Art Contrarian

Back in 2012 I posted about the interesting (to me) case of a famous artist's son who became an admiral and the son of an important admiral who became a painter. I wrote:

"Let's start with Augustus John (1878-1961), best known as a portraitist who sired children by his wife and other women. His second son (by his wife) was Caspar John (1903-1984), who went on to become First Sea Lord (1960-63), attaining the rank of Admiral of the Fleet in 1962. In the Royal Navy, First Sea Lord [was] the highest position that an officer can attain."

Caspar John's Wikipedia entry is here.

Recently I became aware that the grandson of Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet (1829-1896) also became a Royal Navy Admiral. Millais was one of the original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and later went on the become a successful portrait painter and, not long before his death, president of the Royal Academy.

"Bubbles," a 1886 painting of a young boy, became famous because it was controversially for Millais used for many years in advertising material by England's Pears Soap company (more information about it here).

The boy in the painting was Millais' grandson William Milbourne James (1881-1973) who later rose to the rank of Admiral in the Royal Navy.

Sir William had to bear the cross of the painting in the form of having the nickname "Bubbles" during his naval career. He was a prolific author during and after his time in the navy. In the early years of the Great War he was executive officer of the battlecruiser Queen Mary, serving under Sir William Reginald "Blinker" Hall who later was in charge of the famous Room 40 decoding center where James also served. Both Hall and James transferred from Queen Mary before the Battle of Jutland where the ship was destroyed when a magazine exploded: only 20 men survived of a complement of 1,286.

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Caspar John by Augustus John - c. 1920

Admiral of the Fleet Sir Caspar John in 1963
When he was First Sea Lord.

"Bubbles" by John Everett Millais - 1886

Admiral Sir William Milbourne James

Jeanne du Maurier (1911-1996) was an artist, a painter. But she is probably best-known as being the younger sister of the writer Daphne du Maurier. Jeanne and Daphne were daughters of the well-known (in his day) actor Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel Beaumont. Their grandfather was George du Maurier who worked at Punch magazine and wrote the novel "Trilby" that had the character Svengali.

Although there are printed biographies dealing with the three du Maurier sisters (the oldest was Angela, who also wrote), the main Internet source dealing with Jeanne is here. It states:

"She studied at the Central School of Art in Southampton Row, and was in the life class under Bernard MENINSKY. She also studied drypoint and etching there. After she attended the St. John's Wood School of Art (studying painting under P F Millard) her first studio was in Hampstead, and she began exhibiting in 1938 with the RBA [Royal Society of British Artists] and SWA [Society of Women Artists]. ...

"Her next exhibition [after World War 2] was with STISA [St Ives Society of Artists] in the Autumn of 1945, opened by her mother Lady du Maurier. She took a studio in St Ives and again exhibited in 1946 where she met Dod PROCTER who asked her if she could paint her portrait. The two became close friends, spending three winters together, two in Tenerife and one in Africa. By the time she exhibited at the RA [Royal Academy] in the 1950s, Jeanne had moved to Manaton in Devon. She painted mostly still life, flowers, landscapes and the occasional portrait. Among her works exhibited at the RA were flower paintings."

Hardly any images of her paintings can be found on the Internet, nearly all held by the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol. Worse, none are dated. This means I cannot place them in context of 20th century painting trends and fashions. I'll guess that the images below are of paintings made between 1950 and 1970. If any reader has better information, please post a comment.

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Birds and Flowers
This, and the painting below feature mirrors.

Reflections I

Repetition II

The Bird Cage

The House Next Door
Her treatment of foliage seems inspired by Cézanne.

House in Madeira

Your tastes might well differ from mine. And tiny images seen on computer screens seldom capture what one experiences when viewing paintings in person. That said, from my perspective Jeanne du Maurier was not a good artist. The paintings shown here (aside from The Bird Cage and The House in Madera) tend to be wispy and unfocused. Bird Cage seems unresolved, incomplete. The Madeira house painting is the most solid, yet it has those three blue patches representing upper-story windows and the roof without the correct shadow pattern that distract from the rest of the work. Based on these few examples, it puzzles me how she ever got paintings accepted by the Royal Academy. Could it have been her family connections?

Henry Reuterdahl (1870-1925) was born in Sweden and moved to the United States in 1893. As his Wikipedia entry mentions, he lacked formal art training yet nevertheless had a successful career as an illustrator and painter of naval and marine subjects. More information about him is here.

His illustration and painting style tended towards a flashy, free form of impressionism with a touch of other modernist influences. Much of this seems to be for dramatic effect rather than careful documentation of events he witnessed such as the early stages of the 1907-08 around-the-world cruise of the Great White Fleet.

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Illustration showing a U.S. battleship in a foreign harbor

Strange Ships - 1910
One source has the date as 1918. However, this might be related to the previous one even though their settings differ (one has high hills in the background, the other does not).

United States Fleet in the Straits of Magellan, February 1908
The around-the-world cruise: the sea is tranquil here.

The Fleet Passing Through Magellan Straits
And here, at the same location, it seems less so, though this is more of a closeup view. The empty area at the lower right of this print where Reuterdahl signed it gives the impression that the sea is dropping downwards.

Great White Fleet at Sea, December 1907 (Rear Admiral Charles Mitchell Thomas on USS Minnesota BB-22)
Another Great White Fleet illustration.

