Peter Samuelson

Paintings by Peter Samuelson

Born in Salisbury in 1812, British artist Peter Samuelson studied at Eton College where his artistic aptitude was first noticed. He later studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts in Paris before moving to Holland to work as an illustrator. Following his service in the Second World War, Samuelson returned in 1947 to England again working as an illustrator and, later, as a set designer in the London theater.

In the early 1950s, Peter Samuelson helped his mother run a boarding house in Torquay, Cornwall, on the English Channel. It was here that the majority of his work from the 1950s and 1960s was produced, consisting of brightly colored portraitures and life studies of the boardinghouse’s lodgers. A zen-like calm pervades the romantically colored canvases and drawings, with a line quality that suggests the decorative sensitivity of artists Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard.

Samuelson returned to London in 1952, where he opened his own boarding houses, and continued his practice of using lodgers and guests as subjects. The artist, though shy in nature, was able to capture life and movement fluidly in his work, distilling with great skill the essence of his subjects, often merely observed in the public spaces of the boarding houses. Not a social person, Samuelson never actively sought representation or a gallery exhibition; but he did sell pieces to friends and gave some as gifts to friends and models.

Samuelson abandoned painting almost entirely in 1965, spending the latter years of his life in restoring Oriental rugs. In the 1980s, as his health began to decline, his friends placed work in galleries, including an exhibition at Leighton House Museum in London, resulting in some critical acclaim. A book of his work entitled “Post War Friends”, containing paintings and drawings, was published in 1987 by GMP Publishers, London. Peter Samuelson died in 1996.

Michael Triegel

The Artwork of Michael Triegel

Born in December of 1968 in Erfurt, Michael Triegel is a German painter, illustrator and graphic artist based in Leipzig. From 1990 to 1997, Michael Triegel studied at the renowned Hochschule fьr Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, where he was taught by Arno Rink, a painter in the German figurative tradition.

The Academy in Leipzig is closely associated with the New Leipzig School, a movement in German art that arose following the fall of the Berlin Wall, of which the painter Neo Rauch, a proponent of social realism, is the most important representative.The members of this association largely use the same figurative form language, though they vary widely in terms of their technique.

In terms of their subject matter and execution, Michael Triegel’s paintings are instilled with the atmosphere of the early European Renaissance. He works in the style of the old masters, applying layer upon layer with a very refined technique that compliments his ability for realistic detail. Triegel’s paintings are a celebration of pure figurative painting, with classic religious and profane motifs, which look like altarpieces but, at the same time, appear alienating and surreal.

In 2010, Michael Triegel, commissioned by the Bishop of Regensburg, painted the official portrait of Pope Benedict XVI, which resulted in international recognition of his work.

Insert Image: Michael Triegel, “Hermes”, 2008, Mixed Media on Linen

William Strang

William Strang, “Lady with a Red Hat”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 102.9 x 77.5 cm, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland

William Strang, born in February of 1859, was a Scottish painter and printmaker, known for his illustrating the works of writer and preacher John Bunyan, poet Samuel Coleridge, and novelist Joseph Rudyard Kipling.

At an early age, Strang attended Dumbarton Academy, a mixed secondary school, after which he worked in a counting-house of a shipbuilding firm for fifteen months. He left for London, at the age of sixteen, in 1875 to study art at the Slade School, under painter and etcher Alphonse Legros. Strang achieved success as an etcher, and became assistant master in the etching class. An original member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in 1880, he exhibited his work at their first show in 1881.

Strang worked in a multiple of techniques, including etching, drypoint, mezzotint, engraving, lithography, and wood cut. A privately produce catalogue of his engravings contained more than three hundred items. His work on poet William Nicholson’s “Ballad of Aken Drum” is known for its strong drawing and clear,

delicate shadow tones. Strang provided fourteen illustrations for the 1910 edition of John Bunyan’s series “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, and produced a series of etchings and woodcuts, from 1896 to 1903, illustrating Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

William Strang painted a number of portraits, nude figures in landscapes, and groups of peasant families. These were exhibited at several German exhibitions, at The International Society, and at the Royal Academy. His decorative biblical series of Adam and Eve, commissioned for the private library of the Hodson family in the West Midlands, was exhibited at the Whitechapel Exhibition in 1910.

