Horsing Around

Perhaps the greatest painter of the horse ever, George Stubbs was born on August 24, 1724. Stubbs parlayed his lifelong interest in art and anatomy first into a series of medical illustrations for a midwifery text and then into a text on horse anatomy. With his beautifully detailed horse illustrations, Stubbs hit equine gold. Whistlejacket (above), commissioned by the Third Marquess of Rockingham, shows Stubbs amazing ability not only to present horses in all their anatomical wonder but also his ability to capture the sense of personality of these animals that endeared them to their owners. The gratitude of these owners made Stubbs a very, very wealthy artist.

Although Stubbs name is now synonymous with his equine paintings, he also painted other animals, including lions, tigers, giraffes, and even monkeys. Stubbs’ Horse Frightened by a Lion (above) belongs to a series of paintings in which he pitted frightened horses against the king of the jungle. Exotic animals from the jungles of Africa toured England and Europe throughout the 18th century as curiosities and presented Stubbs with an opportunity to expand his repertoire. I’ve always wondered if Eugene Delacroix knew of Stubbs’ paintings of lions and tigers and horses battling. The many late works of Delacroix showing such scenes definitely belong to the fevered Romantic style of his era, but you can also see some early Romantic drama in Stubbs’ blazingly white stallion rearing away from the lion emerging from the darkness.

Despite attempts at pastoral landscapes and history painting, Stubbs fell prey to his own success and never truly escaped the label of the painter of horses. Like Edward Hicks with his Peaceable Kingdom series, Stubbs will always be a one-hit wonder. I like to imagine some frustration on Stubbs’ face in his Self-Portrait from 1781 (above), presenting him as an acclaimed, wealthy, and perhaps bored painter at the age of 57. Other painters have won some glory with paintings of horses (Rosa Bonheur comes to mind) and others have more accurately presented how horses move (such as Thomas Eakins in his A May Morning in the Park [The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand]), but perhaps no one else knew the horse from the inside out, from its heart to its soul, the way that Stubbs did.

Lost and Found

For art history, August 21 and 22 are the dates that will live in infamy, not December 7th (all apologies to FDR). In some strange nexus of negative karma stretching over nearly a century, three of the greatest art heists of all time took place on these dates: the theft of the Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris, France on August 21, 1911; the theft of Goya’s Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London, England on August 21, 1961; and the theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (above) and Madonna from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway on August 22, 2004. Each story ends happily with the works returned safe and sound, but the stories behind each still bewilder and amaze.

In many ways, the stealing of the Mona Lisa made it the icon we know today. Donald Sassoon’s Becoming Mona Lisa wonderfully examines just how famous Mona became after she was missing. On August 21, 1911, a commercial painter named Vincenzo Peruggia who had worked in the Louvre in 1908 walked into the Louvre and waved to the guards who still remembered him and who assumed that he was there to work, since it was the day the museum was closed to the public. Peruggia strolled up to the Mona Lisa, pulled it from the wall, removed it from its frame in a nearby stairwell, and sauntered out of the Louvre with Da Vinci’s masterpiece beneath his painter’s clothing.

An entire day passed before anyone noticed the missing painting. The Louvre shut down for a week after it was discovered. Theophile Homolle, the Louvre’s director, was forced to resign. Without any clues, police followed every thin lead, arresting even poet Guillaume Apollinaire momentarily as a suspect. In November 1913, Peruggia contacted an Italian art dealer, hoping to sell the painting to the Uffizzi. The dealer contacted the police and Peruggia was apprehended. After two years of squirreling the masterpiece beneath his bed, Peruggia claimed that he only stole the Mona back for Italy, since it had been “stolen” by Napoleon and the French. (In reality, King Francois I of France purchased the Mona Lisa from Da Vinci in 1516.) France allowed the Mona Lisa to tour Italy for two years before she returned to the Louvre, her reputation magnified immensely by the worldwide press surrounding the sensational robbery and the amazing recovery.

In 1961, the British government purchased Goya’s The Duke of Wellington for the National Gallery to keep it on British soil and out of the hands of an American collector. As a consequence, the tax levied on all persons owning a television was increased. Not liking higher taxes (or anyone trying to take away his television programs), 61-year-old pensioner Kempton Bunton sprang into action. Climbing through an open bathroom window of the National Gallery one morning, Bunton grabbed the painting and nimbly scampered back through with Goya’s portrait of the Hero of Waterloo. Reuters soon received a letter offering the return of the painting in exchange for a decrease in the television tax, which the government refused. Police were baffled. The Duke of Wellington “appeared” ever so briefly in the 1962 James Bond film Dr. No hanging on wall of the title supervillain’s lair and drawing a double-take from the superspy. Four years later, the press received another letter saying where the painting could be recovered, safe and sound. Bunton surrendered voluntarily 6 months later, and received only 3 months of prison time. The moral—NEVER get between an old man and his television!

