Whistler at the Frick

New York City's Frick Collection is comparatively small, yet astonishingly good.

For example, it holds nearly ten percent of all the known Vermeer paintings. Three, to be exact, two of which are very good and one so inferior that I wonder if it was actually done by that great artist. (You can find links to the Frick's works by name of artist here).

Much of the collection was acquired during the lifetime of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) and the New York museum at his Fifth Avenue mansion was established in 1935 following the death of his widow.

I've been meaning to visit the Frick for some time. I was first there many decades ago, before my knowledge of art history was great enough to appreciate what I was seeing. More recently, I planned to visit, but instead spent far more time in the Metropolitan Museum of Art than expected, so never got to the Frick that day. While visiting New York last September I finally did return to the Frick. The only downside was that photography was prohibited.

Two of the many works that interested me were portraits of women painted nearly ten years apart but in a similar spirit by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) ... Wikipedia biography here. As was his slightly pretentious (in my feeble judgment) wont, Whistler's primary titles of these portraits named the theme he was dealing with, rather than the actual subject.

"Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland" - 1871-74
The Frick's webpage for this painting (acquired 1916) is here. Image copyrighted by the Frick.

"Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux" - 1881-82
It was acquired 1916-18 and its Frick link is here.

Up Close: Maxfield Parrish's King Cole Bar Mural

Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) was famed in his day as an illustrator and painter. The advent of modernism forced him towards eclipse, but his reputation has grown considerably in recent decades. His Wikipedia entry is here.

Parrish's works seem to be mostly in private collections along with a few scattered museums. For many of us, the most conveniently seen examples are murals in two bars. The west coast example is his Pied Piper mural at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The other is the King Cole mural in New York City's St. Regis Hotel. The locale is the King Cole Bar that I briefly visited last September.

The mural dates to 1906 and has been in the St. Regis since 1932. Happily, it was given a cleaning a few years ago, as this New York Times article mentions.

Here are some photos from our visit.

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Here it the whole huge thing. It is comprised of three joined canvas panels, the joins being clearly visible.

The left-hand section showing the fiddlers three.

The central section where King Cole occupies his throne.

The right hand section showing the arrival of his pipe and bowl (that seems to be a jug here).

A close-up of Cole taken by my wife who seems to have had her camera's flash activated, to judge by the colors compared to my non-flash photos. King Cole is wearing glasses that fog over his right eye. Moreover, he doesn't seem to be "a merry old soul," as the poem would have it. Elsewhere on the Internet can be found a possible explanation, and I leave it to any interested Constant Readers to discover this on your own.

Up Close: Anders Zorn's Mrs Bacon

Anders Zorn (1860-1920) is generally placed with John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Sorolla in the top rank of late-19th / early 20th century portrait painters. I posted about him here and here.

It seems that New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has a very nice Zorn portrait, that of Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon (Virginia Purdy Barker), made in 1897 and presented to the museum by her in 1917.

Since I seldom get to New York City these days and visit the Met even less often, I have to wonder if the portrait of Mrs Bacon has been on display very much. But it was on display when I visited early last September. Hence, the present post.

This is the image of the painting found here on the Met's web site. If you click on it, your computer should be directed to an image that allows you to greatly enlarge areas of it you select. Seriously Up Close, in other words. One thing about the image: It is more yellowed than it appeared on display. I have to assume it was cleaned since it was photographed.

This is a slightly cropped and doctored version of a photo I took during my hurried visit.

Lucien Labaudt, Depression-Era Muralist

Lucien Labaudt (1880-1943), born in France, was largely self-taught, and spent most of his career in San Francisco where he is best known for murals he created at Coit Tower and, around 1936-37, for the Beach Chalet. Biographical information is skimpy on the Internet, but one snippet is here. Labaudt was a war artist when he died in a plane crash in India.

