François Flameng: Seriously Versatile

François Flameng (1856-1923) is probably best remembered -- if he's remembered at all outside France -- as a portrait artist. Maybe that is the problem. You see, Flameng was an almost exact contemporary of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the foremost portraitist of his era, not to mention others in the portrait game at around the same time such as Anders Zorn (1860-1920), Joaquin Sorolla (1863-1923), Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), John Lavery (1856-1941) and even Phillip de Laszlo (1869-1937). So Flameng's space in the mental real estate of art historians is necessarily modest, given his competition.

I find this unfortunate, because it seems that he was both good and versatile, as we shall see from the images below. Biographical information of a limited sort can be found in English here, and in French here.

Gallery

Zinaida Yusupova - 1894

Portrait de Mme Meunier

Queen Alexandra - 1908
These three formal, commissioned portraits indicate what Flameng painted and suggest why he was hired to do so. One curiosity: Every subject is posed directly facing the artist and viewer. Makes one wonder how their noses were shaped.

Portrait of a Young Woman
This was either a modest commission or a painting made on the initiative of the artist. Yet another full-face view, this showing narrow-set eyes. Nevertheless, a pretty portrait of a believable lady.

Ile Pointeaux
Interesting sort of landscape here. It has something of the character of an illustration. That might be because Flameng actually was an illustrator as well as a fine-arts painter.

Soldats anglais dans les vieux remparts de Péronne

Spads [model XI] Patrolling - 1918

La citadelle de Verdun: les casemates
Speaking of illustration, above are some of many works by Flameng when he carried out his duties as a war artist during the Great War when he was about 60 years old.

Portrait of Max Decugis (son-in-law of the artist)
Probably a late work. No face-on view here, and plenty of the subject's character showing. Too bad more portraits aren't done in this sort of way.

Riviera Promenade
Another apparently late painting. Wish I was there (then or now!).

Prudence Heward: Canadian Semi-Modernist

Prudence Heward (1896-1947) suffered from ill health for much of her life and died aged 50. Biographical links are here and here. The first mentions that she came from a wealthy family and received art training in both her native Canada and Paris.

Heward was of a generation of painters that interests me greatly because they completed training around the time that modernist painting was becoming respectable while at the same time having largely exhausted its ideological (anti-previous styles and subjects) possibilities. So there was no clear path for painters who saw themselves as being "creative," while other artists were forced to decide how much modernism they should incorporate in their work for marketing and prestige reasons. This is discussed in my book "Art Adrift."

Below are some examples of Heward's work in chronological order followed by some commentary.

Gallery

Anna - 1927

Girl on a Hill - 1929

Rollande - 1929

Farmhouse and Car - 1933

Landscape - c.1935

Girl in a Yellow Sweater - 1936

Autumn Hills - c.1941

Portrait of Mrs. Zimmerman - 1943

Heward was appropriately conservative and Canadian in her time. The portraits made in the late 1920s are largely realistic while incorporating a dash of simplification and solidity fashionable in those days. The landscapes, done a few years later strike me as containing as dash of Group of Seven and Emily Carr, as might be expected for a painter active in the Canadian art scene. The 1936 painting of a girl in a landscape combines the characteristics of the previous images. The final painting shows a bit less simplification than her 1920s portraits and is in line with what some other artists were doing during the early 1940s. I have to rate Prudence Heward as a competent, derivative artist. But then, don't most of us fall into that category?

Ambrose Patterson: Wandering Aussie

"Mount Kilauea, The House of Everlasting Fire," painted in 1917 is the upper image above, depicting the most active of the volcanoes on the island of Hawaii. The lower image is a detail photo I took when I visited the Honolulu Museum of Art in December (my camera distorted the color for some reason, but observe the brushwork and drips).

The main reason this painting caught my attention was that it was made by Ambrose Patterson (1877-1967), born in Australia to a well-connected family, art student in Paris in the early 1900s when Modernist "isms" were in full bloom, resident in Hawaii for several years, and eventually head of the art school at the University of Washington in Seattle. Biographical links are here and here.

As it happened, in college I had a watercolor class by Patterson's wife, Viola. And on one occasion, with other Senior-year art students, visited their Modernist house in Seattle's upscale Laurelhurst neighborhood and met Patterson himself.

But he was in his mid-80s while I was only 21 and grossly ignorant of things that I now know well. The fact is, I mentally dismissed him as an old geezer who it was nice to have met. Today, I would gladly schedule a whole day (or more!) with him and question him until I pumped his brain dry, getting first-hand information about art student life in Paris, the impact of Picasso, Matisse and the rest, what Nellie Melba the Australian opera singer was like, how he and other artists dealt with Modernism after the Great War (the subject of one of my e-books) and more, more, more.

As an artist, I find Patterson competent and versatile, but too willing to explore trendy ideas. As a result, he never settled into a style that was truly his, the fate of many other artists of his generation and the next.

Gallery

Self-Portrait (La fenêtre de l'atelier) - c. 1902
Cute idea, here. To the right is the artist in shadow, while at the center is a painting-within-a-painting showing Patterson's distinctive profile.

La bar, St Jacques, Paris - c. 1904
I like this riff on Manet's bar scene, especially the expressions on the bartender and barmaid.

Young Woman in Garden
No date for this, but probably done before 1910. Lots of impasto and bright colors, perhaps an early experiment in Modernism.

