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A team of scientists used statistical analysis, deep learning algorithms, and 3D printers to create an image that is intended to look like a typical Rembrandt. 


Here's how they did it (Link to YouTube)



Read about the process on The GuardianThanks, Dan

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A major exhibition of the portrait art of Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) has opened at the Frick collection in New York. The exhibition contains about 100 drawings and paintings, making it the largest US exhibition of his work in over 20 years.

The show includes many of his supremely elegant finished portraits from Italy, France, Flanders, and England. But it also delves into his sketches and drawings, with considerable scholarship devoted to his preparatory sketches and working methods.

Anthony Van Dyck Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1640 29 7/8 × 23 1/4 in. (75.9 × 59.1 cm) Speed Art Museum

About the portrait above, for example, the curators note:

"The treatment of the face is highly finished and refined, but the woman’s bust and hand await finishing glazes, and there are extensive areas of unpainted canvas that suggest a shawl wrapped around her body. As with many other works from his London studio, Van Dyck must have painted his sitter’s face from life, resulting in a halo still visible around her head. A workshop assistant would probably have completed the painting of the background and draperies before Van Dyck applied a few final touches."

For larger and more complex group portraits, Van Dyck painted individual studies from life. This one was only rediscovered in 2000 during an episode of Antiques Roadshow.

Van Dyck, drawing of Sebastiaan Vrancx, ca. 1628–31  7 x 10 inches, black chalk

The show includes his informal sketches of fellow artists, which conveys the spirit of camaraderie that must have prevailed among working artists. Sebastiaan Vrancx was known for his landscapes and battle scenes, as well as being a poet, playwright, and book illustrator.
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Catalogue: Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture
Online:  Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture, March 2, 2016 to June 5, 2016
Survey the exhibition in expandable thumbnails at their Visual index
Video lecture by Stijn Alsteens: "Drawing for Portraits"

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Today we'll continue Chapter 9: "Painting from the Life" from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by my comments. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

Today we'll cover pages 173-180 of the chapter on "Painting from the Life," where he talks about Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Frans Hals, and Rembrandt van Rijn.

Sir Joshua Reynolds unfinished portrait

Reynolds

1. Reynolds executed his portraits in monochrome and then glazed the color over it.
The unfinished portrait above shows how his portraits must have looked in progress.

2. Reynolds' business approach for portraits
He'd charge half on commencement and the second half on satisfaction. But "he had a room full of rejected portraits in his house when he died." According to Speed, he produced 150 portraits per year.

3. "The smaller the source of light, the less half-tones you get."
Sharp, small lights create a sharp division of light and shadow. Soft light, which comes from large light sources (large windows or exposure of sky) leads to a more gradual shift from light to shadow.

Speed argues that smaller sources are more flattering, but that's generally not the consensus among portrait painters and photographers. Photographers of women in particular routinely use softer or more diffused lights, that is lights that emanate from a larger area. This soft light downplays highlights and unwanted lines and texture in the halftones.

4. Simplifying the modeling will flatter a face, even without changing the features or proportions at all. Powdering has the same effect by reducing highlights.
"The artist is not obliged to catalogue all these details." He says that a "mean vision," (meaning one that focuses on small, trivial forms) misses out on the larger, nobler vision.

I think what Speed is recommending is using a relatively smaller source of light, but ignoring or downplaying the minor details of wrinkles and highlights.

Gainsborough The Painter's Daughters (with ghost cat)

Gainsborough

5. Method: paint thinned with turps and linseed oil. Commenced by rubbing in with burnt umber cooled with terra vert (green).
This produces cool half-tones, into which reds and yellows are added into the lights, followed by darker accents. Note the drawing with the brush on the toned canvas. Also note the ghost cat.

In ateliers, the coloring of the first painting is called "dead coloring," and it is brought to life with warm glazes later.

6. "Swift unity of impression is one of the secrets of the charm, a thing that must always be caught on the wing."
Painting children is always improvisational, even in Gainsborough's day.

Hals 30 Year Old Man with a Ruff, London

Frans Hals

7. Spontaneous handling, painted with a simple palette. Painted with soft brushes, not hog hair (bristle). Speed speculates that a painting like the one above was accomplished in one sitting.

