Tag: Art History

Marie Laurencin. Part 1.

Marie Laurencin photographed by Man Ray (c.1925)

My blog today features the life and artwork of the nineteenth century French painter, Marie Laurencin.  She played an important role in the bringing out the female and lesbian identity in early-20th century modern art movements which at the time was dominated by men.  Her depictions were mainly of females, including many self-portraits but also many also accompanied by animals.  She prided herself with her choice of subjects famously stating:

“…Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses?  Girls are much prettier…”

Le Bal élégant, La Danse à la campagne by Marie Laurencin (1913)

From early in life, Laurencin was predominantly interested in worlds in which women moved independently and peacefully, creating self-portraits and scenes featuring animals and women which were striking in their thematic consistency. Her fame came through her association with Cubism and she exhibited her work with the Section d’Or, (“Golden Section”), which was also known as Groupe de Puteaux or Puteaux Group, a collective of painters, sculptors, poets and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism.  Her work was also exhibited in America at the Armory Show, but later in her life she fought against her art being compartmentalised in a specific art movement.  She concentrated on her own aesthetic, favouring escapist imagery in pastel hues, that was at once decorative and radical in its embrace of feminine images.

Tête pensive by Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin was born in Paris on October 31st, 1883, and lived in an apartment with her mother, Pauline Mélanie Laurencin, a seamstress. Laurencin was an illegitimate child but did not have the courage to question her mother about her absent father.  However, when she was twenty-one-years-old her mother disclosed that her father was the politician Alfred Toulet. Marie Laurencin’s achievements at school were limited although she w an avid reader and enjoyed sketching.  He failings at school precluded her from becoming a teacher, a profession favoured by her mother.   As a teenager, Marie found life difficult and this was presumably due to her classroom failings.  She became introverted and began to paint self-portraits which she carried on doing for most of her life.  After leaving school she studied the art of porcelain painting at the École de Sèvres with the flower painter Madeleine Lemaire.  In 1903 when she was twenty, she enrolled at the Académie Humbert where she worked on drawing, painting and printmaking. 

Self-portrait by Marie Laurencin (1904)

She completed one of early self-portraits in 1904 whilst studying at Académie Humbert.  Laurencin depicts herself wearing a white painter’s smock and her hair is tucked behind her face.  She stares out at us with calm confidence and yet serious expression and yet she has a piercing questioning stare. The palette Laurençin has used is dominated by browns, whites and pinks and she has cleverly used colour to model her face, with pinks shaping the sides of the nose and the eyelids and browns and greys indicating shadows around her cheeks.  Her lips, at the centre of the canvas, are red and full.  It was this love of self-portraiture throughout her artistic career that indicated her interest in depicting herself as the subject of her work which ties in closely to her concentration on female independence and self-fashioning. Laurencin always depicted herself as both an independent artist and as a modern woman.  The painting is part of the Musée Marie Laurencin, Nagano collection in Japan.

Portrait de jeune femme by Marie Laurencin

It was at the Académie Humbert that she first encountered fellow French students Georges Braque and Francis Picabia who would become famous artists of the twentieth century.  It was through her friendship with Braque that she soon became part of a group that included Picasso.

Natalie Clifford Barney

It was around this time that Marie first encountered Natalie Barney, an American writer born in Dayton, Ohio and after coming to Paris to live, hosted a literary salon at her Rue Jacob home, in Paris that attracted French and international writers.  Although the guests included some of the most prominent male writers of her time, Natalie Barney attempted to showcase female writers and their work.  For her, the events were celebrations inspired by the archaic Greek poet Sappho’s group on the island of Lesbos.  Many of these soirees were neo-Sapphic get-togethers, at which a crowd mainly comprised of lesbian and bisexual women would mingle and discuss links between female desire and creative production.  It was these events that were to influence Laurencin’s creative production which can be seen throughout her artwork.

Aléoutiennes by Marie Laurencin

Laurencin’s first print-making efforts came in 1904 with her illustrations of Pierre Louÿs’s The Songs of Bilitis, a collection of erotica, which basically was a set of lesbian poems celebrating erotic love between women. It was around this time that Marie Laurençin indicated her own preference for women.  In 1907, twenty-four-year-old Laurencin had her work shown at her exhibition debut at the Salon des Indépendants, which was held at the Gallery Clovis Sagot in Montmartre. Many of the Cubists painters had their artwork displayed at this event and they wanted to claim Laurencin as one of their own.  However, she refused to be compartmentalised with any one genre. 

Guillaume Apollinaire,

Whilst attending the exhibition Pablo Picasso introduced her to Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Polish descent.  Laurençin and Apollinaire had a relationship that lasted for six years, during which Apollinaire wrote often about his lover and would refer to her as “Our Lady of Cubism” which of course led more people to associate her with the Cubism movement.

The Muse Inspires the Poet by Henri Rousseau (1909)

The relationship between the two lovers was a strange one. Both were illegitimate children of a single mother and whether this had something to do with it but they lived apart throughout their relationship. The pair never married, and it is thought that this was to the disapproval of their mothers and also they both believed in the modern lifestyle which reject the bourgeois convention of marriage. The “partnership” was depicted in Henri Rousseau’s 1909 portrait of Laurencin and Apollinaire, in 1909, entitled The Muse Inspires the Poet. The two were great influence on each other and their artistic vision so much so that Apollinaire referred to Laurençin as “a female version of himself” and his literary works inspired her dreamy imagery and the symbolism of her work.

Apollinaire and his Friends by Marie Laurencin (1909)

Laurencin completed an interesting painting in 1909 entitled Apollinaire and his Friends.  The painting depicts a gathering of intellectuals, artists, and bohemians, with their host, Guillaume Apollinaire, the celebrated poet and art critic, in the centre of the painting.  He is surrounded by a group of friends.  Before him sits a dog who is depicted with its head turned in loving admiration of the poet !  On the left of Apollinaire are Gertrude Stein, the novelist and art collector, Fernande Olivier, a French artist and model known primarily for having been the model and first muse of painter Pablo Picasso, and for her written accounts of her relationship with him and an unknown woman with a lavish headdress.  To the right of Apollinaire, behind a vase of flowers, are the poets, Maurice Cremnitz, Marguerite Gillot, and Picasso.  Laurencin is seated on the ground wearing a pale blue dress.  She has turned her body turned toward Apollinaire while she looks out at us.  The colour of her dress and the colour of Apollinaire’s tie are similar and she has probably consciously did this to serve as a pictorially connection between her and him.  Laurencin gave the portrait to Apollinaire as a gift and she sold a smaller version to Gertrude Stein.  Apollinaire had the painting placed above his bed in his apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and it remained there throughout his life and after his death was preserved by his family. The painting can now be seen in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris

Laurencin’s paintings dating from around 1910 have a strong flavour of cubism. However, she once again stated that although the experiments of cubism fascinated her, she was adamant that she would never become a cubist painter because she was not capable of it.

…………to be continued.

Jessie and Aniza McGeehan

Jessie Mary McGeehan

Jessie Mary McGeehan was born to Patrick and Mary McGeehan in 1872 in Rawyards, Airdrie, about twenty miles east of Glasgow.  She had four younger sisters, Annie Louise, known as Aniza, born on December 24th 1874, Mary Catherine born March 6th 1877, who in September 1904 entered the Order of Sisters of Notre Dame, taking her final vows in December 1914 and becoming Sister Callista. Agnes McGeehan was born April 26th 1882 and she was the one daughter who helped the mother with the running of household affairs.  Agnes was the only one of the McGeehan sisters who never went for art training. The youngest sister was Lizzie who was born on May 20th 1883. Lizzie was eighteen when she attended the Glasgow School and remained there for for five years.  Lizzie exhibited her watercolours, signing them Phil Winsloe, from 1908 to 1918, the year she died of pneumonia, just thirty-five years old.   There was also two brothers Charles Vincent born in 1882 and William born in 1884. However this is the story of the two eldest sisters, Jessie and Aniza, who made names for themselves in the world of art.

Jessie and Aniza’s father was Patrick McGeehan, whose own parents had emigrated from Ireland in the 1820s. He was a grocer and spirit dealer in Black Street, Rawyards, who later became a carriage hirer.  Patrick was also a talented musician and amateur artist who must have reached a high standard as his painting The Blasted Oak, Cadzow was accepted by the Royal Scottish Academy in 1879.  He was very involved in the town’s community and church life.  There can be no doubt that Patrick encouraged his children to progress with their own artistic ambitions.

Good Morning by Jessie McGeehan

In the March of 1888, Patrick’s eldest daughter Jessie, still only fifteen years of age, enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art.   That September, two of her younger sisters, Annie Louise, known as Aniza, aged thirteen, and nine-year-old Mary Catherine joined her.  One would have thought that they would have been too young to study at the Art School but when examining the attendance register of the School it can be seen that there were many other students of that age.  It is thought that the deciding factor for their admission was down to them having an older sibling or family member at the school.  Jessie and Aniza studied there for seven years but Mary Catherine McGeehan, according to the Art School register, only completed one year before leaving.   While studying at the art college the girls won a number of prizes in local competitions and gained free studentships to the school.

The photograph above shows the female students who were attending the 1894/95 session at Glasgow School of Art Archives.  Aniza McGeehan is standing immediately above the seated gentleman, Francis Newbery, who was head of the Art School, and her sister, Jessie, is the third lady on the right of Newbery.

Dinan by Jessie McGeehan

After leaving the Glasgow School of Art in 1895 Jessie continued her studies in Paris. It was around this time that Jessie’s paintings had a “flavour” of France as can be seen in her work entitled Dinan, depicting the Breton riverside town with a view of the river, bridge and buildings.  Other paintings of hers depicting the French way of life were entitled Un Bon Coin and Flower Sellers, Paris which were exhibited at the Exhibition of the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts (RGI).  From the last decade of the nineteenth century Jessie’s work, both oil and watercolours, were shown at exhibitions at the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and in 1901 her work was shown at the Royal Academy, London.

Harvesting Plums by Jessie McGeehan (1932)

In 1897 Jessie set up her own studio at 134 Bath Street, Glasgow which for a time she shared with her sister Aniza.  Shortly after the turn of the century Jessie’s artwork was being appreciated throughout Britain and abroad.  In the art magazine, The Studio, there was an article about female artists and part of which was dedicated to Jessie:

“…In any notice of the lady painters of Glasgow, mention must also be made of Miss McGeehan’s bold and striking work. She is an ambitious artist whose pictures improve steadily from year to year; she evinces considerable skill in brushwork, and much that is fine and poetic in the inspiration of her work…”

On a Dutch Canal by Jessie McGeehan

During the early 1900s, Jessie spent time in Holland as many of her works, which appeared in exhibitions between 1906 to 1913, featured Dutch subjects. Her reputation as a talented young artist grew and the Scottish newspaper, the Scots Pictorial wrote about her growing reputation in the art world by 1919:

“… Jessie McGeehan – ‘One of our youngest Painters whose work has earned for her a high place among British Artists. Trained at the Glasgow School of Art, and in Paris, where she enjoyed the friendship of some of the greatest painters and sculptors of the age, she has added to this training by travel and an exhaustive study of the treasures in the great European galleries. Miss McGeehan contributes to the Royal Academy and other important art exhibitions…”

Children playing on the Beach by Jessie McGeehan

The year 1915 was the beginning of a sad time for the McGeehan family. That year their son, William who was just thirty-one years-old was reported missing presumed dead, while serving in France with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Three years later in 1918 his brother, Charles Vincent, a joiner who was only thirty-six, died in the Western Infirmary, Glasgow and his younger sister Lizzie died of pneumonia, aged 35.  One year after their deaths and after forty-eight years of marriage, Patrick’s wife Mary died at their home in Montgomerie Street, Maryhill, Glasgow. Jessie’s father Patrick died on May 3rd 1924.

