Not Just Kids’ Stuff

Cover image, courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

When you become a parent, your entire world changes. As your child grows, you try to bring that entire world to them in all its color and beauty. For anyone who loves art and wants their child to love it, too, Maria K. Shoemaker and Katy Friedland’s A Is for Art Museum (above) is a good place to start. Using the entire width and breadth of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Shoemaker, the PMA’s Senior Curator of Education, and Friedland, Manager of Family and Children’s Programs at the PMA, use every children’s educational trick in the book in this book to make the journey through the alphabet a treat for the ear and the eye as well as for the imagination, planting the seeds so that parents can nurture the budding art lover deep inside every kid. “Here is a building filled with art. What will you find inside?” the first page reads, with the majestic classical columns of the PMA sitting atop the Rocky Steps drawing the young reader in for closer inspection. With such a great start, the fun (and learning) is just beginning.


The Kiss (Constantin Brancusi, French, born Romania, 1876-1957). Limestone, 23 x 13 ¼ x 10 inches, 1916. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arsenberg Collection, 1950.

Like any good children’s book, A Is for Art Museum will keep adults interested, too, wondering what will happen next. “D is for Dancer” brings us to the Edgar Degas’ statue of the Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen. I can just imagine the feeling of a child, perhaps a little girl taking her first dance class, connecting with this image and later even going to see the sculpture itself at the museum—a friend waiting for her all this time. “E is for Eyes” presents the museum’s collection of miniature paintings of eyes, one of the wonderfully strange slices of the past hidden in plain sight in one of the museum’s lesser travelled rooms. “K is for Kiss,” featuring Constantin Brancusi’s The Kiss (above) calls on youngsters to stretch their minds to see the two figures smooching. When “N is for Neck” rolls around, the authors ask the young reader to try physically stretching his or her neck just like the woman in a painting by Amedeo Modigliani does. Labels such as classical, Impressionist, modern, or even foreign have no place in this alphabetical tour of cultures and styles, opening up the child’s imagination to a literally boundless world.

Three Musicians (Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, Spanish, 1881-1973). Oil on canvas, 80 ½ x 74 1/8 inches, 1921. Philadelphia Museum of Art: A.E. Gallatin Collection, 1952.

The first time I flipped through A Is for Art Museum, I did so with my 2-year-old Alex in my lap. He knows all his letters, not necessarily all in order, so he was able to concentrate on the visuals of the book. (The inclusion of uppercase and lowercase letters—not always a given in alphabet books—shows that the educators knew what they were doing.) When I came to “M is for Musicians,” for which the authors made the remarkable choice of Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (above), I asked Alex if he could see the instruments. Finding anything in Picasso’s Cubist jumble challenges most adults, but Alex didn’t “know enough” not to try. After a few valiant guesses, Alex looked up at me and I showed him where they were. The look of discovery in his eye alone was worth the price of the book. It said, “Of course, there they were all along.” Not every work in the book is as challenging as Picasso’s, but the diversity of the works will keep the inquisitive child coming back again and again to find new things they didn’t see before. I can easily imagine A Is for Art Museum serving as the beginning of an art scavenger hunt through the PMA with kids giggling in the galleries as they come face to face with their new “old” friends.

The Orchard Window (Daniel Garber, American, 1880-1958). Oil on canvas, 56 7/16 x 52 ¼ inches, 1918. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Centennial gift of the family of Daniel Garber, 1976.

I can’t imagine any better advertisement or marketing tool to the four-and-under set than A Is for Art Museum. The heavy hitters in the Philadelphia lineup, such as Picasso’s Three Musicians and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are here, but quieter gems such as an ornate German helmet from the armor collection and a Qing Dynasty dog cage. The choice of works such as Daniel Garber’s The Orchard Window (above) lends a distinctly Philadelphian flavor to the book, too. Proceeds from the launch party for A Is for Art Museum will go towards providing free copies to local libraries, Head Start programs, and community centers, adding to the aura of good feelings surrounding this book. Even if you’re not from Philadelphia, A Is for Art Museum will pull you and your child into the circle of readers and art lovers and never let you go.

[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing me with a review copy of Maria K. Shoemaker and Katy Friedland’s A Is for Art Museum and for the images above.]

