gouache on Paper, 120 x 120 cm

Albert Wainwright

The Artwork of Albert Wainwright

Born in the historic market town of Castleford, West Yorkshire in 1898, Albert Wainwright was painter, illustrator, and designer of theatrical costume and sets. A prolific artist, his body of work includes thousands of watercolors, drawings, painted ceramics, costume and theatre designs and book illustrations, which reveal him to be an artist of powerful inventiveness and ability.

The youngest of three children, Albert Wainwright had a Methodist upbringing and an early interest in art. He attended Castleford’s Secondary School where he met classmate Henry Moore and began a friendship secured by their mutual interest in art. Until 1920, Wainwright and Moore would correspond to each other through illustrated letters, even as soldiers in the first World War. Although encouraged by his father to seek a profession as an engineer, Wainwright was given permission to train in the arts through the persuasive efforts of his secondary school’s art teacher.  

In 1914, Wainwright entered Leeds Arts University in West Yorkshire. Through his studies, he was influenced by the works of illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and Russian painter and theatrical designer Léon Bakat, as well as, the new works created by the Viennese Secessionist artists. Wainwright was also drawn to the fluid use of line, exaggerated forms, and dynamic use of pattern and color in the works of painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. 

After his service in the Royal Flying Corps, Albert Wainwright rejoined his family who now lived in Pontefract, West Yorkshire. He transformed a room in the family home for use as a studio where he continue his work as artist and designer. In 1920 at the age of twenty-two, Wainwright had his first solo exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery which, well received, gained him the support of Leeds University’s Vice Chancellor Sir Michael Sadler and influential art critic Frank Rutter. He also gained representation by London’s Goupil Gallery which held solo exhibitions of his work in 1921 and 1922.

In 1927, Wainwright was appointed temporary art master at Castleford’s Secondary School for two years. During this period, he went on a school excursion to Germany, the first of his many journeys to Europe, both alone and with his partner. This was a time of great social and political change in Europe, particularly in Austria and Germany with the rise of fascist movement. Beginning with this trip to Germany, Wainwright began a regular practice of illustrating sketchbooks with people he contacted and landscapes he admired. After his family bought a cottage in 1930 at Robin Hood’s Bay, he would spend every summer there to paint watercolors of people on holiday, beach scenes, and depictions of the town’s red roofs. 

As a gay man, Albert Wainwright exercised discretion in his life, a necessity felt by many during that era due to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which had made homosexuality illegal; often a letter of affection was sufficient to bring prosecution. He did have a life-long lover, George Collins, who was a schoolmaster and friend of the Wainwright family. Wainwright often refers to his sexual identity as a gay man in his work. His sketchbooks contain not only landscapes but also studies of men in uniforms at rest or play. Although generally clothed, Wainwright’s portraits of men were sensitively painted with alluring expressions. He considered these sketchbooks as personal and private documents and not intended for public view. 

Wainwright received many commissions to design costumes and sets for local theaters including the Leeds Art Theater and the Leeds Civic Playhouse. He designed for plays ranging from Greek tragedies to modern dramas by Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekov and Bernard Shaw. Wainwright designed sets and costumes for over one-hundred productions which included seven-hundred costumes for a single play in 1927, the “Miracle Play” held at Kirkstall Abbey on the north bank of the River Aire. 

Wainwright never achieved the same level of commercial success and recognition as his school friend, sculptor and lithographer Henry Moore, and had to supplement his art with teaching. In March of 1943, he applied for and was offered a teaching post for the duration of the war as an art teacher at the historic Bridlington School in Yorkshire. After teaching for only three months, Albert Wainwright was stricken with meningitis and died on a bus on his way to his Harrogate home in September of 1943. His work is in many private collections; the largest public collection of his work is housed at the Hepwotth Wakefield Gallery in West Yorkshire, England.