Glass mosaic in St. Augustine’s Church by Jessie McGeehan

Jessie McGeehan created a glass mosaic panel for St Augustine’s Church in Langloan, Coatbridge. She also created a glass mosaic in fourteen panels depicting the Stations of the Cross for St Aloysius Church in Garnethill as well as undertaking work for St Mary’s Church in Lancashire.

Aniza McGeehan by Jessie McGeehan (1929)

Jessie McGeehan’s 1929 oil portrait of her sister Aniza is in the North Lanarkshire Museums collections. This was one of two oil paintings exhibited in the 1929 Walker Art Gallery Autumn Exhibition. At the same exhibition Aniza exhibited a bronze bust of her sister, Jessie.

Running parallel to Jessie’s artistic life was her sister Annie Louisa (Aniza) artistic journey.  Aniza was the second of eight children, born on December 24th 1874.   She was two years younger than Jessie but, like her and her younger sister Mary, she attended Glasgow Haldane Academy Society of Arts, better known simply as the Glasgow Art School.  Aniza’s time at the art school was one of great success, winning a local art scholarship, and in 1895 she was joint winner of the Haldane Travelling Scholarship which came with a £50 prize and with this she was able to afford a trip to Paris in 1896, where she established her own studio and enrolled at the Colorossi Academy.   She began to exhibit her work, paintings and sculptures, and in 1897 she had her sculptured bust of Lizzie Bell shown at that year’s Glasgow Fine Art Institute exhibition.

Ferry on the River Dordogne by Jessie McGeehan

Around this time, her father sold his licenced grocery business in Coatbridge and moved to Glasgow.  Aniza left Paris and returned home to Glasgow where she shared a studio at 134 Bath Street with her sister, Jessie. She had her portrait of school inspector Dr Smith shown at two exhibitions in 1899.  The art critics stating that the portrait was one that evoked “masculine strength” which was in complete contrast to her sculpture work, a bust of Mrs D. Campbell Rowat, which was hailed by the critics as “delicate and refined”.

A Day at the Dunes by Jessie McGeehan

Towards the late 1890s, Aniza received the commission for ten sculptures for Pettigrew and Stephens’ Store, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow and according to her family she barely had time to finish the commission before her marriage in St Aloysius Church, Garnethill on June 12th 1900 to Vincent Murphy, a timber merchant from Liverpool.  The service was conducted by her uncle, Father Charles Brown.  Clearly Aniza’s talent had been recognized by many of the leading figures in the Glasgow Art World.

Pettigrew and Stephens’ Store, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow .

Sadly, this magnificent building, which encompassed many of the outstanding talents in Glasgow, was demolished in 1974. Fortunately, Roger Guthrie, a leading member of the Glasgow conservation movement,managed to save two of Aniza’s sculptures. One was gifted to The Hunterian Museum and the other to the Scottish Amicable Building Society in Stirling. Aniza moved to Waterloo Park in Liverpool which at the time had a number of Scottish families living there.  Vincent and Aniza went on to have four children, but only John Vincernt and Marie Louise (Marielle) survived childbirth. Despite the work involved in raising a family she continued with her sculpture work and in 1903 had one her bronze works, Monsignor Nugent, exhibited at the Royal Academy, London. 

Learning to Walk by Jessie McGeehan

In the mid-1930s, Jessie had moved to 152a Renfrew Street, which was to remain her studio and home for the rest of her life.

Vincent and Aniza flanked by their son John Vincent and their daughter Mariella

Sadly, Aniza’s daughter Marielle died of pneumonia, when she was only nineteen years of age. Following her marriage Aniza continued to exhibit and take commission work, but soon this became too much due to family commitments resulting in her exhibiting less frequently than Jessie.

Annie Louise (Anzia) McGeehan

Anzia McGeehan died in September 2nd 1962, aged 87.

Jessie McGeehan died in Glasgow in 1950, aged 78

Information for this blog came from the usual internet sources plus:

The Parish of St Augustine Coatbridge website – A Family of Artists.

The Glasgow School of Art

Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin

Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin, the French impressionist painter and lithographer, was born on February 16th 1841 in Paris.  He was brought up in a working-class family, the grandson of Jean Joseph Guillaumin who was a notary by trade.  He was sent to school in Moulins, where his family came from, and this period in central France, made him take note of the beautiful surroundings and the mountainous landscape which stimulated his interest in art and it was also in Moulins that he first met Eugéne Murer, a pastry chef, author, self-taught painter and collector of impressionist paintings, who became his life-long friend.

Farms in Janville by Armand Guillaumin (1878)

By 1857, at the age of sixteen, Guillaumin returned to Paris and began working as a clerk in his uncle’s lingerie shop awhile also studying art under the sculptor Louis Caillouet.  His interest in art and the time he spent studying it caused friction with his family and he left to hold a position in the French government railways. He then continued his art training at the Académie Suisse where he trained to draw from the models, in the mornings and evenings.  It was here that he first met with Courbet, and began more lasting friendships with painters such as Cézanne, Pissarro and Francisco Oller, a Puerto Rican Impressionist painter.

Garden in Janville in June by Armand Guillaumin (1886)

Now friendly with the artists associated with the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, (later dubbed The Impressionists) he was able to exhibit with them at the first Salon des Refusés in 1863 and their first joint Impressionist Exhibitions in 1874 at the former studio of the photographer Nadar (at 35 Boulevard des Capucines) in Paris, and in total he submitted work to six of their eight annual exhibitions.  Still young, the art critics of the time judged him to be an accomplished draughtsman who completed amazing mature compositions.  He developed connections with Emile Zola and his circle of friends and was greatly influenced by the artwork of Manet and Courbet.

Portrait of a Young Woman by Armand Guillaumin (1876)

One of the problems Guillaumin soon encountered was financial as he had no private income to turn to and so he had to continue holding down a job to survive.  This situation was further exacerbated with the advent of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.  Once the War and the Paris Commune fighting had ended there was some hope for Guillaumin who had managed to have himself included with the popular Impressionist movement.  Guillaumin and fellow Impressionist, Cézanne had met up with Dr Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a French physician most famous for treating the painter Vincent van Gogh during his last weeks in Auvers-sur-Oise, and he bought a number of their works.  Guillaumin also sold a number of his works to his friend, Eugéne Murer who had recently established a successful café in Paris. Guillaumin and Cézanne began sharing a studio but both found themselves in precarious financial positions despite the sales of their work to Gachet and Murer who continued to be close friends of the pair.

Cottages in a Landscape by Armand Guillaumin (1896)

At the start of the 1880s the Impressionist group was beginning to break apart and it split into two camps.  One headed by Pissarro and the other by Degas.  Gaugin had vociferously supported Pissarro and he had allied himself with Guillaumin.  Although not initially supportive of the Impressionist group having misgivings about what its intentions were, Renoir and Monet joined the Impressionist Exhibition of 1882 with Guillaumin, Gauguin and Pissarro as well as Sisley, Morisot, Vignon and Caillebotte.  However, Degas was noticeably absent.

Moulins en Hollandee by Armand Guillaumin (1904)

It was somewhat surprising that Paul Gaugin, known for his irrational behaviour towards his fellow painters, continued to befriend Guillaumin and keep him in the Impressionist group despite its continued disintegration.  It was through Gaugin, that Guillaumin met many new young artists who had arrived on the Paris art scene such as the Symbolist painter, Odile Redon, and the Pointillists, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. In the mid 1880s Guillaumin’ s studio had become a meeting place for the young group of painters.  By 1885, new styles of painting had come to the fore and this resulted in further rifts between the old guard of Impressionism resulting in the disintegration of the Impressionist Group. The other factor for the break-up of the Group was its leading man, Gaugin, became more and more temperamental and intolerant and was destroying the Movement from the inside.  Guillaumin decided it was time for him to exit the movement which he had been part of from the very start.  Guillaumin’s reputation had grown over the last decade and Paul Adam wrote in La Revue Contemporaine:

“…I was not aware of any other painter who has so correctly noted the corresponding values of the lights of the firmament and of the ground…. their unification in colour appears to be perfect…”

Again, Felix Feneon, the French art critic, gallery director, and writer reiterated this, writing about the same show Immense Skies and commented on Guillaumin’s work:

“… superheated skies where clouds jostle each other in a battle of greens and purples, of mauves and of yellows…”

Vue de Port by Armand Guillaumin (1880)

t was in 1886 that Guillaumin married.  His wife was his cousin Marie-Joséphine Charreton, a schoolteacher, who was able to support him financially.  They settled down at 13 quai d’Anjou in the Saint-Sulpice area of the 6th arrondissement of Paris. It had previously been the studio of the painter Charles-François Daubigny. Guillaumin’s relationship with Pissarro eventually ended with the latter beginning to concentrate on experimentation with pointillism while Guillaumin became progressively interested in romantic art. Guillaumin’s relationship with Gaugin also in due course ended as the latter being constantly away on his travels.

Agay Bay by Armand Guillaumin (1910)

From 1875 to 1880, Guillaumin was a frequent guest of Dr Gachet at Auvers, at a time when he was travelling in that area searching for views of the rural scenery of the Yonne valley to paint and, later, the Creuse valley and the countryside around the farming village of Crozant, where he spent most of his life. Around 1887 Guillaumin became a good friend and mentor to Vincent Van Gogh, who was twelve years his junior. Vincent’s letter to fellow painter Ermil Bernard in December 1887 shows how highly he thought of Guillaumin:

“… I believe that, as a man, Guillaumin has sounder ideas than the others [the Impressionists], and that if we were all like him we’d produce more good things and would have less time and inclination to be at each other’s throats.

Again in a letter to his brother Theo in June 1888, Van Gogh writes about a visit he made to Guillaumin’s house and how he was inspired by him:

“…Wasn’t it pleasant at Guillaumin’s last winter — finding the landing and even the stairs, not to mention the studio — chock-full of canvases? You understand since then that I have a certain ambition, not about the number of canvases, but that these canvases as a whole should, after all, represent a real labour on your part as well as mine…”

Neige by Armand Guillaumin (1876)

In the last decade of the nineteenth century Guillaumin’s circle of artist friends was dwindling.  Vincent van Gogh died in July 1890 and his brother Theo, the art dealer, died in the January of the following year.  Gaugin and Cézanne had left Paris and Guillaumin and Pissarro’s views on art had diverged so much that their friendship had gradually faded.  Despite all this Guillaumin’s life was to change rapidly when won he won the sum of 100,000 francs (about 400,000 euros in today’s money) in a state lottery.  This completely changed his life.  He no longer had to rely on commissions.  He no longer had to exude a subservience towards patrons.  He was now able to paint what he liked and strive for his own artistic goals.

Caves Prunal near Pontgibaud by Armand Guillaumin

With this newly found wealth Guillaumin set off travelling around France capturing on his canvases the beautiful views of the countryside, mountains and the coast, often during sunrise and sunset.  His continuous journeying around was brought to an end with the onset of The Great War of 1914.  Once the war came to an end he once again set off on his travels but by then he was seventy-seven and he, like his artistic output, was declining.   In 1926 a retrospective exhibition was held at the Salon d’Automne.  He died at the Chateau de Grignon in Orly, Val-de-Marne, just south of Paris, on June 26th 1927 aged 86. He was the last survivor of the Impressionist Group.

Crozant, Solitude by Armand Guillaumin (1915)

Guillaumin’s paintings are renowned  for their intense colours and can be found in major museums around the world. Most of all he is best remembered for his landscapes of Paris, the Creuse département, and the area around Les Adrets-de-l’Estérel near the Mediterranean coast in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France. Guillaumin became known as the leader of the École de Crozant, a disparate group of painters who came to portray the landscape in the region of the Creuse around the village of Crozant.

Paysage à Crozant (1917)

One such depiction is entitled Landscape in Crozant, is part of the Art Institute of Chicago collection.

His bust is in the square near the village church in Crozant.

Walasse Ting

Walasse Ting (1929-2010)

Walasse Ting at work in his studio

I have just returned from another stay in the Algarve where I could finally see some sun and experience warm weather.  Whenever I visit the Algarve, I always visit the Art Catto gallery in Loule which I have often written about.  This time I not only got a chance to return to the excellent small gallery in the centre of town,but take up their invitation to the opening of an exhibition at the Conrad Hotel in Quinta do Lago.

