Melencolia I (1514) by Albrecht Dürer

Conjectures and theories about Dürer’s solid: an overview

(See also “A new link between Melencolia I and the golden ratio” and “A Melencolia sequel: tracing Dürer’s point of view”)

The copper engraving “Melencolia I” (1514) by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) remains one of the most enigmatic works in the history of Art. At first view, the composition seems as a jumble of apparently unrelated objects, some of which cannot even be recognized or named. Behind the first layer of perception, that the eye catches immediately, a closer inspection reveals smaller objects, chaotically scattered or even half hidden.

The picture is dominated by a sitting angel, presumably feminine but muscular, whose glance is fixed somewhere in the distance. With her right hand she holds a seemingly idle pair of compasses, while with her left hand she supports her head, gloomy faced, as if dried up of inspiration. At her feet, and half hidden underneath her long garment, lay several carpenter’s tools: a plane, a pair of pliers, a saw and some nails. On her right, a putto sits on a round millstone or grindstone, occupied with scribbling something on a small board fixed on his knees, hiding his work from the viewer with his left hand. Remarkably, the millstone seems to have an axle socket slightly off – centered. Diametrically of the angel stands a large geometric solid, which we will refer to as “the Dürer solid” in this essay. Only four faces of the solid can be seen from the viewer’s point of view. In front of the solid, a dog is calmly rolled up before a sphere. In the background of all these stands what seems to be part of a building, two walls meeting seemingly perpendicularly and fixed on them appear a balance, a hourglass and a bell. A magic square is inscribed on the wall facing the viewer: a square arrangement of the numbers 1 to 16 such as the sum of each row, column and diagonal is equal to 34. A ladder leans on the wall behind the structure while far in the horizon, through the only part of the composition which is not crammed with objects, providing thus an unobstructed view, some sea or lake can be seen and even the houses of some village on its shores. A luminous celestial object on the night sky, possibly a comet, sheds light over the landscape, which is covered by a bright arc, resembling a lunar rainbow. And against the sky, over the whole composition of objects, earthly and heavenly, hovers an imaginary bat – like creature, having only two clawed front legs and the tail of a lizard. The creature stretches its body and its wings to reveal, as if tattooed on its own skin, the inscription “Melencolia§I”.

The conundrum presented by the engraving has been studied extensively in the past by many researchers, and several different interpretations have been offered. Most of these are attempts to guess Dürer’s own intentions, while some could even be described as wild guesses or long shots. Sometimes the interpretations given are not very different from the interpretations of a rather abstract poem: it seems that none of them is more or less “correct” than the others. Dürer has left for us a riddle whose answer is highly susceptible to subjectivity, without leaving any instructions on how this enigmatic work should be read after all. Only a few features of the picture are rather clear, such as the year 1514 appearing in the base row of the magic square. Dürer signed his work AD1514, giving himself the solution to this minor puzzle (note that AD stands for “Anno Domini” and “Albrecht Dürer” at the same time). The inverted 5 of the magic square is generally agreed that represents the month of the year 1514 in which Duerer’s mother died, an event undoubtedly linked to melancholy. It has been suggested that the magic square itself is borrowed from a talisman of the German occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Netteshime (1486 – 1535). Cornelius Agrippa intended the talisman, or “Jupiter’s square”, as a shield from the bad influence of planet Saturn, which could cause melancholy (in medieval times, scholars associated Saturn with melancholy, one of the four humors of ancient medicine). This explanation is at least possible and reasonable, and is supported by the fact that Agrippa had visited Nurnberg, Dürer’s city, in 1510. Little else, if anything, about the picture has been resolved satisfactorily, let alone undoubtedly.

The comet, the bat – like creature, the landscape, the lunar rainbow, the building, the ladder, the scales, the hourglass, the bell, the putto, the millstone, the angel, the tools, the sphere have all been, and still are, subjects of guessing. Even the title of the work, “Melencolia I”, remains largely unresolved, partly due to the misspelled “melancholia” (in latin) and partly due to the mysterious “I”. Of special interest in this essay is the Dürer’s solid, the geometric object dominating the left part of the engraving. The proposed theories or conjectures about the solid can be distinguished in two categories. The first is comprised of theories about the exact geometric nature of the solid. The second collects all theories about the possible message the solid conveys or about what the solid stands for in the general context of “Melencolia I”.

