James Tissot (French, 1836-1902) painted this image of the journeying magi as part of a large collection of Biblical paintings that he did late in his career. His desire to paint scriptural scenes with archaeological accuracy brought him on several research trips to the Holy Land.

The homesite had a magnificent view of the Hudson River, painted here by Bierstadt looking northwest. The view doesn't look like this anymore. It's on a vacant plot of land between two 20th century buildings, and the foundations are overgrown with trees and choked with vines.

A friend brought me there to check it out. You can still see the front steps, a gatepost, and a couple of wall foundations, but that's all.
In Bierstadt's day, the studio was lined with his large panoramic paintings, and the many plein air studies he painted on his travels to the American west. You can see the studies lining the mezzanine and the wall at left.

The home had fine furniture purchased during Bierstadt's years of great success, though by the time he built Malkasten and inhabited it, his career was beginning to decline.

The three-story tall studio was spacious and filled with light, with high ceilings and sliding glass windows 20 feet high. The studio, library, and music room had big doors and curtains that could open to create a single space 70 feet long, so that he could step way back and view his huge paintings.

But as the years progressed, Bierstadt's work became less popular, his wife was in ill health, and he spent less time in the house. The New York Times noted that the taxes and upkeep expenses were astronomical.

In 1882, a fire consumed Malkasten and all its contents. Bierstadt was not there at the time, the studio was locked up, and the place had been rented. Two major paintings and countless studies and engravings were lost forever in the fire, along with the mansion itself.

Fortunately, the studios of some of Bierstadt's contemporaries, such as Frederic Church, Jasper Cropsey, and Thomas Cole, are still intact, and open to visitors.

Read more about the original mansion or how the site looks today, courtesy of Rob Yasinsac, author of Hudson Valley Ruins: Forgotten Landmarks of an American Landscape.
Thanks, Chris.

The new book Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter is a career survey catalog published to accompany the exhibition that's now in San Francisco.


I hesitated to buy it (upper left) because I already have other Zorn books, but I'm glad I did. It's got faithful reproductions, well-written essays, and quite a few images that haven't been published before.

The text is by four authors, all Zorn experts, including a biographical essay by Johan Cederlund, director of the Zorn Collections in Zorn's hometown of Mora, Sweden. They discuss his experiences in America, his nudes, his portraits, and his place in Swedish culture. There's not much coverage of his technical methods or specific insights from an artist's point of view, unfortunately.


I was glad to see many of Zorn's watercolors included. Zorn painted exclusively in watercolor early in his career, and switched mostly to oil later on. Zorn picked the most difficult subjects for his watercolors, such as boatmen in open water, or portraits of children from life.


In Zorn's etchings, figures emerge from an atmosphere of slashing parallel strokes. The etchings were my first introduction to his work when I saw an exhibition of them back in about 1977. The etchings are well represented both in the exhibition and the catalog, with a chapter by James Ganz "Etching in the City of Light: Anders Zorn Among the Post-Impressionists."

The book is hardbound, 9x12 inches, 224 pages, with many large reproductions, something many art book publishers neglect to offer.
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RESOURCES:
Book: Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter
Exhibition: at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco until Feb 2, and will then travel to the National Academy in New York, opening at the end of February, 2014.

It's a design strategy you've probably heard of before, but it bears repeating:

If you link together your little dark shapes into bigger units, you can simplify your value organization and give your composition more impact.

Stanhope Forbes The Seine Boat

This is not as easy as it sounds, and it takes deliberate effort to do it. Note how Forbes doesn't use too many values when rendering the dark garments and the net. By keeping them flat and nearly uniformly dark, they join together to frame the important light shapes.

Edward Simmons Old Woman Peeling an Orange

Simmons connects the woman's dark shawl to the door and the wall behind her, giving her head and hands more importance. I sometimes call this "shapewelding," and others have called it "notan" or "massing." It was an idea that was current in academic painting and illustration between about 1880 and 1920.

John Singer Sargent Padre Sebastiano

Sargent links the hat to the coat on the bed at left and the priest's shirt to the garments and other dark shapes behind him. He also unifies the white papers to the sheets on the bed. Then he takes it a step further and concentrates an oval of illumination in the center of the composition.

Edward Simmons, "Gathering Wood, Concarneau" - 1883

After visiting the Newlyn colony of painters in Cornwall, American artist Edward Simmons described the usual fate of artist colonies:

"The artist finds a place that is beautiful, undiscovered, and suits his pocketbook. He goes there for two years. The third year other artists follow him; the fourth year come the retired British admirals and "vamps"; the fifth year the artist leaves; the sixth come the wealthy people who spend a lot of money on it, making it as ugly and dear as possible, but soon tire and go away. Then the artist comes back again and begins all over, picking the bones of what the Money Bags had killed."

