Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most artists went to the West as strangers. The earliest first-rate American artist to whom the new West was a natural environment was George Caleb Bingham, a self-taught painter who grew up in Missouri. Bingham's Osage warrior lying in ambush is tense testimony to the wagoner's haunting knowledge that Indian eyes were always on him. But Bingham's masterpieces are the superbly drawn scenes of settled frontier life, electioneering, shooting competitions and riverboat life. Painted in the 1840s and 1850s, they already point to the days when Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn will...
Shahn was raised in a Brooklyn slum, where the local toughs forced him to portray favorite athletes on the pavement with chalk. Little Ben learned to draw very well indeed. He also developed a temper. It was the perfect schooling for a "proletarian-school" painter. Shahn grew up to startle the art world with a series of watercolors, almost as beautiful as they were bitter, based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. He became perhaps the best, and most depressing, painter of the Great Depression. Shahn's "havenots" were lean as greyhounds and sad-eyed as spaniels; his "haves" always...
...sheer output, no English painter of the 18th century came close to the eccentric genius. George Morland. In a brief lifetime he finished about 4,000 canvases, most of them seascapes, sentimental family groupings and bucolic country scenes...
Unfortunately for Morland's career and subsequent reputation, few contemporaries could match his prodigious consumption of alcohol.* But through the years, Morland's work has kept a kind of dogged popularity. Last week a show at London's Tate Gallery, commemorating the painter's death in 1804, showed one reason why. No English painter has left a more powerful or popular picture of rural Old England. A man of common pleasures himself, Morland, through his work, has addressed himself over the centuries to the common man's comprehension...
...Morland started out as an infant prodigy. He was already sketching at three, soon painted spiders that scared the servant girls. At ten he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy. Beginning at 14, Morland went through seven years of training. He was apprenticed to his father, a twice bankrupt painter and art dealer, locked in an upper room turning out copies of English and Dutch masterpieces which his father sometimes foisted off as originals. But while still a fuzzless youth, Morland started drinking. To keep himself supplied with gin, young Morland secretly painted sexy love scenes, lowered them...