Art Contrarian

Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), whose most famous painting Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio --Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash -- 1912, shown above, spent part of his career as a Futurist, Futurism being one of Italy's two main contributions to early modernist art (the other is Giorgio de Chirico's Metaphysical Art).

Balla's Wikipedia entry mentions that he had training at Turin academies and then went to Rome where he painted portraits and did commercial art to earn a living. At some point before 1900 he took up Divisionism, related to Claude Monet- style Impressionism. Then, as Wikipedia states (as of 1 January 2019):

"Around 1902, he taught Divisionist techniques to Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. Influenced by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla adopted the Futurism style, creating a pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed. He was a signatory of the Futurist Manifesto in 1910."

So Balla's friendship with Boccioni and Severini, who were early converts to Marinetti's Futurism, seems to have led to his knowledge of and participation in that movement when he was about 40 years old. For a while. Hard-core Futurism and other 1900-1914 modernist movements had lost much of their fizz by 1920, and Balla's style drifted back towards conventional representation by the 1930s.

Gallery

Famiglia Carelli. Effetto sera - c. 1901
Divisionist-lite dual portrait, the title stating "evening effect."

Lampada ad arco (Street Light) - 1909 dated, though 1910-11
Perhaps Balla's earliest Futurist painting.

Accelerazione (Gaining Speed) - 1912
Note his signature at the lower left. He often signed his Futurist paintings FUTUR BALLA.

Velocità astratta + rumore (Abstract Speed + Sound) - 1912-13
This is actually a very early European abstract painting.

Velocità astratta (Abstract Velocity) - 1913
Some Cubist influence here.

Velocità d'automobile (Speeding Automobile) drawing - 1913

Expansion of Spring - 1918
Although Balla's signature includes FUTUR, he is drifting from Futurism.

Circular Planes - 1924
An abstraction -- now FUTUR has become FUT.

Fanciulla pensosa (Fanciulla Pondering)- 1932

Chiacchierì (Chatting) - 1934
Two conventional, nicely made paintings. The one immediatey above seems to show some Balla paintings in the background.

William Orpen (1878-1931), who I wrote about here, is best known as a portrait painter. Biographical information is here.

During the Great War, Orpen became a war artist attached to the British Army, painting scenes of combat areas and related subjects. Naturally, he also made portraits. Some of these were of enlisted men and junior or mid-level officers. Others were of leading officers and statesmen. In 1919, after the war was over, he painted a series of "unfinished" appearing portraits of leading Army and Royal Navy personalities. Perhaps he left these seemingly incomplete because he painted so many of them and lacked time to make them look finished. They mostly are signed, so Orpen must have regarded them as finished. I find these generally more interesting than his more traditionally-done military portraits.

Gallery

Winston Churchill - 1916
Andrew Roberts, in his recent biography of Churchill states that this was the portrait Churchill though best of himself. It was painted after he returned from the Western Front where he had commanded a battalion for several months.

Douglas Haig
Commander of the British Army in France during most of the war.

Hugh Trenchard
Trenchard became commander of the Royal Air Force when it was established in April, 1918. This painting from 1917 and the one of Haig are not "completed," though the use of full background color makes them seem more so than the paintings that follow.

John J. Pershing
This portrait of Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France is one of those seemingly incomplete portraits made in 1919.

Rosslyn Wemyss
Memyss became First Sea Lord (commander) of the Royal Navy after the war. Note how he is posed. The following two painting use similar poses.

Henry Wilson
Wilson became Chief the Imperial General Staff towards the end of the war and was a member of the anti-Haig faction.

T.E. Lawrence
Lawrence of Arabia.

Adrian Carton de Wiart
Carton de Wiart was insanely brave, losing an eye and arm in combat. This failed to prevent him from serving as a general in World War 2.

Ganga Singh
Singh was Maharaja of Bikaner, a general in the Indian Army and a member of the Imperial War Cabinet during the war. Sikhs have long been noted for their warrior qualities.

David Beatty
Beatty commanded battlecruiser squadrons 1914-16 including the battle of Jutland, and then the Grand Fleet, Britain's main naval force.

Carl Erickson (1891-1958) was Vogue magazine's ace fashion illustrator in Paris from about 1925 to 1940 and continued his career at the American edition until his death. His wife, Lee Creelman Erickson also illustrated for the French Vogue and during the early-to-mid 1920s was more prominent than her husband.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find biographical information on Lee. But Eric (as he was called and soon used as his signature) is better documented. For starters, you might link here and here.

Lee's style was comparatively solid and literal, whereas Eric soon blossomed into his characteristic sketchy style. Underlying that sketchy style was a solid grasp of the forms he was interpreting. For that reason, I respect him even though the sketchiness usually was too extreme for my taste.

Gallery

First some images of Lee's work. This illustration is from 1925.

A 1926 illustration. Here and in the image above she signs her full married name.

Finally, an illustration from about 1933. At this point she signs using her married initials in a form similar to that of Eric (see below).