Conrad Hotel, Quinta do Lago, Algarve

The Conrad Hotel is, to say the least, a spectacularly lavish hotel, and the entrance foyer rooms where fine places to exhibit the expensive works of Walasse Ting.  Seven years after his death, Walasse Ting’s has been given a place as a giant of 20th century paintings. He is such a captivating figure and the art he has produced over his 50-year career reveals many influences.   Today, his artwork is in public collections which include MOMA, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Chicago, Chicago; Tate Modern Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hong Kong Museum of Art, and the Shanghai Art Museum. 

Beautiful Ladies by Walasse Ting

Many devoted private collectors also own his artwork. The latter group is growing especially fast, thanks in part to the rise of China as an economic and cultural force.  From the very early works, Walasse Ting’s paintings have charmed viewers with his use of vivid colours and light-hearted mood.

Ladies with Parrots by Walasse Ting

Walassi Ting is a Chinese artist who was born in Wuxi, China in 1929 but in fact was raised in Shanghai.  Ting is primarily a self-taught painter, sculptor, graphic artist, lithographer and poet, who began his life as an artist at a very young age. Ting studied at the Shanghai Art Academy before he left China in 1946 and after living briefly in Hong Kong set sail for France in 1950.   Times were hard for the young aspiring artist continually battling against poverty.  His stay in Paris coincided with the rise of the avant-garde artistic group known as CoBRA.   The word Cobra is derived from the French names of the cities of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.

CoBra member Karel Appel working on a mural in Rotterdam for the Manifestation E55

The artists had founded the CoBRA group during a major international conference held in Paris in 1948 and they came from these three European capitals.  Ting became acquainted with all the members of the avant-garde group, most notably Pierre Alechinsky and Asger Jorn.

Women with Flowers by Walasse Ting

Walassi Ting left Paris and arrived in New York in 1959 and participated in the Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism movement where his closest associates were artists Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, members of the second generation of Abstract Expressionist painters.  He sold many paintings which often featured bold dripping strokes.  It was just over a decade later in 1970 that Walassi Ting created a distinctive style using calligraphic brushstrokes to define outlines and filling flat areas of colour with vivid paint. After 15 years of abstract painting, Walasse Ting’s interest in the body and his exploration of sexuality led him back to figuration in the 1970’s.  Like the colour master, Gauguin, Ting made a number of journeys to Tahiti continually on the lookout for the exotic colours that he loved. The subject of his paintings often contained women, cats, birds and peacocks. 

Kiss me, Kiss me by Walasse Ting

Ting embraced sexual desire through his art, as he conveyed his inner emotions through the fluent and expressive brushstrokes as he captured the alluring beauties set against a background of uncontrolled vibrant acrylic colours that break free into a dreamscape of sensual pleasure. In his 1974 acrylic on paper work entitled Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the title of the work and the bare-breasted model conjure up the emotions of sexual passion.   The work comprises of flat planes of colour and simplified lines, and the woman exposes herself to us, and is drenched in a tumult of multicoloured drips as if she was incorporated into an abstract expressionist canvas.

Come Talk to Us by Walasse Ting

In the summer of 1976 Ting produced his acrylic on canvas work entitled Come Talk to Us which depicted two half-length female figures who stare at a plant-like bouquet of colours at the centre of the image, an image which divides the image in two. The mirror-image like effect creates a sense of calm and balance, and the dabs of green, blue, and red paint trickle slowly along the canvas, exuding a melancholic beauty like that of gazing through a window on a rainy day. The title of the painting, Come Talk to Us, questions the viewer and echoes a lonely yet tantalizing longing. Ting has once again used the depiction of his figures to express the feelings inspired in him by objects of beauty.  Ting explained:

“…When I see a beautiful woman [and] I see flowers, its beauty makes me feel intangible, melancholy, love, refreshed, different, and reborn. I want to use different colours to express my inner feelings and emotions in my paintings.”

Eat me, I’m a Fish b y Walasse Ting

His 1978 work, with the strange title, Eat Me, I’m a Fish, Ting has splattered the paint over the entire canvas giving it the impression of a faint effervescence. This oblong depiction of the woman suggests the shape of a fish and the title boldly summons the viewer to come and consume its imagery, once again arousing the viewer’s culture’s sexual drive. The figure transects the diagonal of the picture plane while a cyan blue rectangle slices off the upper right quadrant of the image, giving the impression of a window.  Eat Me, I’m a Fish is Walasse Ting’s vivid interpretation of everyday life, and yet the composition is an obvious reference to Édouard Manet’s masterpiece Olympia. This painting could be thought of as Ting’s homage to a modern master, reinterpreting the essence of this classic painting and challenging the earlier artist’s greatness.

At the Conrad exhibition, many of his paintings were watercolours on rice paper.  They were both delicate and ornate, rendered with detail and repetitive patterns.

Peacock by Walasse Ting

Peacock II by Walasse Ting

Ting frequently depicted cats, flowers and birds as in his painting, Peacock, in which the ‘eyes’ of the bird’s plumage radiate outwards across the large surface of the painting, creating a striking wallpaper of electric blue, yellow and green. The controlled circles, tightly arranged, create an arresting optical vibration.

Cat Series by Walasse Ting

Cat Series by Walasse Ting

One very unusual thing at the exhibition was a display board giving a brief bio. by Ting himself It was also in the exhibition brochure. That is not strange in itself but what was unusual and some may say inappropriate, was his summary of his life “achievements”, year by year.

In the mid-1980s, he set up a studio in Amsterdam and in 2001 he permanently settled in that city. He was unable to create after a stroke in 2002. Ting died on May 17, 2010, at the age of 81 in New York.

Graham Clarke

What is the reason behind you placing a paintings or prints on your walls at home?  Is it because it reminds you of somewhere you have visited or maybe it is a depiction of somewhere nearby?  Maybe it is a portrait of a loved one or somebody famous whom you admire.  In this period of our lives when there is so much suffering going on around us then sometimes the painting is a depiction which simply lifts our spirits and makes us smile.   Today I am looking at an artist and his work which fulfils that category.  Let me introduce you to the English author, illustrator and humourist Graham Clarke. He has created over five hundred images of his beloved English rural life. He has focused on how the ordinary Englishman viewed Europe. Through his quirky depictions, he brings his own unique brand of humour to his interpretation of past and present history through the eyes of the common man.

Graham Clarke

Graham Clarke was born on February 27th 1941 in a village in Oxfordshire during the Second World War.  His father Maurice was a Midland Bank employee.  He, his mother and his elder brother, Anthony, were evacuated there from their three-bedroomed semi-detached home in Hayes, Kent.  When Graham was two years old the family spent a couple of months at the Cornish village of Denabole, which lies close to Trebarwith with its large expanse of sandy beaches which was always remembered fondly by Graham.  In his teenage years Graham and the family would spend time at the coastal towns of Broadstairs and Looe and it was those holiday times on the coast that made a great impression on him. 

The Flippits.  A Story of the Rabbit, Fox and Badger by Margaret Ross.

On his fourth birthday in 1945, with the war at an end, back living in Kent, Graham received a birthday present which was to remain in his memory in the years that followed.  It was the children’s book, The Flippits.  A Story of the Rabbit, Fox and Badger by Margaret Ross.  It was a make-believe world, a world of peace unlike the threatening years that he and his family had experienced during the war.   It was an underground world of a warren with its cottagey interiors.  It was a book with illustrations which fuelled the imagination of four-year-old Graham.  Looking at many of Graham’s multi-figured depictions one can look back at the multi-figured illustrations from this book and realise the connection.

A la Carte by Graham Clarke

In 1949, when Graham was eight years old, the family left their home in Hayes and moved to a larger three-bedroomed semi-detached house. large enough to also accommodate Graham’s paternal grandfather  who had been widowed.  As a teenager, Graham was described as being an observant and sensitive child by his mother who would spend his free time cycling and exploring Hayes Common.  He and his brother would also help their parents with their love of amateur dramatics and their AmDram group, The Hayes Players.  Graham’s brother Anthony would help his parents by aiding with set building jobs and Graham would assist with painting stage portraits and stained glass windows.

Miss Jay’s Wood by Graham Clarke (1952)

One day Graham’s father came home and presented his son with a box of felt-tipped brushes and spirit-based inks and after the usual child-like sketches his artwork improved and he began to use watercolours for his countryside depictions.  The box of watercolour paints with sable brushes and a set of oils had been a Christmas gift from his aunt and uncle in 1952 and on that Boxing Day he completed his first oil painting entitled Misses Jay’s Wood, which was owned by a close-by neighbour.  The painting was bought by one of the neighbours for ten shillings.  Graham could immediately envision himself as becoming a professional artist !

Close Up Please by Graham Clarke

Meanwhile, Graham attended a small private school who fast-tracked their pupils’ education to be of a standard which would allow them to pass their 11+ exams.  Whilst attending this school Graham let it be known of his future aspirations as a professional artist.  However, he received no encouragement from his teachers, in fact, they told him it would be a pauper’s life for him if he were to realise his artistic dream.  Notwithstanding this, he clung to his ideas and passed the 11+ exams and entered the Beckenham and Penge Grammar School in 1952.  During his time there he enjoyed the geography and history lesson through his love of map-making and his fascination with castles and life for the working-class people of those times. 

A book at the time which fascinated Graham was 1066 and All That, a tongue-in-cheek reworking of the history of England, written by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman and illustrated by John Reynolds.

Another book which Graham loved was Down with Skool, by Ronald Searle which was one of his 1953 Christmas presents.  He became interested in caricature.  He excelled at art under Ronald Jewry, his art teacher who encouraged his students to use their imaginations when they painted.  Graham Clarke enjoyed his time in the art class.

Graham received an excellent grade for his GCSE ‘O’ level Art and managed to scrape through Maths and Science sufficient enough to enter the sixth form ‘A’ level on a Science course but he hated it.  His former art teacher, Jewry, approached his father and suggested that his son should abandon his A-level Science course and take up art instead.  No doubt Graham had already spoken with his father over his future.

Graham’s favourite artist at this time was Samuel Palmer, born in 1805, a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker who was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings.  Graham believed that although he knew about the works of Palmer he realised that to get to really know him he had to visit the countryside around Shoreham, in west Kent, where Palmer had been so inspired.  During his studies at the Art College Graham had enrolled in the History of Art Course and went on a short train journey to Shoreham.  Graham was mesmerised by what he observed.  He later wrote:

“…Palmer loved this place and love it is that makes me walk here too.  Every lane is climbing up its hill [and] down again to the river, over the bridge and up and on again climbing and twisting. These are not mountains here there is no raging torrent, the trees are not giants and all is on a small scale, quiet and complete, Palmer decided God (and Nature) was at its best in this little valley of vision. Twenty miles from here is peace…”

Round and Round by Graham Clarke

One of his tutors as the Beckenham Art School was Wolf Cohen who Graham described as “small, fiercely energetic and a model of dedication” and it was he who instilled in Graham that art should be life-absorbing.  Although Graham’s figure drawing was not the best he managed to improve that during the time he spent in Susan Einzig’s life classes.  She introduced Graham to the Laurie Lees’ book Cider with Rosie, illustrated by John Ward.   It was these delicate and sensitive drawings that appealed to Graham.

Tea Party by Graham Clarke

At the start of his final year at the art college, Graham Clarke had to make a decision about his future.  His tutor Wolf Cohen persuaded him to apply for a post-graduate position at The Royal College of Art and along with half a dozen of his fellow students he would spend weekends at Cohen’s studio building up his portfolio which would be needed when he applied to the college.  Graham succeeded in his entry interviews and portfolio submission and in 1961 he became a student at the prestigious Royal College of Art.

Wendy by Graham Clarke. Pen and ink drawing from his sketchbook.