Those Who Stay

A whole generation of Europe literally died on the battlefields of World War I. The Italian Futurists, more than any other art movement of the time, lost many of their brightest stars to that conflict, perhaps none brighter than Umberto Boccioni. Born October 19, 1882, Boccioni is best known for his 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which Italy chose to place on the reverse side of the Italian 20 cent euro coin, testifying to Boccioni’s enduring place in Italian art despite the shortness of his career and life. I’ve always found Boccioni to be as fascinating a painter as a sculpture, especially in such mysterious works as States of Mind III: Those Who Stay (above, from 1911). Borrowing heavily from the conventions of Cubism, which Boccioni learned firsthand from Pablo Picasso when the two artists met in Paris that same year of 1911, Boccioni explodes the bodies of the figures and tries to paint them from every angle at once. He complicates the issue by immersing the figures in a murky, blue-grey fog. Are these figures shuffling off to the afterlife or living beings caught up in the tempest of worldly events beyond their control? In retrospect, States of Mind III: Those Who Stay seems especially haunting in light of Boccioni’s tragic death in 1916 while training for combat, as if the artist saw himself as headed into a murky, indeterminate future.

Boccioni and fellow Futurist Gino Severini studied under Giacomo Balla just after the turn of the century. Years later, Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti united these artists under the banner of his Futurist Manifesto to worship at the altar of technology and relentless, mechanized speed. Works such as Elasticity (above, 1912) illustrate how Boccioni saw the twentieth century as a huge explosion of energy and expansion. The duty of the modern artist was to celebrate that technology and give it artistic form. Just as the religious artists of the past painted saints and saviors to teach the unlettered masses, Boccioni and his fellow Futurists would paint and sculpt the works that would teach the masses of modern Europe to bow down before the gods of industry and technology. The color and energy found in Boccioni’s works are simply too infectious for me to resist, so it’s easy to judge their contemporary appeal. Faith in the future, when the past lay scattered behind them beneath a sea of disappointment, seemed the logical next step in a world that had yet to taste mechanized, large-scale destruction.

It’s tempting to condemn the Futurists for helping spur on the Great War, just as it’s tempting to say that they got what they deserved in their own destruction. (Marinetti, ironically, survived almost to the end of World War II, immune to the war-faring fever he may have contributed to.) Pushing all the politics aside, however, you cannot deny the creativity behind such a work as Boccioni’s The Street Enters the House (above, 1911). Equal parts Cubism, Futurism, and even Surrealism, The Street Enters the House depicts a believable home invasion in which the outside becomes the inside and all boundaries are erased. What kind of artist a post-war Boccioni would have been is a great guessing game to play, but ultimately unanswerable. Boccioni is much more than just Futurism or Cubism, so forcing an older Boccioni to continue along a similar path denies the expansiveness of his life and art. Boccioni couldn’t stay long enough to demonstrate everything he could do, but he remained long enough to give us enough to remember him by.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

“Immature poets borrow,” T.S. Eliot once said. “Mature poets steal.” Domenico Zampieri or Domenichino wrestled with the giants of the Renaissance but ultimately gave up and embraced their influence. Born October 21, 1581, Domenichino must have looked up countless times at the Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, engraving the famous central scene of God breathing life into Adam. When Domenichino painted The Rebuke of Adam and Eve (above, from 1626), he inserted a clear copy of Michelangelo’s depiction of God trailing clouds of glory. It’s impossible to think that anyone would miss the reference, then or now. Domenichino clearly wants you to know that he loves the work of Michelangelo. Such “theft” isn’t really theft when it’s done in the open. In the Baroque period following the Renaissance, artists such as Domenichino had to choose sides—ignore the previous generation or continue its achievement in a new, fresh way. God clearly comes straight out of the Renaissance playbook, but the rebuke of the first man and woman clearly doesn’t. Michelangelo’s gentle depiction of their banishment from Eden gives way in Domenichino’s version to a more medieval, sinners in the hands of an angry God feel. Mixing the Medieval with the Renaissance, Domenichino brews up his own Baroque concoction.

Domenichino “stole” another figure from Michelangelo’s ceiling in his version of The Cumaean Sibyl (above, from 1610). Domenichino transforms Michelangelo’s brawny version into a more idealized type of beauty, but retains the exotic dress of the original, and maybe even exceeds it. Connecting Domenichino’s work to that of his predecessors brings out not only what he takes but also what he chooses not to take. In this case, you have a figure immortalized by Michelangelo, painted with the delicacy of Botticelli, but with the sensual coloring of a Raphael. Domenichino viewed the Renaissance world as a great buffet table from which he could choose freely and combine at will. Such practice was not only acceptable but encouraged. Students learned by copying from antique statuary during the neoclassicist craze of the Renaissance. Copying from those copyists seemed only natural.