Photo of Eric at work. The bowler hat was habitual attire.

Illustration from around 1925. Here he signs his full name.

By 1929 he was using "Eric." The style here is similar to that of his wife, but freer sketching is on the way.

I'm guessing that was made around 1931. I include it because it shows a car being loaded on a passenger ship. My impression is that fashion illustrators and others who are good at depicting people often do poorly when cars are shown. But here Eric gets the form and perspective correctly even though the car is simply indicated, not rendered. This tells me that he really knew his stuff.

A 1938 illustration showing Eric's mature style.

This was probably done in 1939 after World War 2 started, but before France was defeated. It's a railroad coach scene where the subject might be the woman's attire. Next to her is a French Army lieutenant.

A 1943 illustration made when the Ericksons were in America. Less sketchy than his usual wash illustrations, this is an excellent line drawing.

Another 1943 work, also excellent. To my embarrassment, I do not recognize the subject of this portrait and cannot find that information on the Web: please comment if you know.

Rowland B Wilson (1930-2005) was an animator, an ad agency art director and a cartoonist. He is probably best known to the general public (of a certain age) for the cartooning, and that's what I'll feature in this post.

A brief Wikipedia entry is here. For more details you might want to read his Los Angeles Times obituary.

Although Wilson drew black and white cartoons for The New Yorker, his preference was for full-page cartoons printed in color -- a comparative rarity in the cartooning world. In Wilson's case, it was Playboy Magazine that provided that venue along with advertisements for New England Life, an insurance company.

Viewing a number of his cartoons on the Internet, the things that strike me about Wilson are: (1) his skill at creating believable personalities for his subjects, (2) the large amount of research he must have done to attire those subjects, and (3) the additional research expended to accurately detail the environments in which they were placed.

That is, the jokes were funny, but their context was far more believable than found in run-of-the-mill cartoons. Let's take a look.

Gallery

Playboy
The German planes are Albatros V's and the French fighter is a Nieuport 24 bis. I'm not sure about the escadrille symbol on the side because I couldn't find it in my heap of reference material. Escadrille SPA 48, an outfit that flew SPADs towards the end of the war, used a rooster, but the design was different. The inscription in the upper left corner is to fellow cartoonist/animator Bill Peckmann.

Playboy
The chandelier/window group in the background suggests the Eiffel Tower -- was that intentional on Wilson's part, or is it my fevered imagination?

Playboy
Da Vinci invents the Pizza. Note the earlier signature style.

Playboy
Note the Black Forest type setting and all that architecture.

Playboy
This shows off Wilson's skill in characterization, costumes and posing.

New Yorker
He must have researched Middle Ages crane designs for this cartoon.

New Yorker
Note the East 60s New York City neighborhood evoked by the background.

TV Guide
This was a popular magazine around the 1970s.

New England Life
All the New England Life ads in this campaign had the same caption. Also the setting of impending doom.

New England Life
Another example.

Carlo Carrà (1881-1966) was one of the first Futurist painters, Futurism being a 1910s Italian movement that, in painting, stressed depicting movement. Biographical information on Carrà is here.

From what I could tell from images of his paintings on the Internet, Carrà never painted strictly realist paintings. Some of his earliest works on the Web, painted when he was around age 30, seem Cubist-influenced. Then from about 1911-1915 he made Futurist paintings. Then he became associated with Giorgio de Chirico and his Metaphysical Painting concept. After that, Carrà tended to do cityscapes and landscapes using a simplified, rather rough style.

Examples of his work are below. I find none of them interesting or appealing.

Gallery

Nuotatori (Swimmers) - 1910

Marinetti - 1910-11
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti was the founder of Futurism.

Ritmi di oggetti (Rhythms of Objects) - 1911
This is Futurist because pace and movement are suggested by the title, yet the overall impression is Cubist.

Funerale dell'anarchico Galli Funeral of the Anarchist Galli - 1911
This painting and the following one are Futurist.

Il Cavaliere Rosso, (Cavallo e cavaliere) (The Red Rider) - tempera - 1913

Manifestazione Interventista (Interventionist Demonstration) - collage - 1914

Il cavaliere dello spirito occidentale (Western Horseman) - 1917
At this point Carrà is influenced by de Chirico.

La Musa metafisica (The Metaphysical Muse) - 1917

Le figlie di Loth (The Daughters of Lot) - 1919
Modernists were drifting into a neo- pseudo-classical style at the end of the Great War, and Carrà was keeping up with fashions.

Il faro (The Lighthouse) - 1928
But he still hadn't completely parted from de Chirico's influence.

Il Forte dei Cavalieri di Malta (Fortress of the Knights of Malta) - 1939
By the time this was painted, Carrà seems to have largely departed from doctrinaire Modernism, though was not quite fully free of modernist simplification.

Venezia (Venice) - 1957
A late painting. Crudely done: primitivism combined with lonely de Chirico emptiness.

Fred Ludekens (1900-1982) had a career that varied from the 1930-1960 American illustration norm for leading artists.

