Nieuport Aircraft: From Elegant to Ugly

During the 1930s the aesthetics of French military equipment improved markedly. I wrote about the appearance of battleships here, and in this post I consider aircraft, featuring an exception to the general trend.

Gallery

Amiot 143 - first flight of Amiot 140, 1931
The Amiot 143 was part of the 140 series of 1931. It and other bombers and "multiplace combat aircraft" (a French theoretical concept of multi-rôle aircraft that proved impractical in practice) of the late 1920s and early 30s were stunningly ugly.

Amiot 351 prototype - 1938
But by the later 1930s French bombers were much more sleek, including the Amiot 350 series. It's hard to believe that the Amiot firm could be responsible for such different designs over such a small interval.

Nieuport-Delage Ni-D 62 - from 1928
Now for the counter-example. Nieuport was one of the major builders of fighter planes on the Allied side during the Great War, and it continued that tradition through the 1920s with its 29 and 42 series. The Ni-D 62 was a major refinement of the early 1920s 42, though its performance was not much better. If you look closely at the sleek (in its day) 62, you will notice that it isn't a biplane. Rather, it is a sesquiplane with one full wing mounted high and a half-wing mounted at the lower part of the fuselage. A tertiary airfoil of sorts can be seen between the landing gear wheels.

SNCAC NC 1070 - 1947
Another triumph of the French tendency to value theory over practice was the nationalization of much of its aircraft industry in 1936. The Nieuport firm, already a part of another company, completely disappeared, becoming part of the SNCAO (Société Nationale des Constructions Aéronautiques de l'Ouest) which itself was later merged into the SNCAC (Société Nationale de Constructions Aéronautiques du Centre). The NC 1070 was a clandestine World War 2 project for a carrier-based attack aircraft.

SNCAC NC 1070 - three-view drawing
These plan drawings illustrate the odd, ugly appearance of the NC 1070 better than most photos can. Its wings folded just outboard of the engine nacelles and its length was stumpy indeed. These features were intended to make it compatible with elevators transferring aircraft between the hangar deck and the flight deck. Also, the short length would allow more of these aircraft to be spotted on the flight deck, an important consideration in carrier operations. The 1070 was flight tested, but never entered production even though an order had been contemplated at one time.

SNCAC NC 1071 - 1948
The NC 1071 was a jet propelled version of the NC 1070, and it was equally ugly. It too was test flown, but again there were no production versions.

In the Beginning: John Twachtman

Among my myriad character flaws is that I've never much liked hardcore Impressionism of the mature Monet variety. It surely has to do with the fact that such images are too vague for my taste. I really appreciate a hard edge here and there, and a value (light-dark) design is welcome indeed.

So it is that I've never been much of a fan of the American Impressionist John Twachtman (1853-1902) aside from his Arques-le-Battaille currently residing the Met in New York (also see image below). His Wikipedia entry is here, a website devoted to him here, and a chronological presentation of his paintings is here.

But then there is the early Twachtman, before the Impressionist bug bit him, and there is more to him than Arques-le-Battaille. Take the painting shown at the top of this post, for example. It was buried in the storage area of Seattle's Fry Art Museum and only recently reappeared in conjunction with the museum's reopening following reconfiguration of gallery layouts.

The painting is titled "Windmills, Dordrecht" and was created in 1881 or 1882 while Twachtman was vising Europe with his new bride. It might be a bit hard to tell from the small image, but the painting (which in fact isn't very large) was painted with crispness and economy. Very pleasing to me, at least. Makes me wonder how things would have turned out had he never taken up Impressionism.

Below are two paintings from the first part of his career and three from the later part when he regarded himself as an Impressonist.

Gallery

"Dunes Back of Coney Island" - c.1880
This painting was also on display at the Frye reopening.

Arques-le-Battaille - 1885
This might be Twachtman's very best.

"Figure in a Landscape" - c.1895
He seldom painted people. This is an Impressionist portrait of sorts.

"Gloucester Harbor" - 1900
There are plenty of details in this scene, but they get smudged away thanks to the Impressionist style.

"Waterfront Scene, Gloucester" - c.1901
Structures with clean edges dominate this scene, so Twachtman was forced to tighten things up compared to what he might have done if he were painting a countryside scene.

Molti Ritratti: Winston Churchill

I assume all those reading this post know who Winston Churchill was, but that assumption might be resting on thin ice, given the quality of educational systems in the USA and some other countries.

He is surely best known to posterity via photography and film, rather than from painted portraits. Nevertheless, portraits of him were painted. Some are presented below in approximate reverse-chronological order.

