Word: portraits
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Finding just the right art for the issue was its own adventure. Deputy art director MARTI GOLON was looking for someone to paint Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, for example, when she chanced on a portrait in an illustration annual. She knew the artist, ETIENNE DELESSERT, as a children's book illustrator and thought, "Wow, this is a perfect solution." She had no idea how perfect. Delessert not only knew Piaget but had worked with him. Delessert sent along a photo of the two collaborating on a book, which we couldn't resist reproducing here. You will find other remarkable...
...lessons of Velazquez's Las Meninas, which Sargent had copied in the Prado, sank very deep into his style and would produce curious effects tinged with melancholy, like the brilliant early portrait of the daughters of Edward Darley Boit--four slightly alienated-looking moppets, their white pinafores gleaming in a cavern of bourgeois shadow...
This gave him the best possible qualification for painting the great and the good. He simply took them at their own valuation, producing vivid epitomes of social standing as he did so. His portrait of Lord Ribblesdale, for instance, remains the definitive image of the late-Victorian equestrian male: superbly grave and self-contained, tall as a tree, and yet with a touch of carelessness in the flare of his buff hunting waistcoat and the dashing arabesque of paint with which, in a single loaded stroke, Sargent conveyed the fold of his breeches--a gesture as assured...
...incessant production of highly paid portraiture began to chafe on Sargent. Clients kept interfering, pestering him to take this out and paint that in. "It seems there is a little something wrong with the mouth!" he complained to one of his sitters, about the demands of another. "A portrait is a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth!" In 1907, at the age of only 51, Sargent decided to give up doing "paughtraits," as he disparagingly called them--except for those commissions he couldn't refuse, like a 1917 portrait of John D. Rockefeller. Sargent wanted to travel...
...whistle, Johanna?" asks a beau showing off his belle in Kannst du pfeifen, Johanna? "Can you sing? Eat a peach? Gargle? Babble?" Johanna (a falsetto Frommermann) dutifully answers, with suitably rude sound effects, until the lover says sternly, "Can you be quiet, Johanna?" The comic portrait of a doomed courtship, in three minutes flat...