Unfortunately for Domenichino, tastes and standards change. A clear homage one day becomes a pale imitation centuries later. John Ruskin raked Domenichino over the coals in his late nineteenth century writings elevating J.M.W. Turner to the heights based on his originality. Whereas critics once hailed works such as Domenichino’s Diana and her Nymphs (above, from 1616-1617) as beautiful examples of draftsmanship and fanciful painting of the human form, later critics saw only a mimicking of Leonardo da Vinci’s ideas on rendering atmospheric effects in landscapes. Only in the twentieth century did Domenichino regain a minor place in the pantheon of great Italian artists, yet still overshadowed by his Baroque contemporary, Caravaggio. Nicolas Poussin, who studied briefly with Domenichino, championed the master’s work verbally as well as visually—infusing many of his lessons on landscape into his own ethereal, natural worlds. Perhaps some day the pendulum will swing back and Domenichino’s works will no longer be seen as acts of thievery but as acts of devotion to his art.

Seeking Salvation

Painting one of the oldest stories ever told, Lucas Cranach the Elder puts his own unique spin on the first couple, Adam and Eve (above, from 1528). Born 1472, Cranach lived through the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, both of which shaped the direction of his religious faith up until his death on October 16, 1553. With complete disregard for human anatomy, or even the differences between male and female anatomy, Cranach paints Adam and Eve with long, slender limbs, androgynous to the point of being almost inhuman. Eve’s body differs little from that of Adam except for two tiny breasts stuck onto her chest like scoops of ice cream. She offers the fateful apple to Adam with a sly, knowing smile. Despite their barely covered nudity, there’s no sexual tension between them. The panels of the diptych separate them physically as much as their body language creates emotional distance. Just as his friend Martin Luther reworked the Bible into the vernacular, Cranach reworks the old tale and its common treatment into the visual vernacular of his quickly changing world.

Cranach and Luther teamed up in 1520, when Luther began to question the church’s authority and just a year before the throwdown at the Diet of Worms in 1521 that earned Luther his excommunication and split the Christian world asunder forever. Cranach’s Portrait of Martin Luther (above, from 1543), one of the many portraits Cranach painted of the theologian, shows Luther relaxed and confident in the choices he has made. Cranach allowed Luther to print his vulgate Bibles on his presses in the print shop where Cranach produced the anti-Catholic woodcuts that humorously and effectively portrayed the failures and flaws of the established church. When Luther married Katharina von Bora, a bold move for a man of the cloth, Cranach was present. When Luther and his wife gave birth to their first child, Cranach stood as godfather. The bond between the two men was as inseparable as the link between Luther’s goals for the new church and Cranach’s goal of a new visual vocabulary for that church.

Near the end of his life, Cranach painted an unusual work titled The Fountain of Youth (above, from 1546). In an imaginary place of Cranach’s devising, fragile old women ride in from the left on carts and stretchers. Doctors examine them before they dip naked into the waters. In the rejuvenating waters, the marks of age disappear and the old women emerge on stage right as young maidens, who then join in the dancing and feasting. The waters of the magical pool pour from a statue of Venus and Cupid, the classical figures of love. Facing old age and death himself, Cranach seems to be saying that the eternal life promised by religion can only be found in love. All three of Cranach’s sons became painters, carrying on the family name and continuing the print shop where their father once worked side by side with Luther to change the world. Through his sons, Cranach left behind the only legacy he could control—love.

Impressions of the City

The Ashcan School of Robert Henri and his circle often get credit for being the first artists to take the American urban scene as a subject for fine art in a modern style. But decades before they went in that direction, Childe Hassam, one of the most influential early American Impressionist painters, painted his impressions of the American city in the new style. Born October 17, 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, Hassam painted many scenes of his hometown such as Rainy Day, Columbus Avenue, Boston (above, from 1885). Using the effect of a gray, rainy day to the fullest, Hassam captures the look and feel of Victorian Era New England with the horse-driven carriages on cobblestone streets and the high-necked collars of women’s dresses as they hurry their children home and out of the rain. Just as the French Impressionists came to grips with the urban landscape and the idea of progress, Hassam painted the world he knew best—not the rural setting so often identified with Impressionism but the urban setting of his childhood and early career.

