painting of the month

The Artist's Party -- Joseph Delaney, 1941-43 (Indianapolis Art Museum)

the success of curiosity

Artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff's reaction to first seeing John Singer Sargent's 1884 Portrait of Madame X or Portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau:

"It is a success of curiosity; people find it atrocious. For me it is a perfect painting, masterly, true. But he has done what he saw. Beautiful Mme. ____ is horrible in daylight...."

the individualist

Author and philosopher Ayn Rand was born today in 1905 and died in 1982 at the age of 77. Her perhaps best known work is the architectural epic The Fountainhead, which follows the career of the intense and uncompromising Howard Roark along with many other less idealistic yet occasionally more intriguing side characters. This uncompromising cat enjoys idling by the novel for some reason and tries her best to shred its 695 pages. She may be identifying with The Fountainhead's (anti)heroine Dominique Francon -- and like Dominique is also willful, beautiful, and gets a twisted pleasure out of destroying things.

painterly spirit of the place

Above all, the outdoor painter should get the character and feeling of the place he portrays on his canvas. If in Spain, his picture must look like Spain. The air must be transparent, the architecture clean-cut against the azure. If it be Holland, the atmosphere must be moist, the air like a veil, and with all this there must be nothing in the work that will be mistaken for the smoke-laden air of England. Only thus, by this fidelity to the very nature and spirit of a place, can the picture be made to express the essence of its life, which is really the heart of the whole mystery.

Excerpt from Francis Hopkinson Smith's Scammon Lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago given in 1914, which is probably why the outdoor painter portrayed scenes on his canvas while all the ladies perhaps stayed indoors and made a nice pitcher of lemonade to quench the outdoor painter's deep artistic thirst.

Pictured: The Port of London -- Claude Monet, 1871