Louis Wain [ cats] european artist beginning of century developed schizophrenia
at 57 yrs
Louis Wain was born in London on 5 August 1860. His father was a textile
salesman and his mother designed carpets and church fabrics. A sickly
child, he was educated at the Orchard Street Foundation, Hackney, and
at St Joseph’s Academy, Kennington. He trained at the West London
School of Art (1877-80), remaining there as an assistant teacher until
1882. From his father’s death in 1880, he had to support first his mother
and five younger daughters and soon after a sick wife. He supplemented
his income by working as a freelance illustrator (initially influenced by
Caldecott and May), and in 1882 he joined the staff of the Illustrated
Sporting and Dramatic News. He began to make his name with humorous
cat drawings, primarily in the Illustrated London News, the staff of which
he joined in 1886. He was the first to work consistently within the
convention of depicting clothed and standing animals. His
anthropomorphic vision of the world soon brought him much fame and as
a result he was elected President of the National Cat Club in 1891.
However, he was not a good businessman, and in 1907 he was sued for
debt. In the same year he moved to the United States to make a new
start, producing strip cartoons for the New York American (1907-10).
Back in England, he experimented with animation in 1917, in a film to be
called Pussyfoot, but he did not proceed with the project. After the death
of his sister Caroline in 1917, he suffered a mental decline, becoming a
schizophrenic, as his work clearly revealed. ‘His cats became frenzied and
jagged, sometimes disappearing into kaleidoscopic shapes’ (Spalding).
When, in 1925, he was found in the pauper’s ward of Middlesex County
Mental Asylum, an appeal was launched on his behalf, and he was
transferred to a comfortable room with his paints in the Bethlem Royal
Hospital, Southwark. The appeal reached twice the target sum in a
month - a sign of the public’s continuing affection - and despite poverty
and mental illness he retained for many years the position of President of
the National Cat Club. He died in Napsbury Hospital, near St Albans, on 4
July 1939.
For further information, see:
The definitive biography of Louis Wain, The Man Who Drew Cats by
Rodney Dale, is jointly published by Chris Beetles Ltd and O’Mara Books.
"June 14th. Diseased breast. Kwan Meiurh of Kaouming, 45 years old, a silk
embroiderer, had a preternatural development of the left mamma, which commence two
years ago. Six months before she came to the hospital, she called a Chinese physician
who applied to it a succession of plasters. Soon after the integument ulcerated and the
gland protruded. She was much emaciated and the breast, one third as large as her
head, came down as low as the umbilicus, when she stood up, and layed upon her arm
in the recumbent posture, presenting a large raw surface, exuding blood and and the
natural secretion of the gland as it was irritated by the clothes. At various points were
seen the lacteal ducts greatly enlarged. Her pulse of 90 was feeble: the disease was
strictly local. The patient justly remarked, 'the sooner it was removed the better.' A few
grains of blue pill and extract of colocynth were given her every other day, and on the
20th of June, assisted by Messrs. Cox, Jardine, and Holgate, and Dr. Mallat of Manila,
the breast was removed. In the morning before the operation, the patient being asked if
she feared it, replied in the negative, that 'now if I turn to the right hand or to the left,
incline forward, or backward I am in pain, but in cutting off my breast is but a single
pang.' The composed and confiding manner in which she came to the operation could not
escape the notice of the gentlemen who were present. Apparently no child ever lay in
the arms of its parent with more confidence of safety, than this woman lay upon the
operation table under the knife of a foreigner. In two and a half minutes the breast was
extirpted; no artery required ligature. The patient just moved her lips as a small
remaining portion of the gland was dissected out; but regained the natural expression of
her countenance before she was carried from the table. No fever followed....The third
day the patient was walking from room to room, happy in her deliverance from so
gloomy a prospect and such suffering as the disease and the maltreatment it had
received, occasioned. She is most rapidly recovering." A later note suggests that the
patient made a full recovery.
Additional Commentary
The dignified stoicism of Kwan Meiurh's portrait is strikingly consistent with Parker's
account of the case. Parker's obvious admiration for the patient extended beyond her
high tolerance for pain (a characterisitic of Chinese patient's that continually inspired
awe in Parker and his colleagues). He was pleased with her matter-of-fact attitude
toward the necessity of the operation, her sense of the relative pain of surgery vis a vis
the disease, and her, to believe his account, child-like trust in his surgical power. Lam
Qua appears to have brilliantly captured Kwan Meiurh's stately strength in the tension
between the face and the growth (see the Ways of Seeing Gallery), a comparison invited
by Parker's comment about the growth's size with respect to the patient's head. While
Parker's paternalism is fully on display (he seems to veritably revel in her confidence in
him)it also elicits an expression of his own distance from her as a surgeon and an
outsider. She is almost too confident, too trusting "under the knife of a foreigner."
Parker's sense of the patient's "deliverance" is the only hint of religiosity in the account.
He directs his real animus against the quackery and maltreatent that the patient suffered
at the hands of Chinese practitioners.
Curiosity and Cure:
Peter Parker’s patients, Lam Qua’s portraits
Stephen Rachman
In April 1841, medical missionary Reverend Peter Parker, M.D.,
addressed an enthusiastic audience gathered at a special meeting of
the Boston Medical Association. His subject was "the condition and
prospects of the hospitals of China." He described his own work at
the hospital he had established in the foreign factory district outside
the city walls of Canton where he offered free treatment for both
rich and poor. At P’u Ai I Yuan (Hospital of Universal Love, as it
was known in Chinese) Parker and his colleagues used western
surgical techniques as a means to facilitate religious conversion.
Medicine, Parker believed, could be the "handmaid of religious
truth,"and he held regular religious services for his patients. While
he had, at best, modest success attracting converts to Christianity,
the hospital had fostered tremendous goodwill among the Chinese.
It was a bright spot amid the gloomy period of Western-Chinese
tension that led to the outbreak of the Opium Wars between Great
Britain and China. Forced to flee Canton because of these
hostilities, Parker returned to the United States to raise money and
interest in his operations. In the spring of 1841, he spoke to many
religious societies, a few medical bodies, and even the United States
Congress, where he preached to members of the House and Senate
and lobbied legislators on the need for diplomatic relations with
China.
In his talks, Parker described the state of medical and surgical
knowledge (or rather scientific ignorance) in China. He pointed out
that China had neither systematic nor "scientific" forms of medical
education, and he regaled his audience with accounts of the kinds of
"quackery" common to Canton. Parker had seen, for example, a
practitioner who dealt in plasters, which patients routinely returned
after treatment for reuse. The man’s shop "was covered with them,
the most incontrovertible of all testimony of the high repute of the
doctor who has them at his disposal." Parker had observed a man
with his finger inserted into a live frog as a cure for a whitlow on
the fingernail; he had watched air being blown into the rectum of a
drowned child in an attempt at resuscitation; and he had seen
powders blown into the eyes of infected patients. Hoping to relieve
a patient’s constipation, one doctor had come to Parker requesting
the use of "something like a corkscrew to bring it away." This litany
of outlandish medical practices or folk remedies (some practiced in
Europe and the United States) served to convince his audience that
China was desperately in need of western medicine, especially the
kind of surgery that Parker could provide.
Despite the surgical feats of legendary ancient doctors like Hua T’o
of the third century A.D., surgery did not develop to any great
extent in China. Some accounts attribute this to Confucian precepts
about the integrity of the body and proscriptions against any form
of mutilation or dismemberment; others emphasize the
pharmacological tendencies within traditional Chinese medicine
and a preference for moxas and other caustic plasters. Whatever the
cause, it was undoubtedly the case that Parker’s surgical practice
tapped into a huge unmet need. Almost as soon as he opened his
Ophthalmic Hospital in Canton, as it was known in English, he
acquired a reputation as a surgeon of such skill that the hospital
quickly became a general hospital. Parker and his small staff
handled thousands of cases each year, treating more than fifty
thousand cases by the 1850s. His hospital became the model for
other medical missions, and Parker and his British colleagues
formed the Medical Missionary Society of China to coordinate the
efforts of all the western hospitals springing up in the trading ports
of Asia. Parker earned his reputation performing operations to
remove tumors and cataracts–forms of surgery with relatively good
odds of success that, as important in an era without anesthesia,
could be accomplished quickly. Parker also found a demand for his
skills. Because of the absence of surgery in China, a large number
of patients were afflicted with mature tumors (typically five to
thirty-five years old) of a size seldom seen in Europe or the United
States. It was this work that Parker described to his Boston
audience, and in the most significant cases Parker presented what
were at the time state-of-the-art visual aids–oil paintings of his preoperative patients by a Cantonese artist known as Lam Qua.