For one thing, most of his professional life was spent in San Francisco, far from the New York City media center (though he was there 1939-1945). Moreover, part of that career was as an art director for major advertising agencies. Less unusually, he seems to have been largely self-taught.

There isn't much information regarding him on the Internet, but two sources worth visiting are here and here.

Setting all that aside, Ludekens was skilled at his trade. He did some cover and other work for the Saturday Evening Post, America's leading general-interest magazine at the time. And one of his advertising art clients was General Motors' Chevrolet Division, whose cars were the best-sellers. So from a commercial standpoint, Ludekens was in the front rank.

He also illustrated for True, the leading men's adventure magazine in the 1940s and 1950s.

Below are examples of Ludekens' work.

Gallery

Created about the time he became art director for the San Francisco branch of the Lord & Taylor agency. Fortune was a leading business-oriented magazine, so Ludekens was already on the cusp of major-league illustration.

Two illustrations for Nash-Kelvinator advertisements towards the end of World War 2. The first shows a Marine with a flame-thrower used for attacking Japanese bunkers. The second shows soldiers in Holland taking a break. The Netherlands was largely in the British part of the push towards Germany in 1944, and most American activity there was in the hilly central and eastern part of the country. Ludekens' illustration depicts a flat background with windmills, and a little Web research reveals that the 104th Infantry Division campaigned in the Scheldt River Estuary briefly in the fall of '44. I do not know if Ludekens knew of this comparatively minor detail or simply painted a generic Dutch background for showing American troops in a war zone.

Saturday Evening Post cover.

Two Chevrolet advertisements, the first for the 1948 model year, the second for 1953 Chevrolets. The latter's setting is San Francisco's California Street heading up Knob Hill, so Ludekens didn't have to travel far to research this. The '48 Chevy is not quite depicted accurately (they looked a bit higher and stubbier in reality) while the 1953 model is considerably distorted. But that was normal for automobile publicity illustration in those days.

Cover for True.

Story illustration for True. Ludekens illustrated many Western scenes.

Southern Pacific Railroad poster, probably from the early 1950s. Since it's advertising, the train has more coaches that it likely actually had. Also, I'm not sure if the Oregon background is actual -- so let's consider the publicity photo below:

Ludekens probably used this photo as reference for the illustration and dramatized the scene to please his client -- or perhaps SP's agency's art director ordered the enhancements.

Another important Ludekens client was the large, Tacoma-based timber company Weyerhaeuser (pronounced Ware-howser in American dialect). He painted a series of illustrations for a long-running ad campaign. The scene might be generic Washington State or could be from a reference photo ... hard to say which. The mountain in the background resembles pre-eruption Mt. St. Helens.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was perhaps the leading portrait artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Wikipedia entry here). I've written about him several times on this blog, so use the Search tool at the right if you are interested in locating and reading those posts.

As expected, most of the portraits he painted were of one subject only. Occasionally he would include two subjects and there were times he dealt with three or more. This post deals with examples of the latter case.

The focus is on composition: how his subjects were posed.

At this late date it's probably impossible to be sure whether those arrangements were by Sargent or if they were influenced by whoever commissioned the paintings. However, odds are it was Sargent's doing, so I'll treat the compositions as his. The images are in chronological order aside from the final one, which was painted first. Click on them to enlarge.

Gallery

The Misses Vickers - 1884
Here we find a sort of V-shape or checkmark shape composition. The young ladies are dressed in different colors and are looking in different directions. The one at the right appears to be looking at the viewer -- if she weren't, then she would tend to drop off the canvas due to her semi-isolated position.

Mrs Carl Meyer and Her Children - 1896
A zig-zag composition starting with the children' faces, proceeding to Mrs. Meyer's face, and then zagging down across her dress towards the lower left. Clearly Mrs Meyers is the prime subject and her kids are incidental because there is little of them to be seen.

The Wyndham Sisters - 1899
This is interesting because the canvas is split diagonally with the upper, dark background and the lower, bright dresses of the subjects. Again, the subjects are looking in different directions. Anchoring the scene is the pretty one in the middle who is gazing back at us.

The Sitwell Family - 1900
This painting is almost completely different. Rather than having the subjects lumped into compositional areas, here they are mostly separate. The main sense is diagonal, though much weaker than in the previous image. Here it runs from towards the upper left to the lower right where the young children are. The red dress of the daughter anchors the upper left because the dark clothes of the father blend with the dark background there. Contrasting the diagonal are the two strong vertical elements of the standing people.