8. Blacks: thin painting over a warm ground.
Note the brushwork in the ruff. Speed notes that it was painted with a gradated middle tone into which he has flicked lights and darks.

Rembrandt Head of an Old Man

Rembrandt

9. Analyzing R. is more difficult because of his variety of handling.
Paint laid in with broken color and glazes, and sometimes with direct opaque handling. Generally Rembrandt reserves the thick paint for the lights, and keeps his darks smooth and transparent.

10. Color: "Rembrandt was a great master of getting the utmost variety out of a few earth colors."
That was true of most of the old masters. Ultramarine blue, so common today because it has been chemically synthesized, was more expensive than gold, and was usually reserved for the cloak of the Virgin Mary.


Next week— Tone and Color Design
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Das Geroldsauer Tal bei Baden-Baden by Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (1807–1863)

In the far distance the values step back even further. Light and dark values become very close. In the last range of hills, they merge into a single tone just a shade darker than the sky color.

When painting landscapes in oil, it helps to mix batches of each of these value steps on the palette and make sure they progress evenly.
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There's also a double gradation going on in the sky. More on Sky Gradations on a previous GurneyJourney post
and more of this kind of stuff in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

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Meissonier, Portrait of a Sergeant, 1874, Kunsthalle Hamburg Height: 73 cm (28.7 in). Width: 62 cm (24.4 in).

"What a magnificent collection of different degrees of attention: that of the portrait painter as he studies his model standing in front of him on the pavement, in his finest uniform and his finest pose,"

"that of the model intent only upon doing nothing to disturb his ultra-martial bearing, his gaze menacing, staring, fixed...



"...that of the spectators, some of them drawing near, fascinated, another who casts an amused glance at the picture as he passes by, with some sarcastic remark on his lips; another who no doubt has just been looking, and for the moment, with pipe between his teeth, is thinking of something else as he sits on a bench with his back to the wall and his legs extended in front of him."


"Meissonier rediscovered the decent folk of that period, which was not made up exclusively of mighty lords and fallen women, and of which we get, through Chardin, a glimpse on its honest, settled bourgeois side."

"Meissonier introduces us into modest interiors, with woodwork of sober gray, furniture without gilding, the homes of worthy folk, simple and substantial, who read and smoke and work, look over prints and etchings, or copy them, or chat sociably, with elbows on table, separated only by a bottle brought out from behind the faggots."
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Jean-Louis Meissonier, 1914, free online book by Frederic Cooper
Jean-Louis Meissonier on Wikipedia
Portrait of the Sergeant on Wikipedia Commons

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Today we'll continue Chapter 9: "Painting from the Life" from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by my comments. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

Today we'll cover pages 164-173 of the chapter on "Painting from the Life," where he talks about Velázquez.



1. Velázquez Man with a Ruff

Velázquez Philip IV of Spain (detail)

Next week— Reynolds and beyond.
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Today we'll continue Chapter 9: "Painting from the Life" from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.
I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by comments of my own. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

Today we'll cover pages 144-157, "On Painting a Head."

Harold Speed, Old Tom, courtesy BBC

1. "Before commencing, select the colors you will need and choose the fewest that will serve your purpose."
This is good advice that will reduce confusion, eliminate habits of color mixing, and yield harmony in the final result.

2. Don't take the colors as they come from the tube; Mix your own colors.
Also a good idea. You can create your gamut primaries, instead of using the colors as they happen to come from the tube. So here you're not mixing the particular notes of your scene, but rather you're mixing the ingredients of your color scheme. Instead of using yellow ochre and cad yellow as separate palette colors you can mix the two, and then use that mixture as your gamut anchor. For example he recommends mixing Indian red and burnt sienna. This is what the manufacturers do, mixing pigments to get convenience colors.

3. "The paint as supplied in tubes is a little stiffer than is always comfortable to paint with, and it is as well to thin the white by mixing up some of your medium with it."
I find the opposite is often a problem with modern paint. Paint often comes out of the tube too runny. In that case you can stiffen tube colors by first placing them on blotter paper (or other absorbent paper or cardboard) a few hours before you need to use them. As Speed suggests, it's good to have some "stiff white" about the consistency of butter always available on your palette for impasto-rich highlights.

