Word: portraitists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...unfurls the life of Rembrandt in all its pathos. From prodigy to pauper, the troubled genius of 17th century Dutch painting is intricately conceived as he rises and falls in a world of war, plague and stolid bourgeois comfort. A galvanic force--ambitious, hugely inventive, avaricious--he is the portraitist of the poshest plutocrats, nobly aglitter, and the allegorist of human wreckage. Schama's book is a marvel of storytelling: sometimes heart pounding, always sympathetic and coolly reasoned. Seamlessly joining social history and art, what a triumph of scholarship and imagination...
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was the last great society portraitist--the Van Dyck of his time, as Auguste Rodin was the first to say. Twenty years ago, to confess an admiration (however sneaking) for his work was to invite incredulity. Sargent? That flatterer of the Edwardian rich? That fat-cat holdover, that facile topographer of the social Alps, that living irrelevance to the concerns of modernism? But what goes around comes around. Sargent's reputation is back as though it had never gone away. Once again, if one can judge from the attendance at the Sargent show...
England made his fortune. He was what the English upper classes--both hereditary aristocrats and nouveau riche --had wanted but not found: a portraitist who could perform in the Grand Manner. There had been none since the death of Thomas Gainsborough a century before, and Sargent, with his tremendous fluency and genuine empathy for the social levels of his sitters, filled the gap to perfection. He had no interest in politics past or present, was completely without class resentment and seemed to be devoid of irony. As a biographer who knew him pointed out, "He would have been puzzled...
...knack for portraying sympathetic tough guys; in Los Angeles. The no-nonsense, Bronx-born Clark, who found stardom playing sailors and soldiers in such World War II-era films as Destination Tokyo and God Is My Co-Pilot, also acted on Broadway and television. DIED. STANISLAV REMBSKI, 101, prolific portraitist with an economical style that masterfully evoked the spirit of his subjects; in Baltimore, Md. Among the best known of Rembski's 1,500 works were posthumous portraits of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the latter commissioned by Eleanor...
...first really significant American portraitist, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), appealed to these values. The hard, uningratiating realism of his portraits of Boston's notables--not just the prosperous Tories but dissenters like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere--was more like some French neoclassical painting than like English portraiture of the time. His clients liked Copley in part because everything in his work, from a nailhead in a chair to the exact gleam on red mahogany, was earnestly weighed and measured. In his candor and curiosity, he refused to edit out the warts and wens, the pinched New England lips...