In later years Strang developed a style of drawing in red and black chalk, with the whites and high lights rubbed out, on paper stained with water color. His method gave his work the qualities of delicate modeling, and refined form and gradations. Strang drew portraits in this manner of many members of the Commonwealth’s Order of Merit for the royal library at Windsor Castle.

William Strang was elected a member of The International Society in 1905, elected as an associate engraver of the Royal Academy in 1906, and became a master of the Art Workers Guild in 1907. He died in April of 1921 and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London. In 1955, his son David, also an artist, gifted impressions of the bulk of William Strang’s etchings to the National Gallery of Scotland.

Note: William Strang’s “Lady with a Red Hat” is a portrait of author and garden designer Vita Sackville-West. The strong colors of her outfit and her assertive pose with elbow extended conveys her flamboyant personality. An independent thinker, stylish and assertive, Vita Sackville-West shocked Edwardian society by her affairs with other women.

Vita Sackville-West published more than a dozen collections of poetry and thirteen novels. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her epic “The Land” and in 1933 for her “Collected Poems”. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of the 1928 “Orlando: A Biography” by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.

Insert Note: When William Strang exhibited his self-portrait at the Royal Academy in 1919, he gave it the simple title “A Painter”. Drawing on Impressionism and Symbolism, he had been one of the innovators of the modern style in Britain; but the symmetry of this work and the figure’s direct gaze is very reminiscent of the self-portraits of Rembrandt. Here, in his old age, Strang refers to a traditional model of the artist as a workman secluded in his studio. The painting is in the collection of the Tate Museum, London.

Charles Bargue

Charles Bargue, “The Albanian Sentinel in Cairo”, Detail, 1877, Oil on Panel, 28 x 21 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Painter and lithographer Charles Bargue was born in France in 1826/1827. He was a student of academic painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme. Bargue worked closely with Gérôme and was influenced by his style, which included Orientalist scenes and historical genre. Bargue travelled extensively throughout North Africa, and the Balkans, where he executed many portraits with meticulous detail of the local people.

Bargue is mostly remembered for his “Cours de Dessin”, which was conceived in collaboration with Gérôme and became one of the most influential classical drawing courses. This comprehensive course was published between 1866 and 1871 by Goupil & Cie, a leading art dealership and printing company in Paris.

This course is used by many academies and ateliers which focus on classical Realism. Aided by one hundred ninety-seven lithographs, students were guided from plaster casts to the study of master drawings and finally to drawing from a living model. Among the artists whose work is based on the study of Bargue’s plate work are Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh, who copied the complete set in 1880 to 1881.

Charles Bargue died on April 6th in 1883 in France. His last painting “Bashi-Bazouks Playing Chess”, was completed by Jean-Léon Gérôme and is now conserved in the Malden Public Library in Malden, Massachusetts.

Émile Fabry

Émile Fabry, “Portrait de Suzanne (Fabry) et de Barthélémy”, 1920, Lithograph Colored with Gouache on Wove Paper, 37.5 x 46 cm, Private Collection, Belgium

Born in Verviers, Belgium in 1865, Émile Fabry was an artist who studied under portrait and landscape painter Jean-François Portaels, who is regarded as the founder of the Belgian Orientalist school. An influential artist of the Symbolist movement in Belgium, Fabry was a member of prominent artist groups such as Pour L’Art (Art for Art’s Sake) and La Rose+Croix, a series of Symbolist art salons hosted in Paris in the 1890s.