Examining the first category, these are some of the proposed solutions of the riddle:

1. The truncated rhombohedron hypothesis: Most researchers agree that the solid is probably what in Solid Geometry is called a “truncated rhombohedron”. The name of it may seem somewhat repelling, however it is a rather simple solid with six faces, all of which are rhombi. A rhombus is a quadrilateral with all of its sides having the same length (by school Geometry it can be proved that it is also a parallelogram). The rhombohedron is a solid constructed by repeating a rhombus six times and looks like a dice whose angles are not right. A “truncated rhombohedron” is a rhombohedron with its two facing vertices cut off. It must be stressed that the assertion that the Dürer solid is a truncated rhombohedron is simply a conjecture and is not supported by any of Durer’s writings or by any other data. The only reason leading to a general agreement on the truncated rhombohedron hypothesis is that the Dürer’s solid simply looks like a truncated rhombohedron.

2. The truncated rhombohedron – 72° hypothesis: Some researchers have even made a step further, to assume that the angles of each face of the rhombohedron are 72 and 108 degrees (i.e. 1/5 and 3/10 of the full turn). Mathematically, these values are of special importance and link the Dürer’s solid to the notorious number φ, the ancient “golden ratio” or “golden mean”. Indeed, the above angles refer to a special kind of polygon, called a regular convex pentagon, which is a shape with five equal sides and five equal angles (all of them equal to 108 degrees). It can be proved that the chords of such a shape are in golden ratio to its sides.

3. The scaling hypothesis: It has also been argued that a vertical compression of the engraving by a factor sqrt(φ) turns the picture into a square and the solid into a truncated cube, providing thus another link to the golden ratio.

4. The truncated rhombohedron – 80° hypothesis: According to another point of view, resulting from measurements based on quantitative assumptions, the angle of the rhombohedron is approximately 80 degrees, which by mathematical standards is a rather humble number with no miraculous properties as the ones mentioned above.

5. The heptagon hypothesis: Despite the apparent humbleness of the number 80 mentioned above, it has been observed that it is suspiciously close to the number 77,2, which would be the value of an angle of the irregular pentagon produced if five of the seven vertices of a regular convex heptagon were joined.

6. The truncated rhombohedron – circumscribed sphere hypothesis: According to this theory, Dürer observed that while six of his rhombohedron vertices lie on the same sphere, the other two, those at the bottom and the top, stick out of it. In order to make his solid beautiful, the artist cut of the two protruding vertices in a way that the resulting truncated solid is circumscribed in a sphere. The theory is supported by the familiarity of the artist to the so called “plan and elevation” method, i.e. the using of projections of solids on planes, which would have been of great assistance in the process of the truncation.

7. The rectangular slab hypothesis: Apart from the rhombohedron conjecture, the Dürer’s solid has also been viewed as a nearly rectangular slab, or parallelepiped (a matchbox), with two opposite corners cut off.

8. The ambivalence hypothesis: This can be summarized in physicist David Finkelstein’s phrase “I propose that Dürer designed the Octahedron [meaning the solid] to be ambivalent, irresistibly construed as a truncated rhomboid in one orientation, as a truncated slab in another, and as something else from yet another”.

Number 1 of the above hypotheses may be traced to Erwin Panofsky (“The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer”, 1943), a standard reference on Dürer. Numbers 2 and 6 have been proposed by Peter Schreiber (Historia Mathematica 26, 1999, 369 – 377). Numbers 5 and 7 are found in works by David Finkelstein, who attributes number 7 to personal communication with Dr. Basimah Khulusi, apparently a medical doctor. Number 4 has been proposed by C. MacGillavry (Mac Gillavry C., Nederl. Akad. Wetenschap. Proc. Series B 84, 1981, 287).

A number of explanations have been proposed about some meaning conveyed by the solid, or why Dürer included it in “Melencolia I”, putting it in such a prominent position. Some of these are:

1. The philosopher’s stone hypothesis: According to a point of view, the Dürer’s solid is a symbol, or image, of the medieval philosopher’s stone or the “stone of Saturn” (this is the same stone that, in ancient Greek mythology, Saturn swallowed instead of Jupiter). Such alchemic positions can be found in www.alchemylab.com.

