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

Eugene Delacroix

Eugene Delacroix, “The Baroque of Dante”, 1822, Oil on Canvas, Louvre, Paris

The “Baroque of Dante”, also known as “Dante and Virgil in Hell”, is the first major painting by French artist Eugene Delacroix, signaling a shift in the character of narrative painting from Neo-Classicism towards the Romantic Movement. It was completed for the opening of the Salon in 1822 and currently hangs for viewing in the Musee du Louvre in Paris.

The arrangement of figures is for the most part compliant with the tenets of the cool, reflective Neo-Classicism that had dominated French painting for nearly four decades. There is a group of central upright figures, and a rational arrangement of subsidiary figures, all in horizontal planes, and observing studied poses.

Although the composition is conventional, the painting in some important respects broke unmistakably free of the French Neo-Classical tradition. The painting explores the psychological states of the individuals it depicts, and uses compact, dramatic contrasts to highlight their different responses to their respective predicaments. There is neither comfort nor a place of refuge in the painting’s world of rage, insanity and despair.

The drops of water running down the bodies of the damned are painted in a manner seldom seen up to and including the early nineteenth century. Four different, unmixed pigments, in discretely applied quantities comprise the image of one drop and its shadow. White is used for highlighting, strokes of yellow and green respectively denote the length of the drop, and the shadow is red.

Calendar: June 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of June

Double Eagles

June 20, 1833 was the birthdate of French painter Leon Joseph Florentin Bonnat.

Leon Bonnat was born in Bayonne, southwest France; but in his teen years he lived in Madrid where his father had a bookshop. While tending the shop, he copied engravings of works by the Old Masters, developing a passion for drawing. In Madrid, Bonnat studied and trained at the atelier of Realistic painter Raimundo Madrazo. Traveling to Paris, he developed a reputation as a portraitist and was given many commissions. Bonnat’s portraits show the influence of the Spanish painter Velázquez, and Van Dyke and Titian, whose works he studied in the Prado.

Bonnat received a scholarship from his native Bayonne, enabling him to live independently in Rome from 1858-1860. It was there he became friends with Edgar Degas, Gustave Moreau and the sculptor Henri Chapu. Bonnat won the Grand Officer of the Legion d’honneur and became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1882. He was quite popular with the international students, being able to speak his native French, as well as Spanish, Italian and English. In May of 1905 Bonnat became director of the Ecole des Beauz Arts.

The vivid portraits of contemporary celebrities are Bonnat’s most characteristic works; but his powerful religious scenes are arguably his most important works. His “Christ on the Cross” is now in the Musee du Petit Palais in Paris, his “Job” is in the Musee Bonnat, and the “Saint Vincent Taking the Place of Two Gallery Slaves” is at the Church of Saint Nicholas des Chanps in Paris. Bonnat, however, received few commissions in his life for religious or historical paintings. Most of his work is consists of portraits.

Leon Bonnat was an academic painter following the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. He had a quest for truth to nature, a pursuit for accuracy. On of his students, Gustof Cederstrom said that Bonnat was a scientific observer of the real world who measure the heads and distances between the facial features of his sitters as if he were a scientific researcher. Bonnat went to great effort to capture the realism of his model, sometimes requiring his subjects to sit fifty or more times before completing portraits.

Students chose Bonnat’s atelier over others for a few reasons and a focus on painting was one of them. Though Bonnat always maintained that drawing was important, a student went to his atelier not to learn how to draw but how to paint. His atelier differed from most of its contemporaries in another way: paint mixing. Rather than prepare a set palette before the sitting, Bonnat taught his students to mix their colors directly, in front of the model.