New York Harbor 1914 - H.S. Vanderbilt schooner Vagrant amidst commercial and military shipping
The white building is the Woolworth, the other tall one is the Singer Building: both are idealized, exaggerated. The point-of-view here is looking down the Hudson.

Naval Engagement - c. 1915, watercolor
This has a Fauvist feeling thanks to the exaggerated colors. Again, the water appears to be falling off the frame.

Sinking of the Battlecruiser Queen Mary at the Battle of Jutland, 31 May 1916
The Queen Mary suffered a magazine explosion, broke in half, and sank. Only 20 of her crew survived. One is shown here on the hull of the ship near the center of the paining.

U.S. Navy recruiting poster - c. 1917

Convoy - c.1920 - USS Allen DD-66, SS France, USS Mount Vernon ID-4508
Here in a somewhat Cubist-Futurist vein are depicted camouflaged ships. This is not quite characteristic of Reuterdahl's work, but he is credited as the painter on the Internet site where it was found.

Air Patrol of the Atlantic - USS Edwards - c.1919 - watercolor
Another highly dramatized scene, though the North Atlantic can be vicious and destroyers are comparatively small and narrow.

Battle Fleet Returning to New York Harbor - 1920
From about the same viewpoint as the 1914 scene -- southern Hoboken or northern Jersey City, New Jersey, perhaps. The buildings are shown more accurately here. Even so, I have the feeling that Reuterdahl used some exaggeration: the river seems pretty wide in relation to the indicated size of those battleships.

Ewart Melbourne Brindle (1904-1995) -- Melbourne Brindle, as he signed his name and was known by -- was a successful illustrator whose peak career spanned the early-1930s to the late-1960s when he chose to retire from commercial work. His Wikipedia entry is here, and more background can be found here.

His most characteristic illustrations, in my opinion, were done in pen-and-ink. A few of these are shown below along with works in other media. Some of the images can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Brindle was basically a careful artist who seldom tried for flashy effects. But his illustrations were not necessarily static and dull (unless an art director insisted on him doing so). My take is that, at his best, his illustrations were pleasing and satisfying.

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As noted in the headline, Brindle was a "car guy." He is shown at the top of this advertisement with his Crane-Simplex car -- an extremely rare and valuable one and only part of his collection.

An illustration done in the later-1950s. Note his standard signature at the lower left.

That signature is on one side of his gravestone: the other side has the usual information.

A Packard advertisement from around 1946 featuring a probably fictitious Army Air Forces colonel who loved the Packard-built motors in his P-51 fighters.

A Packard ad from 1948.

Illustration from a 1949 Packard ad. In these advertisements for Packard, the illustration style of the cars and that of the backgrounds are different enough to make one wonder if a different artist painted the cars. On the other hand, Brindle was quite capable of rendering an automobile: plus, his signature is on the illustrations. By the way, the Packards are distorted to make them seem more sleek than they actually were -- a common advertising practice in those days.

An illustration of a 1956 Chevrolet. Again, it is distorted by order of an art director.

Illustration of an early gasoline station.

Matson Line ad from 1946. Yes, the ship is idealized.

Here is what I consider a characteristic Brindle illustration. It was made for an advertisement promoting the Territory of Hawaii in 1936. The view is of Honolulu harbor. At the left is a white-hull Matson liner. At the center is the city's famous Aloha Tower.

View of a Territorial University building from the same ad series.

Landscape painting of Block Island, Rhode Island that might have been painted after he retired.

Until recently I was unaware that, along with collective farming and other individualism-suppressing practices, there was the use of "brigades" of artists who collectively created large paintings in the Soviet Union. This is dealt with in this book starting on page 182. Around 1950 huge paintings were commissioned for exhibition, but with completion deadlines so tight that a single artist could not hope to complete the work in time. So "brigades" of artists able to paint in an academic style were formed to do the work. They were under the direction of a brigade leader, usually an academician, so their style of painting was similar enough that individual treatments would not be noticed. For example, one such painting, "On the Great Stalinist Construction Site" (1951), had five artists participating.

Even before this form of group painting emerged, there were cases where two artists would work on the same large canvas. An example is "The Taking of Sevastopol" painted 1944-1947 by Pavel Sokolov-Skalya and Andrei Plotnov. I viewed it when I was in Málaga, Spain in November where I visited a branch of Saint Petersburg's excellent Russian Museum. It was holding a year-long (ending February 2019) exhibit titled "The Radiant Future: Socialist Realism in Art." A fine exhibit. Plenty of paintings, some of which I even knew about before I visited. Of course I took lots of snapshots, including some of The Taking of Sevastopol, shown below. Click on images to enlarge.

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The Crimean port city of Sevastopol was captured by Germany in the summer of 1942 after an eight month siege. The Russians recaptured it in the spring of 1944, this action being the subject of the painting.

Russian soldiers and sailors are shown attacking Germans, a number of whom are in a state of panic. I'm pretty sure this scene is contrived for artistic and propaganda purposes. Such a concentration of men, artillery and a tank would have been quite rare in World War 2. Furthermore, hand-to-hand combat was not a common as in earlier wars, but might have been more prevalent on the Russian front. Most likely the Germans held off the Russians as long as they could using long-range rifle fire and then retired as carefully as they could manage. However, at the crest of the bluff above the city shown here, there would have been some action because a few German troops were needed to delay the Russian advance up the slope. Also, note the falling Russian soldier at the right of this detail photo and compare it to the image below.

Robert Capa's famous, but controversial, photo of a Republican soldier being killed during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. The pose isn't identical to that of the figure in the painting, but there are similarities -- note the forward legs and the pant leg cloth folds in each image.

