Word: gainsborough
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Here and elsewhere in this excellent show, one sees Van Dyke chasing the Tudor stiffness out of painting, inventing the conventions of future English portraiture, the tropes on which Gainsborough, Reynolds and even Sargent would continually draw. The court he served was the most sophisticated one England would ever have. He did not outlive it; it was collapsing as he lay dying at the end of 1641. But Van Dyck had already changed English art decisively, and much for the better...
...home in London's fashionable Kensington, Antonia Pakenham Fraser Pinter is a composition by Gainsborough. Her English skin would make peaches weep in their cream. Blue eyes seem to savor a secret, shared but not revealed. She is tall, not willowy but womanly, and at 57 she is, by any standard, beautiful...
Reni's image of the young Baptist, modeled to the nth degree of sensitivity, warm against the cold blues and dark greens of the framing landscape, seems about to speak; and to look at the landscape background is to realize what English artists a century later, particularly Gainsborough, would gain from Reni. He had an inspired sense of the mechanics of composition, as Nessus and Dejanira proves: an airy ballet on the theme of rape, in which every billow and facet of the drapery seems to operate as form...
...Artie finds the Harvard experience is somewhat different from what he anticipated. His companions at the graduate dormitory "Comus Hall" are hardly your typical students. Comus houses Voltears, a graduate student in French literature who suffers from a sort of agoraphobia, a gay man ("the Gainsborough boy") and his weekend roomate nicknamed Pithecanthropus, and a host of other eccentrics...
These geographical conditions conspired to provincialize American culture. Today, no colonial weather vane or goffering iron fails to find its collectors, and the productions of traveling limners evoke an enthusiasm that might once have seemed excessive for Gainsborough. Nevertheless, most American towns looked more like Dogpatch than Williamsburg, and none of them could have been confused with Bath. The best American minds, like Thomas Jefferson, were by no means unaware of this. Jefferson in the early 1780s complained that many of the buildings in Virginia's capital of Williamsburg were rude, misshapen piles "in which no attempts are made...