Fig. 1. Lam Qua, Lew Akin, 1837. From the Peter Parker Collection, courtesy of the Yale
University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical School Library.
One of the images he exhibited was of a patient named Lew Akin
(fig. 1). This is but one of a remarkable series of at least one
hundred and fourteen paintings that Parker commissioned between
1836 and 1852 from the studio of Lam Qua, one of the most
successful Cantonese export painters working in a western style.
Parker requested Lam Qua to paint portraits of his more notable
patients. The bulk of these paintings are still housed in the basement
of the Yale Medical School Historical Library where they exist in a
kind of cultural limbo: part missionary document, part medical
curiosity.
A healthy but rather emaciated twelve-year-old girl from the
Shuntih district, Lew Akin was accompanied by her parents and
admitted to the hospital in Canton on April 17, 1837. Parker
determined to remove the large tumor, which had grown to such a
size and heft that the girl had to lean forward to keep her balance
while walking. He placed her on a "generous diet" to strengthen her
for the operation and ten days later removed the tumor in a
procedure that lasted two minutes and fourteen seconds. The
growth, weighing seven pounds, measured two feet in
circumference at its base and was "much larger at the middle." Lew
Akin made an excellent recovery, gaining weight in a week’s time
walking without pain or injury to the incision.
As extraordinary as this particular tumor was, what interested
Parker most about Lew Akin’s case was the patient’s doting father.
The father attended the operation, but when he saw the gaping teninch incision in his only child’s backside, he was overwhelmed and
fled the room in tears. When his daughter cried out at the pain of
receiving stitches, he returned to her side only to flee again from the
equally harrowing sight of the wound being sewn up. Parker was
impressed by the father’s constant vigilance, reporting that he
displayed "the strength of natural affections, equalled only by his
gratitude for the relief afforded his daughter." "We cannot suppose
the fond parent will remain insensible to the obligations of gratitude
when he returns to his home, or fail to speak there of the excluded
foreigner who had gratuitously restored his child to the blessings of
health. We conceive there cannot be a more direct avenue to
influence than will be presented in this department." Such effusions
of parental gratitude were central to Parker’s strategy for winning
over the Chinese. He hypothesized that gratitude for relief from
medical complaints would break down the religious and diplomatic
barriers between China and the West.
In 1872, nearing the end of his career, Parker assessed his success.
He reflected on his work at the hospital, but he remembered as well
his part in negotiating the United States’ first treaty with China in
the mid-1840s. He claimed that during one of the negotiations over
the lease of land for building sites in the treaty ports, a Chinese
deputy minister, "whose father and mother had been my patients,"
suggested that "temples of worship" be included in the list. Parker
had removed polyps from the nose of the father, and he believed
that the son’s deep gratitude had inspired him to permit western
churches in China. Surgical success thus served as the "entering
wedge" in the treaty, and medical success promised to make
possible the evangelization of China. Parker asserted that the deputy
minister offered this provision "knowing the gratification it would
afford me." Such was Parker’s faith in the power of filial gratitude
and his medical mission. In Parker’s theory, gratitude for bodies
cured was a path to the Chinese souls he wished to save.
Parker’s Boston audience responded powerfully to his presentation.
The association immediately passed a resolution commending the
Christian and medical nature of Parker’s efforts. Members of the
audience further resolved to bring his efforts to "the attention of
men of property," inviting the wealthy to help finance the
permanent establishment of more medical missions, and they
formed a committee to facilitate the interest and recruitment of
medical men for hospitals in China. The paintings, however,
elicited a different kind of reaction. "They were truly Cyclopean," a
reporter declared. Parker removed a tumor "from the nates of a little
girl that would startle the surgeons in this part of the world with all
their tact and science."
The rhetorical impact of Parker’s appeal was conventional, wholly
consistent with regular accounts of westerners who were bringing
enlightened science and the gospels to the benighted East. But the
visual impact of the painting of Lew Akin inspired wonder and
curiosity even from an experienced medical audience. "I am
indebted to Lam Qua," Parker explained in his case notes on Lew
Akin, "who has taken an admirable likeness of the little girl and a
good representation of the tumor." What Lam Qua captured was not
merely the verisimilitude associated with western portraiture.
Rather the curious power of his portraits derives from the way they
invite in the viewer a kind of gestalt where the eye and the mind
travel between the likeness and the representation, as Parker termed
it, the normal and the pathological, the subject and the object. The
contrast between the giant, ball-joint-like growth and the petite
figure of the Chinese girl seated on a stool looking rather demurely
over her right shoulder with an almost questioning look on her face
overwhelms the viewer. The pose that Lam Qua has opted for
restores to Lew Akin a kind of balance and poise, of which the
tumor had deprived her when walking or standing, and the delicate
orderliness of the fingers of the right hand at rest force the viewer to
confront the explosive morphological tension between the normal
and the pathological. While the lecture affirmed the power of
western science and the dignity of the missionary enterprise, the
painting excited a more subliminal curiosity, "startling" and
disturbing the equilibrium of western "tact and science."
Artist: Lam Qua (1801-1860)
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Collection: Medical Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Case Study from Peter Parker's Journal
Oct. 16, 1844. "Yang Kang, age 35, of Sinhwui, latterly a beggar in Maco, had a tumor on the
right side of his face, which commenced in the situation of the parotid gland, measuring 2
feet and 6 inches in circumference, weighing when extirpated 6 1/2 catties, equal to 8 2/3
pounds. It commenced ten years since. Portions of the tissue cut harder than the rest, and
approached a cartilaginous or semiosseous structure. the mingling hope of success and fears
of the worst posible consequences excite and devout and sincere intercessions at the throne of
grace in his behalf, and an ernest use of means to prepare him for whatever might be the
divine allotment. He was told that others fervently entreated the most high God to save him,
but that it was desired that he himself should pray to Him who alone would succeed the
means to be used. This patient became the porter of the hospital
Title: Woo Kinshing
Secondary Title: Man with large tumor on chest
Description: By Lam Qua, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches,1838.
Tumor: large tumor
Case Number: 5111
Year: 1838
Modern Suggestion: Neurofibroma? According to the doctors consulted by the Gordon
Museum
Credit: Courtesy of the Gordon Museum.
Dr. Peter Parker's Case History
"April 11th 1838. Large Tumor. Woo Kinshing, aged 49, a fisherman from Shihszetow,
near the Bogue, ten years since had a small tumor just below the clavicle on the left
side. It had now attained a very great magniude resembling in figure a tenor viol.