The Acheson Sisters - 1902
This painting gives me the feeling of advertising illustrations from circa-1900. Here the subjects are dressed in the same color and fabric. The faces of the subjects are the apexes of a shallow triangle. Although all the young women face the viewer, their eyes are looking at different places -- a subtle touch that avoids a static feeling that the similar head positions might have created,

Essie, Ruby and Ferdinand, Children of Asher Wertheimer - 1902
Yet another composition of diagonals and triangles. Sargent added the three dark dogs probably at the request of the Wertheimers.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit - 1882
Sargent painted this at age 26, a seemingly young age for creating such an intriguing, unconventional scene. The four girls (plus the doll) are arranged in a kind of trapezoid that overlays some diagonals. The center is largely a dark void, a bold, unconventional choice by the painter. Little seems obvious where the attitudes of the subjects are concerned. In fact, this enigmatic painting has been analyzed repeatedly over the years, and I have nothing new to contribute. A Wikipedia entry dealing with it is here. A review of the book “Sargent’s Daughters” by Erica E. Hirshler that deals with the painting and its subjects is reviewed here. It happened that in later life none of the girls had conventional adulthoods -- something that Sargent perhaps intuited, knowing the family fairly well.

Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) was a leading painter and sculptor associated with the Futurism movement initiated by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, around the time when other modernist literary and artistic movements were bubbling up.

His Wikipedia entry is of sufficient length to provide a reasonable sense of his life and career. Some of the paintings shown below are discussed, along with two of his early, largely representational paintings.

Boccioni was serving in the Italian army when he died as the result of an accident. As the Wikipedia entry notes, this was when he seemed to be drifting away from Futurism. From the images shown there, it seems he was beginning to experiment with styles being used in Paris. How he might have developed had he survived the Great War is unknowable, of course.

Gallery

A 1912 photograph of Boccioni (at left) and Marinetti: two well-dressed aesthetic revolutionaries.

La risata (The Laugh) - 1911
This painting is partly shown at the left of the photo above.

The City Rises - 1910
An early Futurist painting by Boccioni.

Visioni simultanee - 1912

Horizontal Volumes - 1912
The Wikipedia entry has this dated 1915 and cited as a sign that Boccioni was drifting from Futurism. However, most items relating to this work found via Google have its date as 1912. This seems to make sense because this is clearly a Cubist-style portrait similar to what Picasso and some others were painting around that time. Boccioni must have been experimenting here.

Elasticità (Elasticity) - 1912
An important element of Futurist painting was attempting to depict motion.

Testa + luce + ambiente - 1912

Dinamismo di un giocatore di calcio (Dynamism of a football kicker) - 1913
More motion.

Dinamismo di un ciclista (Dynamism of a Cyclist) - 1913
Again, motion.

Carica di lanceri (Charge of the Lancers) - collage - 1915
Futurism was in favor of warfare.

Charles Edward Chambers (1883-1941) was a highly skilled and successful illustrator, though not as famous as some others active 1915-1940 who had more distinctive styles. His Wikipedia entry is here and Society of Illustrators 2010 Hall of Fame induction statement is here.

The Chesterfield billboard illustration above shows Chambers doing some of his best work for an important client. More examples of his illustrations are below. Given the length of his career, I wish that more of the Internet image sources had dates for them. They didn't, so I do a lot of guesswork in the captions.

Gallery

Story illustration from around 1915, to judge by the woman's clothing.

Original art shown here. My guess is it was painted near 1920.

Color illustration from around 1915.

This is called "Fire Dancer" on the Internet and was given c. 1920 as its date.

Man Playing Guitar, from the Kelly Collection. The painterly style suggests influence from early 1920s Dean Cornwell illustrations.

Woman receiving a gift neckless. More smoothly painted, and her dress and hairstyle suggest early 1930s. It's suggestive of J.C. Leyendecker's style, but without the hashing.

Illustration for Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth."

1932 Red Cross poster. The model is PaulineTrue, who became Chambers' second wife.

This story illustration is titled "She Answers the Question." I'm a bit puzzled because the officer's uniform is Great War vintage while the woman's clothing and hairdo are hard for me to date -- somehow seem more modern than 1918. (Though such uniforms were used in post-war years for a while.) The illustration was probably made in the 1930s, based on other examples of Chambers' work

Jules Vallée Guérin (1866-1946) illustrated books, delineated architecture and painted murals. He is best-known (to me, anyway) for his renderings of the 1909 Burnham Plan for Chicago and for his book illustrations of architectural subjects. As an iconic American delineator, Guérin ruled the early 1900s much as Hugh Ferriss did in the 1920s and early '30s.

Guérin's Wikipedia entry is here, covering the main points of his career but lacking in personal information, including his place of death.

Below are examples of his work. Click on images to enlarge.

Gallery

Aerial view of Burnham Plan showing how it would fit into the city's street grid and topographic features. The Civic Center part of it is at the lower center of the rendering.

The Civic Center and its setting as view on high from the direction of the lakefront.

Focal building of the Civic Center.

Two images of the Château de Chenonceau in France's Loire Valley.

Lake and ruins, Karnak, Egypt.

Faneuil Hall, Boston.

Madison Square, New York City.

Washington Arch, in Washington Square, New York City.

Panoramic view of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition, San Francisco.

Lincoln Memorial murals. Color is probably not accurate.