His usual mural style was the 1930s-fashionable, simplified and slightly cartoonishly distorted way of depicting people and settings. Unlike many other San Francisco mural painters in the 1930s, Labaudt minimized political commentary in his pictures.

Below are images of some of his murals along with two earlier easel paintings. Click on them to enlarge.

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Mural of Baker Beach in the Beach Chalet.

Mural of Golden Gate Park in the Beach Chalet.

Beach Chalet mural with Fisherman's Wharf scene.

Beach Chalet mural featuring Golden Gate area.

Detail of Beach Chalet mural of San Fancisco's waterfront. Labaudt usually included family members and friends in his murals. The man shown here is Harry Bridges, boss of the longshoremen's union that kept West Coast ports disrupted due to strikes for decades.

"L'Atelier" (Workshop), a 1931 painting.

"Composition" from 1927. Note how it differs from the Social Realist style of his later works.

Larry Stults' Hupmobile Illustrations

Elwin Martin (Larry) Stults, Jr. (1899-1996) was a commercial artist active from the 1920s into the 1940s and perhaps for a while beyond. The Stults website has some biographical information here. It seems he spent part of his career working in Haddon Sundblom's shop (I wrote about Sundblom here).

Stults is perhaps best-known for his illustrations for Hupmobile cars that appeared in 1926 and 1927. He invariably included an attractive young woman in his illustrations; men were optional. I like these ads because they are so very-1920s, a time that has interested me for most of my life.

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That sort of dog is also seen in 1920s and 30s Art Deco designs.

The woman is very nicely done, -- the car, not so much.

Here Stults tries a flatter, more diagram-like approach.

The car's perspective is incorrect, but the lady is just fine aside from exaggerated proportions.

This last illustration might not have made its way into an advertisement.

Up Close: Robert Lewis Reid's Fleur de Lys

While dashing through New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art early in September, I came across Fleur de Lis (c. 1895-1900) by Robert Lewis Reed (1862-1929). His Wikipedia entry is here, and I wrote about him here. The Met's website page on the painting is here.

At the time the painting was made, Reid was practicing the American version of Impressionism where broken color and visible brush strokes were combined with greater attention to drawing than in classical French Impressionism, and where key areas such as faces were painted more traditionally. Fleur de Lis has a similar feeling to some of paintings of women by Frederick Frieseke and Richard E. Miller.

Image of Fleur de Lis from the Met's web site.

My establishment / aide-memoir photo.  Note the difference in color due to artificial lighting in the museum and perhaps sensors in my camera.

Close-in photo. This is slightly cropped, and I also played around with the color which is still slightly more in the red direction than the colors in the museum's image above. Reid painted fairly thinly here, though parts of flowers and the subject's clothing show stronger brushwork. Note the blueish background color touches on the subject's face, hair and hands. Also bits of her hair color spotted elsewhere. This helps to unify the painting.

Molti Ritratti: Charles X of France

Charles X (Charles Philippe, 1757-1836), the last main-line Bourbon king of France, ruled for almost six years (1824-1830) before abdicating and being succeeded by Louis-Philippe, duc d'Orléans. Two of his brothers, Louis XVI and Louis XVIII, preceded him as king. Louis XVI was beheaded after the Revolution and Louis VIII became king with the post-Bonaparte restoration. Charles' Wikipedia entry is here.

Charles was pre-photography, but barely. However, portraits of him by different artists show striking agreement regarding his appearance while king, so we can be reasonably sure how he looked. In several instances in the images below, he is wearing the same costume (though medals on his chest vary from portrait to portrait).

Note that several portraits have his lips slightly parted. This must have been a strong characteristic and one that Charles apparently didn't mind being displayed.

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Charles when Comte d'Artois, by Henri Pierre Danloux - 1798

By François Gérard (and atelier), detail - c.1825

By Georges Rouget

By Thomas Lawrence - 1825

By Robert Lefèvre - 1826

By Léon Cogniet

By Horace Vernet