In Boston Common at Twilight (above, from 1885-1886), Hassam again shows mothers with their children walking in the city. Instead of rain, Hassam chooses to bathe the figures in warm twilight. Silhouetted darkly against the white snow blanketing the ground, the pedestrians seem as bare and simple as the trees that extend into the distance. A little girl feeds birds in Boston Common, one of the few oases of nature in the larger urban jungle that Boston was becoming as it neared the turn of the century. Like Paris after the makeover by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, American cities such as Boston faced the new tension of maintaining green spaces as an antidote to the contagion of sprawling progress. The little girl feeding the desperate birds struggling to survive in the cold winter landscape may symbolize the efforts of artists such as Hassam and other lovers of nature to keep these brief interludes of green alive in the face of the brick and mortar invasion.

Hassam’s Manhattan's Misty Sunset (above, from 1911) seems like a painted valentine to the city on a par with Woody Allen’s cinematic tribute Manhattan. The Ashcan artists sometimes approach this level of beauty in their depictions of the city, but their greater devotion to the reality of the everyday existence of the city dweller usually trumps any “purity” of beauty. When people appear in Hassam’s works, they usually don’t play a very big part. It seems as if they’re just film extras passing through. In this way Hassam’s work looks much like that of Edward Hopper, except that the beauty of Hopper’s works is more of a terrible beauty full of loneliness and isolation. Looking at Hassam’s Manhattan’s Misty Sunset, you don’t see the people but you can feel them there, sharing in the beauty of the moment from the windows of their dwellings—a community. In that sense, Hassam is eminently Victorian in his belief in shared community values, whereas Hopper is eminently modern in his disillusioned view of such values. The city in Hassam’s eyes seems pure nostalgia to us now, but it was very, very real to him at the time.

Merchant Marine

Thomas Chambers. Capture of the H.B.M. Frigate Macedonian by U.S. Frigate United States, October 25, 1812,1852. Oil on canvas, 34 ½ x 50 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource; Gift of Sheldon and Caroline Keck in honor of Elizabeth Broun, 1992.

How do you write about a painter about whom almost nothing is known? Can the work absent the biography provide us with satisfying answers? Kathleen A. Foster tackles these challenges in Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808-1869, the companion publication to the exhibition currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The distinctiveness of [Chambers’] style as a painter, matched inversely by the vagueness of his biography, has made him a tantalizing figure,” Foster writes of the artist whom she has pursued since the 1990s, “at once one of the most widely collected American ‘folk’ landscape painters and yet one of the least studied and understood.” Putting flesh on the skeletal framework of what we know about Chambers through relentless sleuthing and an encyclopedic examination of what it meant to be a working artist in nineteenth century America, Foster schools readers not only on what kind of artist Chambers most likely was but also on what it takes to recover such lost souls from the depths of murky art history. Chambers’ works, such as his Capture of the H.B.M. Frigate Macedonian by U.S. Frigate United States, October 25, 1812 (above, from 1852), captivate us with their otherness and strange modernity and draw us in to ask more. Foster provides more answers than we should expect.

Thomas Chambers. Rockaway Beach, New York, with the Wreck of the Ship Bristol, c. 1837-40. Oil on canvas, 21 3/4 x 30 3/8 inches. Indiana University Art Museum; Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection.

Foster begins her manhunt in Whitby, England, Chambers’ birthplace, where his brother George initiated him into the world of being a working artist taking on all manner of jobs to make a living. The theatrical and panoramic paintings of popular English entertainment of the time influenced Thomas and impressed on him the need to market your wares properly to survive as an artist. Chambers arrived in the United States in 1832, setting up shop in New Orleans for a few years. Moving to New York City, Chambers advertised himself in a local paper as “Thomas Chambers, Marine and Landscape Painter” ready to perform “Fancy Painting of every description done to order.” Chambers painted everything from furniture and signs to fine art for the home, including works such as Rockaway Beach, New York, with the Wreck of the Ship Bristol (above, circa 1837-1840), which recounts the story of a shipwreck that would have been familiar to his local audience. “With the practical outlook of a mariner,” Foster writes, “he includes the workaday salvage of the ship by the wreckers who have pulled alongside… [yet] within a romantic structure in which a bystander contemplates, under sunny skies, the aftermath of the most recent episode in a timeless cycle of tragedy and recovery.” This tension between merchandising and higher artistic aspirations energizes much of Chambers’ art as he continually pursued a buying audience, often physically, as shown by moves from New York City to Baltimore, Boston, Albany, and New York City, again, before returning to England in his final years. Foster identifies Chambers’ contemporary audience as “prosperous, bourgeois householders attentive to the latest urban style… evidently attracted by a novel, fashionable, prestigious, and cosmopolitan item: the original framed oil painting of a landscape or marine subject.” Upwardly mobile Americans looking to acquire the trappings of success sought out artists such as Chambers, who supplied them with an affordable touch of class. Chambers, Foster believes, was “the first American painter to bring professional landscape and marine easel painting to an audience beyond the metropolitan elite,” thus democratizing art for the still-young democracy.