4. Sequence: background, hair, forehead (middle tone), planes of lower face, eye socket, nose, highest light in forehead, etc.
It might seem difficult to follow this procedure in the form of text, given that we're used to seeing videos that show the process much more clearly. But try to visualize it. This is close as we're going to get to a time machine back to the Royal Academy.

5. "In the case of a short portrait sitting...do not attempt any more complications in your tones. Keep them flat and simple at first."
Put your work into refining the edges instead of refining the tones. I would say to think of the head as a roughly carved block at this stage, and rejoice that there aren't too many details to worry about.

6. "Always paint with the least amount of paint that will get the effect you want. Reserve thick paint for those occasions when you want to make a crisp touch quite separate from what it is painted into."

7. Carefully define the eye sockets before detailing the eye.
Speed probably learned this method from watching Sargent, who was said to paint an eye in this way, like making a frying pan (eye socket) and dropping an eye into it (the egg). Later Speed says: "Remember the eye is a cavity, through which is pushed the globe of the eye, on which the eyelids are placed. The eyelids therefore partake of the spherical form, as do also the 'whites' of the eye."

8. "You should always talk to your sitters if you want to keep them alive."
Many first hand sources attest to the fact that portrait painters of the past talked to their models while they painted them. This is one of the most important points that is generally missed by modern practitioners. It makes all the difference in the disposition of the face and the expression of the model.  Sleepy, dull models yield sleepy, dull portraits. Talking models yield portraits that are alive. There's no getting around it. Here's a previous blog post "Talking Models" on the topic and another post "Speaking Likeness" on the same subject.

Detail of a portrait by Velazquez

9. The under eyelid: "I know of no part of a head that so easily shows the hand of a master as the painting of the under eyelid."
To find some examples of plane breakdowns as suggested in the detailed discussion on pages 153-155, such as the "three cherries" of the lips, etc. I recommend the anatomy books by Vanderpoel, Loomis, Peck, and others.

10. "Having laid in your work with the muted middle tones, you will be able to use much purer colour in the later stages, as they will be quieted by mixing with the middle tones already there."

11. "Finish is not necessarily the addition of details, but of refinements."

Next week—we'll continue with the chapter with the section beginning on 157.
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Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the German artist Adolph Menzel.

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Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898)

A couple of months ago we took a look at Ivan Shishkin's opinion of photo reference in his landscape painting. Now let's examine more about his specific working methods.

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We continue the Friday Book Club with Chapter 2, "Modern Art" in Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book The Science and Practice of Oil Painting.

Let's take Roberto's suggestion of breaking this chapter into two parts, so we'll stop at page 20. I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by comments of my own. If you want to add a comment, you can use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

1. "A considerable body of artists have deliberately set aside fine craftsmanship in order to express themselves more freely...there has been such a fashion for the crude methods of savages and primitive peoples."

Speed's racist comments, coming at the beginning of his book, have probably turned off a lot of readers to the useful material that comes later in his treatise on painting. That's unfortunate. But let's take a look at his views one by one and see whether there's anything that makes sense to us today.

England after World War 1 was seeing its empire rapidly eroding. Because of widespread press and travel, the doors were thrown open to an awareness of non-European cultures and art.

Andre Derain, The Dance, 1905-6

At the same time, Modern Art, which was primarily a European phenomenon, presented a direct threat to an artist with academic skills. The fact that Speed invokes "savages" and "primitive peoples" and he shows illustrations of African carvings is not altogether surprising since some of the European Moderns around Speed were called "fauvists" (which means wild animals). He was writing not long after the scandalous premieres of such works as The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, which deliberately evoked primordial rituals of non-European cultures.

Ivory Coast, Spirit Spouse. Wood, Ht: 18." Baule ethnic group, early 20th Century.

I think most everyone nowadays would recognize that the art from non-European cultures—whether African or Pacific-Ocean or Native American — presents no threat whatsoever to traditional European academic painting. On the contrary, personally I find them hugely inspiring because of their language of abstraction.

In my mind non-Western art occupies a completely different category than Modern art does, despite the fact that many Modern artists used it as a jumping-off point. One can copy the outward style of any type of art, and that's totally fine. But if an artist doesn't know much about the culture or mind that produced that "exotic" art, it will be different from the original article.

Speed admits that some 19th century painters became overly concerned with naturalism, which he says led to "enfeeblement," so he has left the door open a bit to recognizing the value of Modernism.