Gallery

By Yousuf Karsh - 1941
So I changed my mind. Let's start with Karsh's iconic photographic portrait to set the scene.

By Andy Thomas
This is posthumous, but I don't have a date. I doubt that Churchill would ever have posed with cigar and whisky. Nor could he have held a smile very long while posing.

By Bernard Hailstone - 1955
A site showing this image states that it was his last official portrait.

By Graham Sutherland - 1954
This is the portrait that his wife Clementine famously had destroyed after he died. I can't blame her, though one can find defenders of Sutherland's work if you Google a little.

By Paul Wyeth
I could find no documentation about this one, but it clearly commemorates Churchill's induction as a Companion of the Order of the Garter.

By Frank Mason - 1952
I have no background on this painting either.

By Douglas Granville Chandor - 1946
This was painted after the war when Churchill was no longer Prime Minister. He is shown in the uniform of the Royal Air Force, in which he held honorary status.

By Walter Sickert - 1927
Apparently Sickert, a friend of Clementine, gave Winston some tips on how to paint and did this portrait sketch.

By William Orpen - 1916
In 1916 Churchill was back in the army following his resignation as Admiralty First Lord, so I'm not clear as to when Orpen actually painted this. I suspect 1916 is the completion date and the bulk of the work was done earlier.

By John Lavery - 1915
This was probably done when Churchill was still First Lord.

French Fighter Competition: Early 1930s

I've probably said it before and will probably say it again: Following the aircraft industry was a lot more interesting before 1960 than since. That's because airplanes became much more complicated, which meant that development times and costs increased considerably. In recent times, airliners and combat aircraft take years to bring to production, but they also stay in production and service much longer than in the old days. For example, Boeing's single-aisle 737 series prototype first flew 45 years ago, and variants will be in production for years to come. So far as the aviation buff is concerned, the amount of interesting new stuff had been reduced to a trickle over the years.

Wars and threats of wars served as spurs for technical progress in aviation. Most striking is a comparison of aircraft entering service at the end of 1918 with those flying mid-1914, just before the Great War started.

A consequence of the war was greatly lessened demand for new military aircraft. Technical progress became relative slow so there was less motivation to rush what new designs there were into production. The main French fighter of the early-mid 1920s was the Nieuport-Delage 29, a design under development in the closing months of the war. The late 20s and early 30s saw production of the Nieuport-Delage 62 series that boasted a top speed only 20 miles per hour (30km/h) faster than the NiD-29.

By the late 1920s the threat of a major new war was still small, but the need to modernize was growing stronger thanks to recent technical innovations. The French initiated a specification in 1930 that was modified in 1931 and 1932, forming the basis for a new generation of C1 category aircraft. (C1 is short for Chasse -- fighter (actually, "pursuit," as the U.S. Army Air Corps also called it) -- single-place.)

It's almost hard to believe from today's perspective, but ten different manufacturers submitted entries. That's because aircraft were pretty simple in those days; the builder basically had to come up with an airframe compatible with "government furnished equipment" such as the motor, weapons, radio, and so forth. Even so, airframes were beginning to require more technology than previously, this largely due to the replacement of wood or metal-tube frameworks covered by canvas with (nearly) all-metal construction.

Here are the planes involved in the concours:

Gallery

ANF-Mureaux 170
Although it performed well, this fighter was rejected because the position of the wing interfered with the pilot's forward field of vision.

Bernard 260
The Bernard was unusual in that it had advanced features including slats and trailing-edge flaps on the wings. But it failed to win a production contract.

Gourdou-Leseurre 482
This aircraft suffered from above-average aerodynamic drag, so it fell short of the speed rquirement and was eliminated from contention.

Morane-Saulnier 325
The Morane experienced severe buffeting that was never completely cured.

Wibault-Penhoët 313
Although it offered promising performance, a long development cycle caused the Wibault to lose out.

Blériot-Spad 510
The only biplane in the competition, the Blériot-Spad received a contract for 60 examples. It was the last biplane fighter accepted by the French air arm.

Loire 46
The Loir 46 was an advanced version of models 43 and 45 that, in stages, were in the concours. The 43 and 45 had a wing positioned similar to that of the ANF-Mureaux, but the 46 was an extensive redesign that featured an aile du mouette, or gull-wing. It too saw production. Some 60 were ordered by L'Armée de l'Air while a handful of developmental aircraft were sold to the Republican forces during the Spanish civil war. (These numbers have been disputed, but there is no question that production was less than 100 aircraft.)

Dewoitine 500
This was the winner of the concours and production of variants was in the low-to-mid hundreds.