Panning to the right. Again the soldiers and sailors are packed tightly for reasons of drama. The background city view reflects that most of the building in Sevastopol were damaged during the earlier siege. I wonder if one artist painted the city and other background features while the other concentrated on the soldiers.
The term"tag-team" in the title of this post has to do with a feature of American professional wrestling whereby two two-man teams participate. Only two opponents are in the ring at one time, but team members can be substituted if the man in the ring touches (tags) his teammate waiting outside the ropes.

Marcello Piacentini (1881-1960) was an important Italian architect whose career spanned the years from eclectic Classicism through Mussolini-vintage modernism to postwar modernism. His English Wikipedia entry is here, but the one in Italian has much more detail.

I was in Italy in Novemeber and came across two of his works. One was the Tribunale di Messina -- Messina courthouse. The project began in 1912 but the Great War interrupted work until the early 1920s. It was completed in 1927 and dedicated the following year.

The other was the former Bank of Naples building renovated by Piacentini in 1939 for the 400th anniversary of the creation of the bank (which has gone through many name and management changes: it's now Intesta Sanpaolo). Some background is here.

They are of interest because they bookend the era of what is called "Fascist Architecture," a term I find somewhat misleading. The basic style is similar to the stripped-down ornamentation buildings found in non-fascist countries such as the United States in the 1930s.

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The Messina courthouse, a large, sprawling building. Piacentini modified some exterior design details when construction was resumed after the Great War. Technically, this was pre-Mussolini and not "Fascist." However, modernist influence is present in that ornamentation is fairly limited, though not to the extremes found ten or 15 years later.

Window detail on the side of the building. Note the deterioration.

An entrance on a side wing. Classical elements, but severely styled. Again, some damage above the sculpted head.

Corner of a side wing. Considerable undecorated areas, harking to the future style.

Banco di Napoli, renovated by 1939.

As it appeared in 1929, before its renovation.

Showing plaque noting the 1939 renovation.

Main entrance. Mussolini-era modern featured little ornamentation. Windows and entrances became the main "decorative" elements. Arched shapes were common, something International Style architects and critics probably frowned upon because those arches were usually non-functional.

Plaque citing the bank's 1539 founding. Note the sculpture on the wall.

Close-up view of the sculpture. These sculptures are the main ornamentation besides the forms used for windows and entrances.

In November I visited the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (National Archaeological Museum, Naples) to view the better-quality paintings unearthed in Pompeii and nearby areas covered with the ash of Mt. Vesuvius. What remains on-site is generally badly faded or otherwise of poor quality.

This post deals with depictions of people because I've long been curious as to how good Classical era artists were at this. The problem is, paintings on wood, walls and other material are pretty perishable over two or more millennnia. So aside from Pompeii and some Roman-era Egyptian paintings, few portraits exist from those times.

I find it interesting that in most times and places sculptors did a much better job of depiction than painters. This seems to be true for Roman art if the Pompeii findings are any clue. Were the artists working in Pompeii as skilled as those in Rome itself? Probably not. Pompeii was a resort area before its destruction, so I suppose the painters working there were not much less able than those in the capital.

Another consideration is that the Pompeii paintings were found on walls. Painting on walls is less handy than on boards and canvasses that can be tilted or otherwise manipulated to suit a painter's needs at any given time. That is, wall painting can be awkward and the results might show it.

Many of the paintings displayed in the museum dealt with legendary subjects, so artists often didn't have the constraint of depicting real people. A result is that a number of faces are rather stilted versions of idealized faces seen on Greek and Roman statues. Others display more personality. And of course there is variation in the skill of the painters working in the decades before the AD 79 eruption.

Below are some snapshots I took using my iPhone. Click on them to enlarge.

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This probably shows a mask, but it has a lot of character.

A pair of images showing suspicion. The strong shading is unusual.

Women almost always were given whiter skin than men.

This reminds me of Roman-Egyptian portraits I've seen.

A bit of comedy or commentary here.

Interesting documentation of Roman helmets.

Note the shiny bells on the column. Here and in many of the other images artists exaggerated the size of eyes.

Good work on the man's expression, but he seems slightly off-balance.

This and some other paintings show that Pompeii artists were able to deal reasonably well with skin tones.

I find the disheveled hair at the left interesting and unique.

I wrote about automobile illustrator Walter Gotschke (1912-2000) here and here.

As I mentioned in the first link, "It seems that Gotschke was self-taught, but had little trouble understanding how to portray machines and settings accurately with strong doses of atmosphere and emotion. When necessary, he could change his style to tight rendering. Sadly, he started losing eyesight around 1985 and was blind by 1990, some ten years before his death."

Although I've viewed his work in publications for many years, I don't recall ever seeing one of his illustrations in person. Until recently. In February I visited the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, California. It has a fabulous collection of French cars mostly from the 1920s and 1930s. There also was a small section devoted to automotive art that included one of Gotschke's "impressionist" style illustrations that I photographed and present below in a detail.

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To set the scene, here is a typical Gotschke car race illustration I found on the Internet. It depicts ace German driver Rudi Caracciola in a Mercedes-Benz SSK at Semmering-Bergrenne in 1928.

And this is my reference photo of the illustration at the Mullin museum. It shows French driving ace René Dreyfus in 1930 at Monaco driving a Bugatti.