2. The star of David hypothesis: David Finkelstein sees a Jewish star (a hexagram) of David on the projection of the solid on the ground. In his opinion the “circumcised rhomboid” is a sign of Hebraicism from Dürer’s part.

3. The human skull hypothesis: Many see a rather deformed human skull in the strange stain on the front face of the Dürer’s solid, with unclear meaning.

4. The four ghosts (or hidden faces) hypothesis: David Finkelstein again noticed in 2004 that “anyone who steps back several paces from a good print and focuses on the shading of the front face of the polyhedron patiently for a minute or so, will soon find or construct a face” which, by some sort of Necker’s cube illusion, could be at the same time either a man’s or a woman’s face. After mentioning that these faces may represent Dürer’s mother and father, Finkelstein denotes that “I am less certain of a third hidden face”. By 2008 Finkelstein had discovered two more faces on the solid which he claims first to have inferred and then found. His overall theory about “Melencolia I” is a medley of subliminal images, gematria, rebuses and anagrams, to arrive, as far as the solid is concerned, to the conclusion that it is a puzzle “unsolvable in principle but appears to solve itself in some views. It declares that the Intellectual World may have a mathematical design but, if so, that design is inaccessible to us”.

I must say that some of the above theories and explanations seem to be, to me at least, too farfetched and perhaps many of them did not cross Dürer’s mind, not even as a distant possibility. It must be taken into account that Dürer was an artist of the Renaissance era and, a genius as he might be and a master of the burin, his capabilities were certainly within the boundaries of human ability. It is rather doubtful whether, apart from some basic principles of perspective, Dürer could have rendered his solid with such precision and mastery to deliberately create such a subtle illusion as the ambivalence hypothesis requires. As pointed out in a previous essay (Albrecht Dürer’s eyer lini), the bell of the upper right corner of the picture is after all inaccurately drawn. The 72 degrees hypothesis is plausible and rather tempting to adopt, however there is nothing specific in the engraving to support it. I have more respect to the 80 degree hypothesis, as it is the result of a calculation with data taken directly from the picture, be it so under certain assumptions. The scaling hypothesis is simply wrong: it takes some imagination to link the dimensions of the picture to number φ, and the solid does not look like a cube under the scaling by a factor sqrt(φ). The circumscribed sphere hypothesis is the only one providing a reasonable explanation of why and how Dürer arrived to his solid. The heptagon hypothesis is supported by a newly found sketch of Dürer, showing an irregular pentagon inscribed in a circle with an apex angle approximately equal to 80 degrees (Weitzel, Hans. A further hypothesis on the polyhedron of A. Dürer, Historia Mathematica 31 ,2004, 11). If this is accepted as a rough sketch of the solid, then MacGivallry’s result is confirmed. The rectangular slab hypothesis is plausible but unsupported.

I have several times ventured to discover for myself the ghosts that allegedly haunt Dürer’s solid and I have indeed found several figures that might be taken for human faces. I have also found other figures that might be taken for the head of a rat, the head of an alien and the head of a lamb. It seems to me that there might be still other such figures that remain undetected, which however are of not very different nature than the face on Mars.

Instead of trying to explore Dürer’s mind, by sometimes wild guesswork, in order to understand what he could possibly have intended to depict with this enigmatic solid of his, I find much more interesting the problem of understanding what he actually did depict. And the only way to achieve this, in my opinion, is to build up solid arguments based on direct measurements and calculations.

Romulus, Conqueror of Acron, 1812, Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres

Jean Ingres’ “Romulus, Conqueror of Acron” of 1812. Ingres was born in Montauban in 1780 and at the age of sixteen he went to Paris to study under David. He won the Grand Prix in 1801. He went to Rome in 1807 having secured a following in the art world. He continued to mature and gather a greater gathering until his death in 1867. Romulus, Conqueror of Acron, was created as a large painting for the salon of Napoleon I. It recalls the earliest and mythological history of Rome and reflects the Napoleonic obsession with all things Roman and Classical. The original painting is in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Found Here: http://finecanvas.com/finecanvasartblog/2010/12/romulus-conqueror-of-acron-1812-jean-auguste-dominque-ingres/

