Romà Ribera i Cirera: Painting the Fancy Life

Romà Ribera i Cirera (1848-1935) was a Catalonian painter whose genre was high society, though one source stated that he would have preferred to portray poor people. His Catalan Wikipedia entry is here, and the one in Spanish here. More biographical detail, also in Spanish and Catalan, is here.

In brief, Ribera received formal art training in his native Barcelona, then moved to Rome for a few years where his paintings began to gain recognition. Goupil, the French art dealer, featured his work, and he lived in Paris for a while, eventually returning to Barcelona. He lived to age 86, but his final years were in poverty.

Like a many artists of his generation, Ribera was skilled and well-trained. Better yet, he was able to paint interesting scenes in a pleasing way. His highly representational style was helpful early in his career, but seems to have made his work increasingly passé, even in comparatively artistically conservative Spain.

Gallery

Dama con traje de noche - 1893

De soirée - c. 1894

Woman powdering her nose

Going to the Ball

Dona de l'antifaç
Woman with ball mask.

Salida del baile
Exiting the ball.

Epilogo de un baile de máscaras - c. 1891
Following a masked ball.

Sleeping woman
An "after the ball" scene?

Arrival
At the theatre?

Sortida del Liceu - c. 1913
Leaving the Barcelona opera house.

William Nicholson, Churchill's Art Mentor

A while ago I wrote about Winston Churchill's art. Relatedly, this Telegraph article on Churchill's painting mentions regarding Churchill, that: "First, although he didn’t have any formal training, he learnt from the best. Churchill studied with his friend Sir John Lavery, the Irish artist best known for his portraits, and later learnt a new aspect of his craft from W R Sickert, who had a profound impact on modern art in Britain. Most important was Churchill’s close friendship with another major 20th-century British artist, William Nicholson, of whom he remarked: he was 'the person that taught me most about painting'".

Sir William Nicholson (1872-1949), Wikipedia entry here, might be better known today as being the father of modernist painter Ben Nicholson. In his time, Sir William was well known in Britain for his paintings, illustrations, engravings and stage settings.

In the Gallery section below, portraits are featured first, this to demonstrate his ability level in an area requiring acute observation. The second part shows some of his landscapes, the subject matter of his pupil, Winston Churchill.

Gallery

People

Lady in Yellow - 1893

La Belle Chauffeuse - 1904

James Matthew Barrie - 1904
Creator of Peter Pan.

Max Beerbohm - 1905
British essayist and caricaturist.

The Girl with a tattered Glove - 1909

Miss Wish Wynne, Actress, in the Character of Janet Cannot for the Play "The Great Adventure" - 1913

Miss Maude Nelke - c.1914
Socialite and patron of the arts.

Field Marshal Jan Smuts - 1923
Prominent South African leader.

Landscapes

La Place du Petit Enfer, Dieppe - 1908

The Cornfield - 1925

The Bathing Pool at Chartwell - 1934-35
Chartwell was Winston Churchill's home in Kent.

Matadero, Segovia - 1935

A Grade Near Midhurst - 1936

In the Beginning: Frederick Frieseke

Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874–1939) was an American expatriate who spent most of the last 40 years of his life in France. A fairly lengthy Wikipedia biography is here. It mentions that he regarded himself as more self-taught than formally trained. This was despite that he had studied at Chicago's Art Institute, New York's Art Students League, and the Académie Julian in Paris as well as the Académie Carmen under Whistler. Even though he summered in Giverny, Monet's haunt, Frieseke did not consider himself influenced by him. Rather, he claimed Renoir was more of an influence.

Considered an Impressionist, Frieseke was of the American variety, stressing drawing and depicting form as well as the play of colors.

Even so, it took Frieseke a while to establish his best-known style, The images below do not include his very earliest works, but show what he was producing during his first five years or so in France.

Gallery

The Garden in June - 1911
As usual, I include an establishing image, this showing the kind of painting Frieseke is best known for.

Luxembourg Gardens - 1901
Here he shows interest in the effects of light and shade, but he does this without the use of broken colors.

Landscape, Le Pouldu, Brittany - 1901
This painting seems to have been done with thinned paints that were then wiped.  The famous American illustrator Bernie Fuchs also did something like this at times.

Medora Clark at the Clark Apartment, Paris - 1903
Another fairly thinly painted work, but less sign of wiping.

Nasturiums (Girl with Book) - 1904
The flesh areas are painted conventionally here, but much of the rest is made of heavier or more distinct brushwork.

