Word: raphaels
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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BENJAMIN WEST: AMERICAN PAINTER AT THE ENGLISH COURT, Baltimore Museum of Art. Period pieces today, these 52 canvases show what made "the American Raphael" (1738-1820) the toast of London and the first American artist to achieve international renown. Through...
...adored by a long line of connoisseurs and tourists who held him to have been angelically inspired, the greatest painter of his age: as famous in his own way as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Van Gogh or Picasso. Percy Bysshe Shelley thought that if some cataclysm destroyed Rome, the loss of Raphael and Guido Reni would "be alone regretted...
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...
...actually dissolved into mass media. When this ceased to surprise him, his work came too pat. It coarsened and turned industrial. Even his later images of foreboding and death, like the skulls, are trashily melodramatic by comparison with what had gone before, while his inflated recyclings of Raphael's Sistine Madonna and Leonardo's Last Supper could scarcely be more pointless. In the end he was stranded in a plenitude of subjects with nothing to paint...
...orphaned by German bombs and sent to Norfolk to be raised by his Aunt Deirdre and Uncle Roy, a local vicar. Rounding out the rectory household is Felicity, a laconic and inaptly named teenage cousin, who leaves her room long enough to be impregnated and abandoned by Raphael Hunter, scholar-scoundrel and the novel's sinister presence...