A few important commissions came to him; the French governor of Rome asked him to paint Virgil reading the Aeneid (1812) for his residence, and to paint two colossal works—Romulus's victory over Acron (1812) and The Dream of Ossian (1813)—for Monte Cavallo, a former Papal residence undergoing renovation to become Napoleon's Roman palace. These paintings epitomized, both in subject and scale, the type of painting with which Ingres was determined to make his reputation, but, as Philip Conisbee has pointed out, "for all the high ideals that had been drummed into Ingres at the academies in Toulouse, Paris, and Rome, such commissions were exceptions to the rule, for in reality there was little demand for history paintings in the grand manner, even in the city of Raphael and Michelangelo."^[18] Art collectors preferred "light-hearted mythologies, recognizable scenes of everyday life, landscapes, still lifes, or likenesses of men and women of their own class. This preference persisted throughout the nineteenth century, as academically oriented artists waited and hoped for the patronage of state or church to satisfy their more elevated ambitions."<sup>[19]

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Auguste_Dominique_Ingres</sup>

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (Armenian: Հովհաննես Այվազովսկի – Hovhannes Aivasovsky, originally Aivazian, Russian: Иван Константинович Айвазовский) July 29, 1817 – May 5, 1900) was a Russian^[1][2][3][4] painter of Armenian descent living and working in Crimea, most famous for his seascapes, which constitute more than half of his paintings.

Aivazovsky was born in the town of Feodosiya (Theodosia), Crimea (Russian Empire) (modern-day Ukraine) to a poor Armenian family. His parents' family name was Aivazian. Some of the artist's paintings bear a signature, in Armenian letters, "Hovhannes Aivazian" (Հովհաննես Այվազյան). His talent as an artist earned him sponsorship and entry to the Simferopol gymnasium №1 and later the St.Petersburg Academy of Arts, which he graduated with a gold medal. Earning awards for his early landscapes and seascapes, he went on to paint a series of portraits of Crimean coastal towns before travelling throughout Europe. In later life, his paintings of naval scenes earned him a long-standing commission from the Russian Navy stationed in the Black Sea.

In 1845, Aivazovsky went to Constantinople upon the invitation of Sultan Abdülmecid I, a city he was to travel to eight times between 1845–1890. During his long sojourn in Constantinople, Aivazovsky was commissioned for a number of paintings as a court painter by the Ottoman Sultans Abdülmecid, Abdulaziz and Abdulhamid, 30 of which are currently on display in the Ottoman Imperial Palace, the Dolmabahce Museum and many other museums in Turkey. His works are also found in dozens of museums throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics, including the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and the Aivazovsky Art Gallery in Feodosiya, Ukraine. The office of Turkey's Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gül, has Aivasovsky's paintings on the wall.^[5]

At 31, Aivazovsky married Julia Graves, an English governess in St. Petersburg. They had four daughters. The marriage was dissolved, and at the age of 65, Aivazovsky, married Anna Boornazian, a young Armenian widow from Theodosia.

Aivazovsky was deeply affected by the Hamidian massacres of Armenians in Asia Minor in 1895, painting a number of works on the subject such as "The Expulsion of the Turkish Ship," and "The Armenian Massacres at Trevizond." and renouncing a medal which had been awarded to him in Constantinople.^[6] He spent his last years in Feodosia where he supplied the town with water from his own estate, opened an art school, began the first archaeological excavations in the region and built a historical museum. Due to his efforts a commercial port was established at Feodosiya and linked to the railway network.^[7]. Aivasovsky died in Feodosiya in 1900.

Aivazovsky is best known for his seascapes and coastal scenes. His technique and imagination in depicting the shimmering play of light on the waves and seafoam is especially admired, and gives his seascapes a romantic yet realistic quality that echoes the work of English watercolorist J. M. W. Turner and Russian painter Sylvester Shchedrin. Especially effective is his ability to depict diffuse sunlight and moonlight, sometimes coming from behind clouds, sometimes coming through a fog, with almost transparent layers of paint. A series of paintings of naval battles painted in the 1840s brought his dramatic skills to the fore, with the flames of burning ships reflected in water and clouds. He also painted landscapes, including scenes of peasant life in Ukraine and city life in Constantinople. Some critics have called his paintings from Constantinople Orientalist^[8], and others feel the hundreds of seascapes can be repetitive and melodramatic.

Aivazovsky became the most prolific Armenian painter of his time. He left over 6,000 works at his death in 1900. The funds earned during his successful career as an artist enabled him to open an art school and gallery in his hometown of Feodosiya.