Superiorly it extended over the shoulder to the spine of the scapula and from the
acromion process [outer upper point of the shoulder blade] to the trachea, and from the
axilla to the sternum, and as low as the breast, carrying that galnd down before it. The
circumference at the base was three feet three inches! Its perpendicular length was two
feet, and its transverse diameter from axilla to the sternum one foot eight inches. It was
very vascular, especially the upper portion of it, which was in an inflamed and ulcerated
state...There was a deep longitudinal fissure, and ulcers at several points, from which
there was a constant discharge, of blood, lymph, and pus. The weight of it had become
extremely burdensome, and several times a day the patient experienced severe
paroxisms of pain, causing him to groan alaoud, at which times he laid his tumor upon
the floor and reclined himself upon it. In this position he spent the principal part of his
time day and night. His countenance and furrowed brow expressed unequivocally the
calamity he had suffered. His friends were much delighted on being told that it probably
could be removed with safety, but the old man had been too long accustomed to
expressions of suffering to yield to those of joy, and in his feeble condition was less
sanguine probably in the feasibility of separating him from his old companion. He desired
to return to his family for a few days previous to residing in the hospital; he was
prescibed for and went home. On the 23rd of April he returned. Having undergone half a
month's preparatory treatment, on the @nd of May, assisted, as ususual in cases of
magnitude, by Messrs. Cox and Jardine, and several other friends the operation was
performed. Thirty drops of laudanum were given the patient hald an hour previously,
and after placing himself upon the table, the tumor was elevated for eight or ten minutes
to return its blood to the system as much as practicable. As the surface was extensive
and the veins large and numerous, it was deemed best not to make the incisions the
whole length at first, and the result confirmed the judicisousness of the measure. Two
incisions were first made from the breast upwards as high as the clavicle or a little
above. The gush of venous-blood was considerable, and the first steps less encouraging
than was anticipated...the dissection was almost as difficult as that of the skin on the
bottom of the foot. Perceiving this, the operation appeared most formidable, and the
result scarcely doubtful, but it was too late to retrace our steps....it required division by
knife at nearly every inch of surface throughout its base, and the clavicle attachment
was particularly strong. The tumor was extirpated from below to a little distance above
the clavicle, when the patient began to faint and to be convulsed, and his pulse was
scarcely perceptible. Stimulants, brandy and spirits of ammonia, were administered by
assistants and the operation continued. He soon revived and the tumor was immediately
laid upon the floor, being just sixteen minutes fromt he commencement, and not a
ligature was required....It weighed 15 pounds avoirdupois, and it was estimated by the
best judges present that there was a loss of about two pounds of blood....The first ten
days he lost a good deal of flesh, but since then the scale has turned in his favor. In
twenty days all below the clavicle was firmly healed, and the large cavity above was
most rapidly filling up with granulations [a normal stage in the healing process, esp. of
ulcers]. No fever supervened upon the operation. On the 19th of June the old gentleman
was discharged in perfect health, forming a great contrast with his former emaciated
appearance."
Additional Commentary
Because the shape and size of Woo Kinshing's tumor resembles a familiar object, a cello
or "tenor viol" as Parker calls it, Lam Qua's image raises another issue of pathological
representation latent in many images. What happens to the status of the tumor when it
resembles an ordinary non-pathological object? In Woo Kinshang's case, the suggestion
of the cello is reinforced by the coincidence of it being positioned more or less where a
cellist might play it and the tumor becomes a prop. In fact, Woo Kinshing would rest on
it like a matress. The indirection or redirection of the pathological gaze toward some
other object frequently produces a ludicrous effect, and a kind of "tumor humor"
emerges. Referring to the tumor as the patient's "old companion" and calling Woo
Kinshing at several points "the old gentleman" (though he was only 49), Parker's case
history is more jocular than most of his accounts, especially given how difficult the
surgery proved to be.
article is about the Dutch artist. For other uses, see Rembrandt (disambiguation).
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
Self portrait by Rembrandt, detail (1661).
Birth name Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
Born
July 15, 1606
Leiden, Netherlands
Died
October 4, 1669 (aged 63)
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Nationality Dutch
Field Painting, Printmaking
Danaë, 1636
Famous works Jacob de Gheyn III, 1632
Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632
Belshazzar's Feast, 1635
Night Watch, 1642
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (July 15, 1606 – October 4, 1669) was a
Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters
and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch
history.[1] His contributions to art came in a period that historians call the Dutch
Golden Age.
Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, his later years were
marked by personal tragedy and financial hardship. Yet his drawings and
paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist
remained high[2] and for twenty years he taught nearly every important Dutch
painter.[3] Rembrandt's greatest creative triumphs are exemplified especially in his
portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the
Bible. The self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist
surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity.[4]
In both painting and printmaking he exhibited a complete knowledge of classical
iconography, which he molded to fit the requirements of his own experience;
thus, the depiction of a biblical scene was informed by Rembrandt's knowledge of
the specific text, his assimilation of classical composition, and his observations of
the Jewish population of Amsterdam.[5] Of his empathy for the human condition,
he has been called "one of the great prophets of civilization."[6]
The Gross Clinic is an 1875 painting by Thomas Eakins. It is oil on canvas and
measures 8' by 6'6". Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a seventy-year-old professor dressed
in a black frock coat, lectures a group of Jefferson Medical College students.
Included among the group is a self-portrait of Eakins, who is seated to the right of
the tunnel railing, sketching or writing. Seen over Dr. Gross' right shoulder is the
clinic clerk, Dr. Franklin West, taking notes on the operation. Eakins's signature is
painted into the painting, on the front of the surgical table.
Admired for its uncompromising realism, "The Gross Clinic" has an important
place documenting the history of medicine - both because it honors the
emergence of surgery as a healing profession (previously, surgery was
associated primarily with amputation), and because it shows us what the surgical
theater looked like in the nineteenth century. The painting is based on a surgery
witnessed by Eakins, in which Gross treated a young man for osteomyelitis of the
femur. Gross is pictured here performing a conservative operation as opposed to
an amputation (which is how the patient would normally have been treated in
previous decades). Here, surgeons crowd around the anesthetized patient in their
frock coats. This is just prior to the adoption of a hygienic surgical environment
(see asepsis). "The Gross Clinic" is thus often contrasted with Eakins's later
painting "The Agnew Clinic", which depicts a cleaner, brighter, surgical theater. In
comparing the two, we see the advancement in our understanding of the
prevention of infection.
Interestingly, the sex of the patient is not established by anything concrete in the
painting itself. This fact makes "The Gross Clinic" somewhat unique, as it
presents the spectator with a body that is naked and exposed, and yet is not
entirely legible as male or female. Another intriguing element of this painting is
the lone woman in the painting, seen in the middle ground of the painting,
cringing in distress. She can be read as a female relative of the patient, acting as
a chaperone. Her dramatic figure functions as a strong contrast to the calm,
professional demeanor of the men who surround the patient. This bloody and
very blunt depiction of surgery was shocking at the time it was first exhibited, and
remains so for many viewers of the painting today.
David, Jacques-Louis (1748-1825). French painter, one of the central
figures of Neoclassicism.
Photographs by Mark Harden and Carol Gerten-Jackson
David was in active sympathy with the Revolution, becoming a Deputy and
voting for the execution of Louis XVI. His position was unchallenged as the
painter of the Revolution. His three paintings of `martyrs of the Revolution',
though conceived as portraits, raised portraiture into the domain of universal
tragedy. They were: The Death of Lepeletier (now known only from an
engraving), The Death of Marat (Musées Royaux, Brussels, 1793), and The
Death of Bara (Musée Calvet, Avignon, unfinished). After the fall of Robespierre
(1794), however, he was imprisoned, but was released on the plea of his wife,
who had previously divorced him because of his Revolutionary sympathies (she
was a royalist). They were remarried in 1796, and David's Intervention of the
Sabine Women (Louvre, 1794-99), begun while he was in prison, is said to have
been painted to honor her, its theme being one of love prevailing over conflict. It
was also interpreted at the time, however, as a plea for conciliation in the civil
strife that France suffered after the Revolution and it was the work that reestablished David's fortunes and brought him to the attention of Napoleon, who
appointed him his official painter.
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (June 6, 1599 – August 6, 1660),
commonly referred to as Diego Velázquez, was a Spanish painter, the leading
artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the
contemporary baroque period, important as a portrait artist. He lived in Italy for a
year and a half from 1629 to 1631 with the purpose of traveling and studying
works of art. In 1649 he traveled to Italy again. In addition to numerous renditions
of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he created scores of portraits of
the Spanish royal family, other notable European figures, and commoners,
culminating in the production of his masterpiece, Las Meninas (1656).
From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Velázquez's artwork was a model
for the realist and impressionist painters, in particular Édouard Manet. Since that
time, more modern artists, including Spain's Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, as
well as the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon have paid tribute to Velázquez by
recreating several of his most famous works.
Quentin Massys
The goudweger and his wife (1514)
Quentin Massys (Leuven, c. 1466 - Antwerp, 1530) was a Flemish painter. His
first name is also known as Quinten written, while the surname varies in Massys,
Matsys, Matsijs, Metsys and Metsijs.
Massys was educated by Dirk Bouts. He was listed in the records of the St.
Luke of Antwerp as vrijmeester in 1491.
He painted many religious works. His creations coins mainly in the coloriet
(color) and balanced compositions. He is berschouwd as the first great painter of
the Antwerp School. In the beginning he still leaned close to the Flemish
Primitives, but later showed his works still characteristics of the Renaissance.
His sons John and Cornelius were also painters.
