John Singer Sargent Group Portraits

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.

Fred Ludekens, Big-Time West Coast Illustrator

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 Nob 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.

Carlo Carrà: Futurist for a Short While

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.

The Carefully Observant Rowland B. Wilson

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.

"Eric" et sa femme

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.