In his late teens Graham had been a member of various Youth Clubs, one of which was the Bromley High Street Methodist Youth Club and it was here that eighteen year old Graham first met fifteen year old Wendy Hudd and the two of them became involved with the organising of plays, pageants and parties.

The Four Seasons by Graham Clarke

Graham’s first year at the Royal College of Art was a disaster.  He felt totally isolated from his fellow students and their interests in art.  Whereas they looked for their inspiration by studying modern American magazine depictions of pop stars and flashy cars and motorcycles, Graham clung to his love of all things rural or historical and soon realised that he was going to be isolated by such loves.  As he said, he was destined to “plough a lone furrow”.  He decided to stay with what he loved and he was proud of this sincere decision and when challenged about it, would just say that he did not need to “ride another horse”.  Graham described his first year as being a dark tunnel and yet he added he could just make out a light at the end of it.  Graham was fortunate to have the support of Wendy and her family during those difficult twelve months.

Serenata by Graham Clarke

At the Royal College of Art Graham specialised in illustration and printmaking and had the chance to follow his interest in calligraphy.

Billingsgate Market by Edward Bawden (1967)

During his time at the Royal College of Art he was greatly influenced by one of his tutors, Edward Bawden, an English painter, illustrator and graphic artist, who was known for his prints, book covers, posters, and garden metalwork furniture. 

Yeomans by Graham Clarke

It was through Bawden’s influence that Graham took an interest in producing prints of traditional landscapes, the depictions of which highlighted local areas.  One such print featuring a rural scene was Yeomans which depicted a quaint English street scene featuring cottages and trees. 

Graham finally graduated in 1964, which, fortunately for him, coincided with peoples’ interest in buying prints which resulted in a flourishing sale of them.  His artwork was admired and he soon received commissions for his depictions from the likes of Editions Alecto and London Transport Publicity Department and so a bright career for him began.

Vision of Wat Tyler by Graham Clarke

In 1969 Graham’s first hand-printed “livre d’artiste”, Balyn and Balan was published.  Another of his books was Vision of Wat Tyler which won recognition from the most influential patron and connoisseur of the day, Kenneth Clark. Lord Clark wrote enthusiastically in praise of Vision of Wat Tyler:

“…the whole book is a splendid assertion that craftsmen still exist and cannot be killed by materialism. A few idealists are the only hope for decent values…”

Dance by the Light of the Moon by Graham Clarke

Graham’s famous ‘arched top’ etchings has established his widely successful reputation in Britain and overseas, and came to public attention in 1973 when the first of these, Dance by the Light of the Moon, was exhibited and sold in London at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Show.

For you Madam by Graham Clarke

Examples of his work are held by Royal and public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Tate Gallery and the National Library of Scotland in the United Kingdom, as well as by Trinity College, Dublin, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the New York Public Library and the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Many more are to be found on the walls of private homes all over the world, collected systematically by devotees, as well as singly by ordinary art lovers who “know what they like”

Quite Cricket by Graham Clarke

Graham Clarke, who prides himself as being a “Man of Kent” lives with his wife Wendy, four children, his animals and friends, in the village of Boughton Monchelsea in the county of Kent where he also has his studio. 

He offers open-days at his studio which gives visitors an opportunity to view his work including hand coloured limited edition etchings, watercolours, posters and greetings cards depicting English rural life and history, the Bible and the Englishman’s view of Europe, all of which are available for sale.

My blog has only scratched the surface of the life of this talented artist. The information for this blog came from two main sources:

Clare Sydneys’ 1985 book entitled Graham Clarke

and

Graham Clarke’s website

Amélie Beaury-Saurel and Rodolphe Julian.

Amélie Beaury-Saurel

Amélie Beaury a French painter, was actually born in Barcelona on December 17th 1848.  Her family had previously lived in Spain and Corsica before moving to the Catalan city in 1845.  Her parents, Camille Georges Beaury and Irma Catalina Saurel owned a large carpet and tapestry factory with more than twenty looms, which they called Saurell, Beaury y Compañía. Amélie was their middle child.  She had an elder sister, Irmeta, also an artist, and a younger sibling, Dolores. Amélie later added “Saurel” to her name in recognition of her mother’s family who could trace their lineage to the Byzantine emperors of the 11th century.

Portrait of the artist Jean-Paul Laurens by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1919)

The happy family life was shattered in the late 1850s when Amélie’s father died and her mother decided to relocate with her three daughters to Paris.  Amélie recalled in an interview that she and her family lived in the French capital when she was ten years old and that her widowed mother, with little money, had to endure financial hardships.   Her mother instilled a love of art in her children and she would take them to the Louvre Museum to see the works of the Masters and encourage them to copy the works of the these great artists.

Portrait of Léonce Bénédite, curator of the Musée du Luxembourg,  by Amélie Beaury Saurel (1923)

Due to this family impoverishment, Amélie’s mother decided that her daughters should help with the financial burden and set about having them train as porcelain painting, a socially acceptable way of earning a living and eventually becoming financially independent. Amélie set to work as a painter of porcelainware but later said she considered what she was doing as commercial painting which in many ways damped down her creativity.  Her mother was very supportive of Amélie’s love of painting and, in 1874, initially paid for her nineteen-year-old daughter to study at the prestigious Académie Julian.  One of her first tutors was Pauline Coeffier, a French oil painter and pastelist, who specialized in the art of portraiture. Later many of the leading artists of the day would advise and tutor her, such as Tony Robert-Fleury, William Bouguereau, Jules Lefebvre, Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Paul Laurens and Pierre Auguste Cot.

Rodolphe Julian

The Académie Julian was founded in 1868 by Rodolphe Julian. It was a private art school for painting and sculpture.  Paris was looked upon as the capital of the art world, and the centre of modern art.  This was one reason many young aspiring painters came to the French capital to discover all the latest trends in painting, like Impressionism and Post Impressionism, decorative art of various types, new forms of representational art such as expressionism, lithography and much more. Also with having a reputation as a forward-thinking art college the Académie Julian profited from the reputation of Paris.

Chez Duval by Rodolphe Julian

Another reason for the popularity of Académie Julian was that it was the only art school in Paris to accept foreign students, many of whom struggled to pass the difficult French language exam, which was conditional on their acceptance into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Ambitious female painters were also barred from attending the official Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1897 and even then, it was not considered suitable for women to study life drawing.  In contrast, Académie Julian was happy to offer them a full programme of education and training to women in fine art. They were offered the same classes as men, including the drawing of nude models. In fact, the Académie was one of the few schools to admit women to life-drawing classes. In fact, one of its four new branches was actually exclusively designed for female art students.

The Académie Julian was also regarded as a stepping stone to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts by getting them prepared for the entrance exams and at the same time offered independent alternative education and training in arts.  Aspiring artists, both men and women, were welcome at the Académie Julian.   Men and women were trained separately, and women participated in the same studies as men, including drawing and painting of nude models.  The Académie Julian had no entrance requirements, was open from 8 a.m. until nightfall, and very soon became the most popular establishment of its type. Rodolphe Julian opened several branches throughout Paris, one of them especially for female artists, and by the 1880s the student population at these establishments reached six hundred.

Female Students at the Académie Julian in Paris, c. 1885

To ensure the success of the Académie, Rodolphe gathered together well-known and esteemed artists, such as Adolphe William Bouguereau, Jean-Paul Laurens, Tony Robert-Fleury, Jules Lefebvre and other foremost painters of that time trained in Academic art, to become tutors or visiting professors.  Académie Julian became recognised as a leading art establishment and its students were allowed to compete for the Prix de Rome, a prize awarded to promising young artists, and also show their work in the major Salons or art exhibitions.

So, who was Rudolphe Julian?

Rodolphe Julian was born in Lapalud, a commune in the Vaucluse department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region in southeastern France on June 13th 1839. He worked as an employee in a bookstore in Marseille but later moved to Paris, where he became a student of Léon Cogniet and Alexandre Cabanel, professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, albeit he never officially enrolled there.  Rodolphe was well aware of the struggles of artists who looked for artistic training once they had arrived in Paris and so, in 1863 he opened his own art school, Académie Julian.

Portrait of a Woman by Amélie Beaury-Saurel

Living in Paris, Amélie was determined to increase her knowledge of art and the Académie Julian offered her the best way of achieving that goal and eventually becoming a professional portrait artist.  However this course of action had to be funded so she approached Rodolphe Julian and proposed that in return to her helping out with the administrative and financial duties of the Académie, he would allow her to attend his classes free of charge.  He agreed. Rodolphe Julian had opened a women’s workshop in 1873 and in 1895 he put Amélie in charge of it.  As well as organising the workshop she had begun a very lucrative career as a portrait artist and received many commissions.

Académie by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1890)

In 1890, Amelie completed one of her greatest paintings entitled Académie.  The title for the work refers to the art academy which at the time prohibited female painters from joining its ranks.  Her depiction conveys the compelling message to the viewer that she was not going to allow herself to be browbeaten by the male-dominated artistic establishment and she would not conform to their dictates.  The model in the painting exudes strength and determination as she stands grasping stalks of bamboo and stares out at us, challenging us.  It can be no coincidence that Amélie has depicted her model naked and this nude pose empathises the strong and defiant attitude women embraced as artists.

Deux vaincues (Two Defeated Women) by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1892)

Two years later in 1892 Amelie produced another defiant depiction entitled Deux vaincues (Two Defeated Women).  It is looked upon as a rallying call to all female painters to be fearless as they travel through the unwelcoming and unforgiving world of art education and artistic professionalism and the many obstacles they had to overcome.  It was a plea to female artists to not allow themselves to be defeated in the face of the obstacles they would encounter.  The sketch depicts two women, both naked, chained to a wall.  Both face similar hardships but they have fared differently.  The one with her back to us is slumped forward in a defeated pose, while the other, in contrast, stands boldly upright, unrepentant and stares out defiantly.  The painting is a challenge to all women as to whether they give in or fight on. The work was exhibited at that year’s Salon.

 Portrait de Séverine by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1893)

In 1893 Amelie completed a portrait of Caroline Rémy de Guebhard. She was a French journalist who held strong non-conformist views which labelled her as an anarchist, socialist, and communist.   She also was a great believer in feminist’s rights and opinions and this no doubt drew Amelie to paint the portrait.   Caroline Rémy de Guebhard would use the pen name Séverine, derived from the Latin severus which means “rigorous” or “brave”, for many of her newspaper articles.  When we look at the portrait, our eyes are immediately drawn to the vivid red flower on the sash of her dress.  The flower symbolizes Séverine’s leftist political views.  Look at her facial expression.  It is one that exudes strength, determination and tells you that this lady will not be moved.  Amelie’s ability as a great portraitist is borne out in this beautiful work.

Séverine by Renoir (c.1885)

A portrait of Caroline Rémy de Guebhard was also complted around 1885 by Renoir. It is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Washington.

Dans le bleu by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1894)

One of my favourite works by Amelie is her 1894 painting entitled Dans le bleu.  It is a pastel on canvas which depicts a young woman waking up in the morning and indulging in the gratification of smoking that first cigarette.  However that is not the point of the depiction.  It is all about feminist assertions. In this painting, we see a woman depicted in profile, boldly treating herself to the pleasures of escapism. It is a depiction of defiance as women at this time were not seen smoking, especially not in public.  It was a habit that was counter to the feminine conceptions of the time.  We should remember that Amélie Beaury-Saurel had dedicated a large part of her work to the female model and had always maintained the feminist cause.  She supported the right to arts education and artist status for women.  In 1894 when she was working on this painting her reputation in Paris as an artist was at its highest point and her paintings were exhibited all over the French capital.

The background of the work is very dark, predominantly blue and this allows the figure stand out in the work.   It is hard to know whether the scene takes place in a private dwelling such as a kitchen or a living room or whether the setting was in a public place, such as a café.  The woman in the depiction sits smoking a cigarette, chin in hand.  She appears to be daydreaming. She seems preoccupied as she watches the blue smoke unfurl from her lips, drifting upward. What is she thinking about?  Would she, like the smoke, like to drift away?  Some have suggested this might be a Beaury-Saurel self-portrait, as the model resembles the artist.  The depiction is simple and realistic and in no way staged.  Amelie’s depiction is all about everyday reality and is without any hint of idealization which would have weakened the work and it is this simplicity that has added to the beauty of the depiction and has expressed the woman’s femininity.

