Mary Stevenson Cassatt - The Tea

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Mary Stevenson Cassatt - The Tea

Tea parties were a real thing back in the day. Starting with Victorians, the afternoon tea was a daily event in any respectable well-off family. The fashion quickly spread all over Europe, and reached the US, during its Gilded Age (the period from the 1870s to about 1900). Here affluent families used teas as debutante parties.

Mary Cassatt was a great admirer of Edgar Degas. Both artists had a long period of collaboration. Cassatt said: "How well I remember seeing for the first-time Degas' pastels in the window of a picture dealer. I would flatten my nose against the window and absorb all I could of his art." Degas would help Cassatt get models for her work. Here one of those models was the woman sitting with Cassatt’s sister Lydia.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Peasant Wedding

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Inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Peasant Wedding

Brueghel was well known for his peasant scenes; he was often referred to as ‘Peasant’ Breughel. Through his paintings we came to learn more about village life of the 16th century. Like so many other moralistic genre paintings this is filled with symbolistic references. Here gluttony and poverty stand out, but possibly lack of virginity. The paper crown hung over the bride is in two parts which implies she may already be with child.

Pieter’s son, Brueghel the Younger made a copy of his father’s work, and a couple mysteries appear.  In the elders version, there is an additional foot under the food tray (a door off its hinges). It seems the man in the front of the tray has three feet.

Is this a joke by the painter? Clearly Brueghel the Younger, didn’t think it was funny for in his painting the third foot is eliminated altogether. Another object that went missing is a large codpiece (a leather phallus sheath, cod was slang for scrotum) on the bagpiper. The younger attached this accoutrement to the bagpiper, but Dad’s has gone missing. Through infrared photography they found that senior’s codpiece had been replaced with a black patch. This was not the first time the elder was censored. In his bawdy, The Wedding Dance, several codpieces were removed from the frolicking peasants, only to be discovered during a 1941 restoration. I guess Pieter was not the only one with scruples

See Original: https://bit.ly/3r0aLbF

Tahitian Women on the Beach - Paul Gaugin

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Inspired by Paul Gaugin - Tahitian Women on the Beach

Born in Peru, he emigrated to France, and secured a job as a stockbroker in Paris. He did quite well as a broker. By the age of 31 he was pulling down 30,000 Francs a year, the equivalent of about $150,000 today. At the age of 35 he gave it all up to be a painter. This new job was not a success, so in 1891 he left his wife and five children and headed for Tahiti. He stayed there for ten years, returning once to try to sell his work and raise capital to return. His life in Tahiti was tempestuous. He married three times, all teenage island girls (13 and 14). This was considered a marriageable age in the Tahitian culture, but in western culture it is considered pedophilia. Gaugin was not the only French colonist that took advantage of the Tahitians desire for status or financial gain. These weddings were not legally binding and all three of his wives eventually left him. Gaugin used his wives for the models in countless paintings. The model for both of the women in this painting is Teha’amana, his first Tahitian muse, lover and eventually wife.

In 1901 when he became seriously ill with syphilis and in trouble with the French authorities, he left town. Alone and impoverished, Gauguin died of a stroke in the Marquesas Islands on May 8, 1903. He has been championed and reviled by art history. His painting was magnificent, but his lifestyle seems unacceptable.

If you would like to see the original painting: bit.ly/43HIFQS

George Caleb Bingham - The Jolly Flatboatmen

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Inspired by George Caleb Bingham - The Jolly Flatboatmen

Except for three months of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Bingham was self-taught. He began his career as a portrait painter, which was his money maker all through his career. But where he made his mark was genre painting. He was one of the most important American painters of genre subjects in the 19th century. Working before America’s vastness was made accessible by roads and railways, Bingham found his subjects in the boatmen and trappers who populated the Missouri and the Mississippi, the great rivers of his home state. Through these subjects he captured a taste of life in the West. The Jolly Flatboatmen is from his series depicting life on the river. It is among the first distinctly American paintings that capture the allure of Western expansion during the mid-19th century.Several New York businessmen formed the American Art Union to promote paintings of American scenes by American artists. Every year, the union bought a painting, and held a lottery for their members to decide who took the painting home. They paid Bingham $290 for the Floatmen and gave it to Benjamin van Schaick, a New York city grocer. The total cost to the winner was the $5 he paid for his membership. In 1986 it was sold for $6 million, a record-breaking auction price. The American Art Union produced a large mezzotint that was distributed to its 10,000 members throughout the country, This immediately made it one of the best-known works of art of its era. Some 18,000 were circulated to hang in American homes and places of business. In today’s terms, it went viral.

