Word: painterly
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...genius; but except by name he is not a well-known genius in America, since he built nothing outside England and no attempt, until now, has been made to gather a full exhibition of his drawings. But he was the great English all- rounder of the 17th century: designer, painter, mathematician, engineer and antiquarian...
Curiously enough, not much is known about his life. Jones was a clothworker's son, and he began his career as a journeyman painter. Quite early on, in his mid-20s, he went in the Earl of Rutland's retinue through France and Germany, and then to Italy, where he may have spent five years. How he afforded that stay is a mystery; one theory holds that Jones, who never married and may have been homosexual, was kept by one or another of the powerful exquisites of the Elizabethan court, the Earl of Essex or the Earl of Southampton...
...malapropisms -- calling the French painter "Toujours Lautrec," asking some fellow schemers to "include me out" of a deal -- gained Samuel Goldwyn a perverse fame as the archetypal Hollywood immigrant mogul, crude and semiliterate. But as A. Scott Berg demonstrates in this readable, richly researched biography, Goldwyn was never an archetypal anything, except in his poor Jewish origins in Eastern Europe. Unlike the Mayers and Warners, he made relatively few films, and he never built a mighty empire with a huge star roster and an immense distribution network. He was the ultimate independent producer, with a compulsive need for autonomy...
Still, an artist deserves to be judged on his best work, and the idea that Reni was just a painter of saccharine devotional figures does not stand up. He will never get back on the pedestal he occupied in the 17th and 18th centuries, alongside Raphael. But there was a distinct grandeur in Reni, which his sometimes irksome professional smoothness served, and it is still perceptible today...
This show is the first in a generation to restore Reni; the last one, in his native Bologna, was in 1954. To a great extent it succeeds. When the various phases of Reni's work are assembled, he comes across as a far more diverse and interesting painter than one ever expected. His precocity and rate of absorption were equally striking, and they made room for sly humor, as in a pastiche of Caravaggio he did around 1605, when he was barely 30: David with the Head of Goliath, the David sporting a raffishly theatrical feather...