As of 2006^[update], Aivazovsky's works have been auctioned for as much as $3,200,000, and his international reputation continues to grow.^[9] On June 14, 2007 his painting "American Shipping off the Rock of Gibraltar" sold for 2,710,000 pounds, "the highest price paid at auction for Aivazovsky".^[10] He is also said to be the most forged of all Armenian painters.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Aivazovsky

Biography: Hovhannes (Ivan) Aivazovsky is the most interesting phenomenon of 19th century art. He gained international fame at the age of 25, was elected a member to five European Academies and was awarded the medal of the French Legion of Honor. Delacroix referred to him in reverence and Turner called him a genius.

Aivazovsky's name is intricately bound with the sea. "Perhaps no one in Europe has painted the extraordinary beauty of the sea with so much feeling and expressiveness as Aivazovsky has", writes V. Adasov.

In his best seascapes (and in a legacy of about 6000, there are some works which condescend to his artistic ability and others which merit singular artistic attention) he has revealed his inner self through the spirit of the times, his ideals of humanism, and the love of freedom. The Artist lived by those ideals; the love that he had towards the oppressed, the help he offered and the work that he did for the public good make him an exceptional individual and a true son of his times.

Aivazovsky was born to an Armenian family in the city of Theodosia in the Crimea {The Artist's ancestors were called Aivazian. His father called himself Haivazosky. The Artist and his brother decided to call themselves Aivazian or Aivazovsky. Some of the Artist's work bears the signature Hovhannes Aivazian, in Armenian}. At the age of twenty he graduates from the Art Academy of St. Petersburg with a gold medal. He goes to Italy to continue his studies and returns as an internationally acclaimed seascape painter. Neither financial security nor life in Palace interests him. He returns to his native land, builds a workplace/home on the seashore and, until the last days of his life, dedicates himself to the work that he loves. He participates in exhibitions all over the world. He gets recognition and glory as a representative of Russian art greatly helps in familiarizing it.

In Aivazovsky's creative work one finds such aspects of Armenian culture and national temperament that it becomes impossible to separate his art from his native people. It is this characteristic that gives Aivazovsky's creativity its unique quality.

Found Here: http://www.armsite.com/painters/aivazovsky/

Stephan Balleux - Paintings

Can there be such a thing as painting that swallows its own tail? I was wondering about this after visiting the studio of Stephan Balleux. I had seen paintings that could not ignore their own existence. Whatever else they represented, they always made explicit play of the action of painting: the gesture preserved in paint. There were two nearly finished portraits in the studio. Here and there the palette slipped from its black-and-white into colour; a dark purple that crept into the top of the picture, like the imminent purple of the falling night; or faintly beige tinted legs standing out against a white dress. It was as though you were viewing the first intimations of colour in a world that hitherto existed purely in black and white. The portraits were from a family album; they had something of the atmosphere of old-fashioned photographs in which children, awed by the photographer, pose obediently on a bench or table and peer earnestly at the lens. In this case they were not photographs but large paintings with the children as their subjects.

There was something uneasy about them. Perhaps it was their serious gaze, or perhaps it was an effect of the colour that was sneaking into the image, like the presage of a new era. Or was my reaction due to the strange, twisted objects that appeared, like that in the little boy’s hand or on the table next to the girl? They were mere knick-knacks, like little sculptures made from congealed, twisted paint. There it was: art biting its own tail, shaking itself by the hand, allowing the intrusion of painterly matter into an otherwise photographic space. The work of Stephan Balleux dramatizes the activity of painting. You see an obvious stroke of applied paint; or at least you think you do. Whether you are looking at a portrait, an interior or a relatively abstract play of forms, that explicit brushstroke always turns up; sometimes lavishly, over the whole canvas, and sometimes in a mere detail, a knick-knack, a casually hand-fashioned object left on a table. There is always a gesture that reminds you: this is painting. Why that emphasis? It’s nothing new in itself, this visible impasto which shows how a painting came about. Consider the rough, tortured touch of the expressionists or the loose écriture of the impressionists. Consider Cézanne, and how he could make the light vibrate in a landscape by the genius of his tremulous painter’s hand. These are all products of a painterly touch that claims independence from the represented subject. Look and you will find copious examples in modern art. But something else is involved here. Balleux differs in that his brushstroke is an illusion. It is not what you think you see. Instead of a spontaneous stroke of paint, you are looking at a picture of a brushstroke, an imitation of a painterly handwriting. It is a faux brushstroke, a brushstroke that is play-acting itself. This aside, Stephan Balleux also paints figurative images and sometimes tackles classical motifs. This saves his work from mere conceptual narcissism.

