Henri-Joseph Harpignies: At the Far Edge of Impressionism

Henri-Joseph Harpignies (1819-1916) lived for nearly a century. In his youth, Academic painting was riding high and, by the time of his death, some artists were painting purely abstract works. Harpignies, however, stuck to a narrow stylistic range -- largely Barbizon, but sometimes with a touch of the Macchiaioli, a group of Italian proto-Impressionists. A biographical note is here.

Harpignies was primarily a landscape painter; Google Images-search of his works turn up only incidental people in the landscapes shown. His style varied from clearly Barbizon-like detailing to somewhat more simplified paintings featuring obvious brush strokes. Some of these latter paintings are pretty small, though I did recently notice one on display at the Seattle Art Museum that was large and featured bolder brushwork.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that he was one of those artists who liked to use geometry as the basis for some of his compositions. I note a couple of instances below, but some of the other images seem to have the same feature.

Gallery

Le vieux chêne - 1895
This was painted when Harpignies was about 75 years old, yet it looks more Barbizon-like than some of his painting made years before, when Barbizon was more fashionable.

Cliffs Near Crémieu - 1847
An early work.  Solid, though I wonder about the  composition where the foreground zone is about as high as the sky above the butte.  Crazy me, I would have had less sky, because that's my usual choice when composing photos.

River and Hills - 1850s
I don't have dimensions for this painting, though it doesn't strike me a being very large.  Has a Macchiaioli feel to it.

Washing the Laundry - 1875
This is a small painting, about 13x16 inches (32x40cm), so visible brushwork can be expected.

The Village Church
Sorry about the slightly blurred image, but that was all I found of this painting.  Here the sky and remainder each take up about half the vertical distance.

Le pont canal à Briare - 1888
A nice, clean painting with very little fussy detail.  But note that the focal bridge support on the left side of the canal is approximately one-third of the vertical canvas dimension, the sky and foreground at that point each measuring close to another third each.  Were geometrical relationships (slightly disguised or fudged though they might have been) intentional or simply the way he intuitively painted?

The Big Tree

Dale Chihuly's Portable Radios With Plastic Cases, and More

This is actually one of my occasional industrial design posts, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to begin using a link to an artist.

That artist is Dale Chihuly (1941 - ), master of glass installations (Wikipedia entry here). A couple of years ago, a museum devoted to Chihuly was opened in Seattle right next to the well-known Space Needle. Attached to the museum is a restaurant called Collections Café. Its Web site is here, and a Seattle Magazine article about it is here.

That article notes that the name "Collections" refers to the cafe's decor, which is dominated by objects Chihuly collected over the years. The link includes some photos that help give you the flavor of the place.

The photo at the top of this post is from Seattle Met magazine and shows a wall display in the cafe consisting of dozens of pre-transistor portable radios from the 1940s and 50s for the most part. The variety of styles grafted onto fairly similar electronic boards is astonishing.

A little context for that era of small (for the time) plastic-cased radios is offered below.

Gallery

Philco 40-180 - 1940
Many households of the 1930s had a large radio such as the one shown here.  Such a device was normally located in the living room and served as the focus for evening entertainment for a family.

Philco 84B - 1935
Not all radios were large back then.  That's because the chassis with its vacuum tubes (valves, in Britain) could be pretty much the same size for all AM radios since the electronic functionality was the same.  What usually varied was the size of the cabinet and perhaps the size of the speakers.  The radio shown here is a table-top type that could be placed in a living room, bedroom, home office or somesuch place.
The Philco model illustrated here is the same type as our family radio when I was a wee tyke; it was used until television came along.  I still have that radio.  It looks almost the same as the one above except that the dial has sort of an orange hue.

Philco 38-15T - 1938
By the late 1930s engineers were able to create more compact layouts allowing for even smaller sets.

Philco PT-25 - 1940
Philco cased its radios using wood through most of the 1930s, but added plastic by 1940.

Westinghouse H-127 Little Jewell - 1945-47
An early post- World War 2 portable radio, this from Westinghouse.  I include it because I had such a radio in my bedroom when I was young.  Unlike the old Philco, I no longer have it.

"Brownie" Mostly Worked in Black & White

I exaggerated when writing the title of this post, but not very much. Arthur William Brown (1881-1966) spent much of his career not making color oil paintings for magazine covers, but instead did interior illustrations that were usually printed in black and white in those days when color printing was expensive.

Currently, there is little biographical information about Brown on the Internet, though you might consider linking here and here. There's more about him in books dealing with illustrators such as Fred Taraba's fairly recent Masters of American Illustration.

It seems that Brownie (as he was known by his illustrator and other friends) was an early adopter of reference photographs. This was influenced by his slow, careful approach to creating what look to be quickly-done illustrations. (They appear quickly-done because he mostly worked in crayon, pencil and washes that seem less substantial than illustrations done using oil paints.)

What interests me is that he was good at capturing facial expressions and character. How much of this was the product of the photos he took and how much was conscious deviations from the photographic images? I am not aware of any surviving reference photos from the 1920s and 30s that can be compared to the finished works they were used for, so perhaps that matter can't be resolved. Given that Brownie was highly skilled, I'll assume he used his photos as the starting point and didn't copy them slavishly.

