Word: portraitist
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...loses again, every realist artist and portraitist in America, as well as every satirist, had better beware...
Thomas Gainsborough was the most popular portraitist in 18th century England, and the English still love him: in every way, the big Gainsborough retrospective now on view at London's Tate Gallery is a ceremony of national taste. Organized by Art Historian John Hayes, it traces Gainsborough's career from his beginnings as apprentice painter of homespun Suffolk dignitaries to his apotheosis as the most popular and sought-after portraitist of the Georgian ruling classes. There are more than 150 paintings and drawings, although some of his best-known work-like the Blue Boy, or the exquisite portrait...
...temperament Gainsborough I was an ideal society portraitist. "His conversation was sprightly, but licentious," one of his friends remembered. "The common topics, or any of a superior cast, he thoroughly hated, and always interrupted by some stroke of wit or humour ... so far from writing, [he] scarcely ever read a book-but, for a letter to an intimate friend, he had few equals." He loved music, and entertained his friends by playing the harpsichord and the viola da gamba. "Liberal, thoughtless, and dissipated," he called himself, and admired (without particularly envying it) the application of sturdier and more evenminded talents...
...Jacques-Émile Blanche, Anders Zorn. In England and America, the most successful of all these virtuosos was John Singer Sargent, who became to the British Empire what Velásquez had been to the Habsburg court of Madrid or Sir Anthony van Dyck to Charles I: the official portraitist par excellence, the unrivaled chronicler of male power and female beauty at the top of the social heap. Sargent paid the penalty of success after he died in 1925. Reputations like his were exactly what the English defenders of modernism, starting with Roger Fry, felt most obliged to destroy...
...Benton's focus is so tight that Kramer shows a far more domestic and grittier view of Manhattan than the Allen and Mazursky films. The cinematographer is Nestor Almendros, a frequent collaborator of François Truffaut's and Eric Rohmer's and a brilliant portraitist...