Speed then proposes some sociological reasons for the rise of modernism:

2. Mass culture sets the dominant cultural note of the modern age
Speed suggests that there's a dominant cultural note in every age, such as that set by aristocratic patrons in the 18th century, and realism in the 20th century when middle-class values were in the ascendancy.

In other words, the power that buys the art shapes the art.

He then chalks up the trends of what he sees as crudeness in art to the rise of the power of the middle and lower classes. He says, "a great deal of the unrest and fretful violence that is disturbing the traditions of culture in all directions is due to the coming of this new cruder element into the cultural feast."

This argument strikes me not only as elitist, but wrong. If anything, it has been the cultural elite—especially academics, critics, and investors—that have promoted and supported Modernism.

Modernism has never been terribly popular in a widespread way among the lower and middle classes, compared to the art in comic books and magazines. What has truly captured the imagination of all socioeconomic classes in the West, from poor to rich, has been the "other" modern art movements found in comics, animation, and illustration.

3. "Now nobody waits until he has developed his mind before expressing an opinion."
What would he think of the Internet?

4. "The greatest works of art have been produced by small communities, such as existed in Athens and the independent states of Italy in the Renaissance." 
Interesting point, and perhaps it has a grain of truth to it, but I'm not sure that's always true. I believe art of great quality can appear anywhere, including in commercialized mass culture.

5. "It is only those whose work shouts at you, who have much chance of any immediate notice."
Speed equates bright colors with swearing and other inflated forms of language. He raises an interesting question for our time: Can art with quiet, sober virtues find an audience in our own age of ubiquity and image overload?

Speed observes that as Modernism began to emerge, artists were interested in the exotic. He says, "Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Conder, and the exquisite decadent art of the fin de siècle was the fashionable note. This has been followed by the craze for Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso."

He predicted that people would grow bored with such novelties. But history has proven otherwise, at least in the realm of the auction market and the museums. What may have surprised Speed were he to visit us today is how polymorphous the art world is. Whatever stuff you like, you'll find someone doing it.

6. "anaemic people painted life-size drinking the blood of freshly killed bullocks"
Speed makes reference to a specific painting at the (French?) Salon. Anyone know what painting he's referring to?

7. "I am not at all sure that the columns of literature it has produced, are not of much greater value than the works of which they are supposed to treat."
This is reminiscent of the point of Tom Wolfe's book The Painted Word, which argued that modern paintings serve primarily as illustrations of ideas that have their real life in print, and that the cart is driving the horse.

Tip to young artists: give critics and historians something to write about. 

8. Quotes from Roger Fry on page 16 and 17.
Roger Fry was an interesting character in all this, a promoter of Post-Impressionism and a detractor of Sargent. Rather than try to explain him further, here's the Wikipedia page on him.

9. "The great influence the Press has on modern life has brought into existence a new variety of artist, one who ministers to the demands of art critics."
There were publications cropping up everywhere in Speed's day which acted as tastemakers and gatekeepers. With those publications, Speed argues, comes a professional class of art critics who never existed before. He suggests that "the art-critics have strengthened their position recently by the control they have been able to exercise upon the purchasing departments of our public galleries."

Food for discussion:
a) There are still art critics in newspapers and magazines, but do they have the cultural influence they once did?
b) Has social media made art critics irrelevant?
c) What kind of artworks or artists are being fostered by the proliferation of forums like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Blogger?

10. "Good craftsmanship is a healthier soil for art to grow in than fine theories about aesthetics."
This is a fascinating point, that art is the finest flower growing on a base of craftsmanship running through all of a culture's production. Can there be fine painting without a corresponding value placed on fine furniture and architecture and wallpaper and typography? This idea is reminiscent of William Morris, who believed that all things in a person's world should be conceived artistically.

We'll cover the second half, starting at "Technical Influences," next week.

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Adolph Menzel The Balcony Room, oil, 1845

Adolph Menzel was painting from life in oil many years before the Impressionists. His friend Paul Meyerheim described his way of working: “Especially in the time where the whole world was painting out of that brown soup, it was Menzel's characteristic to put every tone correctly mixed and thickly into the right place."