Brownie was good, successful, and popular socially. Still, I place him a fraction of a notch below the likes of F.R. Gruger and Henry Patrick Raleigh who used similar media in their illustration work.

Gallery

Brownie with his fancy new 1927 Packard. He made a lot of money in the 1920s, but was badly hit in the 1929 stock market crash.

A publicity photo of Brownie at work in the mid-1940s.

Another publicity shot. Here he and Russell Patterson are sketching Florence Kallender in tony Palm Beach Florida, 1947. Brownie was perfectly capable of sketching, but as was mentioned above, he normally used reference photos.

Greta Garbo, done in 1937.

Note Brownie's skill in depicting facial expressions.

A 1920s story illustration.

Illustration for a 1930 Saturday Evening Post story.

1937 story illustration.

A Post illustration from 1935.

By the 1940s, two-color magazine interior printing was common, so Brownie adjusted.  Some other two-color illustrations are seen above.  The first also is from the early 1940s and the next was done in 1937, as noted.

Wilfrid de Glehn: John Singer Sargent Associate

Wilfrid Gabriel de Glehn (1870-1951) was a British painter with German roots (he changed the spelling of his family name from von Glehn during the Great War), who worked with John Singer Sargent and Edwin Austin Abbey (details on this are sketchy, however). He remained friends with Sargent and was depicted by him on a few occasions.

De Glehn's Wikipedia entry is here, but it is brief. Much more information can be found on this site, including some information regarding himself and Sargent (here). More information on de Glehn and his wife Jane is here.

While de Glehn can be considered an impressionist, he made many portraits that were traditional in style. His series on female nudes tended to be more sketchy, but not impressionist.

J.S. Sargent Depicts the de Glehns

Jane de Glehn (in a Corfu garden)

The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy - 1907

Sketchers - 1913
The woman is thought to be Jane, but could be someone else.


Gallery: de Glehn's Works

Self-Portrait

Fishing
A website has this dated 1932, but I'd say it would be more like 1912, to judge by the clothing.

Shadows on the Wall, Cannes, France

Lynn Fontanne - 1912
Fontanne was British, but best-known on the American stage, often appearing with her husband, Alfred Lunt.

Sisters - 1923

Mrs Neville Chamberlain - 1924

Clare Collins - 1927

Jane Emmett - 1931
This is the niece of Jane Emmett, de Glehn's wife.

Louise in Stripped Dress

Resting
De Glehn painted many nudes.

Val d'Aosta scene
An example of de Glehn's landscape work.

Violet, the Artist Duchess

Marion Margaret Violet Manners (née Lindsay), Duchess of Rutland (1856-1937) was a famed Victorian beauty who was portrayed by the likes of George Frederic Watts and James Jebusa Shannon.

But Violet (as she was generally known) was able to turn the tables, so to speak, because she made many pencil portraits of people in her social circle as well as some other noteworthy Britons. Her Wikipedia entry mentions that she had no formal art training. But, given her circumstances (her paternal grandfather was the 24th Earl of Crawford), she surely was instructed in drawing and perhaps painting as part of her education. Sources indicate that she painted portraits, but I could turn up no usable examples during one of my habitually slapdash Google searches. What I did find were plenty of images of her drawings, some of which are displayed below.

Another thing I'm not sure about is whether or not she used photographs as the basis for her drawings. Regardless, she did have a knack for capturing expressions, provided the subject displayed a demeanor other than Victorian sobriety.

Gallery

Sir Rennell Rodd, C.B., Afterwards Lord Rennel of Rodd

Lady Rodd

Lord Charles Beresford, C.B.

Marquess of Salibury, K.G.

Mrs E. Tennant, Afterwards Lady Glenconnor

Princess Trubetzkoy, neé Amelie Rives

The Duchess of Portland

Mr Rudyard Kipling

Jefferson Machamer: Gals, Gals, Gals Cartoonist

Thomas Jefferson Machamer (1901-1960) was a popular cartoonist from the mid-1920s through the 1940s. A brief Wikipedia entry is here, and a detailed career outline and evaluation of his work is here.

Machamer had a breezy, sketchy, distinctive style of drawing in ink that served him well. The second link above opines that the humor in the situations he depicted and the wit of his captions wasn't first-rate. I'm inclined to agree; his strong suit was his drawing style. He featured attractive young women ("gals") throughout his career, and even married one (movie actress Pauline Moore). A problem I have with this is that the gals he drew tended to look very similar if one ignores their clothing and hair style/hair color. Apparently this didn't bother his many fans.

The bottom line for me is that while I have some reservations, I basically enjoy Machamer's work. Click on those images with lots of details to enlarge.

Gallery

Judge cover - 6 August 1927
Satire on 1920s fashions for guys 'n' gals.

Judge cover - 10 March 1928
Here we get closer to Machamer's signature style.

Judge interior art

Katherine Hepburn
After Hepburn burst onto the Hollywood scene, Machamer's gals' faces underwent a change.

A representative post-Hepburn cartoon by Machamer

Gags and Gals panel - late 1930s
The fellow in the top hat in the next-to-bottom strip is a self-caricature that Machamer often included in his cartoons.

Some advice on drawing cartoon gals

Workups of gals' heads

Workups of full-figure gals

Example of Machamer landscape drawing - 1949
Look carefully and you will see a gal.