With the advent of World War One in continental Europe, Émile Fabry sought refuge in St. Ives, England. The issues of war and peace became recurrent themes in his work, continuing even after the battles had ended. In 1919, Fabry, along with Jean Delville, Albert Ciamberlani and Constant Montald, founded L’Art Monumental, an idealistic artist group which evolved from the Symbolist movement. Using classical forms and iconographic traditions, the group desired to elevate the spirit of the people by a shared sense of beauty in the construction of new monuments and public buildings.

Émile Fabry’s 1920 hand-colored lithograph “Portrait of Suzanne (Fabry) and Barthélémy” is an overlay image of two profiles, one of his son Barthélémy and one of his daughter Suzanne. Illustrative of his creative process, the soldier and young woman are depicted in an idealized way, with the stoic, long gaze reminiscent of the rigidity of a sculpture. Fabry used a indistinct, dotted technique of coloring, combining elements of Pointillism and Symbolism, to give the figures a sense of liveliness.

Émile Fabry regularly used his family members as models for his work. There is an existing photo of Suzanne Fabry posing for this work which shows how Fabry focused his composition on her profile. Drawn to the subject of the war on several occasions, Fabry used his own children as models for this work to create a more personal portrayal of the war.

In addition to his paintings, Émile Fabry did the decorative mosaic work in pavilions of the 1880 National Exhibition at the Cinquanteniare of Brussels and, with Belgian architect Victor Horta, the decorations in the large Art Nouveau townhouse, the Hotel Solvay. In 1932, Émile Fabry was made a Commander in the Order of Leopold, the oldest and highest order in Belgium, founded by King Leopold in 1832. He died in 1966 at the age of one hundred and one years old.

Tope Insert Image: Émile Fabry, “Printemps”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 219 x 130 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Émile Fabry, “The Faun’s Song”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 138.1 x 122.5 cm, Private Collection

Otto Greiner

Otto Greiner, Study for the “Triumph of Venus”, 1909

Otto Greiner was born on the 16th of December, 1869 in Leipzig, Germany. He began his artistic career in 1884 as an apprentice lithographer and etcher in his hometown. In 1888 Greiner was awarded a bursary which enabled him to study from 1888 to 1891 at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich under illustrator and historical painter Sándor Liezen-Mayer.

At an exhibition in Munich, Greiner encountered the work of painter and sculptor Max Klinger, who was already a leading figure in the Symbolist movement. In the autumn of 1891, Greiner made his first journey to Rome, where he met Klinger, forming a close friendship, and the painter and printmaker Käthe Kollwitz, who became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts and receive professor status.

Otto Greiner returned to Germany and worked in Munich and Leipzig between the years 1892 and 1898. He returned to Rome where he settled permanently in 1898, moving into Max Klinger’s former studio near the Colosseum. Greiner was in contact with and highly regarded by the community of German artists living and working in Rome.

In 1915, Greiner was forced to return to Germany because Italy sided with France and England in World War I. He settled in Munich, where many of his works were published in journals of the day. Otto Greiner died in Munich, after contracting pneumonia, on September 24th of 1916.

A talented draughtsman, printmaker, and painter, Otto Greiner also produced a large body of studies, working in ink, charcoal, red chalk, gouache, and colored crayon. These studies show the precision of his working methods, and his confident handling of materials and techniques.In his finished paintings, Greiner specialized in the depiction of nudes, often placed in complex poses and set in Italianate landscapes, for which mythological subjects provided an excellent opportunity. He also painted portraits and produced an impressive oeuvre of prints.

Note: Otto Greiner made several studies for the “Triumph of Venus”, his unfinished work that was destroyed in World War II. Three, which are known to exist, are: an oil on canvas study for the figure of Venus, c 1903, 120 x 79.5 cm, now residing in a private collection; the study of three male figures (shown above), 1909, location unknown ; and a preliminary sketch of the entire work, date and location of this sketch is unknown.

George Washington Lambert

George Washington Lambert, “The White Glove”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 106 x 78 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Born in September of 1873 in St. Petersburg, Russia, George Washington Thomas Lambert was an Australian portrait artist and a war artist during the First World War. After the death of his father, he and his English mother moved to Württemberg, Germany, to stay with Lambert’s maternal grandfather. Lambert received his education at Kingston College in Somerset, England, after which the family emigrated to Australia, arriving in Sydney in January of 1887.

