Up Close: "Sonata" by Irving Ramsey Wiles

Irving Ramsey Wiles (1861-1948) ... or it it Irving Ramsay Wiles? Go to Google and you will find both spellings.

In December I came across his painting "The Sonata" (1889) at San Francisco's De Young. The placard next to the painting has it "Ramsey" whereas the De Young's web page for the painting favors "Ramsay."

A small matter, so far as this post is concerned. My interest here is that painting.

As for Wiles, his very brief Wikipedia entry is here. I blogged about his depictions of women here.

In that post I held that Wiles was not a great artist, but a good one who made some fine paintings. "Sonata" is one of those. Note the "X" composition as well as the brushwork in the Up Close photos I took. Click on the images to enlarge.

Gallery

This image is from the De Young web site.

"The Sonata" as seen in its gallery by my camera.

Detail of the upper part of the painting.

Detail showing Wiles' treatment of fabrics.

Motli Ritratti: Tilla Durieux

Tilla Durieux (née Ottilie Godeffroy - 1880-1971) born in Vienna to a chemist (Richard Godeffroy) and a Hungarian pianist (Adelheid Ottilie Augustine Hrdlicka), was an actress who spent most of her career in Germany, but waited out the Nazi years in Switzerland and Yugoslavia. Her Wikipedia entry is here.

Like Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, Durieux was the subject of a number of portraits by artists even though it was the age of photography. With one noteworthy exception, the images below were created by artists of German and Austrian background.

Gallery

Photo of Tilla Durieux

Tilla as Salome, by Max Slevogt - 1907

By Oskar Kokoschka - 1910

By Max Oppenheimer - 1912
Note the surprisingly similar feeling in the three paintings above done by three different artists.

Tilla as Circe - by Franz von Stuck - c. 1912-13

Tilla as Circe - by Franz von Stuck - c. 1912-13

Tilla as Circe - pastel and pencil - by Franz von Stuck - c. 1912-13

By Auguste Renoir - 1914
Here Tilla looks like most other women in Renoir paintings.

By Emil Orlík - 1922

An Especially Wild Boldini

Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931) was a representational painter, yet he painted so freely that many of his images are exaggerated, if not flat-out distorted. His Wikipedia entry is here and includes a number of examples of his work. I have posted about him as well.

San Francisco's Legion of Honor has Café Scene (c.1887) a small sketch-painting made in Paris. It interests me because, like many unfinished paintings, it offers some insight into how an artist goes about working.

In Boldini's case, it is sketchy indeed.

The painting: a cropped photo I took at the Legion of Honor. What was cropped was the frame plus a tiny bit of the painting.

Detail.

Many Artists, Similar Styles, Techniques

Not long ago I drove to the other side of Lake Washington to visit the Howard/Mandville Gallery. It was having the opening reception for Wanderlust: Invitational Landscape Exhibition 2017.

I though most of the paintings on display were pleasant, and a few were very fine. But what struck me was how similar many of them seemed to one another, even allowing for the usual individual artistic personality differences.

Of course, subject matter can be a strong influence. I've mentioned now and then how similar many paintings of California landscapes can be. Then there is the fashion factor. Like the architecture of houses, it can be fairly easy to assign, within a decade or two, when certain paintings or illustrations were made. What I was viewing seems to be a currently popular approach to painting landscapes in the temperate zone of North America. I don't intend this a criticism. Almost all the works I viewed were pleasing.

The image at the top of this post is "Winter Silence" by Roger Dale Brown: I'll use it as an example. What is especially clear when seen in person is thinner, more free brushwork for incidental parts of the painting, though "incidental" might actually comprise much of the area of the canvas or panel. Contrasting this are more thickly painted, usually crisply defined details. In the above painting, the metal roof of the barn is an example of this. So are the tree branches shown against the sky -- the effect is wispy yet much of the detailing is sharp.