A rose, a group of people, a portrait, a skull, another skull, an interior: they are images that have something to say, which are beautiful and menacing. They are sweet yet at the same time repellent, sometimes symbolic and sometimes suggestive. The image is in some cases no more than a colourful form which possesses the whole canvas with its dramatic energy. Layer by layer, it is a painting process that advances patiently, even if it sometimes looks bold and immediate. There is a skull in the studio, which the artist casts as a model, of which he takes a photograph, which he then uses as the basis of a painting. Layer by layer the painting takes shape, first the drawing, then the paint, then more paint, until everything looks fluent and effortless. Balleux employs illusionist devices. That is just what you would expect of the ‘clever’ kind of painter, one who paints so dextrously that you would scarcely realize that the canvas had been painted if he did not continually reminded you of the fact. Balleux not only studies the old masters and their painterly technique, but investigates what photography and video have to offer him, and how classic sculpture and three-dimensional digital representations relate to one another. And he expresses all this in paint and in the illusion of paint. Perhaps he is the kind of painter who is a bit of a philanderer, one who is forever straying off with some other medium, hungry for experience and new expressive opportunities. But in the end he comes back to his true muse, the art of painting. He cannot help it because he loves her. In Pompeii, I saw casts of people trapped in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The figures had an intimacy that was almost embarrassing. It was as though I were witness to something not meant for an outsider’s eyes; people, their outward form immortalized at the moment of their extinction. At the same time, it occurred to me that these were casts many a sculptor might envy, so compellingly did they combine life and death in a single object. I had to think back to Pompeii when I saw how Stephan Balleux uses paint to make not only paintings, but also sculptures and reliefs, of human torsos, heads and skulls. They resemble people congealed in paint, like individuals overwhelmed by some inescapable torrent of fluid colour. The sweeping motion is still visible yet they are now motionless.

Do not speak of Gerhard Richter if the painter is in a bad mood. Anyone who paints today with some awareness of how our vision has become partly photographic cannot get around Richter. You may first think of other painters when seeking parallels for Balleux’s twisted beings and morbidly proliferating shapes, but under the surface it is Richter who counts, and counts like no other. He is the begetter of a generation when it comes to the art of tightrope walking between photography and painting. So must the father die before the son can prosper, before he can find his own way? Maybe the painter toys with the notion of artistic patricide. He presumably shares the master’s interest in photographic effects such as selective focus and blur, or must at least acknowledge a debt to him. The painterly style is one that gains its vigour by embracing the power of the photographic gaze instead of repudiating it. But then something happens with Balleux, that tail-swallowing act, that backward glance over the shoulder, that making a drama out of the act of painting; for example when he imitates the painterly brush-stroke with photographic precision. What serves Balleux well is moreover that he is no stranger to the weird and wonderful. That makes the road he has chosen an unusual one. He has a keen eye for alienation and that is what he sees and portrays in his fellow man. It emerges in the way he exaggerates the faces, dead or alive, in the way he makes them melt, makes them volcanic. Man is a monster, even if he wears a tailored suit. There is another factor in the content of this work. It is the concentration with which the artist makes it, his dedication one might say. Perhaps it is this painter’s greatest talent. When I look at his work, besides looking at a subject and at a self-conscious painted surface, I see patience, precision, control and professional mastery. It is these qualities that bridle the tortuous, volcanic imagination underlying the images. The resulting tension is a pleasing one. The artist once described his painting as a virus. Willy-nilly it spreads one work to the next. Every image he touches is infected, becomes paint-stricken. That is the respect in which his work swallows its own tail; it forms a closed circle. However videomanic or photo-addicted the image may be, it always veers back to painting.

Jurriaan Benschop

Found Here: http://www.stephan-balleux.com/about/texts

Walter Crane

Magnificense

Walter Crane was a magnificent book illustrator who also was a master in the decorative arts, collaborating now and then with William Morris. Here is a wall hanging that is pretty magnificent in its own right.