On the Handschoenmarkt for the Cathedral of Antwerp, "the pit of Quinten
Metsijs", a well whose Metsijs the smeedwerk made.
Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch PostImpressionist artist.[1] His paintings and drawings include some of the world's best
known, most popular and most expensive pieces.
Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief
spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region.
He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, van Gogh
worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and NeoImpressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of
painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the
time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including
around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years
of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of
his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in
his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental
illness, which led to his suicide.
The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and
selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in
numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a
pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous
influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German
Expressionists.
The Dutch pronunciation of Vincent van Gogh's name is [ˈvɪnsɛnt vɑn ˈɣɔx]
(help·info). It is also often pronounced as [ˈvɪnsənt væn ˈɡɒf] or [ˈvɪnsənt vɑn
ˈɡɔx] in British English and [ˈvɪnsənt væn ˈɡoʊ] in US English
Van gogh
The portraits were painted in Auvers-sur-Oise close to Paris, and depict Doctor
Paul Gachet with a foxglove plant. Gachet took care of van Gogh during the
artist's last months. Gachet was a hobby painter and became good friends with
van Gogh. The foxglove in the painting is a plant from which digitalis is extracted
for the treatment of certain heart complaints; the foxglove is thereby an attribute
of Gachet as a doctor.
Delacroix – Tasso
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (April 26, 1798 – August 13, 1863) was the
most important of the French Romantic painters.[1] Delacroix's use of expressive
brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the
work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of
the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works
of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, and the German
writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival, Ingres, Delacroix
took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian
Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on color and movement rather than
clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Dramatic and romantic content
characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical
models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the
exotic.[2] Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also
inspired by Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of
the sublime", of nature in often violent action.[3]
However, Delacroix was given neither to sentimentality nor bombast, and his
Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire:
Tasso, Torquato (1544–1595)
Italian poet. He was the author of the romantic epic poem of the First Crusade Gerusalemme
liberata/Jerusalem Delivered completed by 1575 and first published in 1581, which he revised as
Gerusalemme conquistata/Jerusalem Conquered, published in 1593.
Tasso was born at Sorrento in southern Italy. As a boy accompanied he his father, the poet
Bernado Tasso, into political exile, spending a short time at the court of Urbino and studying at the
universities of Padua and Bologna. In these early years he produced Rinaldo (1562), a chivalric
romance. In 1565 he joined the retinue of Cardinal Luigi d'Este, who took him to Paris, where he
was influenced by the works of the Pléiade group of poets. In 1572 Duke Alfonso II d'Este appointed
him court poet at Ferrara, where his play Aminta was performed in the summer of 1573. By 1575
he had completed the first of his many versions of his epic Gerusalemme libertata.
Soon afterwards he betrayed signs of the mental instability that remained with him for the rest of
his life. In 1577, after a violent outburst in the presence of Lucrezia d'Este, he was briefly
confined: two years later after abusing Duke Alfonso in public, he was confined in the hospital of
Sant'Anna from 1579–86. After his release (authorized by Alfonso), he continued his wanderings,
though now with the protection of prominent men and women and welcomed by various
academies and religious orders. He finally settled at the monastery of Sant'Onofrio in Rome, dying
before his coronation as poet laureate, which Pope Clement VIII had intended for him, could
"Goya's portrait of himself being nursed by his physician is inscribed: 'Goya in
gratitude to his friend Arrieta for the skill and care with which he saved his life in his
acute and dangerous illness suffered at the end of the year 1819 at the age of 73.
He painted it in 1820.' Goya otherwise celebrated his rescue from the jaws of death
by decorating the walls of his villa, the Quinta del Sordo, with the fourteen 'black
paintings', which by and large are the most sickening images he ever painted.
Having survived, he not only gave himself to realising hellish visions, but chose to do
so in a form that left him surrounded by them (and without the freedom canvases
would have offered to turn their faces to the wall).
"All sense of relief was reserved for the Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta. It almost
resembles a Pieta. Goya is seen sitting up in bed, more dead than alive, leaning
back against the doctor, who supports the patient's weight with one arm and with the
other raises a glass of medicine towards his lips. Portrayals such as this of love or
warmth between human beings are rare among Goya's mature works. Others have
created images as terrible as his of man's inhumanity to man, but no other major
artist has conceived of a world so comprehensively consumed by hate.
"Goya seems to have come to take it for granted that a human being with power or
authority over another will abuse it to ruin the other to dismember, deprave, despoil,
relentlessly, gratuitously. Maybe the scenes in The Disasters of War of the pointless
butchery which the victors inflict on the vanquished tell us no more about Goya
himself than that, like any humane and rational being, he loathed the excesses of
war. Maybe the scenes in the Caprices in which the old sell or corrupt their charges
tell us no more about him than that he was a sharp social satirist. His witches'
sabbaths where babies and foetuses are roasted are not proof that he assumed,
even unconsciously, that all women would rather eat than feed children. But there
can be no doubt as to the depth of his despair in the face of his guarded inscription
on a drawing in the Prado of an attractive young woman seated cuddling a small
child: 'She seems to be a good woman.' Love is exceptional. Depictions of
tenderness and compassion are found among the famine scenes of the Disasters:
love flowers in the context of deprivation. A loving care is portrayed in the painting
made in 119 of The Last Communion of Sanjoside Calasanz. It is curiously prophetic
of the Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta - both are images of a suffering man sustained by
a man who is feeding him.
"The mouth plays a role in Goya's art more prominent than in that of any other major
artist. Mouths leer, grin, gape, gasp, moan, shriek, belch. A hanged man's mouth lies
open and a woman reaches up to filch his teeth. Grown men stick fingers in their
mouths like sucking infants. Mouths vomit, the sick gushing out of them, and a great
furry beast sicks up a pile of human bodies. Mouths guzzle: they guzzle avidly,
ferociously, living flesh as well as dead. Saturn grips one of his children in his fists
and with his mouth tears him limb from limb.
"In Rubens's version (which Goya would have seen in Madrid), Saturn bends his
head over the body, sinks his teeth in the flesh and sucks the spurting blood of his
kicking, screaming child. Goya's version shows a bleeding remnant of a body, one of
its stumps entering the hoary giant's gaping mouth. Goya's painting of an episode
from the sixteenth-century novel El Lazarillo de Tormes is its comic counterpart. The
blind old man, wanting to smell out whether his supper has been eaten by the youth
Lazarillo, 'forced open my mouth with his hand, and thrust in his nose, which was
long and thin, and at the same time had grown another few inches with rage'. 'Those
who reach eighty,' reads one of the Caprices commentaries, 'suck little children;
those under eighteen suck grown ups. It seems that man is born and lives to have
the substance sucked out of him.'
"And mouths are focal points in many scenes other than those actually depicting oral
aggression or symbolising oral sexuality. For Goya, to a degree unknown in any
European artist before him, habitually relies on the mouth to convey the passion
possessing a figure. With other artists facial expression is conveyed by the face as a
whole, and by the eyes to more or less the same degree as the mouth. With Goya
the mouth dominates the face - and not only the face but the whole body. For, after
all, in general painters and sculptors of figure-subjects do not depend primarily on
facial expressions to convey the passions animating their actors. Their actors, like
actors on a stage who know that their facial expressions are hardly visible beyond
the front rows of the stalls, must convey their passions through the gestures of their
whole bodies. Goya, however, tends to restrict the body's expressive role.
"His figures have the jerky movements of puppets, not the expansive actions of
heroes. After the eloquent decisive gestures of that long chain of great European
figure-painters from Giotto to Tiepolo and David, Goya's gestures, suddenly - apart
from the gestures of his mouths - are ambiguous. Here gesture loses the clarity of a
language, and the language of flat shape takes over the main burden of conveying
meaning. In a Goya drawing of, say, two men fighting, the drama lies less in how
they are seen to act in relation to each other than in the expressiveness of the
configuration which their combined forms establish on the page.
"And Goya uses every pretext to present his figures, not as articulated bodies, but as
looming shapes, which are as eloquent in their silhouettes as they are mysterious in
their identity and often their actions. There are those menacing silhouettes of
shadowy figures which - especially in the prints - loom up in his backgrounds. There
are his crowds, which are not a multiplicity of individuals but - even when near to the
eye - a sea of faces and bodies in which separate identities are submerged. Above
all, there is his use of cloak and cowl. Goya uses drapery, not as other artists use it,
as a foil to the free action of the limbs and to the texture of flesh, but to disguise, to
submerge, to depersonalise.
