Dante Rossetti's Similar Faces of Different Models

One of my posts that's most often linked is this one dealing with Helen of Troy of the Homeric epic. Here is yet another version of Helen.

Helen of Troy - 1863

The model - Annie Miller, ca. 1860

It was by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), a founder of the famous Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of young, mid-19th century British artists. He mostly painted what amounted to portraits of women in literary settings. He used various women for this purpose, and in his paintings, they all looked fairly similar, as we shall see.

The Wikipedia entry for Rossetti is here.

Regardless of who the model was, Rossetti usually transformed her into a woman with a long nose, a short upper lip/muzzle zone, a strong chin and a long neck. Also, her hair tended to be parted at or near the the center of her head and was usually long and wavy. Below are more examples of Rossetti's women along with photographs of the models.

Gallery

Beata Beatrix - 1864-72

The posthumous model - Elizabeth Siddal, ca. 1860
Siddal (1829-1862) was Rossetti's wife, who died young.

La Ghirlandata - 1871-74

The model - Alexa Wilding, ca. 1875

Bocca Baciata - 1859

The model - Fanny Cornforth, 1863
She was Rossetti's housekeeper and mistress for many years.

Astarte Syriaca - 1875-77

Beatrice - 1879

The model - Jane Morris (neé Burden), 1865
She was married to William Morris of the Arts & Crafts movement. It seems that Rossetti was infatuated with her, and her looks tended to merge into the paintings he made using other models, as can be seen above.

"Art Deco Hawaii" Exhibit

One of Edward Lucie-Smith's many books is titled Art Deco Painting. With all due respect, I find it difficult to class a painting as "Art Deco," though I already conceded that Jean Dupas' works fill that bill. And probably the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka as well.

Which leads me to the recent (3 July 2014 - 11 January 2015) exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art titled "Art Deco Hawaii" that I was able to visit a few days before it closed. There were some pieces of sculpture and some print items, but much of what was on display was paintings -- some were illustration art, others were fine arts images.

To me, Art Deco (a term retrospectively coined by Bevis Hillier in the late 1960s) is primarily an ornamentation style in architecture and graphic arts, secondarily a sculpture genre, and sometimes a variety of mannered illustration. As mentioned, not much in the way of paintings, though that's what the exhibit featured.

So-called Art Deco paintings fall into the category of simplified representation that was common between the two world wars. That is, aspects of pre-Great War modernism were incorporated in an effort to come to terms with modernism without going whole-hog. I deal with this in my e-book "Art Adrift" mentioned on this blog's sidebar. And that was pretty much what I saw: typical 1920s and 1930s paintings with little true Art Deco spirit. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my visit. Below are some images from the Internet along with some photos (a few are cropped slightly) that I took.

Gallery

Girl with ukulele - Edward Eggleston - ca. 1925-30
Eggleston was an illustrator who seemed to specialize in pretty girls. I mention one of his travel posters here.

Lei Makers - Cornelia Macintyre Foley - 1934
Information on Foley (1909-2010) is here. Her style is that often seen in the 1930s, reminding me of the work of Mexican muralists active in those days.

Lithograph by Robert Riggs
Riggs was a leading illustrator in his time. David Apatoff wrote about him here. I didn't know that he dabbled in fine arts, so was surprised to spy this lithograph.

Discovery - Arman Manookian - 1928
Manookian (1904-1931) was born in Turkey, received his art education in the USA, served in the Marine Corps in the 1920s, practiced commercial and fine arts in Hawaii and then killed himself. More biographical information is here. According to the link, he didn't make many paintings over his brief career, and they are seldom shown publicly. So I was fortunate that several were on display. I consider the one above to be amongst his better ones.

Aloha ... the Universal Word - Eugene Savage - 1940
This was one of a set of murals that Savage (1883-1978) was commissioned to paint by the Matson Navigation Company, whose liners carried tourists and others between San Francisco and Honolulu for many decades. The murals were intended to be placed on the liners, but World War 2 intervened and the artwork wound up being reproduced on ships menus and such. Matson still owns the original murals, but large reproductions can be found in places such as Honolulu's Royal Hawaiian Hotel (once owned by Matson). I was pleased to be able to finally view the original artwork.

"Aloha" - detail

Pomp and Circumstance - Eugene Savage - 1940
Savage's Matson murals are crammed with detail, but that's the norm for mural paintings. His Hawaiians don't look very Hawaiian to me, but that really doesn't matter because Savage was trying to create evocations rather than documentation. An oddity in some of the murals is one figure staring out at viewers, as if caught by a camera. (Note the fellow towards the left side.) The paintings featured here include groups of females holding identical poses, which is a decorative characteristic of Art Deco.

"Pomp" - detail
Click to enlarge the two detail photos for a closer look at Savage's brushwork.

Arthur Bowen Davies: Inconsistent Modernist

This post about Arthur Bowen Davies (1862-1928) is rather brief because I couldn't find many useful examples of his work on the Internet.

It seems that Davies, obscure today, was well-known and made a good living as an artist. Plus, it seems he had an interesting life, having one legal wife along with another, secret, de facto one, both with his children. This and his artistic career are well-covered here, here and here.

From what I've seen, I'd rate Davies as a Symbolist -- his painting owned by New York's Met featuring unicorns, and many other works dealing with dancers. Especially during the 20th century's 'teen years, he plunged into modernist styles, though not deeply or completely. Apparently this cut down his sales, so he shifted back to more clearly representational paintings in the 1920s.

For what my opinion might be worth, I saw no Davies painting that struck my fancy.

Gallery

Unicorns (Legend - Sea Calm) - 1906

Air, Light, and Wave - ca. 1914-17

Figures in a Landscape

The Dancers
This is in the Phillips Collection for some reason.

