United States or Ethiopia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Besides, he had the liveliest interest in the astonishing little dog that grew and disappeared, and came back, in some new attitude, on the canvas. He scraped acquaintance with it once or twice to the damage of fresh brush-work. He was always jumping from his pose and running around the easel to see how the latest dog was coming on.
The whole painting is bathed in a soft but luminous haze of gold; yet each figure has its individuality of treatment, the glowing fire of S. Peter contrasting with the pearly coolness of the drapery and flesh-tints of the Magdalen. No brush-work is perceptible. Surface and substance have been elaborated into one harmonious richness that defies analysis.
But then, on the other hand, take the magnificent execution in the most important passages: the distinguished silvery tone obtained notwithstanding the complete red-and-gold costume and the portentous crimson helmet; the masterly brush-work in these last particulars, in the handsome virile head of the model and the delicate flesh of the amorino.
Two tarnished gilt buttons, naval, apparently, a portrait of a monarch unknown to me, cut from some antique print and deftly coloured by hand in just my own bold style of brush-work, some foreign copper coins, thicker and clumsier of make than those I hoarded myself, and a list of birds' eggs, with names of the places where they had been found.
These enlarged drawings were applied to the wet surface of the plaster, and their outlines pricked in with dots to guide the painter in his brush-work. The date on which Michelangelo actually began to paint the fresco is not certain.
He is said to have wished to reproduce the encaustic process of the ancients, and lighted fires to harden the surface of the fresco. This melted the wax in the lower portions of the paste, and made the colours run. At any rate, no traces of the painting now remain in the Sala del Gran Consiglio, the walls of which are covered by the mechanical and frigid brush-work of Vasari.
The Frenchman is more subtle, also more evasive; and there is no hint in him of the trite statement of a fact that we encounter in Bartholomew Van der Heist himself a great painter. Hals had not the poetic vision of Rembrandt, but he possessed a more dexterous hand, a keener eye. Judged according to the rubric of sheer paint, sheer brush-work, not Rubens, not Van Dyck, was such a virtuoso.
More than a century and a quarter ago, there stood on the side of this hill, and not far from its top, an Indian hut, or wickiup. It was built after the manner of the Indian tribes of Southern California a circular space of about fifteen feet in diameter enclosed by brush-work, and roofed by a low dome of the same material.
Those who saw Sorolla's art at the Paris Exposition, 1900, and at the Georges Petit Gallery, Paris, a few years ago need not be reminded of his virile quality and masterly brush-work. Some art lovers in this city are aware of his Sad Inheritance, the property of Mr. John E. Berwind, which has been hung in the Sunday-school room of the Ascension Church, Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street.
The thin paint, every stroke of which sings out, sets you to thinking of John Sargent and how he has caught the trick of brush-work at a slower tempo. But not even Sargent could have produced the collar and cuffs. A Whistler, a full-length, in another gallery, looks like an unsubstantial wraith by comparison.
Word Of The Day