Word: painter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...comeback. A 165-ft. panorama of the palace and gardens at Versailles, painted in two CinemaScope-like sections, it is being installed this week in a specially built circular room in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Versailles is a masterwork of sobersided, redheaded John Vanderlyn (1775-1852), a painter deeply admired in his youth, deeply pitied in old age, and deeply buried in the textbooks after his death. The picture's new home at the Met should do much to rescue Painter Vanderlyn from his long oblivion...
Among his early distinctions, Vanderlyn was the first American painter to conquer naked flesh. Actually, he had small choice in the matter; his patron, Aaron Burr, decided it by sending him to Paris instead of London for training. The earnest student from Kingston, N.Y. struck the French capital in 1796, when Jacques-Louis David and his neoclassic followers were preparing the stage for Napoleon's posturings. Trapped in the doctrinaire icebox of neoclassicism, Vanderlyn conscientiously set about acquiring its basic asset: figure drawing. He also acquired its defects: stale colors and chill poses...
Medal from Napoleon. Vanderlyn befriended his compatriot painter, Washington Allston, when both were visiting Rome. Their brush with the remains of the Renaissance encouraged both young hopefuls to try to paint great pictures instead of settling for good ones. Result: both sprinted too far too soon, and had to sit out their later years. Vanderlyn tasted glory first, when his grandiose Marius Amid the Ruins of Carthage caught Napoleon's eye. "Give the medal to that!" the Emperor ordered; overnight the American became a cynosure at the French court. When Aaron Burr came penniless to France after his trial...
Mortal Wounds. "What is interesting" about a masterpiece, Painter Annigoni argued, is always "the surface as the master left it, aged, alas! as all things age, but with the magic of the glazes preserved, and with those final accents which confer unity, balance, atmosphere, expression-in fact all the most important and moving qualities in a work of art. But after these terrible cleanings, little of all this remains . . . Falling upon their victim, [the scientific restorers] commence work on one corner, and soon proclaim a 'miracle'; for, behold, brilliant colors begin to appear. Unfortunately what they have found...
...wife (1914 until his death in 1930) and muse of British Novelist D.H. (Lady Chatterley's Lover) Lawrence, presumed model for the wife of Mark Rampion, Aldous Huxley's fictional portrait of Lawrence in Point Counter Point, and wife (since 1950) of Angelino Ravagli, Italian painter and ceramist; of a stroke; in Taos...