"The prototype of the recurrent cloaked and cowled figure appears in Plate Three of
the Caprices, looming up, its back to us, over a mother and a pair of terrified
children. The caption is 'Here comes the bogeyman', and Goya's gloss reads:
'Lamentable abuse of early education. To cause a child to fear the bogeyman more
than his father and so make it afraid of something that does not exist.' The nameless
draped apparition is more potent in the children's eyes, more real, than their father, a
mere person, could be. And so it seems to have been for Goya: again and again he
embodies menace or aggression in a nameless looming hulk - and this in realistic as
much as in fantastic scenes, so that in The Executions of the Third of May, 1808 the
firing-squad, their backs to us, are not men but massive threatening shapes, and the
face and pose - the outflung arms - of the next victim precisely echo the face and
pose of the child nearest the apparition.
"The Renaissance-Baroque tradition in painting is essentially about the human figure
acting in space. Not only is man the summit of natural beauty; he is the vehicle of all
life. So the human figure is shown enacting the feelings and emotions the image is
intended to convey, and representations of it acting are sufficient to embody - as the
Olympian gods do - abstractions such as love and war and folly and fear, whereas in
many artistic traditions passions and ideas are transmitted through a language of
symbolic forms. Goya finds ways to deny the human figure that heroic role. The one
area of his mature work in which the most eloquent thing about his figures is their
actions in space is the bull-fighting prints - the most commercial of his subjectpictures - and here, by way of compensation, he makes it fairly plain that for him the
hero is the bull.
"In spite of all he owes to Rembrandt and Velázquez, and in spite of his being a
highly visual painter, the dramatically telling attributes of his subject-pictures tend to
be attributes characteristic of primitive and archaic art-forms - the suggestive
eloquence of impersonal shapes and the vivid representation of an isolated organ of
the body; and also the creation of hybrids of man and beast. Goya here has an
intense obsession and a fertility of invention which set him apart from other
European painters.
"Yet there is still, surely, The Naked Maja as an affirmation of the Renaissance
tradition's cult of the human body? It celebrates the sexiest skin, the most resilient
flesh, the most exquisite suggestion of a line of hair running from the navel down.
But the incoherent articulation - the inexplicable incompetence of the drawing of the
arms, the impossible position of the breasts, the unconvincing conjunction of the
head with the neck - is a virtual denial of the Renaissance tradition's feeling for the
body as a functioning whole, not an assemblage of delicious parts. Goya sees his
nude as he sees the women in his portraits - as a doll.
"His space, moreover, has nothing of the plenitude of Renaissance and Baroque
space. It is airless, depthless, cramping, oppressive: it precludes the very possibility
of heroic action. It is full of flying figures. Titian's figures in flight are solid bodies
borne up by the marvellous buoyancy of the space, a space invested with an energy
which counteracts gravity. Goya's space is a lifeless void; the figures float because
they have no density. All his figures are weightless: their feet placed on the ground,
they do not so much stand on it as brush it, like marionettes. The space is like space
in dreams, the figures like figures in dreams. The fantastic scenes become
nightmarish because they have the quality, the atmosphere, of dreams. And the
royal portrait group, say, no less than the witches' sabbaths, appears to be
happening in a dream..."
Further reading on Goya:





Francisco Goya Y Lucientes: 1746-1828, by Janis Tomlinson. The best
single-volume coverage of Goya's life and work.
Goya: The Complete Etchings and Lithographs, by Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez.
Some of Goya's greatest works were graphical, and this well-illustrated
volume has them all.
Painting in Spain in the Age of Enlightenment: Goya and His Contemporaries,
by Ronda Kasl. An exhibition catalog that provides essential contemporary
context for understanding Goya's genius.
Goya, by Paola Rapelli. From the DK Art Books series, small reproductions,
but a well written and economical introduction.
Disasters of War. For those not collecting the entire graphical work, this is an
economical edition of one series of etchings.

The story

The painting shows an imaginary scene in a Royalist house during the English Civil War. The
Parliamentarian soldiers have taken over the house and are questioning the little boy about his
Royalist father.
During the English Civil War (1642-1649), Roundheads (Parliamentarians) and Cavaliers
(Royalist) fought against each other in order to gain control of the country. The Roundheads
were unhappy with the way King Charles I ruled the country. The Cavaliers were loyal to the
King. Oliver Cromwell, a leading Roundhead, had the King executed and then became leader of
the country.


Who's who





The boy
In the painting we see the young son of a Cavalier being questioned as to the whereabouts of
his father by Roundhead soldiers. Yeames was inspired to paint the picture after recognising
that frankness and childhood honesty could lead to disastrous consequences. In this situation, if
the boy answers honestly, he may endanger his father. However, to save him, the boy may be
forced to lie. To the Victorians, children were seen as ideals of truth and honesty. The boy's
dilemma would have made this painting very appealing to them.
The young boy in the painting was based on Yeames' nephew, James Lambe Yeames (1873 1960). He was about five years old when this was painted.

Joseph Wright (September 3, 1734 - August 29, 1797), styled Wright of Derby,
was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the
first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution."[1]
Contents
[hide]
1 Life
2 Works
3 Painting the British
Enlightenment
4 Memorials
5 See also
6 References and notes
7 External links
[edit]
Life
Joseph Wright was born in Irongate, Derby, the son of an attorney, who was
afterwards town-clerk. Deciding to become a painter, Derby went to London in
1751 and for two years studied under Thomas Hudson, the master of Joshua
Reynolds. After painting portraits for a while at Derby, Wright again worked as an
assistant to Hudson for fifteen months. He then settled in Derby and varied his
work in portraiture by the production of the subjects with strong chiaroscuro under
artificial light, with which his name is chiefly associated, and by landscape
painting.
Wright married in 1773, and in the end of that year visited Italy, where he
remained till 1775. While at Naples he witnessed an eruption of Mount Vesuvius,
which formed the subject of many of his subsequent paintings. On his return from
Italy he established himself at Bath as a portrait-painter, but meeting with little
encouragement he returned to Derby, where he spent the rest of his life.
Wright was a frequent contributor to the exhibitions of the Society of Artists, and
to those of the Royal Academy, of which he was elected an associate in 1781
and a full member in 1784. He, however, declined the latter honour on account of
a slight which he believed that he had received, and severed his official
connection with the Academy, though he continued to contribute to the
exhibitions from 1783 until 1794.
[edit]
Works
Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was an American painter and
printmaker. His works represented light as it is reflected off of familiar objects.
While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a
watercolorist and printmaker in etching.
[edit]
Life
Born in upper Nyack, New York to a prosperous dry-goods merchant, Hopper
studied illustration and painting in New York City at the New York Institute of Art
and Design. One of his teachers, artist Robert Henri, encouraged his students to
use their art to "make a stir in the world". Henri, an influence on Hopper,
motivated students to render realistic depictions of urban life. Henri's students,
many of whom developed into important artists, became known as the Ashcan
School of American art. Hopper studied under Henri for ten years.
Upon completing his formal education, Hopper made four trips to Europe to study
the emerging art scene there, but unlike many of his contemporaries who imitated
the abstract cubist experiments, the idealism and detail of the realist painters
resonated with Hopper. His early projects reflect the realist influence with an
emphasis on colour and shape. Eschewing the usual New England subjects of
seascapes or boats, Hopper was attracted to Victorian architecture, although it
was no longer in fashion. According to Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator Carol
Troyen, "He really liked the way these houses with their turrets and towers and
porches and mansard roofs and ornament cast wonderful shadows. He always
said that his favorite thing was painting sunlight on the side of a house." [1]
While he worked for several years as a commercial artist, Hopper continued
painting with moderate success yet not as much as he yearned for. He sold a
variety of small prints and watercolors to tourists and minor publication yet
received only a casual if warm response from curators and gallery owners. [2]
According to Troyen, Hopper's "breakthrough work" was The Mansard Roof,
painted in 1923 during Hopper's first summer in Gloucester, MA. His former art
school classmate and later wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, suggested he enter it
in the Brooklyn Museum annual watercolor show, along with some other
paintings. The Mansard Roof was purchased by the museum for its permanent
collection, for the sum of $100. [1]
In 1925 he produced House by the Railroad, a classic work that marks his artistic
maturity. The piece is the first of a series of stark urban and rural scenes that
uses sharp lines and large shapes, played upon by unusual lighting to capture
the lonely mood of his subjects. He derived his subject matter from the common
features of American life — gas stations, motels, the railroad, or an empty street
— and its inhabitants.