Then I took a close-up photo of the lower-left part. The inscription is to Dreyfus, adding interest to the illustration. Although Gotschke included a good deal of mostly thinly-painted overstrikes to create a sense of both movement and instantaneous capture, beneath all this is solid drawing. That is, the general impression is of sketchiness, but the basis is solid, carefully done depiction. Besides accurately portraying the cars, Gotschke also captures the men. Note Dreyfus's right arm. Also the pose, facial expression, clothing, and light and shade on the photographer at the right. (Click on this image to enlarge.)

During the early years of the Soviet Union many younger painters embraced Modernism. This was a continuation of a process that had been going on during Czarist days: the appeal of the avant-garde. Modernism's appeal was further fed by the idealistic notion among Bolshevik-leaning artists that the Revolution created a great opportunity to cast aside the past and build a future both better than and distinct from the bourgeois past.

Vladimir Lenin died in January, 1924 while modernist painting was still prevalent, and there is no way of knowing what would have happened to Soviet art had he lived to, say, age 70 in 1940. However, it is known that he did not favor extreme Modernism. Because his health began to fail in 1921 and following his 1922 stroke his active influence regarding Soviet artistic practices was probably limited. Which is why it took his successor Josef Stalin to complete the job of eliminating Modernism as state-supported art.

The emergence of what became known as Socialist Realism began with the 1932 decree calling for a universal artists union. More details are here. Considerable background regarding this is in the second chapter of this book. Regarding Socialist Realist painting style, Matthew Cullerne Brown writes on page 92:

"Stalin laid upon these artists the task of establishing their brand of realism, based on the methods of the Itenerants [a 19th century group of Russian painters] and Russian academics, as the dominant one. This approach reflected both Stalin's personal tastes (cf. his fondness for [Ilya] Repin) and his understanding that the resulting art would be the most easily understood by the masses; it would be both popular and, as a story-telling art, the best vehicle for propaganda."

In the logic of totalitarian statecraft, Stalin's position was entirely rational.

It took until the later 1930s for Socialist Realism to become established. Most artists complied for reasons ranging from ideological commitment to matters of personal well-being. Some artists remained true to earlier ideals and had to eke out a living. A few such as Lev Vyazmenski and Yakov Tsirelson were purged and liquidated in 1938.

When I was in Málaga, Spain in November I visited a branch of St. Petersburg's excellent Russian Museum. It was holding a year-long (ending February 2019) exhibit titled "The Radiant Future: Socialist Realism in Art." A fine exhibit. Plenty of examples, some of which I even knew about before I visited. Of course I took lots of snapshots. Some were of a few paintings made before and during the early years of the implementation of Socialist Realism. They are hardly representative of the Soviet artistic scene of 1930-1934, but provide a sense of modernist-influenced politically-themed art still considered acceptable. Click on the images to enlarge.

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Kuprin, Aleksandr - Steelmaking - 1930
The steelmaking equipment is given better detail than the workers in the foreground.

Adlivankin, Samuel - We Will Close the Gap - 1930
This seems to be an industrial setting where production targets are in danger of not being attained. The workers are about to heroically reach or even surpass those goals via collective action.

Adlivankin, Samuel - At Collective Farm Headquarters Before the Assault on the Gap - 1931
The same situation, but in a rural setting. In these two paintings the style is modernist-influenced, but basically representational bordering on being cartoon-like.

Dymschyz-Tolstaya, Sofia - Agitator Worker - 1931
A rather sickly-looking subject, hardly the strong sort of personality one might expect for a man in that role. The style here carries a whiff of Expressionism.

Lizak, Israil - Portrait of the Blacksmith S. Petran (Study) - 1934
Here we find faint Cubist overtones.

Lizak, Israil - Portrait of the Steel Founder Andrei Krylov (Study) - 1934
A softer portrayal by the same artist. Getting closer to actual Socialist Realism, but still a ways from its classic forms. That this is a study and not a completed work might account for some of its style.

Gordon Hope Grant (1875-1962) began his career as an illustrator but gradually shifted to producing marine paintings and lithographs. A short Wikipedia entry is here. It does not mention that Grant, born in San Francisco, was sent to Scotland for schooling. That involved months at sea on a sailing vessel rounding the Horn. He studied art in London before returning to America, where he then lived in New York City.

Many of his works seem to be undated, and for this post, I make little attempt to guess when they were made. However, I did my best to arrange them in approximate chronological order.

From images found on the Internet, Grant's marine art was much better than his early illustrations, though he had the skills to have made better illustrations. Perhaps expectations of art directors in the early 1900s was a factor. His 1930s Saturday Evening Post covers (not shown here) were done fairly well.

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Puck cover - 1909

Puck Cover - February 1912
Many early illustrations featured pretty women.

Army recruiting poster - c. 1919
Pretty static. I would have been inclined to give the background Rhine castle more emphasis to appeal to a sense of adventure with more to it than holding a rile.

Arching Elms - lithograph
Nice use of shade.

Old Windjammer - lithograph
Strong composition.

Photo of Grant working on painting of USS Constitution (Old Ironsides) for the White House - 1926

Watercolor paintings similar to White House USS Constitution painting
I could find no image of the oil version.

Pulling in the Fish Net
Nice atmospherics here.

Fishwharves, Gloucester
Watercolor.

Clear for Action, USS Chester - lithograph
Judging by the biplane aircraft, this was probably made before 1941.

Photo of cruiser USS Chester CA 27
Although the pose is similar, this photo was World War 2 vintage because the tripod foremast has been changed to accommodate radar.