Found Here: http://mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com/2009/11/magnificense.html

Walter Crane (1845 - 1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the latter 19th century. His work featured some of the more colorful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come. He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and produced an array of paintings, illustrations, children's books, ceramic tiles and other decorative arts.

Early life and influences

Walter Crane was born in Liverpool, England on 15 August 1845, the second son of Thomas Crane, a portrait painter and miniaturist. He was a fluent follower of the newer art movements and he came to study and appreciate the detailed senses of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was also a diligent student of the renowned artist and critic John Ruskin. A set of coloured page designs to illustrate Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" gained the approval of wood-engraver William James Linton to whom Walter Crane was apprenticed for three years (1859-1862). As a wood-engraver he had abundant opportunity for the minute study of the contemporary artists whose work passed through his hands, of Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, as well as Alice in Wonderland illustrator Sir John Tenniel and Frederick Sandys. He was a student who admired the masters of the Italian Renaissance, however he was more influenced by the Elgin marbles in the British Museum. A further and important element in the development of his talent was the study of Japanese colour-prints, the methods of which he imitated in a series of toy-books, which started a new fashion.

[edit] Political activity

From the early 1880s, initially under Morris's influence, Crane was closely associated with the Socialist movement. He did as much as Morris himself to bring art into the daily life of all classes. With this object in view he devoted much attention to designs for textiles and wallpapers, and to house decoration; but he also used his art for the direct advancement of the Socialist cause. For a long time he provided the weekly cartoons for the Socialist organs Justice, The Commonweal and The Clarion. Many of these were collected as Cartoons for the Cause. He devoted much time and energy to the work of the Art Workers Guild, and to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded by him in 1888.

Although not himself an anarchist, Crane contributed to several libertarian publishers, including Liberty Press and Freedom Press. Following the Haymarket bombing, Crane made multiple trips to America where he spoke in defense of the eight anarchists accused of murder.^[1]

[edit] Death, and legacy

Walter Crane died on 14 March 1915 in Horsham Hospital, West Sussex. His body was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium, where his ashes remain.

[edit]

Paintings and illustrations

In 1862 his picture "The Lady of Shalott" was exhibited at the Royal Academy, but the Academy steadily refused his maturer work and after the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, he ceased to send pictures to Burlington House. In 1863 the printer Edmund Evans employed Crane to illustrate yellowbacks, and in 1865 they began to collaborate on toy books of nursery rhymes and fairy tales.^[2] From 1865 to 1876 Crane and Evans produced two to three toybooks each year.^[3]

In 1864 he began to illustrate a series of sixpenny toy-books of nursery rhymes in three colours for Edmund Evans. He was allowed more freedom in a series beginning with The Frog PrinceJapanese art, and of a long visit to Italy following on his marriage in 1871. (1874) which showed markedly the influence of

The Baby's Opera was a book of English nursery songs planned in 1877 with Evans, and a third series of children's books with the collective title Romance of the Three R's provided a regular course of instruction in art for the nursery. In his early "Lady of Shalott", the artist had shown his preoccupation with unity of design in book illustration by printing in the words of the poem himself, in the view that this union of the calligrapher's and the decorator's art was one secret of the beauty of the old illuminated books.

He followed the same course in The First of May: A Fairy Masque by his friend John Wise, text and decoration being in this case reproduced by photogravure. The Goose Girl illustration taken from his beautiful Household Stories from Grimm (1882) was reproduced in tapestry by William Morris.

Flora's Feast, A Masque of Flowers had lithographic reproductions of Crane's line drawings washed in with water colour; he also decorated in colour The Wonder Book of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Deland's Old Garden. In 1894 he collaborated with William Morris in the page decoration of The Story of the Glittering Plain, published at the Kelmscott Press, which was executed in the style of 16th century Italian and German woodcuts. Crane also illustrated editions of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (12 pts., 1894-1896) and The Shepheard's Calendar.

Crane wrote and illustrated three books of poetry, Queen Summer (1891), Renascence (1891), and The Sirens Three (1886). Walter Crane illustrated Nellie Dale's books on Teaching English Reading: Steps to Reading, First Primer, Second Primer, Infant Reader, Book I, and Book II. These were most probably completed between 1898 and 1907.

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Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Crane

Walter Crane was born in Liverpool on 15th August, 1845. Walter's father, Thomas Crane, was a moderately successful artist. In 1851 the family moved to London with the hope that this would provide Crane with more clients. Unfortunately, just as business was improving, Thomas Crane died.

