Anthonius Mor: 16th Century Portraits that Looked Like People

"Sir Anthonius Mor, also known as Anthonis Mor van Dashorst and Antonio Moro (c. 1517 - 1577) was a Netherlandish portrait painter, much in demand by the courts of Europe. He has also been referred to as Antoon, Anthonius, Anthonis or Mor van Dashorst, and as Antonio Moro, Anthony More, etc., but signed most of his portraits as Anthonis Mor" is how this Wikipedia entry begins.

As regular readers of this blog probably know by now, I seldom write about artists active before around 1850. That has to do with my interests, and I write about what interests me. Paintings done before the mid-19th century for the most part elicit a reaction of indifference. I don't hate them, but don't love them either. (Exceptions include Velazquez, Tiepolo, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Chardin and some others.)

Two reasons for this, among others, are (1) the settings are too "staged" or static or artificial for my taste, and (2) I don't love highly "finished" paintings. Plenty of exceptions here, but when both factors are present, I'll usually give the painting a once-over and move on. Which is why, when I'm in Paris next month, I might not get farther into the Louvre than its great book / gift store.

Portraits made before about 1700 usually strike me as offering a sense of what the sitter looked like, but seem contrived, somehow. Again there are exceptions. One such set of exceptions includes some portraits by Anthonius Mor, who I was unaware of until I saw a post on the Gandalf's Galley blog featuring his portrait of the Duchess of Parma. Mor's portraits include all the fancy costuming expected for important sitters. But it is the faces that strike me as being those of flesh-and-blood people -- not smoothly-painted diagrams of people's faces.

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Duchess Margaret of Parma - 1562
Click on the image for a considerably enlarged version and examine Mor's treatment of her face.

Willem I van Nassau (William of Orange) - ca. 1554

Queen Mary Tudor of England - 1544
Painted before she gained the throne.

Sergius Hruby: Sensual Symbolist

There's not a lot regarding Sergius Hruby (1869-1943) on the Internet other than examples of his artwork. Some biographical information is here, and a much shorter mention is here.

In brief, his Czech name to the contrary, he was born in Vienna, studied art and made his career there.

Hruby can best be classified as a Symbolist of the Art Nouveau variety. Many of the images he created featured nude or partly-clad women and were in the form of illustrations for printed reproduction. What I find interesting is that his style changed little over most of his career, unlike many other artists of his generation who chased modernist artistic fashions.

It's also worth noting that Hruby's works draw one's interest because, in part, they are unconventional. That is, the humans he depicts are done in representational style with little in the way of simplification and none of the distortion often found in mainstream symbolist works. From that basis, he places those humans in strange situations using dramatic or unusual compositions.

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Apotheosis

Ungleige Seelen (Different Souls)
That's a rough translation, the title might also be rendered as "Unequal Souls" or even something more freely put in English.

Die Verspottung Christi (The Mocking of Christ)
Click on it to enlarge.

I'm not sure what the title is for this painting. The image I captured from the Internet had the tag "Oil on Wood," which would be the description of materials used to make it. This strikes me as being an earlier work, though I might easily be completely wrong. Nevertheless, it's pleasing.

Anbetung der Natur (Nature Worship) - 1932
At least this one is dated, and was made when he was in his early sixties, still evoking 1900 sensibilities.

Alexander Leydenfrost: Illustrating Technical Stuff

American readers born before, say, 1950 might recall leafing through copies of Life Magazine or other publications and coming across illustrations by Alexander Leydenfrost (1888-1961). What most viewers didn't realize was that Leydenfrost was an Hungarian Baron who moved to the United States in 1923 to escape the aftermath of the Great War. By 1930 he was working as an industrial designer for Norman Bel Geddes, and at the end of the decade moved into illustration full-time. Those and other details can be found in this short Wikipedia entry.

After a fling in Planet Stories, a science-fiction magazine, Leydenfrost built his illustration career depicting current and futuristic machines and settings. This was not a large step away from making certain kinds of industrial design presentations. However, he had an artistic sense that set him apart from those simply skilled in product rendering, which is why his scenes were usually dramatic and halfway believable even if they dealt with future possibilities.

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Brooklyn Battery Tunnel - 1950

Fleeing after atomic attack - Pageant Magazine - February 1951

Science on the March - Popular Mechanics Magazine - January 1952
This was a spread in the magazine's 50th anniversary issue.  Click on the illustration to enlarge.

Future Dirigible - ca. 1944

B-26 Bomber - 1942 or 1943

Pennsylvania Railroad calendar illustration - 1945

Ludwig Dill: Conservative Secessionist

Wilhelm Franz Karl Ludwig Dill (1848-1940), who called himself Ludwig Dill, was a founding member of the Munich Secession artists group. A brief Wikipedia entry on Dill is here.

In 1894 he became second president of the group after Bruno Piglhein's death. He was appointed professor at the Karlsruhe fine arts academy in 1899, so resigned and was replaced by Fritz von Uhde.

Although Dill was supportive of modernist tendencies in painting, his own works were fairly conservative. His mature style tended to simplification through use of broad brushwork as well as somewhat decorative composition. His favored subjects were trees and boating scenes from the Venice Lagoon, especially towards its southern end and the town of Chioggia.

Gallery

Fischer in Venedig - 1880
"Fishermen in Venice" show Dill's earlier traditional style.

Ein bewaldete Flusslandschaft - 1883
The title doesn't translate easily into English, but refers to a landscape featuring woods and water.  Modernist influence is clearly found here.

Trees

Der Morgen
"Morning" and the painting above it are characteristic of Dill's tree paintings, though Der Morgen seems more of a sketch than his usual tree art.