Any humor or eccentricity in art thievery ends with the theft of Munch’s Scream and Madonna (above) on August 22, 2004. Masked and armed thieves rushed into Oslo’s Munch Museum in broad daylight, threatened patrons and guards at gunpoint, and pulled the paintings from the walls with ease. Justifiably, the museum guards placed the safety of the museum-goers over that of the art itself, something that some later critics amazingly saw as misplaced priorities. The museum improved their overall security, including more modern alarm systems, in the aftermath of the theft. Two years passed before the paintings were recovered, safe and sound. The thieves received sentences of 8, 7, and 4 years of prison time, depending on their level of involvement. The shocking violence of the Munch robbery made art lovers long for the days of misguided nationalists and disgruntled old men.

Covering Old Ground Again

“He’s a cover-up kind of guy in life and art,” Thomas Hoving writes of the artist Andrew Wyeth in his introduction to the recently reissued 1995 book Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography. Konecky and Konecky reissue this valuable book on Wyeth at a critical time in Wyeth’s career as he recently celebrated his 90th birthday and we begin to ponder even more seriously his legacy. Although later works such as Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic, the companion catalogue to the 2006 exhibit at the PMA, may be more up to date and address Wyeth more critically, this “autobiography” allows Wyeth himself to speak about his paintings openly (or as openly as he allows himself), revealing some of the emotional backdrop behind each work. People who think they “know” Andrew Wyeth and his work need to read this autobiography and know him “again” for the first time.

In passages “as told to” Hoving, Wyeth unpacks the emotional baggage behind deceptively simple works, such as Trodden Weed (above) from 1951. Wyeth had recently undergone 8 hours of surgery on his lung and nearly died. To recover, he took long walks in his beloved Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Wearing Revolutionary War-era boots once owned by Howard Pyle, artist and teacher of his father N.C. Wyeth, Andrew contemplated his own mortality and how to express that in a naturalistic vision. “I suddenly got the idea that we all stupidly crush things underfoot and ruin them—without thinking,” Wyeth says. “Like the weed getting crushed. That black line is not merely a compositional device—it’s the presence of death.” Armed with this knowledge, the viewer sees Trodden Weed with new eyes, ears ringing with the personal associations of Wyeth with his father and mentor and the larger associations of the natural cycle of death all around us. I recall standing in the gift shop of the PMA exhibit last year and listening to other patrons demean Wyeth’s work as just pictures of houses and fields and wishing that they knew the whole universes behind each image. For me, the addictiveness of Andrew Wyeth lies in this coded language of the imaginative life he has created. Once you break that code and speak that language, Wyeth holds you forever.



Without that insider knowledge, works such as Winter 1946 (above) seem to be of just a young man dressed to ward off the winter chill navigating a hill. To see that hill as the giant mass of N.C. Wyeth’s physical bulk and influential weight on Andrew’s career after his accidental death turns it into a wholly new image, challenging each of us to navigate our own past and the ghosts that haunt us. Memory and Magic went a long way in furthering Wyeth scholarship. Works such as Richard Meryman’s Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life seem ultimately unsatisfying compared to Hoving’s book, which allows Wyeth to speak “unplugged” as it were, free of all critical apparatus but his own level of reticence. A friend recently loaned to me a British film done on Wyeth in the early 1980s, before the Helga Pictures circus, and I could sense the same openness and freedom of expression in those videoed talks as in the words captured here. Post-Helga, Wyeth seems to me either more media-savvy or media-phobic (or a combination of the two), unwilling to speak for his works to further the appreciation of them and content to let the critics and the paintings themselves have their say.


The “as told to” format seems to suit all the Wyeths wonderfully. Jamie Wyeth’s recent catalogue Dog Days, the companion catalogue to the exhibit Dog Days of Summer: Works by Jamie Wyeth at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford (my review here), used the same format to wonderful effect. It’s this oral history aspect of the Wyeth family’s art that makes this time so crucial for their legacy. Wyeth himself was there to record the end of his relationship with Christina and Alvaro Olsen in End of Olsons (above), but who will be there to record the End of Wyeths? Andrew’s wife Betsy, his greatest champion and conservator, may be stashing away this essence of the man and his work, but we may not know for sure until he is gone. Fortunately, Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography allows us to keep some part of Andrew Wyeth with us forever.