In 1894, George Lambert began exhibiting his work at the Art Society and the Society of Artists in Sydney. After drawing pen and ink cartoons for a year at The Bulletin magazine, he began painting full time in 1896. Lambert won the Wynne Prize for his 1899 painting “Across the Blacksoil Plains”, a depiction of a heavily laden wagon pulled by a team of draft horses.

Lambert studied at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney until 1900, after which he won a government traveling scholarship from New South Wales. He spent a few years traveling, first to Paris, and later to London where he exhibited work at the Royal Academy. At an exhibition in Barcelona in 1911, Lambert won a silver medal for his painting “The Sonnet”.

During the years of the First World War, George Lambert served as an official war artist. His painting “Anzac”, depicting the 1915 landings of forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, is now in the Australian War Memorial collection located in Australia’s capital Canberra. In 1920, Lambert painted another notable work “A Sergeant of the Light Horse”, which he executed in London after retuning from Palestine.

Returning to Australia in 1921, Lambert had a successful solo show in Melbourne at the Fine Art Society. This was the year he painted “The White Glove”, a oil portrait depicting Miss Gladys Neville Collins, the daughter of lawyer J. T. Collins, trustee of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria.

George Lambert posed Miss Collins in a manner suggestive of John Singer Sargent’s 1905 work “Portrait of Ena Wertheimer, ‘a vele gonfie”, with its black white-feathered hat and hand raised in front of chest. Miss Collins’s tilted head, half closed eyes, half open mouth, and almost bare right arm suggests individual sensuality, but also a form of codified behavior. Significantly different from the in-vogue contemporary brown-toned portraits, George Lambert, himself, described it as a wild, dashing portrait.

In 1922, the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired the painting for six hundred guineas ( $53,000 in 2019), at the time the highest price paid by a public gallery for a portrait by an Australian artist. The work remains a part of its collection.

Edward Ladell

Edward Ladell, “Still Life with Prawns and a Delft Pot”, c 1880, Oil on Canvas, 30.5 x 26 cm

Edward Ladell was a British painter known for his still-life paintings of flowers, fruit, and glass vessels, done in the style of seventeenth-century Dutch traditions.

Born in April of 1821 in Hasketon, United Kingdom, Edward Ladell spent his early years working at his father’s coach building business. He married Juliana Roope in July, 1848, and moved to the East Hill neighborhood of Colchester, with a daughter being born in 1860. It is thought that he may have been apprenticed as a pattern designer of a Flemish textile company in Colchester, a business central to the city’s economy since the seventeenth century.

Despite the lack of information on his art training, it is evident Edward Ladell was deeply familiar with the still-life paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish schools, either through museums or private collections. He successfully submitted an oil painting entitled “Study from Nature” to the Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1856. Ladell again exhibited his work three years later, at the annual exhibition, and established his career as a painter.

Throughout the first half of the 1860s, Edward Ladell painted his characteristic still-lifes, always with meticulous attention to detail and realism. By 1865, he stopped submitting works to the Royal Academy; listed as single on the 1871 census, it is suspected that serious illness or accident took the life of Ladell’s wife and daughter. It was not until 1868 that Ladell began to exhibit paintings again.

During the 1860s, Ladell, with an acknowledged reputation as a still-life artist, accepted a small number of private students. One of his students was Ellen Maria Levett, who most likely joined his studio class in the mid- 1870s. Ellen became his wife in October of 1878, after which they made their home in the city of Exeter, where Ellen gave birth to a son in 1880.

His domestic life settled, Ladell continued to expand his clientele through both regional exhibitions and the annual shows at the Royal Academy, the British Institute and the Suffolk Street Galleries in London. It was at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1880 that Ladell presented his “Still Life with Prawns and a Delft Pot”, which attracted attention from a number of critics who admired it for its realism and success at expressing shades and reflections.