Hopper continued to paint in his old age, dividing his time between New York City
and Truro, Massachusetts. He died in 1967, in his studio near Washington
Square, in New York City. His wife, painter Josephine Nivison, who died 10
months later, bequeathed his work to the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Other significant paintings by Hopper are at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, The Des Moines Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Edvard Munch (pronounced [ˈmʉŋk], December 12, 1863 – January 23, 1944)
was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker, and an important forerunner of
Expressionistic art.
His best-known painting, The Scream (1893), is one of the pieces in a series
titled The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear,
death, and melancholy. As with many of his works, he painted several versions of
it.[1] Similar paintings include Despair and Anxiety
The Frieze of Life themes recur throughout Munch's work, in paintings such as
The Sick Child (1886, portrait of his deceased sister Sophie), Love and Pain
(1893-94) though more commonly known as "Vampire." Art critic Stanislaw
Przybyszewski mistakenly interpreted the image as being vampiric in theme and
content, and the description has since stuck, Ashes (1894), and The Bridge. The
latter shows limp figures with featureless or hidden faces, over which loom the
threatening shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses. Munch portrayed
women either as frail, innocent sufferers (see Puberty and Love and Pain) or as
the cause of great longing, jealousy and despair (see Separation, Jealousy and
Ashes). Some say these paintings reflect the artist's sexual anxieties, though it
could also be argued that they are a better representation of his turbulent
relationship with love itself.
Andrew Warhola (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987), better known as Andy
Warhol, was an American artist who was a central figure in the movement known
as Pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became
famous worldwide for his work as a painter, an avant-garde filmmaker, a record
producer, an author, and a public figure known for his presence in wildly diverse
social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals,
Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats. A controversial figure during his
lifetime (his work was often derided by critics as a hoax or "put-on"), Warhol has
been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books and documentary
films since his death in 1987. He is generally acknowledged as one of the most
influential artists of the twentieth century.
Mark Rothko born Marcus Rothkowitz (September 25, 1903–February 25,
1970) was a Latvian-born American painter and printmaker who is classified as
an abstract expressionist, although he rejected not only the label but even being
an abstract painter.
Suicide
In the spring of 1968, Rothko suffered an aneurysm of the aorta, a result of his
chronic high blood pressure. Ignoring doctor’s orders, Rothko continued to drink
and smoke heavily, avoid exercise and maintain an unhealthy diet. However, he
followed the advice not to paint pictures larger than a yard in height and turned
his attention to smaller formats, including acrylics on paper. Due to impotence,
Rothko and his wife Mell separated on New Year’s Day 1969, and he moved into
his studio. Sensing the end was near, Rothko and his financial advisor, Bernard
Reis, created a foundation intended to fund "research and education" that would
receive the bulk of Rothko’s work following his death. (Reis later sold the
paintings to the Marlborough Gallery at a considerable loss and pocketed the
difference with Gallery representatives, the result of which was one of the longest
and most heavily hyped legal battles in art history.)
On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found the artist in
his kitchen, lying dead on the floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. His arms
had been sliced open with a razor lying at his side. During autopsy it was
discovered he had also overdosed on anti-depressants. He was 66 years old.
[edit]
Legacy
Claude Monet (French pronounced [klod mɔnɛ]) also known as Oscar-Claude
Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926)[1] was
a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific
practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before
nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting.[2] The term
Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.
Degas
By the time Degas completed “Woman Drying Her Hair” in 1905,
his eyesight had dropped to somewhere between 20/200 and
20/400. Marmor notes that after 1900, there was virtually no
detailing of faces or clothing in Degas’ artwork. Credit: ©Norton
Simon Art Foundation
Edgar Degas completed this pastel titled “Woman Combing Her Hair,” in 1886.
During the mid-1880s, he first began to talk about his “infirmity of sight.” Credit:
Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775[1] – 19 December 1851)
Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775[1] – 19 December 1851) was an
English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style
can be said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was
considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who
elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.[
John Constable
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A self portrait by John Constable
John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic
painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of
Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable
Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own
places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another
word for feeling".[1]
His most famous paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802 and The Hay Wain of
1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in
British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of
the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He
so Born ld more paintings in France than in his native England
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (February 25, 1841–December 3, 1919) was a French
artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As
a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that
"Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to
Watteau".[1]
Illness: the pathway to creative genius?
Disease, rather than being a barrier to greatness, may be its wellspring
by Roger Dobson
New research in fields as diverse as music, art, science and literature suggests that we’re wrong to think that great men
and women achieve despite disease. Their illness in many cases is a path, rather than an obstacle, to genius. Einstein,
Warhol, Newton, Cézanne, Goya, Michelangelo, Turner and Berlioz are among many whose achievements are now
thought to have been influenced by disease. Conditions such as depression, autism, myopia, anxiety, chronic pain,
gout, stroke and dementia heavily influenced their paths to creativity.
“Illness has affected the artistic achievement of musical composers, classical painters, creative authors, and
sculptors,” says Paul Wolf, a clinical pathologist from the University of California, who specialises in
investigating the effects of disease and drugs on the creativity and productivity of sculptors, painters, composers
and authors. “The associations between illness and art may be close because of both the actual physical
limitations of the artists and their mental adaptation to disease.”
According to Dr Wolf, Michelangelo had symptoms of gout and bipolar disorder, a form of manic-depressive
mental illness. He painted more than 400 figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512,
and Dr Wolf says that his paintings mirror his depression. Features of melancholy appear, for example, in the
depiction of the prophet Jeremiah in the Sistine. Michelangelo’s gout also makes an appearance in a fresco by
Raphael, now in the Vatican Palace, which depicts the artist with a gouty, deformed right knee.
The link between artistic achievement and depression has inspired an exhibition at the Galeries Nationales du
Grand Palais, Paris, Genius and Insanity in the West, which runs until January 16. The work of Goya, Rodin,
Van Gogh, Munch and Picasso is on show. According to its organisers, melancholy is a key element in the
temperaments of those marked for greatness.
But it isn’t just mental illness that is influential. Eye conditions, including short-sightedness and cataracts, have
also had a significant impact on creativity. According to reports by researchers from the St Louis University
School of Medicine, in Missouri, cataracts appear to have been a particular affliction of the early Impressionists.
“Monet’s serial paintings of the Bridge at Giverny clearly demonstrate the effects of cataracts on painting, with
the bridge slowly disappearing over time,” says John Morley, an author and professor of gerontology at St
Louis. “Renoir and the American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt were also afflicted with cataracts. This
plethora of cataracts among artists of this time has led to the concept that Impressionism is the world seen
through cataracts. The researchers say that those who influenced the Impressionists were also affected by
cataracts, and give JMW Turner as an example, while several of the works of the Norwegian Expressionist
painter Edvard Munch depict a large floater which obstructed his vision towards the end of his life.
“Constable’s blue-green colour-blindness accounted for his colouring of his landscapes which are primarily
yellow and brown,” says Dr Morley. He believes the fact that the postImpressionist painter Cézanne was
diabetic was also influential. The artist developed a condition called diabetic retinopathy, which causes bluegreen colour-blindness, and may account for some of his colour choices in later paintings, which became more
subdued. Van Gogh’s famous painting Starry Night may have been the result of the artist’s epilepsy. He was
treated with digitalis and the painting represents a classic example of the haloes seen by someone suffering the
side-effects of this toxic drug, according to the St Louis researchers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dipFMJckZOM
At Oxford, Ioan James, a professor of geometry, is writing a book in which he investigates whether 20
influential figures, including Einstein and Newton, the composer Bartók, the mathematician Alan Turing and the
artist Andy Warhol, had Asperger’s syndrome, a mild autism characterised by extremely focused attention.