Fred Cole (1893-1983) was an illustrator who seems to have specialized in automobile advertising. I could find little about him on the internet and nothing in my own reference library. Fortunately, the Web did have this link which provides useful information regarding his work and personality.

Among other things, Cole provided the illustration for what many in the advertising trade consider one of the greatest and most influential ads of all time: the Jordan Motor Car Company's "Somewhere West of Laramie."

The are two somewhat opposing advertising content strategies. One is to make a rational case for the product being advertised by dealing with its features. The other is the Jordan approach, eliciting positive emotion regarding a product or the company that makes the product. In practice, most advertisements offer some of each, though in recent decades the tendency is towards emotion, rather than rationality. A case in point are the TV commercials aired during the annual Super Bowl football game.

As for Cole, his car illustrations were unusual in that he left out parts of cars rather than being conventional and depicting the whole thing. That is, cars were suggested rather than portrayed. Even more interesting is that Cole did similar illustration for several carmakers, even during the same model year. One would expect that advertising managers and sales directors would want ads looking distinct from those of competitors. But that was 90 or so years ago, so perhaps the game was played differently then.

Gallery

The famous advertisement from 1923.

Cole illustrated advertisements for the luxury Lincoln brand, this example from 1925. Here most of the car is shown, but not all. This approach works well with the vignette style of the advertisement where incompleteness is expected.

Another Jordan ad, this for a not-sporty 1926 Victoria sedan. Note that Cole entirely omitted the rear wheel.

Chrysler ad from the same year. Here Cole shows only a fragment of the subject.

Yet another 1926 advertisement, this for Oldsmobile, a Chrysler and Jordan competitor.

Artwork for a 1932 Dodge ad that nicely evokes speed..

Most Cole car illustrations imply speed. In this instance he does this by fading out the aft part of the 1935 LaSalle.

LaSalle publicity for 1940. A more solid looking car as Cole makes use of the airbrush rendering style popular around that time.

Dodge truck ad from 1947. Trucks are not flashy, speedy cars, so here Cole's illustration is conventional.

Cross-posted at Car Style Critic.

Sir Henry Clinton - 1777
I normally pay no attention to miniatures. But the above portrait of British General Henry Clinton that I noticed in a book about America's War of Independence caught my eye. It's actually less than two inches (50cm) high, and painted by ace 18th century miniaturist John Smart (1739/40–1811).

What struck me was how persuasive a likeness it seems to be -- as compared to most portraits of any kind from that era. That Smart fellow knew his stuff and occasionally pulled off a truly exceptional job such as seen above.

Background regards Smart can be found here, here, and here. The last link mentions paper and vellum as supports, though their example is on ivory, as is the case for some of the miniatures shown below.

Gallery

Sir William Hood - 1766
The earliest example I could find.

Young woman
Not dated. Smart either had a tendency to depict subjects with small chins -- or maybe that's the way they actually appeared.

Miss Byron

Member of the Talyer Family - 1787
Here Smart for some reason chose not to flatter.

Portrait of "ER"
He spend a number of years in India, so this might be front that period.

Self-Portrait - 1797
Watercolor on Ivory.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) dabbled in many art media, but his subject matter was mostly people. The next rung down included still lifes and bulls. Bringing up the rear of traditional painting subjects was landscapes, the topic of this post. He painted few of these, and apparently most might be classed as townscapes because he included or even featured buildings.

Below are some examples I found on the Internet during a Google search.

Gallery

Barcelona Beach - 1896
Painted when he was about 15 years old and perhaps still being coached by his father. Its relevance to his future styles is minimal.

Barcelona Rooftops - 1902
Yes, this was painted during his 1901-1904 Blue Period.

Paysage aux deux figures - 1908
An early Cubist-type work showing people, but no buildings such as are found in all the other images here.

The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro - 1909.
More solidly Cubist. Fellow Cubist Georges Braque painted quite a few subjects like this around the same time.

Landscape - 1933
Now we reach the point where Picasso was starting to run out of new ideas. Compare this to the image below that was painted 25 yers later.

Landscape - 1958
More Cubism here than in the previous image, and some of the subject surfaces are dappled. It retains the harsh look that Picasso began to practice in the late 1930s.

Gustave Franciscus De Smet (1877-1943) was a Belgian painter who helped found the Flemish Expressionist school of painting. A sketchy Wikipedia entry is here, and you can link to the French version for more information.

As might be expected, I don't find his post- Great War Cubist-influenced Expressionism particularly interesting compared to his Impressionist-influenced earlier work. De Smet was essentially a creature of his time, following various style fads about a decade or two after they had reached their peak influence.

Gallery

Still Life with Apples
I don't have a date for this, but if I had to guess, I'd say it was made in 1910 or before.

Willows Along a Stream - 1912
One of his Impressionist style paintings. Like American Impressionists, De Smet defined the subject matter more distinctly than Uber-Impressionist Claude Monet did.

Vrouw bij Rozelaar (Woman with Roses) - 1912
Although the painting is fairly "flat," the structure behind the women is in reasonably correct perspective.