Howard Pyle - Marooned

Pyle was considered the dean of American illustration. In 1894, he began teaching illus-tration at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry (now Drexel University). He left there to open his own school, the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art This was in Wilmington, Delaware where he had spent most of his life. Artists came from all over to be part of this studio. NC Wyeth was from Massachusetts, but gravitated to Pyle in Delaware. He sent Pyle a portfolio and was accepted. Pyle did not charge his students, but he only accepted the ones he felt were truly talented.He influenced so many artists, and told them "Throw your heart into the picture and then jump in after it."
Historians at that time were not sure what pirates actually looked like. In his many pirate books, he created their clothes straight from his imagination, giving them a style akin to gypsies. His works became so well known, that what Pyle painted is now what the general public thinks pirates looked like. The creators of “Pirates of the Caribbean” with Johnny Depp, acquired a number of his pirate illustrations and modeled the characters in the movie after them. Many of his pirates wore a big red sash and bandana, a style that was not from history, but manufactured by Pyle. In this painting the hat and the coat at the pirate’s feet are those of a naval officer. Probably garnered from a high seas skirmish.In his stories, there was a pirate’s code, which if broken brought on punishment. One possible punishment was, marooning. The pirate would be left on a desert island and given a knife or pistol with which to commit suicide. This poor sole hangs his head and contemplates his end. To see original: https://bit.ly/3Yduocp

Georges de La Tour – The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds

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Inspired by Georges de La Tour - The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds

The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds - 1635

Musée du Louvre, Paris

De la Tour created two versions of this painting. One is in the Louvre and the other is in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth Texas. The only difference being the clothes and especially the cheat card. In this painting that card is an ace of diamonds and in the other it is an ace of clubs. You can probably guess the name of the Kimbell version. Like so many paintings from the 17th century, this one is loaded with a moral message from the church. Many artists wished to remind their audiences that sinners were barred from Heaven. As far as sins go this painting includes the three biggies: gambling, drunkenness and lust. The choice of the cheat cards is no accident. The diamond evokes money and commerce of the flesh, while the club symbolizes ill fortune.

De la tour was a very successful painter in the 1600’s, but quickly fell out of favor after his death. His star would not rise again until this painting appeared in a 1934 exhibition at the Louvre. It was the first time his work had been exhibited in almost 300 years. This sparked a growing craze for the artist and his work started popping up everywhere. Despite this new stardom, Pierre Landry, a Paris art dealer, spent 15 years trying to get the Louvre to buy this painting. They finally completed the acquisition in 1972. Maybe he was just asking for too much money.

To see original: bit.ly/3Cx2aiB

Grant Wood – American Gothic

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Inspired by Grant Wood – American Gothic – 1930

Wood's inspiration came from what is now known as the American Gothic House, and his decision to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." When asked what, American Gothic was about, Wood often said that it was really about architecture. The house seemed to him typically American. He found the house in Eldon, Iowa and made several sketches. In the painting the pitch fork and the shirt connect us to the lines of the building behind. The pattern on the woman’s dress relates to the shades in the window. The elongated faces of the models go with the elongated windows.

The figures were modeled by Wood's sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. Wood’s first choice for a female model was his mother, Hattie. However, he was concerned that posing at length would be too much for her. So, in her stead his sister Nan sat in. Nan, was embarrassed at being depicted as the wife of someone twice her age - and began telling people that the painting was of a man and his daughter. 

The painting came to be seen in the Great Depression as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit. Wood was quoted as saying, "All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow."  Wood entered his painting in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. It received the bronze medal and a $300 cash prize.  As the painting gained attention it was reproduced in newspapers. Iowans were furious at their depiction.  One farm-wife threatened to bite Wood's ear off.  To that Wood said, He didn't paint a caricature of Iowans but rather “a depiction of Americans”.