Between 1880 and 1886, Edward Ladell became a highly regarded member of the Exeter community. He died after a brief respiratory illness on November 9, 1886, at the age of sixty-five, and is buried in the Higher Cemetery behind St. Mark’s Church in Exeter. Today, Edward Ladell’s works are held in the collections of the Museum of Croydon in London, the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter, the Reading Museum in Berkshire, and the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, United Kingdom.

Hans Thoma

Hans Thoma, “Self Portrait in Front of a Birch Forest”, 1899, Oil on canvas, 94 x 75.5 cm, Städelscher Museums-Verein. Frankfurt

Hans Thoma, “Apollo und Marsyas”, 1886, Oil on Panel, 45 x 55 cm, Kunkel Fine Art, Munich

Born on October 2, 1839 at Bernau in the Black Forest of Germany, Hans Thoma, in his youth, spent his summers drawing and painting landscapes and portraits of family members. Between 1859 and 1866, he studied at the Karlsruhe Academy under landscape painter Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and history and portrait painter Ludwig des Coudres, who made a significant influence upon his career.

Hans Thoma entered the prestigious Düsseldorf Akademie in 1866, where he was introduced to modern French art. Two years later, he travelled to Paris, where he met painter Gustave Courbet, a leading painter in the Realism movement of France. Moving to Munich in 1870, Thoma shared a studio with realist painter Wilhelm Trübner and gradually changed his style, influenced by the German symbolist painters Hans von Marées and Arnold Böcklin.

From 1876 to 1899 Hans Thoma lived in Frankfurt am Main, where he made contact with avant-garde artistic circles, and gradually achieved artistic success. He returned to the city of Karlsruhe in 1899 as director of the Kunsthalle, the city’s art museum. His reputation as a painter became firmly established with a 1900 exhibition of thirty paintings in Munich, after which he regularly exhibited in Germany.

In 1909 a Hans Thoma Museum, showcasing his work, opened within the Karlsruhe Kunsthalle. Hans Thoma died in Karlsruhe in November of 1924 at the age of eighty-five. His art was formed by his early impressions of the simple life of his native district and his attraction to the works of the early German masters, such as Albrecht Altdorfer and Lucas Cranach the Elder. In his love of the details of nature, in his precise drawing of outline, and in his predilection for local coloring, Hans Thoma has distinct affinities with the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Top Insert Image: Hans Thoma, “Frühling auf dem Gebirgssee (Spring on a Mountain Lake)”, 1898, Color Lithograph, The British Museum, London

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Thoma, “Archers”, 1887, Oil on Board, 95 x 64 cm, Berlin State Museum

Note: A collection of one hundred-fifty works by Hans Thoma can be found at the ArtRenewal site located at: : https://www.artrenewal.org/artists/hans-thoma/7785

Alfonso Ossorio

The Artwork of Alfonso Ossorio

Born in August of 1916 in Manila, Alfonso Ossorio was an abstract expressionist artist of Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese heritage. At the age of fourteen, he moved to the United States and attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island, graduating in 1934. Ossorio studied fine art at Harvard University from 1934 to 1938, and continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became a United States citizen in 1933.

Discovered by art dealer and collector Betty Parsons, Alfonso Ossorio had his first show, featuring his Surrealist-influenced works at New York’s Wakefield Gallery in 1940. Following World War II service in the US Army as a medical illustrator, tasked with drawing surgical procedures on injured soldiers, he took some respite in the Berkshires, a region in western Massachusetts known for its outdoor activities. It was there at the 1948 Tanglewood Music Festival that Ossorio met Edward Dragon, a ballet dancer, who would be Ossorio’s life-long partner.

Through his connection with Betty Parsons, Ossorio became acquainted with the work of Jackson Pollock. Becoming both an admirer and a collector of Pollock’s expressionist work, he and Pollock soon developed a close friendship and reciprocal influence on each others work. Later in 1951, through critic and art historian Michel Tapié, Ossorio established a contact between Pollock and the young Parisian gallery owner Paul Facchetti who realized Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Europe in 1952.