Summer - 1913
Perhaps De Smet's nicest painting. After it, his work went downhill.

Hoofd van een jonge vrouw (Head of a Young Woman) - 1914
A year later, elements of modernist-inspired distortion enter the scene: note the enlarged eyes.

Artiste et sa femme, Deurle (The Artist and His Wife at Deurle) - 1927
Cubism-lite.

L'homme à la boutelle (Man with Bottle)
The was painted around 1930.

Le port d'Ostende (Port of Ostende)
Compared to "Summer," this is pathetically childlike.

Boerenerf met koeien (Barnyard with Cows) - 1936
This is typical of De Smet's late style.

Hermann Dudley Murphy (1867-1945) was one of those early 20th century Boston School painters that escaped my attention until recently.

Landscape - c. 1903
In February I was viewing the American art part of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and came across the painting shown above by Murphy. Unfortunately, my photo and an image found on the Internet fail to show the rather free and nice brushwork in the foreground area. I was impressed enough to collect some more images of his work for this post.

Biographical information seems scarce on the Web. Some information can be found here (click where it offers more information). A much better source is this one that even includes the details that Murphy was six feet six inches tall and taught drawing at Harvard.

Murphy's earlier work was influenced by Whistler, but he also could produce competent "finished" portraits. He also made landscape and cityscape paintings before eventually doing many paintings of flowers in the later part of his career, perhaps due to the influence of this second wife.

For better or worse, Murphy strikes me as having no distinct style, and this might in part be why he seems less known that a number of his Boston contemporaries.

Gallery

Dutch Nocturne - 1900
Very Whistler-like in its moodiness, its title, and the symbol-signature at the lower right.

Portrait of Henry Ossawa Tanner - 1891-96
An earlier work, a portrait of the painter Tanner.

Mrs. Sarah Skinner - 1905
A traditional kind of portrait. See the second link above mentioning some juicy (in a 1905 Boston Brahmin sense) background on the sitter.

Rio del Paradiso, Venice - 1908
The title seems to be Murphy's invention: I do not know what part of Venice this depicts.

The Beaver Hat - 1920
This is the most "Boston School" painting by Murphy that I found find.

In Taxco - c.1930
A later townscape, but that date is my guess.
Unlike my late wife, I'm not "into" flowers. But if you are, there are plenty of Murphy's flower paintings to be found on the Internet.

Jo Kotula (1910-1998) specialized in illustrating aircraft over a long, successful career. As best I can tell from a Google search, he seems to have done little in the way of aviation art in the form of standalone paintings, unlike the typical professional aviation artist. Kotula's work was mostly in the form of cover art for magazines along with boxtop illustrations for model airplane kits. He also did advertising and editorial art.

Almost nothing about him turned up in that search. The most detailed biographical information is here (scroll down). Another dab is included in an image below.

Gallery

One of the earliest examples I found: December 1933. Note the signature in block letters with his full name. Before long "Josef" became "Jo" and he shifted to cursive script. Shown here is a U.S. Navy dirigible and a Curtiss F9C-2 parasite fighter carried by the airship.

The signature evolves to what seems to be "Jo" while the letters are caps and lower case in this April 1936 cover. The Hawker Hurricane fighter existed only as a prototype at that point, so the combat scene here is pure conjecture.

By 1939 Kotula hit the magazine Big Time in the form of this Saturday Evening Post cover. The aircraft is fictitious, but seems to be inspired by the Douglas DC-4E experimental transport that first flew in 1938.

A cropped portion of what probably was art commissioned by the Brewster firm that built the F2A Buffalo fighter shown here on the aircraft carrier Saratoga. Kotula interprets the Buffalo as being noticeably more svelte than the tubby little beast actually was.

Poster for the U.S. Army Air Forces, probably from 1944.

Model Airplane News cover featuring a 1934-vintage Boeing P-26 fighter. Kotula has distorted the perspective slightly as to include more of the tail.

Model kit box illustration from the 1950s.

Lockheed F-94C Starfire interceptors. This has the appearance of conventional aviation art, though it might have been painted for another purpose. The aircraft strike as as being a trifle more sleek than there actually were.

Again, I'm not sure if tis was cover art or aviation art. The plane is a 1930s Curtiss XF8C dive bomber prototype.

Advertising art from 1958.

An interesting example of an illustration in raw form. The jet transport seems to be conjectural.

Contents page fragment from the April, 1942 Popular Science Magazine with some background on Kotula.

Clip from the November, 1942 Popular Science. During World War 2 several articles and advertisements appeared featuring prospective postwar family airplanes. I shudder to think of the aerial traffic and collisions that would have occurred if these fantasies had become commonplace.

Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880) died aged 50 after a life where he never lived in any one place for more than a few years. His career began around the time that some artists in Paris and the first Italian Macchiaioli began the first stirrings of proto-Modernism. Perhaps aware of this, even though his major works were Classical, Feuerbach's lesser or more casual paintings would be loosely done. This source has him "working in a Romantic style of Classicism."