Task Group 21-6 Patrols the Atlantic (America Rises to the Challenge)
A World War 2 painting. The positioning of the carrier, destroyer and cruiser is wrong. So is the perspective. If this were reality, a three-way collision was in the offing. Chalk it up to artistic license with the goal of dramatization.

Leslie Saalburg (1897-1974) was highly successful for most of his long illustration career. This despite the fact that his style changed little -- often the cause of a career foundering when illustration style fashions changed. Some of this had to do with timing. His use of India Ink pen outlining and watercolor or perhaps colored ink washes to fill areas was in line with 1920s fashion illustration styles and also the general illustration shift from heavy oil paints to washes during the 1930s. By the 1950s Saalburg thickened his washes for some of his work as a slight concession to later style trends, but the results remained easily identifiable as his work.

Although many Saalburg illustrations can be found on the Internet, biographical information is sparse. One site with a good deal of information regarding his work and working practices is here, though it has little about his personal life. For what it's worth, I can add that, although he was American, he was born in London and died in Paris -- fitting places given the scenes he usually portrayed.

An illustrator a decade older than Saalburg who had a similar career with regard to style and subject matter was Lawrence Fellows (1885-1964) who I wrote about here.

Below are some examples of Saalburg's work.

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Women's fashion illustration from 1929.

Men's fashion illustration.

British country clothes.

Illustration for Nettleton shoes advertisement.

Page from Esquire magazine.

French Line advertisement from 1933.

Saalburg also made many illustrations for series dealing with classic automobiles. Shown here is a 1933 Packard Dual-Cowl Phaeton.

1933 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow, Brooklyn Bridge in the background.

1937 Cord 812 Convertible Coupe.

1954 Buick Skylark pictured at West Point.

Aleksandr Pavlovich Bubnov (1908–1964) was, in my judgment, one of the most skilled of Soviet-era painters. And that's saying a lot, because while Western art had degenerated into Modernism where skill was largely irrelevant, Russian artists were "encouraged" by the State to retain circa-1890 standards. There is little about Bubnov in English on the Internet, though some information can be found here and here.

Although he painted obligatory paintings featuring Joseph Stalin, Bubnov's true interest seems to have been the semi-mythic Russian past. The Great Patriotic War (the Soviet label for World War 2) interrupted the Socialist Realism of the 1930s that featured idealized views of life under Communism. In its place, again encouraged by the State, Soviet artists often created paintings harking to historical triumphs of Russian arms. Bubnov's great example of this is shown below along with some of his other works.

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At the Congress of Collective Farmers
Probably painted in the late 1930s, this is typical of much Soviet art from those times.

Young Oleg on Campaign
One of a series of paintings featuring Oleg, who I'm guessing was not a historical figure.

Boris Godunov
A successor to Ivan the Terrible who became the subject of a play by Pushkin and an opera by Mussorgsky.

Tale illustration - 1946
This painting and the two previous ones feature strong, wide brushwork.

Taras Bulba
A character in a Gogol novel set in an earlier century.

Morning on the Kulikovskoye Field - 1943-1947
Bubnov's greatest work, in my opinion. It deals with the Battle of Kulikovo 8 September 1380 where early Russians defeated the Tatars who ruled large parts of the country. Started during the war and completed two years after, this painting won the Stalin Prize for painting in 1948. Click on it to enlarge and get a better view of how Bubnov composed the figures and handled the atmospherics.

Grain - 1948
A postwar scene.

In the Field - 1958-1960 (detail)
My photo of part of a painting showing farm workers. Click to enlarge and view Bubnov's brushwork.

Our cruise ship docked at Naples and, I suspect, most of the passengers going ashore had signed up for tours of Pompeii and other sites on the far side of the Bay of Naples.

Not me. Been there done that a couple of times. But I'd previously spent only two or so hours in Naples and really wanted to visit the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (National Archaeological Museum, Naples). That's because it has a collection of the better-preserved wall paintings from places covered by Vesuvius' ash. (What's left on-site is mostly low-quality in terms of preservation.)

In this post I deal with how Roman artists dealt with situations calling for one-point perspective. That is, where buildings or parts of them are portrayed.

Geometrically-derived linear perspective wasn't discovered until about the time of the Renaissance, though some Classical artists were aware of its general effect and attempted to include that in their work. Sadly, aside from the buried art in and around Pompeii, little has survived due to its perishable condition (as compared to robust sculptural art).

Here is an interesting article dealing with Pompeiian perspective. Precise single vanishing points are not found, though clusters of convergences in small areas are. The article makes the further claim that in the real world we don't really observe one-point perspective aside from limited circumstances, this due to eyeball movement as we view things.

Here are some snapshots I took of items in the museum depicting structures. Click on images to enlarge.

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The face at the top is of a mask. Assuming a high viewing point, the receding lines of the tall yellow building roughly approximate linear perspective. Other structural objects do not.

Two related paintings. Linear perspective is essentially absent here.

Perspective here seems mostly isometric.

Only the buildings at the left have a sense of perspective.

The central (framed) structure with multiple columns relates to the upper part of the projecting structure to the left, which otherwise is isometric. The tiled roof is completely at odds with perspective.

The main structures depicted here exhibit a cluster of vanishing points not far from where Renaissance painters would place a single point. Only the structure with columns at the left deviates seriously.