The Dawning - 1915

Dancers
I think this is a Davies, but the Web information on it is sketchy.

Italian Hill Town - Ca. 1925
Here he is back to representational painting.

Heliodora - 1926

Edward Cucuel's Lounging Women in White

Edward Cucuel (1875-1954) was born and died in California. But his parents were German, and he spent much of his career there following training in Paris and flitting back and forth to the States. He left Germany for good when World War 2 started. These and other details of his life can be found here and here.

The second source mentions that Cucuel, who mostly portrayed attractive young women, used family members and friends rather than professional models. To judge from his body of work (just Google on his name and then go to Images), his friends must have been dear and the family members very obliging. That's because he did painting after painting showing a pretty woman in white dress, lounging around so that plenty of leg above her white hose was showing and, by the way, part of the top had fallen away to expose a small breast. I show only one of the latter below, the rest indicating other subjects he painted.

Gallery

Picking Flowers
Some of his ladies were fully dressed and not wearing white.

Mädchen in einem Interieur
Although the title I found for this is in German, it was probably painted around 1950 when Cucuel lived in Pasadena.

Picnic on the Starnberger See
This painting seems a bit more hard-edge than some of the others, but that might be due simply to size.

Die Badenixen

Wood Nymph
Flatter than most his his paintings. If the tree trunk were less modeled, that would be an improvement to what already is an interesting work.

Young woman on dock
The perspective of the sailboat is highly distorted -- for no good reason, in my opinion.

Young woman reading in garden

Young woman sleeping, parasol
Were I female and dressed like that, I'm not sure I'd want to flop on the grass.

Young woman sleeping on a sofa
One of many of this general theme.

New Robert McGinnis Book

This is the cover of a recently published book about illustrator Robert McGinnis (1926- ) and his works.

And this is another book dealing with McGinnis by the same author that was published in 2001. I happen to happen a copy of each, so they will be dealt with in this post. A brief Wikipedia entry on McGinnis is here, and his Web site is here.

McGinnis is what is called an "all-rounder" in that he can depict almost anything well -- landscapes, cars, sailing ships. Also, by the way, lanky, sensuous, intelligent and fascinating women -- usually lacking in clothing. He painted hundreds of the latter because the major part of his career was doing cover art for paperback books, and a "good" cover from the standpoint of a publisher was a cover that could attract potential readers and entice them to buy the book. Since many paperback books deal with murder mysteries, romance, and such, McGinnis' subjects were usually women. He was very, very good at it.

McGinnis' women almost always are tall, long-legged and well endowed where it counts. They also have distinct personalities. None of the usual cookie-cutter generic pretty girl solutions for McGinnis: his women often had unconventional faces (for instance, Shere Hite was a frequent model early in his career). As the recent book mentions, in many respects McGinnis was doing portraits.

He generally used gouache or tempera on smooth-surface supports for the book illustrations and worked comparatively small -- about twice the size of the printed version, which is not large where paperback books are concerned.

The recent book has a large format, allowing readers to get a reasonably good feeling for McGinnis' painting style. It also had a Q&A with McGinnis that is brief, but interesting. He reveals what illustrator most influenced him when he was getting started doing book covers and tells who his favorite painter is.

One defect of the new book is that reference photos are nearly absent. Another is that nothing is said regarding his technique or approach when making book cover illustrations, though some study sketches are included. Moreover, McGinnis is a skilled colorist, and his thoughts on that would be very useful to learn. Admittedly, these matters are mostly of interest to fellow artists, and perhaps the book was intended for for non-artist McGinnis fans.

The earlier book has a few more reference photos, but they are tiny. And many illustrations and book cover images are small. Again, nothing much on how McGinnis worked. Still, the earlier book is interesting and useful for the likes of artistic McGinnis fans such as me.

Gallery

Never Kill a Client - cover art - 1963
Strange, interesting background here.  Did he draw it in pen and ink and then paint a wash over it?

Murder Me for Nickels - cover art (cropped at the bottom) - 1960
Again, plenty of interesting textural effects.

Girl on the Tower - Saturday Evening Post - 24 September 1960
At this point, even the Post was allowing a casual, partly unfinished style for story illustrations.

Slab Happy - cover art - 1973
A subject without a conventionally pretty face.  The new book includes a reference photo showing that McGinnis did indeed portray his model's face -- but enhanced her elsewhere.

Some Like It Cool - cover art - 1962
Did I just mention that McGinnis was a skilled colorist?

John Wayne in "The Searchers"
He didn't always paint pretty girls, even when doing movie industry work.

Guideposts magazine illustration
This hints at his landscape style.

The Return - cover art
A rather unusual McGinnis here.  Aside from the treatment of the church and hills in the background, it looks like he was suffering from Bernie Fuchs envy.

Brian Cook: Illustrator and Parliament Member

The poster-like illustration above is probably book cover or poster art by Brian Caldwell Cook Batsford (1910-1991), something apparently innovative in its day and now considered collectible.

A brief Wikipedia entry on Cook is here, and a better, much more detailed biographical sketch is here.

It seems that Cook was a bored student in school whose only interest was painting. His grades were so mediocre that university was out of the question for him. Fortunately, an uncle was a publisher, so Cook went to work at Batsford's, a firm he eventually led. He added Batsford to his name after leaving the RAF after World War 2 when he returned to the firm. Cook created many wraparound book covers for Batsford as well as posters for others.

On the side, he was a Tory parliamentarian and eventually was knighted.

Gallery

The front cover of a book I'm currently reading that deals with the London of 1932. Missing is the bloc containing the writer's name (Paul Cohen-Portheim).  The orange stripe at the right is not on my copy.

Here are examples of wrap-around book covers illustrated by Cook.

Cook didn't always do landscapes and cityscapes.