Robert F. Blum, The Ameya, 1893, The Metropolitan Museum

Quick tip: When painting a complex scene, especially one with color and pattern, use overcast or indirect light. This choice removes from the scene the complex pattern of cast shadows, and it keeps the color values more in their home ranges.

Indirect light is also very flattering for faces of women and children. Generally the more the planes face upward, the lighter they are.

This painting by Robert Blum (1857-1903) of Cincinnati was based on sketches and studies he did from life in Japan. Thanks to the Met's wonderful web interface and large files, you can get a close look at the painting even if you don't live near New York.

Previous post on Robert Blum

Anders Zorn, Self Portrait

Biographer Karl Asplund said in 1921: "With Zorn it was not a question of the jargon of the studio, with its talk of 'the emancipation of art.' In the depth of his heart he would rather conquer the subject, retain it, explain it, and communicate to others in his own way the pleasure his eyes had experienced."

Anders Zorn, Self Portrait

Michel-Martin Drölling, Portrait of the Artist aged 18, 1804

"What sort of painting can a young fellow do at your age? Generally something mediocre as far as ideas go.... Do sketches, train yourself in composition: whatever ideas you've got, put them on to paper in a single day at one stroke, and even though it's on a small scale, you can put into it anything you like in the way of harmony, elegance, costumes, poetry and so forth: those are the sort of paintings you should be doing at seventeen.... Above all, see to it that all your efforts and studies converge and help you to qualify for the [Prix de Rome] competition. That's your goal and, if you want to reach it, don't waste a day on feeble and useless studies."  —Michel-Martin Drölling (1789-1851)

Ernest Messonier (1815-1891), painted many of his small oil compositions directly from live models in authentic costumes. His paintings commanded the highest prices of any artist in the nineteenth century.

Ernest Meissonier, Standing Man

He had this to say about painting directly from the observation of reality:

"I should have done more perhaps to cultivate my memory. But I infinitely prefer going straight to Nature, the fountainhead. If you want to prevent my consulting Nature, you must shut me up, without any model. If there was a looking-glass in the room I should pose before it, and paint from that. Nature is my favorite and indispensable slave. There is no room for conjecture in my painting, no doubt about the reality of my conception, no shuffling. There it is."

Rembrandt van Rijn, Carcass of Beef, 1657

Meissonier was a great admirer of Rembrandt:

Jean-Léon Gérôme in his studio

According to Edouard Cucuel, the great academic master Jean-Léon Gérôme demanded two things of his pupils before they started to paint: "That they lay on a red or yellow tone, and that they keep their brushes scrupulously clean. Woe to him who disobeys."

John Singer Sargent, Young Girl Wearing a White Muslin Blouse, oil on canvas, 19.5x 15 inches.

There's an exhibition of over 40 rarely seen original oils and watercolors by John Singer Sargent at the Michael Altman gallery in New York City. The show continues through December 6.

You have to go to this website to get the interactive feature. (User tip. You don’t have to drag the bar across. The easiest way is to click near the right or left edge of the picture.)

"I find it fascinating to compare. The landscape has often changed somewhat between now and then. More interesting is to see how the painter has chosen to use and sometimes change a little what was before his eyes, and how style, personality and the story the painter wanted to tell shows up in the painting, and how a painting can show things better than a photo can. Something you often have written about yourself.
A bit of historical context. When the national romantic painters, such as J.T. Lundbye and P.C. Skovgaard and Købke started in the 1840s, Denmark had become much smaller than it used to and still fighting with Germany over where the border should be. So the feeling you sense in those paintings are a fervent love for Denmark as a nation and its landscapes. Lundbye went on the customary tour to Rome and was terribly homesick the whole time. They wanted to show the danish landscape as magnificent as that of any other country, even if Denmark is small and flat. You can see in Lundbye's picture that he has exaggerated the forms a bit. National feelings ran high all in all of Europe at the time."

Danish landscape / photo comparisons from Politiken (thanks, Peter!)
Previously on GurneyJourney: Christen Købke

The scope of the book is ambitious, too. It not only includes the French Salon tradition, but also samples of Victorian painting, works from the American Hudson River School, and some pieces from Eastern Europe.

The introduction discusses the causes of the recent revival of interest in Salon painting and compares the spectacle of many 19th century epic history paintings to the popular appetite for extravagant Hollywood movies.

Carl Theodor von Piloty - Seni at the Dead Body of Wallenstein

The 230 color reproductions include masterpieces not only by acknowledged masters such as Bouguereau, Gerome, Waterhouse, Leighton, but also by many other deserving but lesser-known painters, such as Morelli, Cormon, and Makart. The size of the reproductions ranges from generous double page spreads to small images the size of postcards or even business cards, but on balance, compared to many other recent books, the pictures are ample in scale. There's so much more detail in a good printed reproduction than most internet images.