In Paris in 1951, Ossorio and Edward Dragon frequently met with artist Jean Dubuffet and his wife Lili. While they were visiting, Jean Dubuffet wrote the text for his monograph on Ossorio entitled, “Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio” and introduced Ossorio to art critic and collector Michel Tapié. Tapié organized a one-man show at the Studio Paul Facchetti of Ossorio’s small, luminous “Victorias Drawings”, which Ossorio made while visiting the Philippines. Produced using Ossorio’s experimental drawing technique of wax-resistant crayon on Tiffany & Co. stationary, the works in this series are counted as some of Ossorio’s most innovative.

Dubuffet’s interest in art brut opened up new vistas for Ossorio, who found release from society’s preconceptions in the previous unstudied creativity of insane asylum inmates and children. In the 1950s, Ossorio began to create works resembling Dubuffet’s assemblages. He affixed shells, bones, driftwood, nails, dolls’ eyes, cabinet knobs, dice, costume jewelry, mirror shards, and children’s toys to the panel surface. Ossorio called these assemblages congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.

On the advice of Pollock, Ossorio and Edward Dragon purchased an expansive 60-acre estate, The Creeks, in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, in 1951, where they lived for more than forty years. Alfonso Ossorio died in New York City in 1990. Half his ashes were scattered at The Creeks estate and the other half came to rest nine years later at Green River Cemetery, alongside the remains of many other famous artists, writers and critics.

Alfonso Ossorio’s works can be found at The Creeks, the Harvard Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, among others.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Alfonso Ossorio”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Middle Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Double Portrait”, 1944, Watercolr, Black Ink on Paper, 35.5 x 50.8 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Dunstan Thompson”, 1942, Watercolor, Gouache and Ink on Paper, 64.8 x 52.1 cm, Private Collection

Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio, “Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy”, c. 1594-1595, Oil on Canvas, 92.5 x 127.8 cm, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

While most other Italian artists of his time followed the conventions of late Mannerist painting, Caravaggio painted the Biblical stories as dramas, staging the events of the sacred past as if they were contemporary, often working from live models whom he depicted in starkly modern dress. He also developed a highly original form of chiaroscuro, using extreme contrasts of light and dark to emphasize details of gesture or facial expression, a style that greatly influenced later artists.

“Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy” was the first of Caravaggio’s religious canvasses. Completed between 1594 and 1595, it was presumably painted as a commission from Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, a diplomat and art connoisseur during the reign of Pope Sixtus V, and executed during the time that Caravaggio was living in Palazzo Madama, the home of Cardinal Del Monte.

The painting is based on the story told by Brother Leo, secretary and confessor to Saint Francis of Assisi. In the story, Francis retired in 1224 to the wilderness with a small group of his followers to contemplate God. At night on the mountainside, Brother Leo saw a winged seraph, one of the higher Orders of angels, come down amidst dazzling light as a fiery figure nailed to a cross of fire.

From the seraph’s wounds in its heart, hands and feet came streams of fire and blood, which pierced the hands and feet of Francis with nails and stabbed his heart with a lance. As Francis shouted, the fiery image merged into his body; Francis sank down unconscious in his blood with the wounds of the Stigmata on his body.

In Caravaggio’s “Saint Francis”, the violent confrontation described by Brother Leo is not depicted. Instead, a gentle angel, larger than the unconscious saint, is shown holding Francis, while Francis’ followers are seen dimly in the darkness of the painting’s mid-ground.

Caravaggio’s version of this 13th century subject is more intimate than Giotto di Bondone’s 1297 “Stigmatization of Saint Francis” or Giovanni Bellini’s 1480 “Saint Francis in the Desert” with its rocky landscape. Caravaggio’s work shows no sign of blood or the Stigmata, just a wound shown in the Franciscan robe of the saint. Francis rests peacefully in the arms of a boyish figure wearing a white robe and golden wings; both figures lit by Caravaggio through a chiaroscuro effect.