When I was in Málaga, Spain in November I visited a branch of St. Petersburg's excellent Russian Museum. It was holding a year-long (ending February 2019) exhibit titled "The Radiant Future: Socialist Realism in Art." A fine exhibit. Plenty of examples, some of which I even knew about before I visited. Of course I took lots of snapshots.

One of the featured, huge paintings on display was "Prospectors Writing a Letter to the Creator of the Great Constitution" completed 1937. The "Creator" of that marvelous, idealistic and fraudulent constitution was Josef Stalin, of course.

Its painter was Vasily Nikolayevich Yakovlev (1893-1953), background here, not to be confused with the Vasily Yakovlev (biography here) who was liquidated by Comrade Stalin in a 1938 purge.

What I find interesting is that Yakovlev, consciously or otherwise, borrowed the theme of the famous painting "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire" (Wikipedia entry here) by Ilya Repin (1844-1930), painted over the years 1880-1891.

The letter Repin dealt with was negative in tone and that of Yakovlev was positive, which explains difference in body languages of the subjects.

Images are below. Click on them to enlarge.

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Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire - 1880-1891 - Ilya Repin

Prospectors Writing a Letter to the Creator of the Great Constitution - 1937 - Vasily Yakovlev
One measure of how large this painting is can be seen with reference how close to the floor it had to be hung.

Detail of the central part of the composition. Yakovlev used a hard-edge style. His depiction of clothing reminds me of some of Salvador Dalí's work.

Mario Chiattone (1891-1957) is not nearly as famous as Antonio Sant'Elia (1888-1916), who I wrote about here. Both were architectural theoreticians caught up with extending the ideas of Otto Wagner while embracing the Italian Nuovo Tendenze and Futurist movements (Chiattone less so for the latter than was Sant'Elia).

I could find almost nothing about Chiattone on the Internet. A short Italian Wikipedia entry is here. A short sketch in Dutch is here. A longer piece, but with little biographical information is here, though it has many examples of Chiattone's and Sant'Elia's drawings.

The most detailed information I have is from this book. On pages 99-100 Esther da Costa Meyer writes:

"The only other architect [besides Sant'Elia] in the [Nuove Tendenze] group, Mario Chiattone, is a key figure in the understanding of Sant'Elia. Young, wealthy, and well schooled, Chiattone had a thorough grounding in modern art. His father, Gabrielle Chiattone, himself an artist and connoiseur of contemporary art, became one of the earliest patrons of [the Futurists] Boccioni and Carrà. Sant'Elia and Chiattone met in 1909 at Brera, where both were studying architecture... Between 1913 and 1914 they shared a studio building owned by Chiattone's father...

"On the whole it was Chiattone, not Sant'Elia who presented the most dazzling and, with the benefit of hindsight, the most prophetic vision of the modern metropolis... But although the verticalism is more pronounced and the antihistoricism more radical, this cityscape is less complex than Sant'Elia's. There is less emphasis on circulation, and the traffic levels are limited to two. Unlike [Sant'Elia's] Città Nuova, it is situated on the waterfront, although water itself is not exploited for transportation.

"Surprisingly enough, while Sant'Elia's projects were extolled for their modernity, Chiatttone was all but ignored by the critics [of the Nuove Tendenze exhibit]... Why Chiattone's contemporaries failed to notice him remains a mystery."

I do not know if Chiattone served in the Great War (Sant'Elia was a junior officer and killed in action). But by the early 1920s he had moved to Ticino, the Italian-speaking Swiss canton where it seems he spent the rest of his life.

Gallery

Sant'Elia - combined train and aircraft terminal, 1914.

Sant'Elia - Città Nuova scene.

Sant'Elia study.

Chiattone - Buildings for a Modern Metropolis, 1914.

Chiattone - City with raised railways, 1914.

Chiattone- Industrial building - 1914.

Chiattone - Apartment building with balconies.

Chiattone - Cathedral.

King George V (1865-1936, reigned 1910-1936) was photographed many times, but seems to have had surprisingly few painted portraits made of him. Most of the ones I was able to find on the Internet are shown below. His son, King George VI, whose reign was about half as long had more portraits made, if what can be found on the Internet is any guide. I also find it interesting that George V was portrayed by few of the leading British portrait artists of his time. Information on the life of King George is here.

Gallery

By the Lafayette photography firm - 1926
Reference photo.

By John Berrie
Shown as colonel of his army regiment. His early career was as an active-duty officer in the Royal Navy, the army connection shown here was ceremonial. I think this is the least well-done of the set, especially due to the unconvincing depiction of the King's body. Perhaps Berrie did the head during sittings and painted the uniform dressed on a mannequin in his studio .

By Isaac Snowman
Another lesser work. I have no date for this, but it was probably painted early in George V's reign.

By Oswald Birley - 1928
Here the King is not dressed in ceremonial attire.

By Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope - 1928
A formal royal portrait. His dress naval uniform beneath the robe is nearly the same as the one below, pictured 17 years earlier.

By Sir Luke Fildes - 1911
This is a portrait of George V in his coronation robes.

By Solomon J. Solomon - 1914
Solomon is probably best known for his non-portrait work. This panting is more of a sketch than a finished work, and it's not signed. It's the only "casual" portrayal in the set shown here.

Thornton Oakley (1881-1953) received a BA and an MA in architecture from Dear Old Penn (I went there too), as mentioned in his Wikipedia entry as well as this other fairly lengthy source.