Wikipedia's English link is here, containing a fair amount of biographical detail. The German site is comparable, though the French and Italian sites are sketchy..

Feuerbach still seems to be well-regarded in Germany where his paintings can be found in major museums. Seattle's Frye Art Museum has a few examples of his work, and the "Old Woman Seated" painting shown below is at the Norton Simon in Pasadena, California.

Gallery

Die Römer der Verfallzeit (Romans of the Decadence) - c. 1850
This early study is in the Frye collection, thought I don't recall having seen it displayed.

Hafis vor der Schenke (Hafiz in His Cups) - 1852
Wikipedia calls this "his first masterpiece." It was painted in Paris.

Self-Portrait - 1852
Feuerbach painted several self-portraits around that time, this being the most dramatic.

Old Woman Seated - 1853
A nice study, not at all Classical.

Nanna (Anna Risi) - 1861
She was his model in Italy for several years. His painting Ruhende Nymphe (Peaceful Nymph), a nude work that's not office-safe looks like it might be her, but is listed as a 1870 work -- probably after their relationship.

Henrirtte Feuerbach (his step-mother) - 1867
She was a strong supporter of Feuerbach.

Gastmahl des Plato (Plato's Symposium) - 1869
A major painting. The German title might also be translated as "Plato's Banquet" (Austrain dialect).

Medea with the Urn - 1873

Titanensturz (Fall of the Titans) - c. 1875
The first biographical link above, in reference to this ceiling painting, states: "In 1873 Feuerbach became a professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and painted for the academy building Fall of the Titans, generally regarded as his weakest work. Ill and discouraged by the harsh criticism of this work, Feuerbach left Vienna in 1876 and returned to Italy, where he died."

Charles H. Hubbell (1898-1971) was an illustrator specializing in depicting aircraft. He is probably best known for his calendar illustrations for Thompson Products, a series that lasted for around 30 years.

Biographical information on Hubbell is sparse on the Internet. Sketchy sources are here and here.

As I've probably mentioned elsewhere, possibly years ago on the 2Blowhards blog and probably here on Art Contrarian, professional aviation art tends to be torn between two approaches. One approach is to meticulously depict an aircraft, perhaps even to the point of showing rivets on the metal (if there were any on the actual airplane). This tends to please a certain breed of airplane fan who expect the illustration to show everything. The other approach tends toward somewhat painterly, somewhat impressionistic views of aircraft. Here planes are depicted correctly in terms of their dimensions and the perspective from which they are viewed. But details are more selectively chosen, usually with one area in tighter focus in the way humans actually see things. Hubbell leaned towards the latter approach, though his skill level fell short of later aviation artists such as R.G. Smith, who I mentioned here.

Below are examples of Hubbell's work. Most or all are from those calendars, and most were probably painted 1946-1949. The first five Great War images from the 1947 calendar are those I viewed on my bedroom wall when I was young, my dad having obtained one of those calendars.

Gallery

This shows some American Army DH-4 reconnaissance bombers under attack.

Balloon busting by a Royal Flying Corps S.E.5. This was far more dangerous than it looks because observation balloons were normally heavily defended by anti-aircraft guns.

Canadian ace Billy Bishop is shown downing what looks to be an Albatross.

America's top ace Eddie Rickenbacker in action.

The final seconds of Manfred von Richtofen's life. Whether the Red Baron was shot down by a fighter or by ground fire can never be resolved, so Hubbell includes both possibilities in this illustration.

Army Air Corps P-26 "Peashooters," active in the early/mid 1930s. Theories vary, but I am convinced that unofficial nickname was due to the long, peashooter-like gunsight.

Print showing early U.S. Army P-38 fighters with markings current from around mid-1942 to mid-1943.

A 1950 image showing the XF7U-1 Cutlass Navy fighter. The prototype Cutlass was an exciting-looking aircraft (though here Hubbell makes it slightly more graceful than it was), but went through a long, troubled development.

Another 1950 illustration, this of the F-86 Sabre that was entering service about that time. The Sabre's fuselage is subtly shaped and not easy to depict. Hubbell's version is not realistic, perhaps because he might not have had enough useful reference photos.

Roger de La Fresnaye (1885-1925) paintings are in the collections of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery in Washington DC, and a number of museums in France.

Yet he is comparatively unknown. His Wikipedia entry in English is brief, as are similar entries in French and Italian. Little more was gleaned from a four-page Google search.

The link above mentions that he had a good deal of training in art, both conventional and modernist. Various sources offer various categorization of his style such as Expressionist, Fauvist, Cubist, Symbolist, etc. To me, asked to select a single type, I'd call him a Cubist during his most prolific period. But his cubism was superficial compared to that of, say, Picasso.

La Fresnaye's career was cut short by the tuberculosis he caught while serving in the Great War. The Wikipedia entry mentions that, postwar, the disease greatly hampered his productivity.