Good Friday Procession, Madrid - 1906
Here Patterson is in an Impressionist mood, sacrificing accurate drawing for color effects.

Hollyhocks - 1908
Two years later, he pulls back from Impressionism.

Mural, Mount Vernon, Washington Post Office - 1938
Even though Patterson was on the University of Washington faculty, he somehow got one of those make-work Depression era artist gigs from the government. For this mural, he had to be representational, though the style and feeling are typical of the time.

Dancers - 1947
A post-war work combining abstraction and representation. Other Seattle area artists such as Mark Tobey and Kenneth Callahan were also painting in this vein.

Franciszek Żmurko, Painter of Women

I surely saw some paintings by Franciszek Żmurko (1859-1910) several years ago when visiting the National Gallery in Warsaw. But with so many unfamiliar names of painters to assimilate, it was difficult for me to keep track of the interesting ones. Yes, I must have taken some notes on my gallery map, but that was tossed aside a long time ago.

That means Żmurko is known to me mostly by images found on the Internet. There is a fairly large number of those, which makes it surprising that there is so little in the way of biographical information about the man. His Wikipedia entry in English is here. It's skimpy, but the entry in Polish is almost as brief. Nothing is mentioned in English about his personal life or why he died at the comparatively young age of 51.

Żmurko was born in the Russian Empire and spent much of his career there, mostly in Warsaw. But he was trained largely in the Austrian Empire (Kraków and Vienna) and in Munich. The result was an ability to paint in the "finished" academic style, though he also did more freely painted works. He was prolific, and most of the images found on the Web are of attractive women. I find the paintings and their subjects impressive.

Gallery

Self-Portrait - 1895

Zuzanna i starcy (Susanna and the Elders) - 1879
One of Żmurko's early (and apparently unfinished) paintings. If the date is correct, he showed plenty of potential at age 20.

Z rozhazu padyszacha (At Padishah's Order) - 1881
He included some Orientalist subjects, popular during the late 19th century.

Widzenie Fausta (Faust's Dream)
I wonder if the actual painting is as spectacular as this small image found on the Web.

In Delightful Dream

Kobieta z wachlarzem
Notes about this painting in my National Gallery guide suggest that the subject was someone he encountered while visiting Florence.

Portret kobiety z Wachlarzem i papieros
If this digital image is any guide, the original painting has a nice mix of detailed and free brushwork.

Seated woman
Another seemingly unfinished painting -- parts are sketchy and it is unsigned. From its looks, it might be a late painting.

Girl wearing brown hat

Polackt kobiety - 1910
This was painted the year he died. The subject appears to be the same as in the image immediately above it.

Moïse Kisling: Silplified Solidity

Moïse (Mojżesz) Kisling (1891-1953) was born in Kraków, Austro-Hungarian Empire, but moved to France in 1910 and remained there for the rest of his life aside from a period of time in the U.S.A. around the time of World War 2. Kisling because a French citizen due to his serving in the Foreign Legion during the Great War and being wounded. These and other facts can be found in this fairly brief Wikipedia entry.

Although Kisling maintained a base in Paris, he spent much of his time in the Riviera. He was sociable, with many friends in the School of Paris collection of artists as well as other modernists. His sociability was perhaps outshone by his wife, Renée (1896-1960), daughter of career cavalry officer Jules-Chalres-Émile Gros. She was not pretty by most standards, but compensated via her personality.

As for his art, Kisling didn't exactly plunge into modernism. Instead, his paintings depicted real people and objects, but in the simplified yet rounded, solid style that was widely used during the 1920s and 30s. To that degree, Kisling was comparatively conservative. Moreover, his style did not evolve much during those years, finally changing a little by the 1940s as can be seen below.

Gallery

Portrait of André Salmon - 1912

Paysage de Provence - c.1919

Kiki de Montparnasse - 1925

Renée Kisling - 1928

Nu alongée sur l'herbe - c.1930

Portrait of a Young Woman

Self-Portrait - 1937

Nu assis - 1942

Sylvia Mann - 1943

Photo of Kisling with model - c.1935

William Margetson's Domestic Life Art

I can't tell you much about William Henry Margetson (1861-1940), an English painter, because I could not find any halfway detailed biographical information on the top few pages of a couple of Google searches of the Internet. Perhaps I didn't drill deeply enough, but what can I say? -- I'm both lazy and non-obsessive.

What I did find were a couple of squibs such as this. Plus, there was one Wikipedia entry (here), but it's in Dutch, which is near enough to English for some readers to follow.

The sources mention that while he painted some religious and allegorical works, he mostly did scenes featuring pretty women. I'll add that many such scenes were domestic -- around a household. Moreover, they tend to be nicely done.

Gallery

Water Sprite
This sprite or siren falls into the allegorical category.

On the Sands - 1900
This lady is so perfect that she doesn't leave footprints.

The Amulet

Two Young Women Seated
I'm guessing from the hair styles that this was painted during the late 1920s or early 30s. Other works done in a looser style probably were made after around 1910, but that too is a guess. Beside lacking biographical information, dates of paintings also seem to be in short supply.

Maid

The Lady of the House

At the Cottage Door

Afternoon Tea

A New Day - 1930
This is both signed and dated. The strong colors of the garment and the outdoors are complemented by the much larger areas of drab colors.