But he became aware of famed illustrator Howard Pyle and his training program down the road from Philadelphia in Chadd's Ford, near the Delaware border. So he dropped the idea of becoming an architect and learned illustration, making a successful career at it.

Pyle did not deal much or at all on the mechanics of making art. Instead, he stressed psychological factors of picture-making, having to do the the artist becoming intellectually, emotionally and theatrically involved with the subject.

Nearly all of Pule's students went on to careers in illustration, some highly successful ones, making illustrations dealing with people in historical or fictional settings. Not so Oakley. Much of his work had to do with industrial scenes having little or nothing in the way of story-telling. Perhaps his architectural training and interests had something to do with this, though he often sought to dramatize his scenes Pyle-like.

Gallery

Broadway scene
An early illustration.

The Betsy Ross House
Another work not typical of his later production.

Building Military Airplanes
Probably created in 1917 or 1918, showing airplanes destined for non-European service. Planes to be used in France during the Great War were given roundel insignia similar to those of the UK and France, but with the outer band painted red, the middle one blue and the central dot white.

Building the Manhattan Bridge over the East River
The bridge was completed in 1909, but I'm not sure when this illustration was. For many years Oakley tended to favor vertical formats for his industrial illustrations as seen here, the preceding image and the two following ones.

Ocean Liner Passenger Terminal
These passengers have completed customs inspection and now need to find ground transportation.

Mills
Oakley usually included a few workers, sometimes to feature them at their tasks, or in this case to provide scale.

Radio-Telephone Control Room
This looks somewhat like a matte painting for a sci-fi movie.

Subway Platform, 34th Street
Probably painted in the very late 1930s or early 1940s, judging by the length of the red-orange skirt the nearest woman is wearing.

West Side New York Bus Terminal
From about the same period. Here Oakley's style had shifted to the sketchier, watercolor-influenced illustration fashion that began in the early 1930s.

Loading a C-47 Transport
From about 1943, judging by the red-bordered insignia on the aircraft. Actually, most of the planes are C-47s, but the tail of the second aircraft in line is that of a Curtiss C-46. So Oakley clearly was painting this on-site or working from a reference photo. And paying good attention.

Some Soviet Social Realism paintings were very large, and a number of these were group portraits with large casts. Often the groups portrayed were Party leaders or members of prominent Russian organizations. Others were of common folks.

When I was in Málaga, Spain in November I visited a branch of Saint Petersburg's excellent Russian Museum. It was holding a year-long (ending February 2019) exhibit titled "The Radiant Future: Socialist Realism in Art." A fine exhibit. Plenty of examples, some of which I even knew about before I visited. Of course I took lots of snapshots. Examples of some of those group portraits are shown below. Click on images to enlarge.

Gallery

Odintsov, V.G. - Sergei Kirov in Astrakhan in 1919 - 1940-49
This painting's composition seems peculiar. Which man is Kirov? (A prominent Bolshevik later assassinated in 1934, possibly on orders from Stalin and then treated as a hero for political purposes.) Is Kirov the man in dark clothes toward the upper left who appears to be gesturing, but actually is holding onto a line? Or is he the man towards the upper right in a light jacket and khaki uniform? I guess the latter because he is better lighted and at least a few people in the lower center of the picture are looking at him. But why are most other folks not paying him attention? Also note that the composition is in the form of an X, but where the lines cross there is only the side of a man's head.

Left side details.

Right side details.

Lukomsky, Ilya - Meeting of a Factory Party Committee - 1937
Some background regarding the painting is in this book. On page 108 Matthew Cullerne Brown writes:
"[T]the subject of which is a komsomol [Party youth organization] member's acceptance into the party, depicts the actual membership of the Stalinogorsk communist party at the time. The applicant stands at the left, answering with anxious resolve questions put to him by the committee. The painting lacks drama, but the social importance of its theme -- this moment was advertised as being the most significant in a person's life -- caused it to be widely discussed in the art press of the time."

This painting has a whiff of the primitive to it, but I don't know if this was a purposeful affect or the artist's actual style.

Nalbandian, Dmitri - For the Happiness of the People (Session of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party) - 1949
The room shown here is not at all fancy. Was Stalin's Kremlin actually like this, or did the artist make the place appropriately proletarian?

Detail of the pervious image. Among those easily identifiable are Anastas Mikoyan (standing, with mustache), Nikita Kruschchev (to the right of Mikoyan), Vyacheslav Molotov (seated, wearing glasses), and Josef Stalin (in uniform, drawing on the map).

Efanov, Vasily - Session of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR - 1951
Efanov, also rendered as Yefanov, was perhaps the best Socialist Realist portrait painter. Here he creates a believable scene with some attendees focusing on the lecturer, others doing other things. At the far left is a man reading something, and there are others scattered across the room doing the same. At the center rear is an attractive secretary in pink, the only cast member in sunlight (Efanov liked to depict pretty young women). Viewing it all are sculptural busts of Lenin and Stalin.

Detail view. Nice study of the old gent wearing a hat and sporting medals on his suit jacket.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) seems forever linked to the French Impressionists. Although he was involved with their exhibitions, the styles he used over his career were considerably different from those of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, archetypical Impressionists. A long Wikipedia entry on Degas is here.

The present post presents some of his earlier paintings, most from when he was under 35 years old. They were painted before the first exhibit of Impressionist works in 1874 the year Degas turned 40, though the movement had begun to form in the early 1860s. Into the 1860s Degas' style tended to be traditional, but not hard-core Academic.