Our Girl Scouts by Amelie Beaury-Saurel

In this painting by Amelie, the seven women are represented in a compact group, around a table with a pile of books. On the left, holding his handlebars in his hand gloved, the Belgian cycling champion, Hélène Dutrieu; next to her, holding a paintbrush, the publisher Anna-Catherine Strebinger (Madame Henri Rochefort) who was also a student at the Académie Julian; then the collector Marguerite Roussel looks at the viewer; in the center, in professional attire and pointing to an article in a code, the lawyer Suzanne Grinberg, an eminent member of the French Union for the women’s suffrage, created in 1909; leaning on her, in the outfit that she had adopted to travel safely to the Middle East, archaeologist and explorer Jane Magre-Dieulafoy. Then comes the novelist and journalist Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and aviator Elise Deroche, First woman to obtain a pilot’s license.

After Lunch by Amelie Beaury-Saurel (1899)

In 1895, Amélie Beaury-Saurel, married Rodolphe Julian and he put her in charge of the women’s workshops which he had started in 1873.  Amélie managed the expenses for the women’s studio, served as an intermediary between instructors and students, and ran the women’s group but also continued her career as a portraitist. She earned a medal for her submissions to the 1885 Paris Salon and the bronze medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. 

Chateau Julian, Lapalud

Rodolphe Julian died on February 2nd 1907, aged 67, and two months later on April 10th, Amelie’s mother died.  Following the death of Julian, Amelie took on the role of director of the Académie Julian.  This was a mammoth task and so she received help from her nephews Gibert and Jacques Dupuis, the children of her sister Dolores.  Rodolphe Julian had bought a large house in the village of Lapalud, where he was born and on his death they were bequeathed to his nephews.  Amelie bought this large property from her nephews and transformed it to accommodate her family. It was called the “Mas” Julian.

Amélie Beaury-Saurel

During her last years, Amélie continued to paint but also fought for women’s rights and supported women artists and their fight against male-dominated art circles.  She participated in solidarity exhibitions for the benefit of institutions such as the Société des Artistes Français, the Société Nationale des Beaux- Arts or the Fraternité des Artistes.  Such commitment to the promotion of art and her endless creative activity were recognized in 1923, a year before her death, through her appointment as Chevalier de la Légiond’honneur.   

Amélie Beaury Saurel died on May 30th 1924 aged 75 at he Paris home which she had once shared with her late mother and sisters.

Information for this blog came from the ususal search engines plus:

Aware Women Artists

Elles-d-artistes blogspot

Musings on Art

Ville de Lapalud

The Funen Painters. Part 2.

Peter Syrak Hansen and his family.

Following the last blog regarding the early members of the Funen artists, this blog looks at some of the younger members and how they were often connected.

Peter Syrak Hansen

One of the leading figures of the Funen painters was Peter Syrak Hansen and it was his home and workshop, Mesterhuset, which became a cultural meeting place for the Funen painters. Syrak Hansen was born in Swanninge, a Danish village on South Funen, on September 10th 1853. He trained as a decorative painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen under George Hinkler.

The Double Portrait of Count Preben Bille-Braheand his second wife Johanne Caroline neé Falbe by Christoffer Eckersberg (1817)

After qualifying Syrak received many decorative work commissions in South Funen’s to decorate manor houses and churches. He was also given funds by the prominent and wealthy art collector and art patron, Count Bille-Brahe of Hvedholm, and continued his artistic studies in Germany, Austria and France, where he concentrated on studying church decorations. Following his European travels, he later settled down as a master painter and decorative painter in Faaborg in southern Funen and based himself in the building, which became known as the Mesterhuset. He bought Mesterhuset, situated at Lagonis Minde 7 in 1875, and he became a sought-after decorative painter working primarily in churches and manor houses on South Funen.

Sonnige Strandansicht by Peter Syrak Hansen

Syrak Hansen became so busy with all the commissions he received he had to look for some help and he hired a journeyman painter. The painter was Fritz Syberg who worked with Syrak in his workshop from 1882. It was here that Fritz Syberg got to know his future wives, Anna and Marie Hansen.

Faarborg Harbour by Karl Schou (1917)

Syrak Hansen married Marie Birgitte née Rasmussen and he and his wife had five children.  Marie Hansen, the eldest, was born in 1865 and became a parliamentary stenographer whose first husband was the painter Karl Schou. Schou was born in Copenhagen in 1870. After normal schooling he became a student at Valdemar Sichelkow’s painting school from 1884 to 1886 and then studied under Malthe Engelsted at The National Drawing Teacher Course, Copenhagen from 1886 to 1887, Finally he attended  Kristian Zahrtmann’s School from 1887 to 1900. During those three years at Zahrtmann’s school he became friends with the Funen painters.

Three persons in conversation at an evening party by Hans Nikolaj Syrak Hansen (1903)

A year after the birth of their first child, Marie Hansen gave birth to their first son, Hans Nikolaj Syrak Hansen who became apprenticed to his father. Hans attended Zahrtmann’s School in Copenhagen from about 1885 to the spring of 1887, but he had to give up his art studies and return home in order to take over the painting company from his father in 1891.

The Hay on the Meadow, South Funen by Peter Hansen

Syrak and Marie Hansen’s third child, their second son, Peter Marius Hansen was born on May 13th 1868. He attended the Copenhagen Technical School before studying under Kristian Zahrtmann at the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler between 1884 and 1890. 

Double portrait of two children. The artist’s stepdaughters by Peter Hansen (1889)

Peter Hansen married Elisa Nikoline, who had previously been married to an engineer, Ludvig Conrad Neckelmann, whom she divorced. In 1898, shortly after the divorce, Peter and Elise married. Ludvig and his wife, Elisa, had had two daughters, Marie Christine and Elizabeth and Peter completed a double portrait of his stepchildren.

By the window. Double portrait of the artist’s daughter, Elena and stepdaughter, Marie Christine by Peter Hansen (1902)

Peter and Elisa went on to have their own two daughters, Elena Italia in 1899 and Anna Margrethe in 1906. In 1902 Hansen completed a double portrait of his twenty-year-old elder stepdaughter, Marie Christine and his own three-year-old child Elena Italia.

The Ploughman Turns by Peter Hansen (1902)

Peter Marius Hansen belonged to the group of Danish painters who were called the Funen Painters, since they came from and mainly worked on the island of Funen.  One of the important qualities Peter displayed was his respect for the steadily, busily working human being and he made it a key motif in his art. For him the Peasant was the epitome of this ideal, when he would depict local Danish farmers and the mountain farmers from around the Danish artists’ colony in the Italian village of Cività d’Antino in Abruzzi.

Fritz Syberg self portrait (1910)

Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Syberg, generally known as Fritz Syberg, was born on July 28th 1862, in Faaborg.  He came from a poor background and was first apprenticed as a house painter under Syrak Hansen.  From there, in 1882, he attended the Copenhagen Technical School where Holger Grønvold taught him drawing. In the Spring of 1884 he enrolled for a short period at the Danish Academy but then attended the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler  where he became one of the first Fynboerne, along with Peter Hansen, Johannes Larsen, and Poul S. Christiansen to study under Kristian Zahrtmann.

Dodsfald (Death) by Fritz Syberg (1881)

In the early 1890s may of Syberg’s paintings were dark and this can be seen in his 1892 work entitled Dodsfald (Death) which depicts his mother, Johanne Marie, on her death bed in 1881 in the Fåborg’s poorhouse.

Fritz Syberg “Jeg vil synge dem alle, alle!, sagde Moderen” (1898). Illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s Historien om en moder. (I will sing them all, all of them!, said the mother) (1898). Illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s The Story of a Mother by Fritz Syberg

In addition to the sale of his paintings, Syberg accepted many book illustration commissions, the most famous being his depictions for Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic tale, The Story of a Mother, which no doubt, Syberg could relate to his own childhood.  These depictions became one of the most celebrated collections of illustrations in Denmark’s history.

Spring by Fritz Syberg

Watching Birds on the Windowsill by Fritz Syberg

Having struck up a close friendship with Syrak Hansen’s daughter Anna whilst working as Syrak’s apprentice, their friendship turned to love and the couple married in 1894. The couple went on to have seven children.   In the 1890s and the early decade of the twentieth century Fritz Syberg made a number of trips to other European countries such as Italy, The Netherlands, Germany and France, sometimes with his family.. 

Anna Syberg by her husband Fritz Syberg (1896)

Syrak and Marie Brigitte Hansen had their fourth child, a second daughter, Anna Louise Birgitte Hansen in January 1870 and she, like her brother Peter, became part of the Funen painters. Anna Syberg grew up amidst a very colourful and energetic artistic environment that differed from ordinary middle-class conventions. Her father, Peter Syrak Hansen, was a master painter, and a renowned figure in the town of Faaborg.  Fortunately for Anna, her parents believed that education was of prime importance to both their daughters as well as their sons.

Crocus, Hyacinths and Tulips by Anna Syberg (1898)

Anna loved to learn and one of her favourite pastimes was decorative painting.  In 1884 she enrolled on a two-year course at a technical school in Faaborg, and in 1889 she was receiving tuition in Copenhagen from the sculptor Ludvig Brandstrup and the painter Karl Jensen. Her artistic education was topped off when she received singing lessons, learnt to play the piano to a high standard and learnt to sing lieder and Danish songs.

Wild Roses by Anna Syberg (1898)

Anna Syberg became a key figure in the Funen Painters artists’ colony.  Her paintings, other than a few figure scenes, depicted flowers and plants, often in the vases and pots around her home, or in her garden and ones she saw when out walking in the countryside. She worked mainly in watercolours, using multiple layers that would often include sketched lines of pencil, transparent layers of watercolour and black ink contours ensuring the depiction of the floral was of the utmost accuracy.

Grapes in the Greenhouse by Anna Syberg (1903)

The subject of her depictions were often of stage-managed as she experimented with the floral arrangements.  In many of her works she would often let the depiction of her flowers and plants extend beyond the edge of the paper in a form of dynamic cropping.  Her floral painting were neither symbolic nor botanical studies.  In Anna Syberg’s pictures, flowers are not charged with symbolic significance, nor are they stringently restrained botanical studies with all its scientific accuracy. In her works, Anna Syberg portrays the simple beauty of the flowers, a testament to their beauty. In 1894 Anna Hansen married Fritz Syberg.

Fritz and Anna Syberg

So this life as a Funen painter amongst family and friends was to be part of much loved idyllic lifestyle for Anna Syberg.  What could possibly interrupt this peaceful and fulfilling way of life?   And yet………..

At the turn of the century in Denmark, like many other European countries and those across the other side of the Atlantic, the stature of women in art, and even in life itself, was continually being questioned by men.  For many men, including even some fellow artists, women simply painted as a hobby or to add to their social graces but for women in the early 1900s practicing art was problematic.  For Anna it was one thing to be a talented artist, it was another thing to have the same respect bestowed upon her for her work as that of the men.  Things came to a head in Faarborg when the town got their own museum and paintings had to be selected for display in the museum.

Mads Rasmussen

Mads Rasmussen, an important businessman in Faaborg, and his wife Kristine, held a party one evening and among the guests were the Funen Painters’ inner circle including amongst others Fritz Syberg, Peter Hansen and Jens Birkholm. Together with Johannes Larsen they were all to become part of the Museum’s purchasing committee which, in turn, came to act as the steering group for the Museum’s acquisitions, their curation and the fixtures and fittings for the gallery.  It was very unusual that the “money man” would let a group of artists dictate as to what works were to fill the gallery.