Note: An interesting read is “Caravaggio’s Secrets” by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit by The Mit Press. An excerpt from the book, Chapter One, “Sexy Secrets”, can be found at: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bersani-caravaggio.html

Yannis Tsarouchis

The Paintings of Yannis Tsarouchis

Yannis Tsarouchis is one of a group of twentieth-century Greek artists who portrayed and defined modern Greek identity. A sensual painter influenced by French Impressionism, Tsarouchis is a significant gay artist who painted images of vulnerable men and occasionally strong women.

Born in January of 1910 in Piraeus, Greece, Yannis Tsarouchis initially trained in the studio of Byzantine artist Fotis Kontoglou, an influential Greek modernist who introduced him to Byzantine iconography. He later studied at the Athens School of Fine Art, graduating in 1935, The major influence on Tsarouchis’ work, however, came from a trip to Paris, Istanbul, and Italy in the mid-1930s that exposed him to the bohemian lifestyle and both Renaissance and Impressionist art.

Tsarouchis’ work moved in two main directions: toward the orientalist and sensual, with strong influences from Matisse, and toward the ancient Greek ideal as expressed by the Renaissance and the Baroque movements. In doing so, Tsarouchis played a pivotal role, alongside his contemporaries, in portraying and shaping modern Greek identity.

Returning to a war-torn Greece in 1936, Tsarouchis become a soldier in the Greco-Italian war in 1940. With a more political and humanist perspective after his service, he began painting scenes of young men who were preparing to defend their homeland from the rise of Fascist Italy. Tsarouchis’ depiction of the soldiers and sailors was controversial; some of his exhibits were taken down by censors, who saw his work as unpatriotic and degrading to the Greek male image.

Tsarouchis’ paintings of soldiers and sailors he admired captured not only a Greek identity, but also a gay awareness. Transforming Rodin’s bronze statue into an icon for Greek culture, he painted his 1936 “The Thinker”, showing a modern young Greek sitting on a cafe stool, a cigarette in hand, with a faraway look in his eye. Among Tsarouchis’ other paintings are: the 1939 “Young Man Posing as an Olympic Statue”; “Sailor with Coffee Cup” painted in 1954; and the 1956 “Forgotten Guard”.

Yannis Tsarouchis established in 1949, along with other Greek artists including sculptor Nikos Nikolaou and seascape painter Panayiotis Tetsis, the “Armos” art group which worked to promote Greek traditional painting. In 1951 he had exhibitions in Paris and London and participated in the 1958 Venice Biennale. Tsarouchis moved to Paris in 1967 in a self-imposed exile to.wait out the years of military dictatorship in Greece.

During this exile, Tsarouchis designed theater sets for productions at Milan’s La Scala opera house, the Greek National Theater, the Dallas Opera, and London’s Covent Gardens, as well as the annual Avignon Art Festival in France. He also designed sets and costumes for films by Jules Dassin and Michael Cacoyannis. After his return to Greece in the middle of the 1970s, he designed an acclaimed operatic set for director Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Italian classical composer Luigi Cherubini’s comedic opera “Médée” at the ancient amphitheater at Epidauros.

Residing in northern Athens at the age of seventy nine, Yannis Tsarouchis died on July 20th of 1989. The Yannis Tsarouchis Museum, an art collection hosted in the artist’s home in Maroussi, Athens, was officially opened in 1982 in recognition of Tsarouchis’ contributions and respect for Greek culture. Upon the reading of his will and testament, it was found that Tsarouchis bequeathed all his assets to the Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation.