James argues that the obsessive and repetitious behaviour often associated with autism was a positive thing in
these people. “Perseverance, perfectionism, disregard for social conventions and unconcern about the opinions
of others could be seen as a prerequisite for creativity, and these are also behaviours associated with
Asperger’s,” he says.
Much of the research on disease and creativity has centred on historical cases, but a remarkable case reported
two years ago by American neurologists from the University of California, at Davis, and published in the
medical journal Neurology, shows how artistic skills can evolve from disease. It involved a woman in her fifties
who developed a rare disease, frontotemporal dementia, which affected the left side of the brain. Over several
years her brain gradually deteriorated and she had more and more difficulty talking. But during the same period,
her artistic skills improved dramatically. Despite, or perhaps because of, her illness she was able not only to
paint but to sell her work. It was described by the research leader, Dr Bruce Miller, a neurologist from
California University, as some of the most beautiful he has seen.
Exactly how it came about is not clear, but the left side of the brain is involved with language and words, while
the right side is more involved in visual creativity. One theory put forward by the neurologists who treated her
was that the decline of the left side took the shackles from the right, allowing more creative freedom and
experimentation: “The study of artistic development in the setting of this dementia suggests that language is not
required for, and may even inhibit, certain types of visual creativity.”
They describe the case of another patient with the same disease who had no artistic talent but began to paint
obsessively as the disease progressed, and the paintings improved into a distinctive style centring on the colours
purple and yellow. One of his pieces, featuring a bird, won a national award in America. “By the time he painted
the bird he no longer knew what a bird was,” says Dr Bruce Miller. “So this was an extraordinary evolution of
language loss and visual creativity producing very beautiful, strange pieces.”
continued on page 2
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The work of Dr Wolf and others raises issues about treatments. As he points out, the diseases and afflictions that
led to creativity and genius in the past would today be mostly diagnosed, probably treated, and even cured. The
painting of St George and the Dragon, by Ivar Arosenius, for example, might never have come about but for the
Swedish artist’s haemophilia. Arosenius, who was known for his paintings of fairytales, died of bleeding caused
by haemophilia at the age of 30. Dr Wolf says that he might have been treated successfully for the disease today,
possibly losing his inspiration. “His painting Saint George and the Dragon depicts a dragon that is bleeding
profusely after his slaying by Saint George. A modern coagulation laboratory would have detected the genetic
abnormality for haemophilia and appropriate therapy with recombinant haemophilia factors could have been
instituted,” he says.
There’s an argument that history could have been substantially changed for the worse if the conditions of the
leading figures had been diagnosed and treated properly. Alan Turing, for example, is famous as the man who
led efforts to decipher German codes during the Second World War. Would the course of the war have been
different if he had been labelled autistic? Would Einstein and Newton have had the same kind of impact if they
had been offered therapy for their condition?
Such questions will never be resolved. But research does raise issues about whether we are too negative about
some conditions. Kay Jamison, a psychiatrist and writer who has suffered with severe depression, is aware of all
the negative effects her illness has had on her life, including a marriage failure and a suicide attempt. But in her
book, An Unquiet Mind, she comes to the conclusion that, overall, the disease was the source of much of her
creativity and achievement, as well as her passion for life. Normal or manic, she says, she has run faster, thought
faster and loved faster than others. “I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have
manic-depressive illness,” she writes. “Strangely enough I think I would.”
Suffering for their art?
Francisco de Goya, artist, 1746-1828. A 1792 illness, possibly bacterial meningitis, left Goya deaf and
depressed. The gaiety disappeared from his work and he began to paint dark, disturbing, private pieces,
according to Professor Henry Claman, of the University of Colorado’s Health Sciences Centre, and an expert on
medicine and art.
Andy Warhol, artist, 1928-87. The grid pattern of art he pioneered, as well as his extreme shyness and
repetitious behaviour, may be clues to a mild form of autism, according to Professor Ioan James, of Oxford
University. “The absolute flatness of his voice and his peculiar locutions are also indications.”
Mervyn Peake, writer and artist, 1911-68. He had a degenerative illness of the nervous system, similar to
Alzheimer’s, called dementia with Lewy bodies. “Visual hallucinations are portrayed in sketches and together
with paranoid delusions are apparent in poetry composed during his illness,” says the neurologist Dr DJ Sahla of
the University of Toronto.
Hector Berlioz, composer 1803-69. Opium, taken to relieve agonising toothaches, may have contributed to the
creativity of the French composer, according to the clinical pathologist Dr Paul Wolf (see main piece).
Albert Einstein, physicist 1879-1955. Evidence of impairments in social relationships, communication and
obsessional and routine-based behaviour suggest Asperger’s syndrome, according to a commentary in the
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Turner, John Mallord William (1775-1851). One of the finest landscape
artists was J.M.W. Turner, whose work was exhibited when he was still a
teenager. His entire life was devoted to his art. Unlike many artists of his
era, he was successful throughout his career.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London, England, on April 23,
1775. His father was a barber. His mother died when he was very young.
The boy received little schooling. His father taught him how to read, but
this was the extent of his education except for the study of art. By the
age of 13 he was making drawings at home and exhibiting them in his
father's shop window for sale.
Turner was 15 years old when he received a rare honor--one of his
paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was 18 he
had his own studio. Before he was 20 print sellers were eagerly buying his
drawings for reproduction.
He quickly achieved a fine reputation and was elected an associate of the
Royal Academy. In 1802, when he was only 27, Turner became a full
member. He then began traveling widely in Europe.
Venice was the inspiration of some of Turner's finest work. Wherever he
visited he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. His
early training had been as a topographic draftsman. With the years,
however, he developed a painting technique all his own. Instead of
merely recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a
light-filled expression of his own romantic feelings.
As he grew older Turner became an eccentric. Except for his father, with
whom he lived for 30 years, he had no close friends. He allowed no one to
watch him while he painted. He gave up attending the meetings of the
academy. None of his acquaintances saw him for months at a time.
Turner continued to travel but always alone. He still held exhibitions, but
he usually refused to sell his paintings. When he was persuaded to sell
one, he was dejected for days.
In 1850 he exhibited for the last time. One day Turner disappeared from
his house. His housekeeper, after a search of many months, found him
hiding in a house in Chelsea. He had been ill for a long time. He died the
following day--Dec. 19, 1851.
Turner left a large fortune that he hoped would be used to support what
he called "decaying artists." His collection of paintings was bequeathed to
his country. At his request he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.
Although known for his oils, Turner is regarded as one of the founders of
English watercolor landscape painting. Some of his most famous works
are Calais Pier, Dido Building Carthage, Rain, Steam and Speed, Burial at
Sea, and The Grand Canal, Venice.
Constable, John (1776-1837). English painter, ranked with Turner as one of
the greatest British landscape artists
Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia (today Daugavpils, Latvia), on
September 25, 1903, the fourth child of Jacob Rothkowitz, a pharmacist (b. 1859), and Anna Goldin
Rothkowitz (b. 1870), who had married in 1886. Rothko and his family immigrated to the United
States when he was ten years old, and settled in Portland, Oregon
. Cassatt, Mary (b. May 22, 1844, Allegheny City, Pa., U.S.--d. June 14,
1926, Château de Beaufresne, near Paris, Fr.), American painter and
printmaker who exhibited with the Impressionists.
The daughter of an affluent Pittsburgh businessman, whose French
ancestry had endowed him with a passion for that country, she studied
art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and then
travelled extensively in Europe, finally settling in Paris in 1874. In that
year she had a work accepted at the Salon and in 1877 made the
acquaintance of Degas, with whom she was to be on close terms
throughout his life. His art and ideas had a considerable influence on her
own work; he introduced her to the Impressionists and she participated in
the exhibitions of 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886, refusing to do so in 1882
when Degas did not.
She was a great practical support to the movement as a whole, both by
providing direct financial help and by promoting the works of
Impressionists in the USA, largely through her brother Alexander. By
persuading him to buy works by Manet, Monet, Morisot, Renoir, Degas
and Pissarro, she made him the first important collector of such works in
America. She also advised and encouraged her friends the Havemeyers to
build up their important collection of works by Impressionists and other
contemporary French artists.