Artists hanging their works in the galleries of Faaborg Museum, May 1915. From the left: Peter Hansen, Peter Tom-Petersen, Johannes Larsen, Astrid Noack, Nicolaus Lützhøft, Christian Ernlund, Carl Petersen og Fritz Syberg.

Here was the problem – the purchasing committee for Faaborg Museum, made up of the Funen painters, were all  male artists from the group, and they didn’t believe in the quality of the works produced by the female members of the group. In the minutes of the meetings of the purchasing group, comments were recorded stating that

“…At the negotiations, Peter Hansen and Birkholm wanted to be recorded in the minutes that they voted against the acceptance of Mrs. A.(Alhed) Larsen and Miss Christine Larsen’s works. Peter Hansen also against Mrs. Syberg…”

Also in the minutes, Peter Hansen, Anna’s elder brother, noted:

“…AS (Anna Syberg) and the other ladies had no significance for Danish art…”

Gallery at the Faarborg Museum

No reasoning was ever recorded as to why they thought so little of the works of the female Funen painters but the damage was done.   Presumably, one has to recognise that at that time there was generally a reluctance for women to be able to produce an artistic work. The one thing to remember also is that flower painting traditionally had a lower rank in the art world and this could have been in the minds of the male purchasing committee.

Anna was horrified that her own brother would critique her work so harshly and the rift between siblings became bitter.  She wrote to her brother Peter:

“…Where you create yourself. You voted against me at the Faaborg Museum based on high idealistic notions of safeguarding the best interests of art in Denmark. “You did not want to hide from me”, you wrote that I and the other ladies had no significance for Danish art…”

Faaborg Museum Inauguration (1910) by Peter Hansen

Anna Syberg is not in the picture of the artist group Fynbomalerne, despite her being a central part of the group. She should have supposedly sat on the empty chair in the bottom right corner.

The empty chair.

During the heated exchanges between Anna and Peter, he was working on a painting depicting the inauguration of the Faarborg Museum. The depiction was supposed to pay tribute to a group of artists who were both well-known and acclaimed painters. Anna Syberg’s outburst of anger over the words of her brother and members of the purchasing committee came while her brother was working on the painting, and it is believed that he deliberately chose not to paint his sister as part of the group and yet, to rub salt into the wounds, he provocatively indicated her absence with the empty chair, despite her being present at the inauguration and was said to have sat tanned and dressed in festive clothes with a large hat in the front row of the group. All the other female artists in the group are in the painting.

Anna Syberg (née Hansen) 1870-1914

Anne Syberg died on July 4th 1914 following a failed operation to treat a gallbladder infection.  She was just forty-four years of age.  Sadly the recognition she deserved as a gifted artist never came until after her death.  In 1915 a retrospective of her art was held and it was a success, and sales were high, including Faaborg Museum which purchased sixteen of her works. quite central in the country. After her death, Fritz Syberg married Anna’s elder sister Marie who he had known since the days of working for is father-in-law.

In 1873 Syrak Hansen’s youngest child, Poul Gerhardt, was born.  He did not follow his siblings into the world of art. He was married to Dagmar and the couple had two children: Helga and Louise.  Poul is believed to have died at the young age of 33 in 1906.

I could not have put together the two blogs about the Funen painters without the information I gleaned from various websites:

The Beauty of the Moment

Faarborg Museum

DR

The Hirschsprung Collection

arkivdk

The Funen Painters (Fynboerne)

The term Artists’ Colonies defines gatherings of artists in towns, villages and rural areas, who have assembled at places of natural beauty and where the cost of living is less than that of city life.  In the latter part of the nineteenth century, art colonies began to spring up as village movements with thousands of professional artists taking part in a mass exodus away from urban centres and heading for the idyllic countryside where they resided for varying lengths of time in artistic communities. Art colonies appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, forming on both the East and West coasts of America.  Many were also established in Europe such as Barbizon on the outskirts of Paris, Pont Aven in Brittany, Worpswede in Germany, Giverny in the northern French department of Eure, Lamorna and St Ives in Cornwall and the Newlyn School to name just a few.  Denmark had two important art colonies.  One was in Skagen in the north of the country, which I have written about on a number of occasions and the other was on the Danish Island of Funen.  In the following blogs I want to look at the Funen Art Colony and the artists who founded it and others who came later and were part of this artistic movement.

Self portrait by Kristian Zahrtmann (1915)

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1754 and was the dominating force in the teaching of art to aspiring painters in that country.  In the first half of the nineteenth century during the era of the great Danish painting, Christoffer Eckersberg “ruled”, and the period became known as the Golden Age of Danish Painting.  At the centre of this movement was Copenhagen which although it had experienced fires, bombardment and national bankruptcy, the arts took on a new period of inspiration brought about by Romanticism, the dominant intellectual movement of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  However, many artists began to rebel against the outdated way art was taught at the Academy and its policies. They wanted an alternative and this came in the form of  the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler, (Artists Studio School) an art school established in Copenhagen in 1882.  It became the central institution of the Modern Breakthrough in Danish art, the name given to the strong movement of naturalism and debating literature of Scandinavia which replaced Romanticism near the end of the 19th century.  Laurits Tuxen became the school’s first director and Peder Severin Krøyer one of its teachers.

The Funen Painters

One hundred years ago an exhibition took place when the Faaborg Museum building opened its doors back in 1915, the Funen artists curated their own work, as the Museum had been conceived and built solely to show their ‘home-grown’ art. In 1915 gallery convention required that paintings were hung closely together and so there was space for the 366 paintings, sculptures and drawings, which had been purchased by the Museum from 1910-15. The entrepreneur Mads Rasmussen had the idea for a museum to showcase work by the Funen artists and he set up a purchasing committee composed of artists which had free rein to select work

The Funen Painters group, similar to other artists’ colonies in the late 1800s, searched for an alternative to city life by setting up a colony which was not just about painting but also a new lifestyle. Their aim was to connect their art with the countryside and the everyday life of the rural community which they believed created an overall vision for a ‘lifestyle’ reflecting their artistic ideals.

An oil painting recreating the frivolous court of Christian VII by Kristian Zahrtmann

In 1884 a preparatory class was added to the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler and in 1885 Kristian Zahrtmann became the head and, under him, it developed into an independent department.  Zahrtmann’s school became more avant-garde and innovative, due to his calls for radical experiments and strong use of colours.  By 1893 the preparatory class, which under his leadership,  turned into an independent department. He had some two hundred students from the Scandinavian countries and because of his stature as a teacher, the school was often simply referred to as “Zahrtmann’s School“.

A Family under Lamplight by Kristian Zahrtmann (1890)

Many of Zahrtmann’s students formed a group of painters who became known as Fynboerne (Funen Painters) due to their attachment to the island of Funen. His students included Peter Hansen, Fritz Syberg, Poul S. Christiansen, Johannes Larsen and Oluf Hartmann; and modern painters Karl Isakson; Edvard Weie, Harald Giersing and Olaf Rude. Zahrtmann travelled through Europe many times and his favourite country was Italy.

Piazza Santa Maria i Civita d´Antino by Kristian Zahrtmann (1904)

In June 1883, which was a very hot summer in Europe, Kristian Zahrtmann, travelled to the mountain town of Civita D’Antino in Italy, in search of cool temperatures as well as his love of good wine, and on the first afternoon in the town he decided that here was the ideal place for his summer painting school. His enduring fondness for Civita D’Antino lasted nearly 30 years and between 1890 and 1911 he spent every summer in the town living with the Cerroni family and gathering friends and students in an annual artist colony. He was named an honorary citizen of the town in 1902. This culminated in a vast production of portraits, landscapes, and scenes depicting an idyllic daily lifestyle around the mountain communit. His paintings are distinguished particularly by their realism and bold colour.

Johannes Larson, self portrait (1910)

Winter Day at the Zoo by Johannes Larson (1891)

One of the leading members of the Funen painters’ group was Johannes Larsen who was born in Kerteminde on the island of Funen on December 27th 1867. He was the son of Jeppe Andreas Larsen, a merchant and Vilhelmine Christine Bless.  During the 1880s, after regular schooling, Johannes studied art at the Free School in Copenhagen under Kristian Zahrtmann. It was whilst studying here that he met a number of aspiring painters who lived on Funen, notably Fritz Syberg and Peter Marius Hansen both of whom came from the southern port of Faaborg.  It was the coming together of these young artists that morphed into the Funen Painters group (Fynboerne).  Later they would create an art colony which would galvanise many Danish and Swedish artists to paint and exhibit their work.

Summer Sunshine and Wind by Johannes Larsen (1899)

After completing his studies with Kristian Zahrtmann, Johannes Larsen returned back home to his native Funen town of Kerteminde where he continued to paint working in oils, watercolour, woodcuts and drawing.  His depictions featured landscapes and other open-air scenes, and often included birds.  He received many commissions to illustrate books and paint large paintings for public buildings

The Garden House with Blossoming Cherries by Alhed Maria Larsen (c.1920s)

In 1898, Johannes married the painter Alhed Maria Warberg.  She played a central role within the Funen Painters group and would often have the role as hostess at their events.

Alhed Larsen

Alhed Larsen was born on April 7th 1872.  She was the second eldest of eight children, Laura Maria and Albrecht Christopher Warberg.  She had six sisters and one brother.   Her father was the estate manager for a very large farmstead, Erikshåb, and he had an office help, a teacher for the children and six servants.  Alhed grew up in well-to-do circumstances on the estate.  It was said that the seven sisters would often shock the bourgeoisie neighbours by walking around the streets of the town without wearing gloves and by using newfangled bicycles !  Many young painters would gather at the farmstead and soon Alhed began to learn to paint and was guided by the painter, Fritz Syberg.  Later it was the task of her husband, Johannes Larsen to take the role of her artistic mentor.  Peter Hansen joined the group along with his sister Anna and Maria and Johannes’ sister Christine and it was Alhed who had the role of unifying these painters of Funen.

Beach Leaves in the Window, Båxhult by Alhed Larson (1927)

When she was seventeen, Alhed went to Copenhagen and lived with her maternal uncle, the sculptor, Ludvig Brandstrup.  Between 1890 and 1893. In 1893, Alhed worked at the Royal Porcelain Factory with underglaze painting, at the same time as she received drawing lessons from her maternal uncle.  In late 1893 she travelled to Italy with the Brandstrup family and during that long holiday she managed to master the Italian language.  Back home at Erikshåb she formed a close and romantic relationship with Johannes Larsen but her parents were not happy with the prospect of their daughter marrying an impoverished artist.  She finally overcame her parent’s reluctance to have Larson as their son-in-law and in 1898 the couple married and settled in Kerteminde. Three years after the wedding the couple had a new home built on Møllebakken, on the coastal slope on the outskirts of the town.   Alhed decided that she was not satisfied with simply being the wife of an artist and decided that she wanted to become a professional artist as well.

Rhododendrons by Alhed Larson

Alhed Larsen’s artwork primarily depicted flowers, still life, interiors and window views. In 1917, Alhed and Johannes’ house was expanded with a large studio added, spacious enough for each to have their own studio space.

Møllebakken home of Alhed and Johannes Larson

Between 1901 and 1902, the couple built their home on Møllebakken in Kerteminde. Their home became the gathering place in summer months for many painters, particularly younger artists from Zahrtmann’s school.

Landscape with birds by Johannes Larsen (1946)

The Funen painters guiding principle was to encourage plein air painting, not just sketching but painting, notwithstanding the weather. Following this principle led to paintings having a fresh purity and energy which was missing from studio painting. Their works were appreciated by the public and became very popular, so much so that the Symbolist painters of the time attacked their style and in 1907 in the midst of a newspaper debate on Danish art, the Symbolists derogatively called them “farmer painters”.  Instead of being browbeaten by this tirade the artist gained greater recognition.

Birds flying over a landscape by Johannes Larson (1929?)

A turning point for the group came in 1910 when businessman Mads Rasmussen, who operated a successful cooperative canning factory in Faaborg, proposed to help the group by creating a museum next to his canning factory at Møllebakken in Kerteminde. which would promote and exhibit Funish Art. This made it possible for the public to view and buy their paintings which gave the Funen artists financial support. Johannes and Alhed Larsen lived almost their entire lives at Møllebakken.