Notes: An extensive online collection of Albert Wainwright’s work can be found at “Albert Wainwright: The Unseen Archive” located at: https://sites.google.com/view/albertwainwrightunseenarchive/home

A short video on his life is available at the Hepworth Wakefield Gallery site located at: https://hepworthwakefield.org/our-art-artists/collections/highlights/albert-wainwright/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Albert Wainwright”, circa 1912, Vintage Print on Card Stock, Hepworth Wakefield Collection, West Yorkshire, England

Second Insert Image: Albert Wainwright, “Portrait Study of George Collins”, Date Unknown, Watercolor on Paper, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Albert Wainwright, “The Dragon Slayer”, circa 1927-1938, Gouache on Paper, 39 x 54.3 cm, Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami Beach, Florida

Bottom Insert Image: Albert Wainwright, “Boy Sleeping”, Date Unknown, Watercolor on Paper, 23 x 27.5 cm, Private Collection

Géza Vörös

The Paintings of Géza Vörös

Born in 1897 in Nagydobrony, now the Ukrainian city of Velyka Dobron, Géza Vörös was a Hungarian painter. He studied at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts under Ede Balló, a Hungarian graphic artist and painter best known for his portraits. After his studies, Balló lived and worked in Szolnok located on the Tisza River and the former mining town of Nagybánya (Baia Mare in Romania).

Géza Vörös painted landscapes, both rural and urban, still life arrangements, posed figurative works, and portraits. His stylized paintings reveal a keen sense of observation and subtle humor. Vörös’s work bears the objectivity of the Neo-Classical style as well as the elegant sensual aesthetic seen in works of Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts. 

In the early twentieth-century, Szentendre was a small provincial town on the Danube River, approximately twenty miles north of Budapest. During the period between the two World Wars, its established artist colony provided a shelter for numerous artists and writers. With Vörös’s arrival at Szentendre in 1929, his paintings changed from their earlier uninspiring shades of color to palettes of warm, soft colors. Vörös remained in the city until the 1940s, after which there is very little information on his life. 

Géza Vörös was a member of both the New Artists’ Association and the prestigious New Society of Artists. He was associated with Budapest-born painter Hugó Scheiber, a modernist painter whose work, initially executed in a post-Impressionist style, turned increasingly towards Futurism and German Expressionism. Scheiber was also a member of the New Society of Artists. 

Géza Vörös died in Budapest in 1957. A memorial retrospective of his work was organized in 1961 and held at Budapest’s Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, its historic Neoclassical styled Hall of Art. 

Note: If anyone has any additional biographical information on Géza Vörös, I would be interested in adding that to the biography. Please send it via my contact page. 

Top Insert Image: Géza Vörös, “Self Portrait”, 1935, Oil on Canvas, 60.5 x 50 cm, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Bottom Insert Image: Géza Vörös, “The Bird Preachers”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Josep Tapiró i Baró

The Artwork of Josep Tapiró i Baró

Born in February of 1836 in the Catalonian city of Reus, Josep Tapiró i Baró was a Spanish painter and one of the leading representatives of international Orientalism. He  was the first painter from the Iberian Peninsula to settle in Tangier. Through his thirty-seven years in Tangier, Tapiró was a direct witness to North Africa’s urban and cultural transformation under European colonialism. He is best known for his series of half-length portraits of traditional characters and religious scenes.

The son of hardware retailers, Josep Tapiró i Baró displayed an affinity for drawing in his early years. He began his formal art training in 1849 under Domènec Soberano, a prosperous wine merchant and self-taught artist who had founded a drawing school in Reus. At the age of thirteen, Tapiró met fellow student Marià Josep Maria Bernat Fortuny i Marsal. These young men, both exceptionally talented painters, established a friendship that lasted their whole lives. In 1853, Tapiró and Fortuny were given the opportunity to exhibit their work at a show held by the cultural and recreational association Casino de Reussense. 

In the latter part of 1853, Tapiró and Fortuny enrolled at Barcelona’s Escola de la Llotja where they studied under Claudi Lorenzale i Sugrañes, a Spanish painter associated with the German Nazarene movement for the revival of spirituality in art. Tapiró produced mainly historical and religious scenes during his time in Barcelona. In 1857, a group of four students, among whom were Tapiró and Fortuny, were given the opportunity to compete for a Rome study grant. The test was a portrait of Barcelona’s eleventh-century military hero Ramon Berenguer III. Marià Fortuny unanimously won the competition and left for Rome in 1858. 

Josep Tapiró i Baró traveled to Madrid in 1858 and enrolled at the School of Painting and Engraving which was a branch of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Ferdinand. He studied under portrait and historical painter Federico de Madrazo until his return to Barcelona in 1860. Tapiró assisted with the decoration of the façade of the Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya, one of the few medieval buildings in Europe still functioning as a seat of government. 