Soon after his father's death Walter Crane obtained an apprenticeship at William Linton's engraving shop. William Linton had been a member of the Chartist movement in the 1840s and his stories of the struggle for parliamentary reform, had an important influence on Crane's early political development.

Linton was impressed by the quality of Crane's work and helped to find him commissions. This included providing the illustrations for J. R. Wise's book on the New Forest. Crane went to live with Wise for six weeks while he was working on the pictures. J. R. Wise had radical political and religious opinions and introduced Crane to the work of John Stuart Mill, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Ruskin.

In 1865 Walter Crane saw Work, a painting by Ford Madox Brown, at an art gallery in Piccadilly. The picture, shows the historian, Thomas Carlyle, and the leader of the Christian Socialist movement, F. D. Maurice, observing a group of men working. The painting marked an important development in British art because for the first time an artist had decided that a working man was a subject worth painting. Although Brown's painting did not immediately influence Crane's work, it had a profound impact on his long-term career.

In the 1860s Crane began to take an active interest in politics. He was a supporter of the Liberal Party and some of their more radical politicians such as John Bright, Henry Fawcett and William Gladstone and campaigned for the 1867 Reform Act. Crane gradually developed socialistic views and spoke out in favour of the Communards who attempted to overthrow the French government in 1871.

Found Here: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jcrane.htm

Harry Grant Dart

Harry Grant Dart was an American illustrator and comics artist active in the late 1800’s and early 1900s.

He worked for the Boston Herald and then the New York World, where he eventually held the position of Art Editor. He was one of the newspaper sketch artists who sketched important events for newspapers prior to the use of photographs (see my post on The Illustrators of La Domenica del Corriere). He also maintained an outside career as a magazine illustrator, working for titles like Life and Judge.

As a cartoonist Dart created a comic strip called The Explorigator, about a an airship staffed by a crew of adventurous kids. Meant to be a competitor for Winsor McCay’s spectacular strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, The Explorigator only ran for 14 weeks in 1908.

There aren’t a lot of resources on Dart that I could find, but there is a treasure of an archive of The Explorigator on the Barnicle Press site; sadly, not in color, but still a stunning example of this detailed, beautifully drawn and wildly imaginative strip.

The strip featured Dart’s penchant for drawing fantastic Victorian era aircraft, which also showed up in his other illustrations, like the image above (large version here on Flickr), done for a magazine called The All-Story.

I love the fact that he’s given us a liberated, fashionably attired Victorian era woman pilot, years before women could vote.

• Link: The Explorigator on Barnicle Press
  Dart aircraft illustrations on DannySoar
  Paleo-Future, article with illustrations (note: running some kind of Flash widget that my copy of Safari chokes on)
  Artnet
  AskArt, and here
  AllPosters
  The Explorigator, article on Thomas Pynchon Wiki
  Article on giant aircraft on Dark Roasted Blend
  Bio on Lambiek.net
  Bio on Wikipedia
  
  

Harry Grant Dart (1869 – 1938) was an American cartoonist and illustrator known for his futuristic and often aviation-oriented cartoons and comic strips.

His first jobs were brochures for the National Crayon Company and illustrations for the Boston Herald. His career took off when the New York World arranged to send him to Cuba. He became a sketch artist for important events, his sketches being published in the newspaper in the days before photographs were used. He rose to become the art editor for The World. It was at this time that he started perhaps his most famous comic strip, The Explorigator.^[1]

Intended as a rival for Winsor McCay's Little Nemo, The Explorigator concerned the flight of the eponymous airship, headed by a crew of children ages 9–10: Admiral Fudge (who, interestingly, wore a swastika on his hat), Detective Rubbersole, Maurice Mizzentop, Nicholas Nohooks, Grenadier Shift, Teddy Typewriter, and Ah Fergetit.^[2] The strip only ran for 14 weeks in 1908, yet its detailed drawings of airships and various other aircraft would later find some fame in the steampunk movement.^[3]

Dart went on to become a very prolific cartoonist, continuing with Boys Will Be Boys in 1909 and Life and Judge in the 1920s. Although he is one of the more obscure cartoonists of his era, a few of his works survive in the Library of Congress.^[4]

^{Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Grant_Dart}