Adolph Menzel, The Studio Wall

Meyerheim continues: "He never performed the method of glazing. He always painted differently than his contemporaries and as a result the world wasn't familiar with his technique."

"He compared glazing or similar transitions with transparent colors to the use of the pedal on the piano, stating that a good pianist can play everything as if he was using the pedal. Yet as a matter of fact everything has to be played on the keys themselves without the tones getting blurred.”
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Thanks to Christian Schlierkamp and Christoph Heuer for help with the translation.
From Paul Meyerheim

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Gouache is an effective medium for portraits. Here are some examples by Valentin Serov (1865-1911) to serve as inspiration.

Portrait of Henrietta Girshman. 1904. Gouache on cardboard. 100.8 × 70 cm. Tretyakov Gallery

Gouache lends itself to exploratory studies, allowing you to try out a composition quickly and efficiently. The board chosen can be a light brown, approximately equal to the dark halftone of the model's skin. Skin tones can be modeled with gossamer layers above and below that base tone.

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I've been reading about 19th century Russian painting, and several books on the topic have mentioned that the artists were influenced by an 1853 essay called "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality" by Nicolas Chernyshevsky.

Ivan Shishkin, Mast Tree Grove, 1898

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The revival of academic drawing and painting in America and Europe has largely been guided by the republication of the book by Charles Bargue and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

But there are other ways of approaching the teaching of academic drawing, most notably the Russian tradition, which has more of a focus on spirit and construction, rather than the outward appearance of the form. I discussed some of the differences between the two approaches in an earlier post when I interviewed Professor Sergey Chubirko who teaches at the Russian Academy in Florence.

For those interested in Russian academic methods, there are two recent books by a living Russian master named Vladimir Mogilevtsev. He is the head of the Drawing Department of the Russian Academy of Arts (also known as the Repin Institute) in St. Petersburg.

Mr. Mogilevtsev's primary books are Fundamentals of Drawing (first published in 2007) and Fundamentals of Painting (2012). They were published in Russian, but they have been translated into English, and I've had a chance to read through a PDF version of the English edition, alongside the Russian print editions.

I was interested in the drawings, of course, but even more interested in the thinking behind the drawings, and these books provide an excellent window into the mind of the Russian academy.

He also analyzes the form into its blocky forms, the skeletal foundation, and the individual muscles beneath the skin. The examples from old master drawings, sculptures, and paintings clarify his observations, and deepen the appreciation of the way our predecessors solved similar problems.
"Sometimes students complain that they don't like a scene. This is a sign of laziness and limitation of an artist's imagination. There is a person, and a person is the whole world. Revealing this world is a huge task for any artist."

Sketches and finished portrait by Valentin Serov

There's a lot of emphasis on planning with sketches to capture the quality of the subject that attracted the artist, and in maintaining that perception throughout the arduous process. The text emphasizes seeing the whole, contrasting warm and cool, and establishing a hierarchy of details, with not all details being equal.
I also highly recommend Academic Drawings and Sketches (Fundamentals Teaching Aids) (shown at left). Instead of showing a couple of drawings taken through a long series of stages, this is a large collection of finished examples of Russian academic figure drawings. They're mostly nudes, drawn by the instructors and students over the last 25 years.

It also includes some more informal sketchbook drawings of fellow students and landscapes. This book is mostly pictures, with high quality reproductions. It has minimal text at the beginning, an introduction by Vladimir Mogilevtsev in both Russian and English. The captions in this book are in both Russian and English. Academic Drawings and Sketches  is 168 pages, softcover, 9.5" x 13.5".

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The Finnish National Art Gallery has released online the sketchbooks of Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905).

Since the 104 sketchbooks are in chronological order, you can trace the journey of his mind and see the people he met and the moments he lived.

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John Singer Sargent, Ambrogio Raffele, 1904

An exhibition of John Singer Sargent's portraits of artists friends has opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and will be on view through October 4.
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Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

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In Ye Good Old Days, artists formed social events called "Sketch Clubs." The purpose of these social groups was conversation, smoking, music, conversation, comic speeches, and imaginative picture-making.

