Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pius XII called him "an outstanding painter characterized by deep spirituality, an innovator, sympathetic, effective, sincere, perfect. The picture world of Fra Angelico is truly the ideal world, whose atmosphere glows with peace, holiness, harmony and joy, whose reality is in the future, when finally justice will triumph on the new earth and in the new heavens...
...statuary. In a gallery at the end of a vine-covered arbor, they will find the museum's guest of honor and newest pride: a small, gold-framed 12¾-in.-by-9½-in. painting, Le Lorgneur or The Sidelong Glance (opposite), by famed 18th-century French Painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. Filling the rest of the gallery will be a loan exhibition of some 50 paintings and drawings by such other 18th-century French painters as Pater, Lancret, Boucher and Fragonard, testimony to the fact that the tone of elegance and grace set by Watteau in his dreamlike...
Sargent learned the lessons of his chosen masters brilliantly and soon. It was in Paris, at a scant 27, that he proved himself a painter of felicity and not just flair. His Daughters of Edward D. Bolt (opposite) found a place at the Salon of 1883, and in the minds of men. One critic dis missed it instantly as "four corners and a void." Novelist Henry James was more discerning: "The naturalness of the composition," he wrote, "the loveliness of the complete effect, the light, free security of the execution, the sense it gives us as of assimilated secrets...
...light falls on objects becomes mere virtuosity in Sargent. The fortuitous manner in which Sargent's light picks his flowerlike figures out of the gloom smacks more of the theater than of life. Yet when all this has been said, it is true that no painter alive today-with the possible exception of Augustus John -could have carried off half so well what Sargent set out to do. He remains, as the Metropolitan Museum's onetime Director Francis Henry Taylor puts it, "one of the most brilliant virtuosos of the brush since the 18th century...
...short, Sargent was a painter of appearances. Nothing could be more foreign to the modern, analytical temper, which is always denying that appearances count for much...