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!).

Roy Crane's Two Shades of Gray

Aside from Lyonel Feininger, I find it hard to come up with the name of an important fine artist who drew comic strips. After all, comic strips are highly constrained in terms of technology, spatial requirements, marketing channel considerations and other factors that can lead to their being ignored by fine artists and even by illustrators.

But lessons -- some, not many -- can be learned from comic strips. Consider value, the painting term referring to areas of light, dark, and intermediate shades on a painting. Value, in most cases, is the basis for an image's composition. Traditional art instruction sources suggest having one of a painting's preliminary studies deal with values, and a limited number (say, three or four) of them at that.

Roy Crane (1901-1977) was an influential comic strip artist who, as his Wikipedia entry indicates, evolved his style to a point in the 1940s that he could make use of areas of solid black, white (the un-inked newsprint background) plus two shades of gray. Earlier, he used black, white and a single gray shade, the latter based on a uniform benday screen. He found three values to be too limiting for his taste, so later adopted Craftint. That provided two levels of shading -- the lighter one simply parallel lines and the darker one a crosshatch of other parallel lines set at a right angle to the former. This blog post deals with Craftint and its eventual demise, using Roy Crane as an example of how it was made to work.

Artists wanting to sharpen their values awareness might consider the work of Crane and perhaps some other comic strip artists who made use of shading technology.

The examples below are from Crane's Buz Sawyer strip. He liked cute puns for names of some of his main characters. For instance, Buz Sawer = "buz(z)saw" and Wash Tubbs = "washtub." Click on the images to enlarge.

Gallery

Buz Sawyer - December, 1944
This strikes me as the best of the examples of Crane's Craftink work shown here. These are panels from successive daily strips. Not how he forces readers to rotate the page half a turn to display the Douglas SBD dive bombers at work.

Buz Sawyer - November, 1949

Buz Sawyer - January, 1950
More daily strips from a few years later.

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?

Raleigh's Out-of-Plumb Ladies

Henry Patrick Raleigh (1880-1944) was a successful, prolific illustrator in his heyday of the 1920s and early 30s, but committed suicide after illustration fashions changed and he failed to follow them. The image above is typical of the elegant lifestyle he portrayed in 1924. The latest issue (No. 43) of Illustration magazine features Raleigh in an article written by his grandson who is planning to sell his extensive collection of Raleigh's works (see announcement at his website). Other interesting information regarding Raleigh can be found here, here and here.

Even though Raleigh would leave his drawing board for months at a time to travel the world, he could create illustrations in a matter of a few hours in many cases: he claimed to have produced thousands. He also did not make extensive use of models, basing his work on his knowledge of human anatomy along with a good memory for visual details.

So it isn't surprising that he sometimes slipped up. I noticed a couple of cases in the Illustration article where women were shown at angles that in real life would have them toppling to the floor. (When standing erect, the center of a person's head should not be outside the zone covered by his feet.) I really like Raleigh's work, but it's still somehow comforting to know that it wasn't always perfect.

The most obvious instance is the lady at the right.

A borderline case here, but I vote that the gal in riding togs ought to be falling backwards. And the helmeted man in the center might fall to his left.

The girl in front of the large man is also in an unstable pose, since she doesn't seem to be leaning against him.  (One can argue, but I judge that she is standing slightly in front of him: note the position of her left arm relative to his chest and the way his body is turned.)

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.

Nice Poster, Obscure Illustrator

I could find next to nothing about Donald Masefield Easton (1896-1956) on the first few pages of a Google search, and almost no examples of his work.

The only reason I made the search and decided to write this post was because I finally discovered who illustrated one of my favorite vintage Hawaii tourist posters, the one you see above (slightly cropped from a photo I took). One of these posters was displayed in Honolulu's Royal Hawaiian Hotel along with a small plaque noting the artist's name. I had seen the poster elsewhere over the years, but without any indication of who did it.

As for the poster itself, I like it because of its early 1930s view of Waikiki when the only major buildings were the Royal Hawaiian (left) and Moana (right) hotels, and because it features a whiff of those toned-down color schemes popular during the 1920s. Clearly a case of false-nostalgia on my part.

Indian Smoke Signals - 1931

Night on the Range - 1932

Union Oil Company advertisement - 1950

The examples shown here really aren't sufficient for a serious evaluation of Easton. Because they deal with the west (Union Oil was a West Coast firm), I'll assume for now that he was based in California, was able to make a living as a competent illustrator, but never made it to the New York - Chicago "big time" for illustrators of his generation.

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.