At his arrival in Rome in 1862, Tapiró joined his friend Fortuny and was introduced to Fortuny’s circle of artists who regularly frequented the Antico Caffè Greco. This café, the oldest in Rome, was a historic meeting place for such figures as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Gordon Byron, Franz Liszt, and John Keats. While in Italy, Tapiró visited Naples and Florence with Fortuny, took watercolor classes and painted works that focused more on genre themes. In 1871, he and Fortuny traveled to Tangier in Morocco where they spent most of a year. While Fortuny painted scenes of courtyards and Moroccan landscapes, Tapiró painted detailed watercolors of common people and beggars. Their trip ended in 1872 with his return to Rome and Fortuny’s return to his wife and son in Granada. In 1873, Tapiró exhibited his Orientalist works at the International Art Circle in Rome. 

In November of 1874,  Josep Tapiró i Baró was shocked to learn of Fortuny’s sudden death in Rome from malaria he had contracted painting in the open air in Naples. Rather than remain in Rome or Spain, Tapiró decided in 1876 to join a diplomatic mission to meet Sultan of Morocco Hassan bi Mohammed. He moved into a house near the historical district of Tangier and acquired an old theater as a studio. Although he traveled as far as New York and Saint Petersburg to exhibit his work, Tapiró lived in Tangier for the rest of his life. Returning to the medium of watercolor, he painted a series of detailed, brooding portraits that, instead of his previous dramatic Orientalist style, documented the humanity of the Moroccan people.

In 1886, Tapiró married a Tangier native of Italian ancestry, twenty-year old Maria Manuela Veleraga Cano. Shortly after the marriage, they adopted the orphaned son of Maria’s friend who had recently died. In 1903, Tapiró contracted a lung infection which caused respiratory and cardiovascular problems that led to lack of energy and, by 1905, a decline in his career. The decline was compounded by the decrease in foreign visitors to Tangier due to a kidnapping of two British nationals and a rebellion led by Bou Hmara, a pretender to the throne of Morocco. 

In 1907, Josep Tapiró i Baró and his wife relocated to Madrid in order to promote his work at an exhibition held at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, a major cultural center. After their return to Tangier, Tapiró’s health problems worsened over time and led to his death, at the age of seventy-seven, in October of 1913. He initially was buried in Tangier; however, the government of Reus demanded in 1921 that he be recognized in his home town. Tapiró’s remains were moved to Reus in 1947 and reinterred near the burial space of his friend Marià Fotruny. The city of Reus placed a commemoration plaque on the house in which Tapiró was born.

Notes: The Catalan-speaking territories abide by the Spanish naming customs; however, the discrete surnames are usually joined with the word “i”, meaning and, instead of the Spanish “y”, a practice very common in formal contexts. Thus, Josep Tapiró i Baró’s first or paternal surname is Tapiró and the second or maternal family name is Baró.

For those interested in a deeper study of Spanish Orientalism, particularly in regard to the works of José Tapiró y Baró and Mariano Bertuchi Nieto, I recommend University of Edinburgh researcher Claudia Hopkins’s 2017 “The Politics of Spanish Orientalism: Distance and Proximity in Tapiró and Bertuchi”. The published version can be found online at: https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/files/41514515/Hopkins_Tapiro_Bertuchi_final_clean_copy.pdf

Top Insert Image: Marià Fortuny, “Portrait of Josep Tapiró i Baró, Tangier”, 1874, Ink Sketch on Paper, Private Collection

Second Insert Image:  Josep Tapiró i Baró, “An Oriental Atrium”, Date Unknown, Pencil, Watercolor and Bodycolor on Paper, 67.8 x 47.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Josep Tapiró i Baró, “Homme en Blanc”, Date Unknown, Watercolor on Paper, 64 x 47 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, ” Josep Tapiró i Baró”, circa 1865-70, Vintage Print, Provenance Unknown

Charles Haslewood Shannon

The Artwork of Charles Haslewood Shannon

Born in Sleaford, Lincolnshire in April of 1863, Charles Haslewood Shannon was an English artist best known for his portraits. The son of Reverend Franklin William Shannon, Rector of Quarrington and Old Sleaford, and Catherine Emma Manthorp, he received his primary education at St. John’s School in the town of Leatherhead, Surrey. Shannon received his art training at the City and Guilds of London Art School, which emphasized a strong connection between fine arts, craft and design.

In October of 1882, Charles Shannon met his lifelong partner Charles de Sousy Ricketts, a fellow student who was studying wood engraving under the prominent engraver Charles Roberts. Inspired by a meeting with the French artist Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes in 1887, Shannon retired from the world to focus on his painting while Ricketts provided an income through work as an illustrator. Over the course of their lives, they collected Old Master paintings and drawings, Egyptian and Greek antiquities, Persian miniatures, and Japanese woodblock prints. Shannon and Ricketts moved into Whistler’s house, The Vale, in 1888 and lived together in London’s Chelsea community for over fifty years until Ricketts’s death. 