As noted, the competition dragged on for several years. And then getting the Loire 46 into production took longer than it might have, thanks to the nationalization and consolidation of French airplane builders in 1936; its first-line service life was about two years. By late 1938 this generation of fighters began to be replaced by the Morane-Saulier 406, a monoplane featuring retractable landing gear and an enclosed cockpit, standard features of World War 2 fighter planes.

Emily Carr's Centered Compositions

Emily Carr (1871-1945) is one of Canada's most famous artists. And if you visit Victoria, British Columbia, her home town, and wander the old part of the city near the touristy harbor, it's hard to escape references to her. Wikipedia can still be hit-and-miss when it comes to being comprehensive, but its entry on Carr contains a good deal of useful detail about her and her career as a painter and writer.

The largest trove of Carr's painting seems to be in Vancouver, a city I find unappealing apart from its spectacular setting. So the Carr paintings I tend to encounter are in Victoria, whose art museum devotes a room to her work.

Carr received artistic training, plus she was friends with leading artists such as Lawren Harris (who I wrote about here) and Mark Tobey. Which is why it puzzles me that she often resorted to placing subjects of paintings at or near the center of the horizontal axis of her paintings. I suppose this can be explained through an analogy to a portrait painter placing his subject in a similar way. Still, the result is a little too static for my comfort.

Let's take a look at some examples.

Gallery

Painting of a tree; don't have title or date for this

"Red Cedar" - 1933

"Heart of the Forest"

"Crying Totem" - 1938

"Indian Church" - 1929

Molti Ritratti: Edith Minturn Phelps-Stokes

Edith Minturn Stokes (1867–1937) and her husband Isaac Newton (I.N.) Phelps Stokes are the subject of a famous painting by John Singer Sargent, now residing in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I couldn't find much biographical information about Edith. Wikipedia has this entry on Isaac, but more about Edith can be found here.

However, the images below do indicate that Edith was a very attractive woman.

Gallery

The Minturn sisters
Edith is at the right of the photograph.

By Carl and Fredrika Weidner - c.1895
The original is a miniature. Edith is at the left.

By Daniel Chester French - Statue of the Republic
Edith posed for French's giant statue for the 1893 Chicago fair. A smaller version was made in 1918, and that is the one shown above. More information about the statues is here.

By Fernand Paillet - 1892
This must have been painted about the time French was working on the statue.

By Cecilia Beaux - 1898
Beaux was an ace portrait painter who had the thankless task of painting Edith a year after Sargent created his masterpiece version of. Beaux was very good, but comparing the two versions of Edith, it's hard to dispute that Sargent was even better. Well, flashier, anyway.

Feature-Distorting Makeup Fashions

If you don't have a model handy, the next option is using a photographic reference. And if you want to paint a picture of a pretty woman, why not use a photo of a movie star.

I'll tell you why not.

One reason is that publicity photos are usually retouched, and that retouching can distort light-shade relationships, hiding the true facial structure to some degree. This was particularly evident before 1950, when most publicity shots were in black and white which made extensive retouching easier to perform. (It's interesting that Joan Crawford had a heavily freckled complexion, yet nearly all publicity photos hide it.)

Another reason has to do with fashions in make-up. From the mid-1920s to around the mid-1940s, lipstick and eyebrow makeup practices were tailored to distorting natural facial features. Such distortions make it somewhat difficult to understand exactly what the underlying face was like.

Combining these two problems results in photos that are not worth using for reference unless one's goal is painting a period-piece scene. The photos below illustrate my point.

Gallery

Clara Bow - late 1920s

Evelyn Brent - late 1920s
Not all women did this, but some important movie stars did: Note the "bee sting" lipstick pattern where the edges of the mouth are not painted while areas above and below the lips at the center of the mouth are. The Cupid's bow feature of the upper lip is slightly exaggerated by the lipstick application shown in these photos.

Constance Bennett - 1933

Jean Harlow - mid-1930s
During the early to mid 1930s the Cupid's bow continued to be exaggerated, as can be seen in the photo of Constance Bennett. At least coverage now extends to the corners of the mouth. The Jean Harlow photo shows another fad of that era: natural eyebrows plucked and replaced by a penciled-in line. I have no idea why people thought that stunt improved beauty.

Ann Sothern - late 1930s

Hedy Lamarr - early 1940s

Veronica Lake - early 1940s
Natural eyebrows returned by the late 1930s and even received eyebrow pencil enhancement. Lips were enhanced by lipstick extending very slightly beyond the edges of the lips themselves.

I find that there are still a fair number of 1925-45 photos acceptable for reference. After 1945, matters improve somewhat. But an artist's best bet is to rely on informal photographs where retouching is absent and makeup is more likely to be lightly applied.