[Many thanks to Konecky and Konecky for providing me with a review copy of this book. Anyone interested in ordering from them should e-mail them at seankon@comcast.net. Beautifully illustrated and in sturdy hardback, Konecky and Konecky’s $17.95 reissue provides a much-needed, affordable re-introduction to one of America’s greatest artists of the 20th century.]

Elementary Art Criticism

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes questions Inspector MacDonald, who has just been in Professor Moriarty’s room in Chapter 2 of The Valley of Fear from 1914:

"That painting was by Jean Baptiste Greuze."

The inspector endeavoured to look interested.

"Jean Baptiste Greuze," Holmes continued, joining his finger tips and leaning well back in his chair, "was a French artist who flourished between the years 1750 and 1800. I allude, of course to his working career. Modern criticism has more than indorsed the high opinion formed of him by his contemporaries."

The inspector's eyes grew abstracted. "Hadn't we better--" he said.

"We are doing so," Holmes interrupted. "All that I am saying has a very direct and vital bearing upon what you have called the Birlstone Mystery. In fact, it may in a sense be called the very centre of it."

MacDonald smiled feebly, and looked appealingly to me. "Your thoughts move a bit too quick for me, Mr. Holmes. You leave out a link or two, and I can't get over the gap. What in the whole wide world can be the connection between this dead painting man and the affair at Birlstone?"

"All knowledge comes useful to the detective," remarked Holmes. "Even the trivial fact that in the year 1865 a picture by Greuze entitled La Jeune Fille a l'Agneau fetched one million two hundred thousand francs--more than forty thousand pounds--at the Portalis sale may start a train of reflection in your mind."

It was clear that it did. The inspector looked honestly interested.

"I may remind you," Holmes continued, "that the professor's salary can be ascertained in several trustworthy books of reference. It is seven hundred a year."

"Then how could he buy--"

"Quite so! How could he?"

And so the game is afoot and another mystery begins to unravel in the hands of the great detective. Greuze, born on this date in 1725, once stood among the biggest names of 18th century art. How his genre scenes, such as The Village Agrees (above), from 1761, showing the village elders agreeing to allow the young beau to take the young village lass’ hand in marriage, and his masterful portraits fell out of favor remains a mystery.

Greuze painted in the middle of the early Enlightenment period in France, just as a heightened sense of humanism began to question monarchies and revolutions began to roll forward. Many of the famous people of the age sat before him for a portrait. Greuze’s portrait of the seven-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from 1763 appears above. Pushed by his ambitious father, Mozart already performed for the crowned heads of Europe as a virtuoso pianist and fledgling composer. On the other end of the age spectrum, Greuze paints the 71-year-old Benjamin Franklin (below) in 1777, while Franklin charmed the French royalty for their assistance against the British in the American Revolution. (On the same trip, Franklin charmed the French ladies for a different kind of “assistance.”) Greuze’s portrait of old Ben shows the elder statesman with grace and dignity, sans the fur cap that he affected in his attempt to play the colonial “savage” loosed upon the people of Paris.

Although Sherlock felt that “[m]odern criticism has more than indorsed [sic] the high opinion formed of him by his contemporaries,” Greuze today seems lost in the sea of great portraitists of that time. In the middle of the French Revolution, Greuze seemed outdated, many of his portraits symbols of an elitist past and his genre paintings too simple for the bravado of the brave new world. He attempted some classical history paintings fraught with contemporary meaning, ala Jacques-Louis David, but never achieved the same propagandistic effects. Perhaps that inability to stir up the revolutionary emotions that soon boiled over into “the Terror” says something positive about Greuze, and something negative about David.

Objectively Objecting

Christian Schad, born August 21, 1894, used his clear eye and steady hand to portray the decadence of the Weimar 1920s in Germany. Along with Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann, Schad painted in the Neue Sachlichkeit or “New Objectivity” style that strived to hold a mirror up to the chaotic society around them. But, where Dix, Grosz, and Beckmann twisted their visions to mimic the twisted soul of the Weimar years, Schad brings an almost Old Master realism to his works, believing that only the objective truth was necessary. Sometimes, he even turned that clear eye on himself, as in the Self Portrait from 1927 (above). Clad in a bizarre see-through shirt with a naked, scarred woman behind him, Schad shows himself taking part in the sexual deviancy of the time that was only a symptom of the larger issues at hand.