Thomas Chambers. The Constitution and the Guerrière, c. 1840-50. Oil on canvas, 24 3/4 x 34 1/4 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1962.

Capitalizing on the continued interest in the War of 1812, Chambers painted multiple versions of The Constitution and the Guerrière (above, from circa 1840-1850), the battle that made “Old Ironsides” a household name. Chambers painted several different naval conflicts from that war, always looking to open up new markets or fulfill new commissions. Chambers played to the wishes of his audience and his own tastes rather than slavishly copy reality. “Sailors might have been disdainful, considering the nonsensical signal flags, out-of-scale vessels, and perilous courses depicted,” Foster muses, “but perhaps they enjoyed [Chambers’] spirit,” as adventuresome in paint as the events he depicted. To expect properly rendered ship’s rigging from Chambers work seems as silly as to expect anatomically correct animals in the work of Edward Hicks, an artist from the generation just before Chambers’. N.C. Wyeth actually owned two naval battle scenes by Chambers, proving that their inner spirit continued to entrance kindred spirits even a century later. Although not truly an illustrator like Wyeth, Chambers scoured popular magazines and newspapers for subjects for his brush, illustrating the images that were fresh in the mind of his buying audience.

Thomas Chambers. Niagara Falls from the American Side, c. 1843-52. Oil on canvas, 18 1/16 x 24 inches. Indiana University Art Museum; Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection.

Although Chambers painted both marine and landscape scenes, he clearly identified himself as a marine painter. The few works that bear his signature are marine paintings. Chambers might actually have gone so far as to create aliases under which he could sell his landscapes. Another factor that may have led Chambers not to place his name on such works as Niagara Falls from the American Side (above, circa 1843-1852) may have been his “borrowing” of such subjects from prints. Foster sees the fact that Chambers never copied one of Thomas Cole’s compositions as a sign that he respected the older artist’s work too much to mimic it. Although Chambers grew up in an art world that viewed such copying as a long-accepted practice, he practiced long enough to reach a time when such copying was looked down upon. “The issue of originality defines a sea change in that world during [Chambers’] lifetime that would forever disqualify him as a so-called fine artist in the eyes of his contemporaries,” Foster writes, explaining in part how Chambers fell into obscurity over time until his rediscovery in the middle of the twentieth century.

Thomas Chambers. Landscape with Lake and Monastery [Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo?], c. 1843-60. Oil on canvas, 18 1/16 x 24 3/8 inches. Indiana University Art Museum; Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection.

In the late 1930s, art dealers Albert Duveen and Norman Hirschl discovered a signed work by Chambers that led them to connect that one work to similarly painted works that had also emerged around that time. In 1942, they exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City 18 works attributed to Chambers, hailing him as the “First American Modern” and “The American Rousseau” for his unique style so similar to the primitivism valued by modern art movements. Just as Herman Melville resurfaced as the quintessential American novelist in the 1920s, Chambers resurfaces from obscurity as an “authentic American artist” according to critic Thomas Craven and others. Ironically, Foster points out, the “flatness, unnatural color, expressive distortion, abstraction, and simplification” of such works as Landscape with Lake and Monastery [Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo?] (above, circa 1843-1860) that Chambers’ contemporaries “deemed bad in Chambers’ day… are exactly the traits that… make him a model of liberated individualism and originality” for a modern audience. Foster proceeds to prick this tidy balloon of posthumous acceptance by viewing the modern reading of Chambers as being as much a misreading of his art as the reading of his contemporaries. “Laundered, over time, of the class and guild prejudices that colored the opinions of Chambers’ own contemporaries,” Foster explains, “his work comes to us with nuances of subject matter and context likewise lost, and a measure of nostalgia and condescension added, as we smile over imagined naïve and innocent citizens of the past decorating their fancy parlors.” Foster’s coup de grace arrives in the form of Thomas Kinkade, whom Foster evokes as a possible analogue to the case of Chambers—an artist who played to the taste of his time in his own style despite critical approbation. “[I]f it is useful to call Chambers the ‘First American Modern’ in 1942,” Foster asks, “is it helpful to understand him as the ‘first Thomas Kinkade’?”

