Word: rubenses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stubbs painted quite a few such marvels (though not, alas, the Arabian nightwalker or the Spotted Negro). He portrayed lemurs, monkeys, a rhinoceros and several leopards, and foreign animals gave him the pretext for two of his greatest images. One of these was a painting of a cheetah that had...
The African works did not need to be masterpieces of their own style. The face of Matisse's Portrait of Madame Matisse, 1913, possibly one of the dozen greatest portraits of the 20th century, was based on a mediocre Fang mask from Gabon. Sometimes, though, a modernist work would...
There were, of course, great differences between Rubens and his hierophant Watteau. One painted big, the other small; the tone of Watteau's paintings is always unofficial and intimate, very unlike the grand elocution of Rubens.
Watteau managed to skim off Rubens' lustrous surface and endow it with a still greater sense of nuance, while leaving his master's tyrannous physicality behind. To look at his fētes champětres -those felicitously idealized gatherings of young lovers, planted on the unchanging lawn...
But there is another reason to connect Watteau with impressionism: the colloquial, almost chatty strand of improvisation that purls along the surface of his art without distracting from its depths. As with Renoir, his models were his friends. He drew them incessantly, in fine-pointed chalks -a red, a white...