The Green Sash - 1904
To me, this seems Whistler-like with a strong hint of Japanese-influenced flatness in the setting.

Ballerina - 1904
Another fairly conventional work, but again the setting is flattened.

Lady with Parasol - 1905
The lower half seems Van Gogh- like, the upper part more like Gauguin.

Lady with Parasol - 1908
Even though Frieseke was approaching his signature style, this painting includes thin, wiped areas as well as more solidly depicted parts.  No divisionism or broken colors.  This would have been a really nice painting except for the botched boat (if that's what it is).

Rudolph Belarski's Pulp Art

Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983) was one of many illustrators whose early career was spent painting covers for the many "pulp" (low-quality paper) magazines that were especially popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s thanks to their low prices and ability to distract readers from the hard times. A short biographical sketch is here.

Belarski came from Pennsylvania's coal mining country, but was able to get away to New York City and study engineering and art at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. Unlike his contemporary, Walter Baumhofer, Belarski never graduated from pulp to "slick" magazines, but he did move on to illustrating covers for paperback books.

Below are examples of his pulp work, 1928-1943.

Gallery

War Stories cover - 16 August 1928
Early Belarski cover art. It's not well done. The helmets of the (probably) American soldiers are a lot smaller than in reality, which helps to make the heads unconvincing.

Aces cover art - July 1930
This is better, though the scene is improbable -- the American pilot twisting around to fire the dead gunner's Lewis gun at a pursuing German fighter. Perhaps the magazine featured a short fiction story that included this action.

British or American soldiers attacking
Again, Belarski has trouble drawing Great War British style helmets, though these are better than in the earlier image.  The case was the same for many illustrators and fine artists, including William Orpen.

War Birds cover - June 1936
A Three Musketeers theme, though the flyers are in American planes.

Thrilling Mystery cover - November 1936
Damsel in distress. The red dress helps attract the attention of news stand browsers, a standard pulp cover practice.

Argosy Weekly cover - 8 January 1938
That airplane really interests me because it resembles the De Havilland Vampire jet fighter that first flew in 1943. Belarski's plane seems to be rocket powered.

The Phantom Detective cover - n.d.
Belarski's technique has improved considerably by the time this cover was painted -- I'm guessing it's from the end of 1930s or the early 1940s.

Charging French poilus
Probably painted in 1939 after World War 2 started but before France fell in June, 1940.  The helmets are convincing, as is the Char B1 bis tank in the background.

Flying Stories cover - Fall 1943
The geometry of the relationships of the aircraft and tracer bullet streams is haywire, but I assume the art director asked for lots of Japanese army fighters shooting, burning and otherwise keeping the USAAF B-17 occupied.

Adriano Sousa Lopes, Portuguese Semi-Modernist

As best this blog's internal Google search tool can tell, I've never posted about a Portuguese artist. Perhaps that's because there are no famous artists from Portugal. Consider this Wikipedia list -- none of the names mentioned is familiar to me.

Not even listed there is Adriano Sousa Lopes (1879-1944), some of whose work I've noticed on the Internet. His Wikipedia entry mentions that after studying art in Portugal, he went to France and studied under Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard and "from 1904 to 1912, he exhibited regularly at the Salon d'Automne." In 1917-18, during the Great War, he was commissioned as a war artist to depict Portuguese troops serving on the Western Front.

The entry mentions that Sousa Lopes was a modernist, but later changed to a more traditional style. To me, his modernism was tepid. Mostly it boiled down to sketchiness in his paintings and the use of bright, faintly Fauvist color.

On the whole, his work doesn't excite me, though a few paintings are interesting.

Gallery

As Ondinas - 1908
A painting done in traditional style even though his French teachers were modernists. Perhaps this was done with the intent of pleasing the Portuguese art establishment of his time.

Le Moulin Rouge - c. 1910
More a sketch than a finished modernist work.

Narcisos
I don't have a date for this, but guess from the clothing and hair style that it was painted around 1915. Sousa Lopes did a good job here.

Ferme du Bois, distribuição do rancho
A Great War engraving.

Margerite Gros Perroux - 1920
This surprised me, because it's so different from other Sousa Lopes paintings. For now, I'll have to trust the source site, but let me know if another artist painted this.

At the Park - early 1920s
This might be his wife.

Blusa azul - 1925-28
This is probably Sousa Lopes' best known painting, probably of his wife.

Retrato Madame Sousa Lopes - 1927

Great War mural panel in Museu Militar de Lisboa - early 1940s?
Other artists might has assisted in the painting because Sousa Lopes' health was deteriorating.