Gallery

Autoportrait - 1905

Alice lisant - 1907

Alice in a Large Hat - 1912
Two versions of Alice, whoever she might have been, at different points in his career.

Landscape at Ferté-Sous-Jouarre, Final Version - 1911
Cubist-lite construction, Fauvist-lite colors. The subject is a town by the Marne River that has been associated with battles and the military for many years. During the 1939-1940 campaign it was the headquarters of General Georges, who was in charge of operations in northeastern France. I drove through it once on the way to Château-Thierry. Yes, it's hilly there.

View of Florence - 1911
Here La Fresnaye seems to be experimenting with square-brush technique.

Artillerie - 1911
Pre- Great War painting. His father was an army officer. Available sources do not indicate whether La Fresnaye was conscripted or was commissioned when he was about age 20 and then was in the reserves until the war -- one or the other was likely. In any case, he was familiar with the army and painted some military subjects.

Cruirassier - 1912
Another military subject, a cavalryman.

Jeanne d'Arc - 1912

Baigneurs - 1912
Perhaps his best-known work.

Study for Couple with Greyhound - c.1913
Note the squaring. La Fresnaye clearly constructed some of his paintings carefully.

La Conquête de l'air (The Conquest of the Air) - 1913
A painting of the artist and his brother with a balloon shown in the upper left part of the canvas.

The Romanian - 1921
Postwar, La Fresnaye's style because more conventional in line with what other modernist were doing.

Guynemer
Georges Guynemer who died in 1917 was one of France's most famous Great War aces.

Entrance to the La Fresnaye Villa in Grasse - 1923-24
Although La Fesnaye was from northern France, this property is near Nice.

John Marshall Gamble (1863-1957) was what we call a California Impressionist, one of a group of artists who painted landscapes in various parts of that state, mostly over the years 1900-1930.

Gamble seems to have had a successful career, but was not one of the core group of California Impressionists. I justify that claim because after the 1906 San Francisco fire he was based mostly in Santa Barbara, slightly off the California Impressionist beaten track. Biographical information can be found here and here.

It seems that Gamble nearly always included wildflowers in his paintings, a feature that became something of a trademark. His paintings sold well, buyers coming from across the USA until the late 1930s when his eyesight began to fail.

Regarding his inclusion of flowers, the first link above states:

"When questioned by an interviewer about his passion for floral painting, he replied: 'I never painted them as flowers at all. I didn't even think of them as flowers while I was painting. They were just color patches to me, I simply liked the way they designed themselves across the field'. Many stolid Easterners considered his paintings pure fabrications, however when they made the trip to California's countryside in springtime the doubters were always proven wrong."

True, he didn't do close-up portraits of flowers. And it's also so that they add interest to the paintings in terms of composition and color schemes. But I also think he included those swathes of flowers because they helped make his paintings more marketable. Nothing wrong with that -- I'd rather an artist be prosperous than starving.

Also, as can be seen below, Gamble relied on several well-tested compositions for his California scenes.

Gallery

A Spring Morning, Poppies and Bush Lupine - c. 1915
This is the only dated (sort of) painting I downloaded.

Coastal scene
I don't have this painting's actual title, if it ever had one.

Poppies And Yellow Lupine, Point Lobos
Note the similarity of the hillsides in these scenes of different part of the state.

Wild Heliotrope near Laguna Beach

Wild Heliotrope near San Juan Capistrano
Again, two similar looking works.

Wild Lilac and Poppies

Wild Mustard and Radish
Hillsides sloping down to the right, but with different kinds of flowers.

Lupine, Del Monte Dunes
This has blockier brushwork. I'm not sure if it: (1) is a study, (2) is small, or (3) was painted when his eyesight started to go.

The Dunes
Same general location, similar brushwork.

Twilight, Hope Ranch, Santa Barbara
This painting is quite different from the rest, and I'm not sure why. I have friends who live in Hope Range (nowadays a very upscale housing area) and have walked near where this painting was made. The view is toward the west. That low-lying coast takes in perhaps part of Goleta where the airport and University of California Santa Barbara are, and definitely shows the coastline farther west of there, but not the high inland hills.

Giacomo Balla, the Oldest Futurist

William Orpen's Great War Portraits

"Eric" et sa femme

The Carefully Observant Rowland B. Wilson

Carlo Carrà: Futurist for a Short While

Fred Ludekens, Big-Time West Coast Illustrator

John Singer Sargent Group Portraits

Umberto Boccioni, Futurist

Charles Edward Chambers, Highly Competent Illustrator

Jules Guérin, Illustrator and Muralist

Fred Cole's Suggestively Incomplete Car Illustrations

John Smart, Miniaturist

Some Picasso Landscapes

Gustave De Smet: Impressionism to Modernism

Hermann Dudley Murphy of Boston

Aircraft Illustrator Jo Kotula

Anselm Feuerbach, Classicist and More

Charles H. Hubbell: Aviation Art from Late 1940s

Roger de La Fresnaye, Borderline Cubist

John Marshall Gamble's California with Many Flowers