Her own works, on the occasions when they were shown in various mixed
exhibitions in the USA, were very favourably received by the critics and
contributed not a little to the acceptance of Impressionism there. Despite
her admiration for Degas, she was no slavish imitator of his style,
retaining her own very personal idiom throughout her career. From him,
and other Impressionists, she acquired an interest in the rehabilitation of
the pictural qualities of everyday life, inclining towards the domestic and
the intimate rather than the social and the urban (Lady at the Teatable,
1885; Metropolitan Museum, New York), with a special emphasis on the
mother and child theme in the 1890s (The Bath, 1891; Art Institute of
Chicago). She also derived from Degas and others a sense of immediate
observation, with an emphasis on gestural significance. Her earlier works
were marked by a certain lyrical effulgence and gentle, golden lighting,
but by the 1890s, largely as a consequence of the exhibition of Japanese
prints held in Paris at the beginning of that decade, her draughtsmanship
became more emphatic, her colors clearer and more boldly defined. The
exhibition also confirmed her predilection for print-making techniques,
and her work in this area must count amongst the most impressive of her
generation. She lived in France all her life, though her love of her adopted
countrymen did not increase with age, and her latter days were clouded
with
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926
Diagnosed with diabetes, rheumatism, neuralgia, and cataracts in 1911, she did
not slow down, but after 1914 she was forced to stop painting as she became
almost blind. Nonetheless, she took up the cause of women's suffrage, and in
1915, she showed eighteen works in an exhibition supporting the movement.
In recognition of her contributions to the arts, France awarded her the Légion
d'honneur in 1904.
Paul Cézanne (IPA: [pɔl se'zan], January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906) was a
French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of
the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and
radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form
the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's
new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and
Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed.
Cézanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and
draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are
highly characteristic and clearly recognisable. He used planes of colour and small
brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct
expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from
observed nature. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects, a
searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human
visual perception
Ivar Arosenius (b. October 8, 1878, d. January 2, 1909 from the complications of
haemophilia), was a Swedish painter and author of picture books. In the lastmentioned he is most notably for the book Kattresan (Eng. The Cat Journey),
which was published after his death. He lived in the village of Älvängen, north of
Gothenburg. After his death, his house was disrepaired for a long time before it
finally was demolished.
In Älvängen, one of the schools, Aroseniusskolan, is named after Ivar Arosenius.
Nowadays, some of Ivar Arosenius' paintings can be seen at the Museum of Art
in Gothenburg.
Hans Holbein the Younger
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A 1543 portrait miniature of Hans Holbein the Younger by Lucas Horenbout
Holbein's 1533 painting The Ambassadors
Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497– before November 29, 1543) was a
German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He is
best known for his numerous portraits and his woodcut series of the Dance of
Death.
Contents
[hide]
1 Early life and career
2 Holbein in England
3 Later years
4 Portrait techniques
5 See also
6 Notes
7 External links and
references
[edit]
Early life and career
Holbein was born in Augsburg, Bavaria and learned painting from his father Hans
Holbein the Elder. Later he went with his brother Ambrosius Holbein to Basel
where he met many scholars, among them the Dutch humanist Erasmus. Holbein
was asked by Erasmus to illustrate his satires. He also illustrated other books,
and contributed to Martin Luther's translation of the Bible. Like his father, he
designed stained glass windows and painted portraits.
[edit]
Holbein in England
The Reformation made it difficult for Holbein to support himself as an artist in
Basel, Switzerland, and he set out for London in 1526. Erasmus furnished him
with a letter of introduction addressed to the English statesman and author Sir
Thomas More. Holbein painted many portraits at the court of Henry VIII. While
there he designed state robes for the king. He also designed many of the
extravagant monuments and decorations for the coronation of Henry's second
wife, Anne Boleyn, in the summer of 1533.
Several extant drawings said to be of Anne Boleyn are attributed to Holbein. One
portrays a woman with rather plump features dressed in a plain nightgown. Some
have said that this shows the queen during pregnancy, sometime between 1533
and 1535, but recent research suggests that the subject is actually one of Anne's
ladies-in-waiting, possibly Lady Margaret Lee or one of her sisters. It seems more
likely that portrait Holbein drew or painted of Anne Boleyn was destroyed after
she was beheaded in 1536 on false charges of treason, adultery, incest and
witchcraft.
Holbein painted Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour. He also painted Jane's sister,
Elizabeth Seymour, who married the son of Thomas Cromwell. This portrait was
incorrectly identified as Henry's fifth wife, Queen Catherine Howard, when it was
discovered in the Victorian era. After Seymour's death Holbein painted Christina
of Denmark during negotiations for her prospective marriage to Henry VIII. The
likeness met with Henry's approval, but Christina declined the offer of matrimony,
citing a desire to retain her head.
William Hogarth (November 10, 1697 – October 26, 1764) was a major English
painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has
been credited as a pioneer in western sequential art. His work ranged from
excellent realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern
moral subjects”. Much of his work, though at times vicious, poked fun at
contemporary politics and customs. Illustrations in such style are often referred to
as Hogarthian.
Hogarth
Scene 3: The Inspection
This scene takes place in a surgery. Viscount Squanderfield leans towards the doctor holding a pillbox in one
hand and brandishing a cane with the other. The mercury pills he was prescribed are not working and he is
making a half-hearted demand for compensation. Neither the doctor nor the angry woman inspires much
confidence: both have syphilis and she is most likely a convicted prostitute. The skull on the table portends the
fate of everyone in the room including, it would seem, the young girl on the right who dabs a sore on her mouth,
an early symptom. Given the close proximity between the girl and the viscount, we can assume that she is a lowborn prostitute currently in his pay.
Scene 6: The Lady’s Death
The final scene takes place in the home of the countess’s father situated in the City near the Thames. In contrast
to the aristocratic extravagance of Scene 1, we find a house of bourgeois miserliness. The countess is dying from
an overdose after reading of Silvertongue’s execution. As she passes away in her chair, the grieving nurse holds
the countess’s child towards her for a last embrace. Unfortunately, the child displays signs of syphilis including
the tell-tale black spot and legs strapped in callipers. Meanwhile the avaricious merchant pulls the gold ring from
his daughter’s hand. Hogarth juxtaposes the tragedy with a moment of pure comedy; the apothecary upbraiding
the dim-witted servant to the right, perhaps an attempt by him to deflect responsibility for the overdose.
Louis Wains [ cats ] 1860 – 1939
Dementia Paintings [ woman ??]
Lam Qua 1801 – 1860
Rembrandt – The
Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a 1606-1669 1632
Bathsheba in her bath, also modelled by Hendrickje, 1654
Thomas Eakins The Gross Clinic is an 1875
Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497– before November 29, 1543 – the
ambassadors
David, Jacques-Louis (1748-1825 – death of Marat
Velaquez Dwarfs - 2nd is Sebastion de Mora 1645
A Grotesque Old Woman circa 1525 – 30 , by Quinten Massys 1465-1530 ? pagets
Michelangelo – prophet Jeremiah showing depression 1475 – 1564
Vincent Van- gogh 1853 – 1890
Delacroix – Tasso in the mad house 1798 – 1863
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (March 30, 1746 – April 16, 1828) was a
Aragonese Spanish painter and printmaker
William Frederick Yeames (1835 - 1918)
Joseph Wright of Derby (September 3, 1734 - August 29, 1797 – an
experiment on a bird in an airpump
Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967 – Nighthawks
Edvard Munch (pronounced [ˈmʉŋk], December 12, 1863 – January 23, 1944)
the Scream
Andrew Warhola (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987), better known as Andy
Warhol,
Mark Rothko born Marcus Rothkowitz (September 25, 1903–February 25,
1970)
Claude Monet (French pronounced [klod mɔnɛ]) also known as Oscar-Claude
Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926)
Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917
Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775[1] – 19 December 1851)
John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (February 25, 1841–December 3, 1919)
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926
Diagnosed with diabetes, rheumatism, neuralgia, and cataracts in 1911, she did
not slow down, but after 1914 she was forced to stop painting as she became
almost blind. Nonetheless, she took up the cause of women's suffrage, and in
1915, she showed eighteen works in an exhibition supporting the movement.
In recognition of her contributions to the arts, France awarded her the Légion
d'honneur in 1904.
Paul Cézanne (IPA: [pɔl se'zan], January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906)
William Hogarth (November 10, 1697 – October 26, 1764