Shannon’s work was influenced by painters of the Italian Renaissance’s Venetian school, which gave primacy to color over line, and his partner Charles Ricketts’s work inspired by Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and Symbolist Gustave Moreau. Abandoning his early heavy-toned works, Shannon painted his new works in clearer, more transparent colors. He achieved success with portraits and classically-styled figure compositions distinctive for their color and mood. A gold medal was awarded to Shannon for work entered at Munich’s  Annual Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1897.

Although known for his portraits, Charles Shannon also created lithographs and etchings. He was particularly interested in woodcut illustrations and experimenting with different lithographic techniques.  Many complete sets of Shannon’s lithographs and etchings have been acquired by London’s British Museum and the print collections at both Berlin and Dresden Museums.

Shannon and Ricketts collaborated on the design and illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s 1891 “A House of Pomegranates” and 1894 “The Sphinx”, as well as wood engraving for editions of “Daphnis and Chloe” in 1893 and “Hero and Leander” in 1894. Influenced by Arts and Crafts designers William Morris and A. H. Mackmurdo, Shannon and Ricketts founded the Vale Press in 1896 with assistance from investor William Llewellyn Hacon. Through this celebrated London establishment, they published fine art journals and books, including the last year’s issues of their own art portfolio “The Dial”. While Shannon and Ricketts did all the design and typographic work for all books issued by Vale Press, the actual printing was entrusted to Ballantyne Press, the work of which was supervised by Ricketts with fastidious care.

Charles Shannon painted Ricketts’s portrait “Man in the Inverness Cape” in 1898, a striking portrayal of the bearded Ricketts now housed in London’s National Portrait Gallery. Among the many portraits by Shannon are the 1904 “The Lady with the Green Fan”, depicting Amaryllis Roubichaud-Hacon, a leading Scottish suffragist; the 1922 portrait of theatrically-dressed actress Lillah McCarthy as the character “The Dumb Wife”; the 1928 “Portrait of Hilda Mary Moore”, the stage and film actress; and the  1917-1918 portrait of Queen Victoria’s grand-daughter “Princess Patricia of Connaught”. 

Shannon was elected as Associate of the Royal Academy in 1911 and, in 1918, became vice-president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers. In 1920 he elevated to Royal Academician at the Academy. In January of 1928, Shannon became disabled after a fall while attempting to hang a picture at their house in Regent’s Park. The neurological damage suffered from the fall was permanent and halted his successful artistic career.

Devastated by his partner’s poor health and working ceaselessly to support their household, Charles Ricketts died at age sixty-five of heart failure in October of 1931. Charles Haslewood Shannon died in March of 1937 at the age of seventy-three. At Shannon’s bequest, their extensive art collection was given to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. 

“Oscar Wilde had taken me to the Vale to see Ricketts and Shannon before I came to live in Chelsea, when I was charmed by these men, and by their simple dwelling, with its primrose walls, apple-green skirting and shelves, the rooms hung with Shannon’s lithographs, a fan-shaped watercolor by Whistler, and drawings by Hokusai – their first treasures, to be followed by so many others.”—William Rothenstein, 1893

Note: A short article entitled “Celebrating History’s Unsung Creative Couples” by Sara Davis, which discusses the lives of Shannon and Ricketts, can be found at the Rosenbach Museum & Library’s website located at: https://rosenbach.org/blog/celebrating-historys-unsung-creative-couples/

An extensive article on Shannon and Ricketts’s connection with Ballantyne Press, the printer of Vale Press published works, can be found at Paul van Capelleveen’s Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon blog located at: http://charlesricketts.blogspot.com/2013/08/107-vale-press-books-printed-on-hand.html

Top Insert Image: George Charles Beresford, “Charles Haslewood Shannon”, October 13 1903, Half-Plate Glass Negative, 15.9 x 11.3 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Charles Haslewood Shannon, “The Young Bacchus”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 89 x 69 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Sir William Rothenstein, “Charles Haslewood Shannon”, 1896, Pencil and Colored Chalk on Light Brown Paper, 38 x 29.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Charles Haslewood Shannon, “Robert Gregory”, 1906, Oil on Canvas, 101.6 x 101.6 cm, Dublin City Gallery, Dublin, Ireland