Gallery

René De Gas - c. 1855
The artist's younger brother who later ran up large debts in New Orleans that Edgar took it upon himself to repay.

René-Hillaire De Gas - 1857
Degas' grandfather.

An Old Italian Woman - 1857
He spent the late 1850s in Italy.

The Daughter of Jephtha - 1859-60
A classical theme, but not painted in a truly Academic manner: an academician would consider it "unfinished," which it literally is.

Young Woman with Ibises - 1860-62
Most of the detailing is on her garment. Note the imaginary cityscape in the background -- here Degas seems to be influenced by the Renaissance paintings he studied in Rome.

Portrait of a Lady in Gray - c. 1865
Degas had the habit of not finishing his paintings. Here the woman's face and upper body seem completed, but her arm and hand are sketched in.

The Bellelli Family - 1858-1867
Perhaps Degas' best-known early work, depicting his Italian relatives.

The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans - 1873
Painted years later than the others, but its style remains essentially traditional. However, note what seems to be forced perspective of the room.

Stanley M. Arthurs (1877-1950) was one of the earliest select students of famed illustrator Howard Pyle. Arthurs first encountered Pyle at the Drexel Institute in west Philadelphia near the Penn campus where Pyle was teaching art. (I myself once taught there: an introductory Sociology class while I was a grad student at Penn.)

Pyle decided to continue teaching at his home base in the Wilmington Delaware - Brandywine Pennsylvania area -- but instructing only those who he considered had great professional potential. The result was something now referred to as the Brandywine School of illustration.

The most lengthy biography I could find on the Internet regarding Arthurs was in this PDF file. Below is an extraction of that part of the document.

"Stanley Massey Arthurs was born November 27, 1877, to Nancy and Joshua Arthurs, in Kenton, Delaware, where Joshua Arthurs owned a general store. Arthurs was interested in art as a boy, and, after leaving school, he studied in Wilmington with Clawson Hammitt, who urged him to study with Howard Pyle. Convinced of his talent, Pyle enthusiastically accepted him as a student. In 1897 Arthurs joined the classes Pyle was teaching at Drexel Institute, and in 1898 he was invited to attend the summer scholarship classes at Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. His first illustration was published in the December 2, 1899 issue of Harper's Weekly. When Pyle left Drexel to open his own school in Wilmington, Arthurs went with him and worked in one of the studios Pyle had built for the school. When Pyle died in 1911, Arthurs purchased his studio and, until he died, led a quiet, solitary life there, dedicated to his work. He lectured occasionally at the Wilmington Academy and did some teaching in his studio.

Although Arthurs illustrated a great deal of popular literature, his real specialty was illustrating historical texts. His pictures were as historically accurate as he could make them. He did several murals of historical subjects for the State House in Dover, Delaware, and for the Minnesota State capitol building and produced a long series of historical paintings for DuPont Company calendars and the DuPont Magazine. Many of these were published in book form in the American Historical Scene in 1935. The historical illustrations occupied most of Arthurs' attention after 1920, but he also painted landscapes, not only of local scenes but also in Florida, the Western states, and Europe.

Source: Elzea, Rowland and Elizabeth H. Hawkes, eds. A Small School of Art: The Students of Howard Pyle. Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1980."

Examples of Arthurs' work are presented below. I find his painting style a bit too heavy for my taste, but it was mainstream -- especially in the period 1900-1920.

Gallery

Death of Modred - 1906
Modred was a traitor to King Arthur.

Old Boston Post Road
Two illustrations from an article Arthurs wrote for the November 1908 issue of Scribner's Magazine.

Woman with Parasol - c. 1905

The Third Minnesota Entering Little Rock - Minnesota State Capitol mural
Civil War Scene.

Franklin the Printer - 1915
Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia.

Waiting at the Ford - 1915

The Fleet - 1912
A somewhat sloppy work. I don't know if this was simply a sketch or if it was published. The warships are not convincingly portrayed -- too sketchy and the perspective seems off.

America's Answer to the Submarine - c. 1918
A Great War vintage illustration supporting the war effort, though I don't know where it was published. Arthurs seems to have used artistic license here because submarines were usually destroyed using depth charges. Unless they were caught on the surface, as shown here. But about the only way a German submarine could be caught on the surface by a warship this closely would be if it had been damaged by a depth charge and had to surface. Fortunately for Arthurs, most viewers were probably ignorant of anti-submarine warfare, so such details didn't really matter.

Trimming the Tree
Probably from around 1926. The reproduction was intended to be two-color, a common magazine practice in those days.

New Year's Eve - 1928

Admirals Descended from Artists

Daphne du Maurier's Sister Jeanne's Paintings

The Naval Art of Henry Reuterdahl

Melbourne Brindle, Illustrator and "Car Guy"

A Soviet Tag-Team Painting

Two Building by Marcello Piacentini

Pompeii People Portrayals

Up Close: Walter Gotschke

Transitioning to Socialist Realism

Gordon Grant, Illustrator and Marine Painter

Fashions and Automobiles by Leslie Saalburg

Aleksandr Bubnov's Historical Pantings

Perspective in Pompeii Paintings

Vasily Yakovlev Echoes Ilya Repin

Mario Chiattone - Overshadowed by Antonio Sant'Elia

Molti Ritratti: King George V

Thornton Oakley, Howard Pyle's Atypical Student

Examples of Socialist Realism Group Portraits

In the Beginning: Edgar Degas

Stanley Arthurs, Early Howard Pyle Student