painting of the month

The Pool -- Tom Thomson, 1915 (National Gallery of Canada)

and the cotton is high

Degas made the front page of the weekend Wall Street Journal with his 1873 painting The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans; the price of cotton is spiking due to an anxious market, with share numbers rising to amounts last seen around the Civil War era. Or around the time that Degas packed his trunk and set sail to visit family living in New Orleans, making him the only French Impressionist (of the original Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, et al group) to ever go to the United States.

ten power

Pictured is Willard Leroy Metcalf's The Ten-Cent Breakfast (Denver Art Museum), painted in 1887 when Metcalf was hanging out in Giverny with various other American artists. Metcalf would later return to the States to become part of The Ten American Impressionists and to otherwise lead a professionally productive yet occasionally personally troubled life.

Metcalf was a tall, strapping guy with an individualist streak; he had marital and financial problems every now and then and sometimes drank too much, but he nonetheless always seemed to be working and painting and focused on his art. In this breakfast club scene, Metcalf's Giverny companions at the time are included, namely author Robert Louis Stevenson and fellow artists Theodore Robinson and John Twachtman. (The standing man with the pipe is apparently unknown.) I read Elizabeth De Veer's splendid biography of Metcalf a few years ago, however, and while I'm not 100 or even 10 percent sure of my recollection, I thought she suggested that the man at the table watching Stevenson read the newspaper is Metcalf himself and not Twachtman. And that Metcalf's less than welcoming stare came from his dislike of Stevenson, which began as a gut feeling and intensified with circumstances that followed. Again, this is my total unsubstantiated recollection from the bio (Sunlight and Shadow), which unfortunately I don't own a copy of and which actually had to be brought in on interlibrary loan to the Chicago Public Library. No matter what the case, it's still an intriguing painting -- especially on 10-10-10.

the full gamut

"I was trying to fill what they call the full gamut, or the race as a whole...in all my paintings where you see a group of people you'll notice that they're all a little different color. They're not all the same color, they're not all black...they're not all brown. I try to give each one of them character as individuals."

Archibald Motley, Smithsonian Archives Oral History Interview, 1979

Pictured: Barbecue, Howard University Art Collection (Archibald Motley, b. October 7, 1891 -- d. January 1981)

luminous luma

The Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) is one of Chicago's museum gems, and this week they're featuring tours by candlelight of their Martin D’Arcy Collection. As LUMA itself details: "Walk through the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque galleries and see the art with new eyes, viewing the work as it would have been seen when it was created hundreds of years ago." The pictured The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de la Tour is at the Met and not LUMA, but thoughts of Baroque art by candlelight brought it to mind. It all sounds great, especially at this time of year with candles and bulbs flickering a little bit earlier each night.

she's listening

"A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world." Edmond de Goncourt

(Pictured: La Grande Odalisque -- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1814, Louvre Museum)