Note: A more extensive biography of Yannis Tsarouchis and collections of his work can be found at the online site of the Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation located at: https://tsarouchis.gr/en/

Second Insert Image: Yannis Tsarouchis, “Departure with Oval Mirror”, Detail, 1970, Oil on Canvas, 110 x 209 cm, Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation

Third Insert Image: Yannis Tsarouchis, “Portrait of a Man”, 1976, Oil on Canvas, 51 x 65 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Yannis Tsarouchis, “Sailor”, circa 1970, Oil on Panel, Private collection

Romer Kitching

Paintings by Romer Kitching

Born in London in 1995, painter Romer Kitching began drawing at an early age. From 2015 to 2018, he received his formal education at the Florence Academy of Art, a school which offers classical training in the Realist style. Having been trained daily in the aspects of form, anatomy, and the effects of light, Kitching now paints exclusively from live models.

Romer Kitching currently resides in Cèret, a communal town in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of southern France. Having visited the area from the age of fourteen, he considers it his home and has painted many ‘open air’ landscapes of the area. Painting to capture the different elements of the area, Kitching pays particular attention to the broken light and the dappled shadows in the scene.

Romer Kitching produced a number of academic portraits during his time at the Florence Academy, using live models to increase his skills. In addition to this work, he has painted more intimate, stylized portraits of family members and friends.

Romer Kitching’s website is located at: https://www.romerkitching.com

Andreas Leissner

Paintings by Andreas Leissner

Born in Berlin in 1978, Andreas Leissner is a figurative painter of the realist style, who documents the isolation of humans in the modern world, using strict, controlled, almost stolid images. In his more recent works, he finds his points of reference in the great works of European occidental culture, recognizable in the themes of his paintings.

From 1996 to 1998, Andreas Leissner studied with figurative realist painter André Krigar. He later studied, from 1999 to 2004, under painter and graphic artist Volker Stelzmann at Berlin’s University of the Arts. After graduating with his MFA in 2004, Leissner began a career as a freelance artist.

Andreas Leissner has exhibited solely and in group shows in galleries and museums including: the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen; the Art Association of Plön, Germany; the Art Association of Mainz; and the historical Spandau Citadel in Berlin.

Based in Brandenburg, Germany, Andreas Leissner is represented by Gallery KK, founded in 1983 by Klaus Kiefer and located in Essen, Germany. The gallery is focused on figurative contemporary art. It is located at: https://www.galerie-kk.de

Andreas Leissner’s website is located at: https://andreasleissner.com

Cornelius McCarthy

Cornelius McCarthy, “The Waiting Room’, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas

Born in Stepney, London, in 1935, Cornelius McCarthy was among the top painters of the male form working in the United Kingdom during the second half of the twentieth- century. Greatly influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso and Keith Vaughan, his own unique style makes his works instantly recognizable.

In 1950 Cornelius McCarthy entered Goldsmiths College School of Art, studying under Sam Rabin, who taught him the importance of line in defining form. His pursuit of art did not falter even during the time he was called to National Service for England; he continued drawing on whatever material was at hand, even military forms. After demobilization, McCarthy took a position at the Stepney Public Libraries where he met Alec Ayres, who would become his life-long partner.

After seeing the 1962 Keith Vaughan retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, McCarthy decided that painting the male nude was a subject to pursue. McCarthy conveyed his subjects as real men, strong and unapologetic in their private reveries. His work is characterized by a solid sense of composition and the use of still-life elements that often lends itself to Cubism.

Basically a retired man in 1997, McCarthy visited Mexico in search for inspiration. The artwork he produced there was included in a special “Mexico” exhibition in 1998 at the Adonis Gallery. McCarthy continued to exhibit works at this venue until 2007. when he began to experience increasing health problems, but still continued to paint.

Cornelius McCarthy died peacefully at his “Willow End” home on November 19th of 2009. Upon his death, Alec Ayres donated his sketchbooks, containing the sum total of McCarthy’s rough works, to the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives in Bethnal Green, London.

Note: An inteesting read is McCarthy’s lide-long friend Peter Dobson’s 2015 illustrated book “Radiant Affinities: The Life and Work of Cornelius McCarthy”. It highlights the significant developments in McCarthy’s life and his sensibility to the male form in art.