Schad excelled at showing the cabaret life of the 1920s in Vienna and Berlin, his two bases of operation during that decade. Sonja (above), from 1928, shows a typical pseudo-flapper in a café, smoking a Camel cigarette with a long holder, the advertising symbol of the camel clearly showing on the package sitting on the table. The hardness and hopelessness of these years comes through the definition given these faces. He paints an eerie lifelessness into their eyes, a deadness sinking down into their souls. Grosz’s work more colorfully captures the cacophony of the café patrons longing to drown out the sound of their own soul-sickness, but Schad’s portrayals capture the quiet desperation behind all the noise—the lonely moments experienced in even the largest, loudest crowds.

There’s a surgical precision to much of Schad’s realistic explorations of the Weimar psyche. Like the vulnerable patient in his 1929 Operation (above), the Germany of the 1920s seemed anesthetized to the chain of events happening within that would lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. Ironically, thanks to his more realistic painting style, Schad eluded the label of “Degenerate Art” that stuck to Grosz and others, driving them and their art from Germany at the moment they were needed most. Schad continued to paint portraits throughout World War II (he faked a heart ailment to escape fighting in World War I) and returned to his Dada roots and his photographic experiments in photograms, which he dubbed his “Schadograms.” These “Schadograms” occupied much of his artistic imagination for the rest of his long life, perhaps as an escape into abstraction from the memories of his realist depictions of the road to Germany’s self-destruction.

The Patron Saint of Impressionism

Born into a wealthy family, Gustave Caillebotte put his wealth to good use, not only becoming a painter himself but helping promote the work of other painters who counted him as a friend and benefactor, buying their works as well as helping pay the rent of artists such as Monet. Caillebotte, the “Patron Saint of Impressionism,” was born on August 19, 1848. After studying law and fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, Caillebotte stumbled into painting under the wing of Leon Bonnat. In The Orange Trees (above), he paints his brother Martial Jr. and cousin Zoe enjoying the surroundings of his family’s home in Yerres, France around 1878.

Although Caillebotte surrounded himself with the Impressionists, he himself painted in a realistic style, specifically scenes of urban Paris, such as The Floor Scrapers (above). The interior of The Floor Scrapers resembles many of the ballet class interiors of Edgar Degas, a close friend of Caillebotte. The unique cropping of The Floor Scrapers shows the influence of photography, a hobby of Caillebotte’s, on his painting. The strong diagonals of the floorboards also indicate the influence of Japonisme, which impressed itself on so many late 19th century French artists.

Kirk Varnedoe praised Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (above) as one of the finest paintings of the 19th century for its innovative perspective and use of photographic cropping. Although his career was relatively short, Caillebotte painted a few works of lasting importance. Caillebotte’s dual role in art history as painter and patron once did his artistic reputation a disservice. (Varnedoe recounts that critical struggle here.) However, there is no denying Caillebotte’s importance to the Impressionist movement. When Caillebotte died in 1894, he left in his will (executed by his close friend Renoir) 68 paintings to the French government by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Manet, Pissarro, and Sisley. Amazingly, the French government refused many of them. Years later, many of them ended up in the Barnes Collection. With the perspective of years, Caillebotte’s role in the history of art, including his personal contribution to the making of art itself, has finally been recognized.

On the Waterfront

When he traveled in 1861 with his brother Thomas to England to study painting further, little did Edward Moran know that his encounter with the works of J.M.W. Turner on display in London would influence the rest of his career. Whereas Thomas used his training to capture the glory of the virginal American West in his paintings, Edward, born on August 19, 1829 took to the high seas, painting picturesque maritime scenes such as Moonlight on the Thames With a View of St. Paul’s in the Distance (above) from that fateful year of 1861. Moran soon returned to America and began painting the sea from that side of the Atlantic.

Moran emigrated to the United States from England in 1844 and settled in Maryland before moving on to Philadelphia and later New York City. Living in the antebellum North, Moran got a good view of the political turmoil leading up to the American Civil War. The war was in full swing when he returned from his studies in England in 1861. Moran paints The Morning After the Gale (above) in 1865, perhaps to symbolize the end of the dark clouds of the Civil War and the onset of the hopeful clear skies of peace. Moran never gets as quasi-abstract in his seas or skies as Turner eventually did, but he does reproduce some of the emotional charge of the conflict of water and wind, writing in the clouds the darkest and brightest moments in people’s hearts.

Moran’s patriotism for his adopted country appears in his The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World (above). This 1886 painting shows the moment of Lady Liberty’s unveiling, specifically the 21-gun salute announcing President Grover Cleveland’s landing on Bedloe’s Island (now Liberty Island). Accounts of that day say that rain fell on the festivities, but Moran here paints clear skies, interrupted only by the rising statue and the smoke of the guns’ salute. Edward Moran brought not only the style of Turner across the waters but also an idealism and iron-clad faith in the democratic experiment that perhaps only an immigrant can maintain.