Gallery

"Valley Light" - Brian Blood

"The Soloist" - Shanna Kunz

"Road to the Forest" - David Lidbetter

"Remnants" - David Santillanes

"Ocher Landscape" - Andrew Skorut

"Old Barn in Autumn" - Romona Youngquist

Saul Tepper in Illustration Magazine

Saul Tepper (1899-1987) is one of my favorite illustrators active in the 1920s and 1930s. So I was very pleased to see that Illustration Magazine featured him in this, the issue current when this post was drafted. I wrote about Tepper here, and mentioned him in a few other places. More regarding him can be found here, here, and here.

Tepper's 1920s style was similar to the 1920s work of Dean Cornwell, perhaps in part because they studied under Harvey Dunn. Later on, both Cornwell and Tepper adjusted their styles to new illustration fashions, though Tepper eventually changed his career from being strictly being an illustrator (read the Illustration article for details).

Below are examples of Tepper's work from that era, some also appearing in the magazine article.

Gallery

From a 1933 issue of McCall's magazine.

Detail of illustration for General Electric refrigerators, 1930.

Illustration for a story about football (American).

"The Make-Up Time" story illustration -- 1930s college students.

One of my favorites, this from a Chesterfield Cigarettes advertisement. I like the toned-down colors and the pose of the flapper just off the ship from Europe confronting a U.S. Customs inspector.

The Moody World of Henri Le Sidaner

Henri Eugène Augustin Le Sidaner (1862-1939) was a prolific painter despite the fact that he usually painted in a small-stroke divisionist fashion. Even though he is not well known these days, the Athaenium web site has nearly 400 images of his work, far above their typical image count for painters.

Sidaner's English language Wikipedia entry is brief, so consider the more detailed French entry and have it translate the text if you don't read French. A useful article about him from 2014 can be linked here on the (British) Spectator site.

As for his style, Sidaner's divisionism was a treatment he applied much of the time to fairly structured draftsmanship. That is, if you look at the thumbnail images at the Athaenium site above, many seem sharp. It's only when you link through to enlarged versions that the brushwork becomes more dominant.

Gallery

The Return of the Flock - 1889
An example of Sidaner's early style and subject matter.

Portrait of Madame Hemon - 1896
Divisionism is beginning to creep in here in the form of small color areas.  The arms and hands are poorly done.  In any case, he seldom painted people.

Sunday - 1898
A pleasant scene: one of his more interesting works with a Symbolist touch.

A Canal at Bruges - 1898
Le Sidaner avoided Paris, spending time at various places in France and Belgium.  A few of his works deal with the London area.

The Cathedral at Chartres - 1903-04
Note the small, lighted window.  This makes the image less relentless.  Examples of this can be found in a number of his paintings.

Full Moon on the River - 1919
Two lighted windows here (plus one reflected window) in this pleasantly moody painting.

Une petite Table au crépuscule - 1921
He often included tables with a bit of still life as subjects.  Here too is a lighted window.

La Fenêtre du Midi, Villefranche-sur-Mer - 1927
Another Sidaner trait was showing scenes beyond open windows.

La ville haute - 1937
A fairly late painting.  Color areas return, though some divisionism remains.

Evening Celebration - 1939
Painted not long before his death.  Atypical subject matter.  More of a sketch than a finished work (in Le Sidiner's sense).

A Portrait by Henry Brown Fuller

Henry Brown Fuller (1867-1934) was a capable painter who left few works of note, if the number of his paintings found via Google is any criterion. Plus, he had personal problems that might well have been related to this. His brief Wikipedia entry is here.

As for the quality of those few images is concerned, one painting, Illusions, is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection. Another, his portrait of Ebba Bohm (c.1905) was on display at San Francisco's De Young when I visited in December.

The Ebba Bohm portrait is interesting in part due to its comparative "flatness" -- not poster-like, but far from the rounded, hard-edge academic style that was prevalent only a few decades before Fuller painted Ebba. This characteristic is not so apparent in the images posted here, but for some reason stood out when I viewed the painting in person. I found it a very satisfying work by a not-well-known painter.

This is an image of the painting found on the Internet.

Here is a photo I took at the museum. For some reason it seems "flatter" than the image above. Perhaps it's because the colors seem less intense -- and those colors in my photo seem closer to what I saw than those in the first image.

A close-up photo. Modeling of the head is much less apparent here than in the Internet image.