In the autumn of 2006, a sculpture by the city’s two great artists, Johannes Larsen (1867-1961) and Fritz Syberg (1862-1939), was unveiled on Nordre Kirkerist, Kerteminde, next to the parish church, executed by local sculptor Bjørn Nordahl.

Johannes Larsen is looked upon as one of the greatest painters of birds and a knowledgeable pictorial storyteller of nature. His knowledge, his role as a conservationist and his beautiful artwork earned him an honorary membership of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation. At the age of 92, he was named president of the Wildlife Foundation established by the prime minister’s department.

………to be continued.

Hungarian Artists. Part 2.

Károly Ferenczy and the family

In this blog I am looking at the lives and works of a talented Hungarian family of painters.

Károly Ferenczy

Károly Ferenczy

Károly Ferenczy is considered one of the most important pioneers of Hungarian Modernism,    He was the son of Ida Graenzenstein and the Austrian railway construction official Karel Freund, who moved to Budapest with the construction company. Ferenczy was born in Vienna on February 8th 1862 and soon after his birth, his mother died.

Boys throwing Stones by Károly Ferenczy (1890)

Boys Throwing Stones was a major work completed by Ferenczy in 1890, whilst he was living in the River Danube town of Szentendre, having returned from Paris and his studies at the Académie Julian.  The setting is a barren landscape which had a sense of melancholia to the work and adds a gloomy backdrop to the three boys throwing stones into the river.  There is not one bright spot of colour and it is the shades of the pearly grey which he used for the water that lightens the rest of the dull earthly colours.

In Front of the Posters by Károly Ferenczy (1891)

Károly Ferenczy first studied law and completed his economics degree at the University of Vienna. In 1885 Ferencszy married a fellow artist and distant cousin, Olga Fialka who was twelve years older than him.  She studied painting under Jan Matejko in Kraków and went on to study under August Eisenmenger in Vienna. She was known for her paintings and book illustrations.

Portrait of Artist’s Wife by Károly Ferenczy (1891)

After she married Károly Ferenczy, the couple went on to have three children. With the birth of the children, Fialka turned her attention away from her art and focused on looking after the family.  The couple’s first child Valér Ferenczy, who was born in 1885, became a painter and printmaker. In 1890 Olga gave birth to twins, Béni Ferenczy, who went on to became a famous sculptor and Noémi Ferenczy, who became an equally well-known textile artist.

Triple Portrait by Károly Ferenczy (1911)

Károly Ferenczy‘s three children, his son Valér, painter and graphic artist, and the twins Béni , painter and graphic artist and Noémi, a painter who established tapestry in Hungary.

Noémi with Let-down Hair by Károly Ferenczy (1903)

In 1885 Károly enrolled at the Art Academy of Naples (Accademia di Belle Arti), but the following year moved to Munich. Ferenczy studied art in Budapest at the Academy of Fine Arts where his Hungarian tutors were Bertalan Székely the history and portrait painter who worked in the Romantic and Academic styles. and Gyula Benczúr who specialized in portraits and historical scenes. Benczúr is now looked upon as the greatest Hungarian masters of “historicism”, a term used to encompass artistic styles that draw their inspiration from recreating historic styles or imitating the work of historic artists and artisans. Ferencszy was living in Hungry at a period when the country was undergoing a cultural renaissance, and Ferenczy became part of a generation of artists eager to explore new artistic ideas and break away from academic conventions.

Birdsong by Károly Ferenczy (1893)

Károly Ferenczy became interested in plein air painting when he was studying in Munich.  One of is most famous works at that time was entitled Birdsong which he completed in 1893.   Unlike other realist depiction Ferenczy’s depiction is free from details. The random appearance of impressionism in details of nature and capturing atmospheres, lights and colours hastily painted could not be more unusual for him.   He spent much time working out the composition of the work and the solitary figure in the depiction is a woman, dressed in red, embracing the trunk of the tree, gazing upwards as she listens to the melodic tones of a bird in full song.  The forest is symbolized by white trunks of birch-trees and the green of the leaves.

On the Hill Top by Károly Ferenczy (1901)

In 1889, at the age of twenty-seven, Ferenczy travelled to Munich, where he first came aware of western European artistic styles such as Impressionism and the plein air works of the Barbizon School artists.  It was the works of this latter group which led Ferencszy to explore plein air painting and the effects of light on the landscape. His greatest influences were that of the French painters, particularly Édouard Manet and Camille Pissarro, and they stimulated his change of artistic direction towards a more liberated and expressive style.

Gardeners by Károly Ferenczy (1891)

Ferenczy completed Gardeners whilst living at Szentendre. The way he puts the painting together with the use of lighting, colours and details follow the ethos of Naturalism. It is typical of him to see that the space is limited. There are two figures, one of the old gardener and the other the young boy who is standing next to him in front of a light background. How Ferenczy managed the arrangement of his two figures and the balance between light and dark colours demonstrate his appreciation of decoration which were a constant throughout his career as a painter.  Gardeners is considered to be a major picture of Ferenczy’s early period and highlights his skills as an artist at the beginning of his career.

Simon Hollósy. Self-portrait, 1916

Between 1893 and 1896 he lived in Munich with his family. There he joined the circle of Simon Hollósy, a Hungarian painter who, as a young man, had moved to the German city because there was no academy of fine arts in Hungary at that time.  However, he was critical of the way art was taught at the German Academy which was strongly based on copying classical models. He left the Munich Academy and set up his own private school where he gave free classes.  His way of teaching art appealed to many young talents who were interested in realistic portrayal of their subjects.  Simon Hollósy was persuaded by some of his friends and pupils to re-locate his class in the summer of 1896 to Nagybánya, which is now Baia Mare, Romania.  He agreed and it was that new location that led to the founding of the Nagybánya artists’ colony, of which, Károly Ferenczy was one of the founding members. Nagybánya was an idyllic rural location and was the perfect place for plein air painting. It was the artists at this colony who played an important role in introducing Impressionism and Post-impressionism.

Sermon on the Mount by Károly Ferenczy (1896)

In his later years, Ferenczy painted subjects ranging from portraits, to nudes, and Biblical scenes.  Ferenczy was highly productive, and he worked in a variety of materials and genres. In November 2011, a major retrospective exhibition opened for six months at the Hungarian National Gallery, featuring nearly 150 paintings and 80 prints and drawings, together with about 50 documents (photographs, letters, catalogues and books) related to his art and life. Sadly, Károly Ferenczy’s life and prolific career were cut short by illness. He succumbed to pneumonia on March 18th, 1917, at the age of 55.

Olga Fialka

Béni Ferenczy  by his mother, Olga Fialka (1892)

Károly Ferenczy was just one part of a talented artistic family.  In 1885 he married Olga Fialka, who on her mother’s side was a relative of his, whom he met for the second time in 1884.  Olga had developed a love of art as a teenager and had family support for her desire to become a professional artist.  She studied art in Krakow under Jan Matejko, a Polish painter, and leading 19th-century exponent of history painting, known for his depictions of events from Polish history.  She then went to Vienna and attended the Academy of Fine Arts under the tutelage of August Eisenmenger, a portrait and historical painter. 

The Fialka Family by Olga Fialka (1874)

In the painting entitled The Fialka Family, Olga depicts her family taking coffee in a simple, bourgeois interior. At the head of the table is her mother, Karoline, and beside her stands her younger sister, Milada von Fialka. One of the two male family members is perhaps Károly Fialka.  If you look carefully at the right background, you can just make out a woman painting and this is thought to be Olga herself. The picture is a combination of the common interior genre and the group portrait. What differentiates this work from other contemporary genre painting of the time is that the interrelationship of the four figures comes not from a purported story line, but from a simple everyday conversation between family members and does not have the sense of a rigid group portrait. One can believe that Olga has simply conjured up a snapshot of an everyday scene.

Valér Ferenczy

Self Portrait by Valér Ferenczy

Valér Ferenczy was born on November 22nd 1885 in Kremnica, Slovakia.  He was the eldest son of Károly Ferenczy and Olga Fialka Ferenczy.  The family moved to Baia Mare in 1898, where Valér began his artistic tuition given to him by his parents in his father’s studio.  Between 1896 and 1901 he was enrolled at the Hollósy School in Baia Mare.  Between 1902 and 1906 he attended the drawing and painting courses held in the Free School of Painting and at the same time he also travelled abroad and attended various European academies of art.  In 1903 he studied at the Munich Academy before going on to the private school of the German secessionist painter, Lovis Corinth, in Berlin through 1904 and 1905.  From Munich he travelled to Paris where he attended the Colarossi School and later the Julian Academy in 1906.Between 1911 and 1912 he returned home and studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Nude by Valér Ferenczy

In 1914 Valér returned to the French capital to study the technique of engraving with Orville Houghton Peets, the American painter and printmaker.

The Artist’s Mother by Valér Ferenczy

Valér applied for and was granted Romanian citizenship in 1919 and two years later married painter Eta Sárossy in 1921.

Valér Ferenczy died in Budapest on December 23rd 1954, aged 69.

Eta Sárossy

Eta Sárossy in her studio (1923)

Her father was Barnabás Sárosi, who was a sergeant in the Imperial and Royal 15th Hussar Regiment, and her mother Maria (Irma) was from Moldova. She grew up in Szilágysomlyó and graduated from high school there. From 1920 she studied painting at the free school in Baia Mare, for three years. 

Fire Flowers by Eta Sárossy

Young Man with a Tennis Racket by Eta Sárossy (1933)

Eta’s marriage to Valér ended in 1929 and she remarried the following year.  She regularly exhibited her work and was a founding member of the National Salon. Initially she painted landscapes, then studied portrait painting with the Hungarian painter, Oszkar Glatz, at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Béni Ferenczy

Béni Ferenczy by Kaoly Ferenczy (1912)

On June 18th 1890 Karoly Ferenczy’s wife Olga gave birth to twins, Béni and Noémi. Béni was the second son of Karoly and Olga Ferenczy. As a young man, Béni followed in the footsteps of his elder brother Valér and father Karoly and went to study art in both Munich and Paris.  During his stay in the French capital, he studied under both the French sculptor, Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and the Ukranian sculptor Alexander Archipenko, a resident in La Ruche, an artist’s residence in the Montparnasse district of Paris.

Béni Ferenczy carving his statue Hercules. (Nagybánya, 1916)

Once he had completed his studies abroad, he returned to Hungary and lived in Budapest.  Béni was swept up by the short-lived (March to August 1919) Hungarian Commune described as a “genuine, grandiose, albeit unfinished revolution”.  He played his part in it by becoming one of the leading artists to instigate a reform of the national art scene and the setting up of a new art programme for the Hungarian nation.  After the fall of the Hungarian Commune in 1919 which only lasted 133 days, Béni exiled himself to Nagybánya in annexed Transylvania, and from there, in 1921, travelled via Czechoslovakia to Vienna and that summer he settled down in the Austrian capital.

Danae by Béni Ferenczy (1934)

The Pair by Béni Ferenczy

Béni arrived in Vienna in 1921 and married an Austrian lady and the couple had a son and daughter. He and his wife went to live in Berlin and Potsdam but found the cost of living too high and so returned to Vienna. His marriage ended in divorce and in 1932, he moved to Moscow, where he married a second time.  His bride was Erzsi (Elizabeth), a Hungarian, who had also spent her childhood in Nagybánya. From Moscow they moved to Vienna in 1936 and on to Budapest in 1938. Erzsi, beautiful, strong, full-bodied, and full of life, became the model for many of his sculptures, drawings and watercolours. Erzsi became his close companion, an inspiration for his work.  After her husband’s death in 1967, Erzsi Ferenczy worked to preserve his work and memory.  

The Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre

In 1972, Erzsi Ferenczy founded the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre, with a large art collection that included works by each member of the family. In 1993, Erzsi established the Ferenczy Family Foundation. She died in 2000 at the age of 96.