View of a town
No tile or date for this, but it shows that he didn't exclusively paint trees and boats. However, he tended to avoid painting people other than small, incidental figures in his boat paintings.

Segelboote in Kanal - ca. 1890
"Sailboats in a Canal" is in a style different from the paintings below that also are said to be from around 1890, so I wonder when it was made.

Ankunft des Fischerbootes - ca. 1890
"Arrival of the Fishboats" and the following painting are done in a decorative, broad-brush style that yields a modernist feeling without much distortion of the subject matter.

Fischer in Pellestrina - ca. 1890
Pellestrina is a barrier island to the Venice Lagoon.

Booten im Hafen - ca. 1900
"Boats in Harbor" apparently was painted later than the images above and incorporates a slight shift towards Expressionism and away from Dill's faintly Romantic earlier views.

John Lavery's Glasgow Exposition Sketches and Paintings

Sir John Lavery (1856-1941) is perhaps known as a portrait painter (I wrote about his portraits of his wife here). But he was pretty much an all-rounder, painting village scenes, doing wartime art, interiors, and finally poolside views of sunny south Florida. A short Wikipedia entry about him is here.

The present post deals with career-building works he painted at the 1888 Glasgow International Exposition. Lavery made a number of oil sketches along with a few finished paintings, including a major one of Queen Victoria and a multitude of assembled dignitaries that helped him win portrait commissions thereafter.

Gallery

State Visit of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888 - 1890

Woman Painting a Pot at Glasgow International Exposition, 1888
A finished painting.

The Dutch Cocoa House at the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888
One of the sketches. Note the Van Houten plaque ubder the mantle.

The Blue Hungarians at the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

The Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

The Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

The Musical Ride of the 15th Hussars during the Military Tournament at the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

The Cigar Seller at the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

Frank Gehry's Mangled Buildings

Frank Gehry (b. 1929) is a famous architect who I wouldn't commission to design a doghouse.

Unfortunately, people and organizations having pockets far deeper than mine seem to be thrilled to hire the old fellow to create yet another twisted, smashed-up appearing structure. No accounting for taste, as they've been saying for centuries.

I will grant Gehry one thing. Classical examples of modernist architecture or "International Style" (as the Museum of Modern Art called it in the 1930s), are almost always boring to look at and not human-friendly. Gehry's buildings are far from boring. They are appalling. Also not human-friendly.

My limited experience with Gehry buildings (Los Angeles' Disney, Seattle's EMP -- see images below) is that their interiors are confusingly laid out. The exteriors generally try to hide the fact that these are buildings with some sort of structure that supports them. By visually denying the logic and solidity of a building, they are disorienting, upsetting, denying their proper nature. Which does not mean that I necessarily favor structural clarity über alles -- that was a major defect of International Style.

Gehry, his buildings, and perhaps those who commissioned them, strike me as being sad victims of perpetual adolescence; aging juvenile show-offs, if you will.

Here are some examples of Gehry's work, images found here and there on the Web.

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"Dancing House" - Prague - 1996

Experience Music Project - Seattle - 2000

Peter B. Lewis Building, Case Western Reserve University - Cleveland - 2002

Walt Disney Concert Hall - Los Angeles - 2003

Cleveland Clinic, Lou Rovo Center for Brain Health - Las Vegas - 2010

Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, University of Technology Sydney - 2015

William Logsdail: From Cityscapes to Portraits

William Logsdail (1859-1944) was born in the hill city of Lincoln in the English Midlands and received his initial art training there before going to Antwerp for further study. So it might be said that his training was probably competently done for the times, but not at the elite level. But training can only take someone part of the way; personal factors come to the fore once a career is launched. In Logsdail's case, architecture was a strong interest, so his best known works include scenes of the cities of Venice and London. He could portray people as well, so by the early 20th century switched to portraiture for a more reliable income stream. His Wikipedia entry is here.

I don't believe I've ever seen a Logsdail painting in person, so my evaluation of the London scenes below must be tentative. The impression I have is that although they seem fairly tightly done, this is slightly loosened by his use of color and atmospheric perspective. Some other works shown below are painted more loosely, though his portraits of the 1900s generally seem to have a high degree of finish.

Gallery

Venice
An interesting point of view. Shown is the central tourist zone square-on. Most artists choose to paint from the opposite side of the Grand Canal and sight down it.

Venice - 1881

Eve of the Regatta - 1881
Some of the better American illustrators of 1895-1930 painted scenes much like this.

By the Lion of St. Mark, Venice - 1885
Here Logsdail sights along the canal, but this view is in the opposite direction from the usual depictions.

Church of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice - 1885
Another unconventional viewpoint. The Church is usually shown with the canal or its shoreline in the foreground, rather than from a subsidiary canal as done here. This viewpoint is one a photographer might select, though Logsdail was a plein-air artist in those days and didn't use reference photos so far as I know.

St. Paul's and Ludgate Hill - ca. 1884
An historical document, this is.

Bank and the Royal Exchange - 1887

The Bank of England - 1888

St. Martin's-in-the-Fields - 1888

The Greek Theatre, Taormina, Sicily - 1890s
Having visited Taormina a year ago, I can vouch that Logsdail did a good job of capturing the scene. That's Mt. Etna in the background. Today, the shoreline is built up and large tourist hotels can be found.

John William Waterhouse - ca. 1887
Portrait of the well-known Victorian artist. The style is similar to that used by the Glasgow Boys school.

The Artist's Wife - ca. 1905

George Nathaniel Curzon - 1909
Curzon had been Viceroy of India before this was painted.

Mary Victoria Leiter, Lady Curzon - 1909
A posthumous portrait of Curzon's first wife.