One of the finest prose stylists in art history writing today, Kathleen Foster delivers mightily with Thomas Chambers. As shocking as including the “Painter of Light™” in her argument seems, Foster makes it not only provocative but illuminating. Like Chambers’ art itself, Foster easily crosses all strata of culture, high and low, including Walt Disney’s Fantasia and PBS’ Bob “Happy Little Trees” Ross, to give a fully rounded recounting of what Chambers’ life most likely would have been like based on the sketchy evidence that survives. Foster’s presentation of her Sherlock Holmes-ish detective work and deductions are exhaustive without being exhausting, lightened by the twinkling wit of her writing and her impeccable eye for images that illustrate Chambers’ strengths. If you should ever fall into obscurity, pray for someone like Kathleen Foster to pull you out of it. Thomas Chambers recreates a little-understood era in early American art and exhumes an artist both representative of that time and well welcomed in our own.

[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing me with a review copy of Kathleen A. Foster’s Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808-1869 and for the images from the exhibition.]

No Ordinary Painter

After taking the Grand Tour, and painting the portraits of others on that nineteenth century rite of cultural passage, Allan Ramsay found himself named “Painter in Ordinary” to England’s King George III, besting the greatest portraitists in England for the post. Born October 17, 1713, Ramsay painted the king in full regalia in his Portrait of George III (above, from 1762). Since the days of Elizabeth I, royal portraiture carried a giant load of metaphorical weight. Ramsay’s relaxed, warm style suited the new “look” that the king wanted for himself and the royal family—still seated firmly in the position of power but also conscious of the oncoming Age of Enlightenment and its challenges to entrenched, enthroned authority. Whereas Elizabeth I requested portraits posing her literally astride the globe like a colossus with all traces of humanity covered up by voluminous gowns, George III wanted viewers to see him as a man first and foremost, albeit a man with considerable power. Ramsay, the “Painter in Ordinary,” made the ordinary look extraordinary with his own extraordinary skills.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Thomas Lawrence would follow Ramsay’s lead as they founded the golden age of British portraiture in the generation just after Ramsay’s peak years. That trio followed Ramsay not only in portraying the trappings of power, but also in painting more tender, “behind the throne” scenes such as Ramsay’s Queen Charlotte with her Two Children (above, from 1765). Queen Charlotte widely patronized the arts and clearly recognized the more subtle skills of Ramsay. Instead of asking for the royal treatment, Queen Charlotte chose to have her and her two children painted more naturally, as if they were simply a well-off mother with her beloved children and not the queen and the heirs to the throne. Ramsay’s skill in painting the children with the same tenderness shown to them by their mother matches the attentiveness he gives to the beautiful fabrics they wear.

Ramsay’s talents extended beyond just the visual arts. Like his father, also Allan Ramsay, Ramsay wrote poetry and dabbled in other forms of writing, cultivating the rich, cultured existence of a gentleman of the time. Ramsay certainly knew the works of David Hume when he painted his portrait (above) in 1766. Hume’s naturalistic philosophy based on the idea that reality is only what we perceive empirically and not something we can reason out, succinctly described in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (bane of freshman Philosophy students everywhere, myself included), fits in well with Ramsay’s style of painting. Rather than construct a grand narrative and alter the facts to fit that narrative, Ramsay instead painted exactly what was before him—the grand and the small, the superhuman and the humanly fragile. The gentle treatment of Hume in his portrait may attest to Ramsay’s finding of a kindred spirit in the philosopher. Sadly, Ramsay fell from a ladder in 1770 and injured his painting arm beyond repair. After finishing one last royal portrait despite excruciating pain, Ramsay left his post and an assistant completed the unfinished works. Ramsay spent his final years in Italy, writing and reading yet always pining for the days when he could paint the ordinary in his extraordinary fashion.