Noémi Ferenczy

Béni and Noémi Ferenczy

Noémi and her twin brother Béni were born to Karoly and Olga Ferenczy on June 18th 1890. Noémi, like her twin brother, first began to practice art in her father’s studio and often visited the artists’ colony in Baia Mare.  In 1911 she went to Paris and learned tapestry weaving at the Manufacture des Gobelins but was largely self-taught. Contrary to common practice, she not only designed her creations, but also made them herself. She wove her paintings on cardboard using woollen yarns that she had dyed with plant paint. Her first works were designed and woven in Baia Mare, where she exhibited for the first time in 1916 at the Ernst Museum in a joint exhibition with her father Károly and her brother Béni.  The title of the exhibition was Károly Ferenczy and his children.

State of Innocence by Noémi Ferenczy

At the age of 23, however, she started working on an early masterpiece entitled Teremtés (Creation). She chose to remain responsible for the creative process from the beginning to the end, from the numerous pencil drawings, colour sketches and cartoons, to the weaving itself.

She recalled the inspiration for this tapestry:

“… My mother and I travelled a great deal and once we went to Chartres, the cathedral of those famous 13th century glass paintings.  Brilliant in the shafts of light, the beautiful, artistic glass paintings were spellbinding.  This was where I first felt the uncontrollably inspiring force of the desire to create, which has not abandoned me throughout my career.  Creation is my first truly large-scale work.  But even that stemmed from the magic of Chartres…”

In 1920, Following the collapse of the Hungarian Commune the year before, Noémi Ferenczy moved back to Nagybánya/Baia Mare, which had become part of Romania. There she helped organise a general workers’ strike, for which she was arrested and spent a few weeks in prison. She remained active in the Communist movement, taking part at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1924.

Her works were regularly displayed in Hungary, as well as in Romania and abroad. In 1932 she moved to Budapest. By this time, her style had changed: her compositions became more monumental, with fewer, but larger figures.  From 1945 she taught at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts. She received the Kossuth Prize in 1948 and the title of Meritorious Artist in 1952. She died on December 20th 1957, aged 67, in Budapest, and is buried in Kerepesi Cemetery.

The Hungarian Artists. Part 1.

Viktor Madarász & Pal Szinyei Merse

Museum Of Fine Arts Budapest

Buda Castle

I visited the Hungarian city of Budapest the other week and decided to visit some of its art museums.  The two main establishments are the Szépművészeti Múzeum, the Museum of Fine Arts on the Pest side of the city and the Hungarian National Gallery on the Buda side of the city which is located inside the royal palace of Buda Castle, and the vast collection there traces the country’s creative history from medieval triptychs through to post-1945 art and sculpture.  In the following blogs I want to look at the works of art of the Hungarian painters which feature predominantly in these collections.

Viktor Madarász

Self portrait by Viktor Madarász

Viktor Madarász was born on December 4th 1830 in the small village of Csetnek, (today: Štítnik, Slovakia) in what is now middle-eastern Slovakia.  He came from a once noble family.  His father, András was an iron manufacturer and craftsman. Originally, his parents wanted Viktor to have a career in law and so he went to study in Bratislava.  The majority of Hungary had been under Ottoman rule from 1541 and 1699 at which time the Habsburg monarchy defeated the Ottoman forces and took control over Hungary. 

In 1848, when the Hungarian Revolution began, Madarász left college to join the struggle for independence. Despite being only seventeen, which was too young to join the army, he was accepted and participated in numerous battles and became a Second Lieutenant.  The revolution failed and for Madarász the experience was traumatic and one which he never forgot. He dedicated his art to the idea of Hungarian independence from Habsburg rule for the Hungarian people and recalled pictorially the heroic and tragic memories of this time in the history of Hungary.

Kuruck and Labanc by Viktor Madarász

One of his early historical paintings was entitled Kuruc and Labanc which depicted two brothers fighting on opposite sides of the Hungarian Revolution. The Kuruck was a group of armed anti-Habsburg grouping that wanted to rid Hungary of the Habsburg rule and the word “kuruck” is used in both a positive sense to mean “patriotic” and in a negative sense to mean “chauvinistic.” The term Labanc was designated to those Hungarians who advocated cooperating with the outside powers, the Habsburgs, and is almost always used in a negative sense to mean “disloyal” or “traitorous”. The painting was well received by the critics.

Thököly’s Dream (The Dream of an Exile) by Viktor Madarász (1856)

Dózsa’s People by Viktor Madarász

After the war of independence, the uprising had been defeated, and Madarász lived in exile and after hiding out briefly, returned on foot to his family’s home in Pécs.  Once back home he continued with his legal studies but also enrolled in art lessons from a local artist. In 1853, he enrolled for preparatory work at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna but was disheartened with the old-conservative atmosphere there, and he went to the private school of Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, who was looked upon as a bold innovator at the time. In 1856, Viktor Madarász moved to Paris where he studied in the studios of Léon Cogniet and at the École des Beaux Arts.

The Mourning of László Hunyadi by Viktor Madarász (1859)

One of Madarász most popular works and considered the main work of his life, is part of the Hungarian National Gallery collection. It is entitled The Mourning of László Hunyadi and was completed by Madardsz in 1859 whilst he was living in Paris. It is a major work of romanticism. The painting depicts the altar of the Church of Mary Magdalene in Buda, before which is the body of László Hunyadi. László Hunyadi, the son of János Hunyadi, who had defeated the Ottomans and became a national hero, was ordered to be killed by Vladislav V. Young Hunyadi enjoyed widespread popularity among the Hungarians, so he was seen as a threat to the seventeen-year-old, inexperienced King Vladislav V, the only son of the Habsburg German King Albert II.   The king, fearing the popularity of Hunyadi, ordered his execution and he was beheaded on March 16th 1457.  In this depiction we see two women kneeling at the feet of Hunyadi.  One was his mother, Erzébet Szilágyi, the other was his bride, Maria Gara.  This painting by Madarasz was believed to be an anti-Habsburg political statement during a time of the Habsburg oppression of the Hungarian people.  The work of art became a symbol of the failed Hungarian Revolution and National self-sacrifice.  The painting was thought of as the Hungarian Pieta following the iconography of the Lamentation of Christ, in which Christ’s torso was removed from the cross and his friends mourned over his body and so in a way Madarasz’s painting offered a promise that like Christ, the Hungarian nation would rise again. 

Zrínyi and Frangepán in Bécsújhely Prison by Viktor Madarász (1864)

Another painting in the Hungarian National Gallery by Madarász was his 1864 historical work entitled Zrínyi and Frangepán in Bécsújhely Prison. When the painting was first exhibited in 1866 people flocked to see it.  The painting depicts two men, Péter Zrínyi, the Ban (local ruler) of Croatia, and the Hungarian Count Ferenc Frangepán, sitting facing each other across a table in the Bécsújhely prison.  Guards and imperial officials can be seen in the background.  Both had been implicated in the Wesselényi Conspiracy, a plot among Croatian and Hungarian nobles to oust the Habsburg Monarchy from Croatia and Hungary.  The two men are saying their last farewells to each other before they were both executed.

Pal Szinyei Merse

Self portrait by Pal Szinyei Merse (1897)

The second artist I am showcasing is Pál Szinyei Merse. Pál Szinyei Merse was an outstanding master of nineteenth-century Hungarian painting and one of the most influential figures in Hungarian art. He was born on July 4th 1845 in Szinyeújfalu, a village and municipality in the Prešov District of eastern Slovakia..  He was the third of eight children of Félix Szinyei Merse and Valéria Jekelfalussy and came from a noble family which had 700 years of history, but by the 19th century the family wealth had dwindled, and yet, Pál, because of his art, never ever had problems making ends meet. 

Winter by Pal Szinyei Merse (c.1905)

After the death of his grandfather in 1850, the family moved to the mansion in the east Slovakian town of Jernye (now Jarovnice). His father graduated in law from Košice and became ambassador to the town of Sibiu during the 1839/40 Parliament, and was appointed Alispan, an office held by the most prestigious and generally wealthiest of the commoners and in 1871 became the High Sheriff.  His father was a great supporter of his son and his artistic ambitions, and his mother was a lover of literature and music, who brought considerable wealth into their marriage.

Skylark by Pál Szinyei Merse.(1882)

From 1856 Pál studied at the Catholic high school in Prešov and remained there until he reached the sixth grade. He remained a private student until 1859, and, in the autumn of 1861, he studied in Oradea, where he graduated in the summer of 1863. Pál Szinyei started to become interested in painting and took it more seriously during his high school years and received tuition from Lajos Mezey a local artist from Oradea.

The Field by Pál Szinyei Merse (1909)

In 1864, thanks to the support of his parents, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied under the Hungarian artist, Alexander von Wagner, and later, from 1867 to 1869, his tutor was Karl von Piloty, the German historical painter.  Another famous artist he met whilst attending the Academy was Wilhelm Leibl, who introduced Pál to plein-air painting. After seeing a major art exhibition in 1869, Pál was anxious to get to work on his own and decided to leave the Academy. Pál Szinyei Merse was a ground-breaking pioneer and the first true colourist in the history of Hungarian painting. 

On October 15, 1873, Pál Szinyei Merse married the love of his life, Zsófia Probstner, the twenty-year-old daughter of the owner of the Lublo bath. They went on to have six children, a son, Laszlo Paul Felix and five daughters, Sophie, Mary, Valeria, Elisabeth and Adrienne.

Picnic in May by Pál Szinyei Merse (1873)

In 1873 Pál Szinyei Merse completed the painting entitled Picnic in May and although it was ridiculed by his contemporaries it is now looked upon as one of the finest Hungarian paintings.

In his autobiography Pál wrote about the painting, saying :

“…I painted myself into the picture prone, minching away, with my back to the spectator. I must admit I was thinking of the critics who would dislike my picture…”

Lady in Violet by Pál Szinyei Merse (1874)

Probably one of his most famous works was painted a year later, 1874, and is entitle Lady in Violet. It is seen on many posters around Budapest advertising the Hungarian National Gallery. It has become the Hungarian Mona Lisa and is one of the most well-known painting to this day.The painting depicts the artist’s wife, Zsófia, who was pregnant at the time, resting in the garden of their manor house in Jernye. She is wearing a taffeta bustle dress which was very popular in those days. The artist started the painting using complementary colours and then created a new colour harmony by juxtaposing yellow, violet and green. While he was in Munich he had bought the high-quality violet paint from Richard Wurm, a paint merchant and a mutual friend of both Pál Szinyei Merse and the Swiss Symbolist painter, Arnold Böcklin. It was Böcklin who encouraged Pál to use colour vigorously.

The Artist’s Wife Dressed in Yellow by Pál Szinyei Merse (1875)

The painting of his wife, which was never finished, was painted a year after his painting, Lady in Violet.

Portrait of Zsigmond Szinyei Merse by Pál Szinyei Merse (1866)

His family featured in many of his painting, such as his 1866 painting, Portrait of Zsigmond Szinyei Merse which he completed while spending his summer in Jernye. It is a depiction of his younger brother Zsigmond with a red cap, lost in thought as he plays a chibouk.

Portrait of Ninon Szinyei Merse by Pál Szinyei Merse (1870)

Pál Szinyei was working in Hungary during the French-Prussian war and painted several pictures of members of his family in a naturalist style. This portrait of his elder sister is one of them.

Portrait of Artist’s wife by Pál Szinyei Merse (1880)

Lovers by Pál Szinyei Merse (1869)

One of Szinvei’s favourite themes was outdoors parties and the enjoyment of periods of relaxation.  His 1869 painting entitled Lovers depicts two people relaxing in a rural setting, on a hillside during the early summer.  The artist has used pale colours which he has used harmoniously and this muted colouration evokes a lyrical aspect to the scene.  It is a scene of great intimacy as we see the couple lock eyes whilst their fingers tenderly intertwine and set in an almost dream-like countryside background.

…….to be continued