Sketch by Lawson Wood, LSC, courtesy BPIB

The idea is still good—though maybe we can invite the ladies and forgo the smoking. There's no substitute for hanging out in a clubhouse with other kinds of artists—painters, cartoonists, illustrators, animators—and drawing from the imagination just for fun, in a low-risk setting. When I was an art student, we had similar gatherings at the Golden Palms Apartment. Sometime I'll have to show you the "E.T. Sketchbook"�wacky drawings of "rejected concept sketches for E.T." by Thomas Kinkade, Paul Chadwick, Syd Mead, and others.

W.M.R. French, Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, wrote about the importance of imaginative sketching in the context of a complete artist's education. "From the beginning," he said, "a student should practice composition or picture-making, even in a rude way, in the classes of illustration and composition. Memory drawing should be stimulated by the assignment of subjects for illustration in which the student relies upon material accumulated in his studies elsewhere. He should learn to present a given subject in agreeable form with regard to line, arrangement, and balance of light-and-shade. This study gradually develops until it eventuates in a completed picture."
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Howard Pyle's Sketch Club on the Howard Pyle blog
London Sketch Club's current website
Slade Archive Project, which is archiving ephemera
Previous related posts: Cecil Aldin, Phil May, Drawn Together, Golden Palm
Quote by Mr. French from Art Education in America by W. M. R. French, "Brush and Pencil" Vol. 8, No. 4 (Jul., 1901), pp. 197-206

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Sir Edwin Landseer, Study of a Lion, 1862, oil, 914 x 1378 mm, Tate

British animal painter Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) developed remarkable skills of speed and dexterity. 

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Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) was a self-taught and independent-minded Anglo-Welsh painter, etcher and muralist who was also a mentor for Dean Cornwell.

"We must never forget that the great artists of the past were, first and foremost, honest, capable craftsmen, who worked to the order of various patrons and clients. Isn't it nonsense to talk, as the 'highbrows' do, of 'prostituting your art' when you work for a businessman? Obviously you only prostitute Art when you do it badly. As to selling your work, it is quite immaterial whether your client is a king, a bishop or a soap-boiler, as long as your work is really worthy of you.

"There should be a lot more commonsense in Art, and less affectation; and perhaps the worst affectation is this nonsense about 'vulgarising' Art by associating it with commerce. I want to see it used a great deal more, not only for Commerce, but for Life. I want it to be more useful and comforting to the people. What is Art, if it is not a message that everybody can understand?

"Did Rubens, or Titian, or Rembrandt mystify the public or sneer at them? They did not. Did they set themselves on pedestals—or pose—or paint down to the public level? They did not. The public is quite ready for the finest Art that any living artist can offer. And we shall certainly get more commonsense into Advertising when the Artist and the Businessman are better friends."
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Quote is from Phil May: The Artist and His Wit by David Cuppleditch
Website sampling from Brangwyn's Art 

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Fidelity Bridges, Milkweeds, 1876. Watercolor and gouache on paper

Fidelia Bridges, Calla Lily, 1875

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Septimus Power, The End of the Day

H. Septimus Power, Horse Cart, Watercolor

H. Septimus Power, Bringing Up the Guns

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 A detail suggests three things to my eye.

1. The sky must have been dry or nearly dry from a previous session, rather than painted all wet together. If it was previously painted, it then have been "oiled out" with a very thin layer of painting medium to make it receptive.

2. He must have had a wide variety of brushes, and switched between them as he built up the foliage and branch textures. A big old, splayed brush, dabbed against the canvas, could have provided the foliage textures.

3. The branches are painted with a very thin round brush, and some of the lighter branches in the lower right of this detail seem to be scraped out of the wet paint with a knife or a brush.

4. The foreground leaf masses are laid on quite thickly. The full effect is loose and direct, but not "brushy"�that is, it doesn't look like a collection of brushstrokes.
The Shishkin painting is Lot #1 in an upcoming Sotheby's sale of Russian pictures in London on June 2.

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One of the masters of gouache painting was the French academician Jehan Georges Vibert (1840-1902). All the paintings in this post are in watercolor / gouache.

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A scandal about a displeased portrait client damaged the career of the most famous painter of his day, Ernest Meissonier (French 1815-1891), and ended with the portrait thrown onto a fire.

Ernest Meissonier, Self Portrait

Despite his celebrity and the vast sums paid for his work, Meissonier had painted few images of women, and few portrait likenesses. This commission came in the last decade of his life and at the pinnacle of his international success.

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