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Japan in Arles

“In early 1888, Van Gogh moved to Arles in the south of France, where he hoped to establish an art colony. Believing that painting could be reinvented through the genre of portraiture, he encouraged his fellow artists to paint themselves, and then to exchange the canvases. After receiving self-portraits from Emile Bernard and Gauguin, who were working together in Brittany at the time, Van Gogh inscribed this painting “To my friend Paul Gauguin,” and sent it to him. He described the process of creating his arresting likeness in several letters to his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, explaining how he manipulated his features in response to Japanese prints, changed the contours of his jacket for coloristic effect, and painted the background “pale veronese…

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Etienne de Lavaulx at youtube

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Archibald Thorburn at wikiwand

Archibald Thorburn at Christie’s

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Many thanks to bluebird of bitterness for introducing me to this music in the post Today’s Cultural Moment.

Thanks for Visiting 🙂

~Sunnyside

“By 1935, when this work was painted, Morris’s fascination with irises had firmly taken hold. He established a studio in the garden where he would sit and paint his flower subjects for days on end, and one ex-student, Joan Warburton, poignantly reminisced how ‘to go in there quietly when Cedric was painting the favourite of all his flowers, Irises, was a revelation.’^[2] Morris’s thorough understanding of the iris is evident in the present work which explores each flower individually, using colour and texture to give them mood and personality.”

Philip Mould and Co

Thanks for Visiting 🙂

~Sunnyside

Just after the UK’s last COVID lockdown, and longing to visit galleries again, my mum and I did an online City Lit course on major artists whose work was to be exhibited in London over the summer of 2021.

One of those discussed was renowned Portuguese artist Paula Rego (1935-2022), an artist known for her feminist and political stance, along with skewed references to fairy tales, nursery rhymes and Portuguese fables, reminiscent of a painterly Angela Carter. Other interests and influences include traditionally female crafts such as embroidery and dollmaking (subtly subverted), Jungian psychology and surrealism.

I wasn’t particularly taken with Rego’s work when it was presented to me on screen, but when I went to see the large-scale retrospective of her work at Tate Britain that autumn I was converted. Mum and I saw more of her work on display at the Venice Biennale this year, when we escaped…

On the way back from a visit to the West End, I passed St-Martin-in-the-Fields, standing out against the cold sky.

The statue in the foreground, left, is the Edith Cavell Memorial, seen from the back. Edith Cavell (1865-1915) was a British nurse. In German-occupied Belgium, guided by her principles of humanity and her Christian faith, she provided medical care to soldiers irrespective of which side they were on. She was executed by a German firing squad 1915, because she had helped Belgian, British and French soldiers to escape the German occupation and reach Britain. Her grave is in Norwich Cathedral.

I sketched standing on a corner of the Charing Cross road, see map above. This turned out to be a very noisy location. The National Portrait Gallery is being refurbished and there was continuous drilling and banging. Buses and…