Word: welching
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...would be too easy to call Stuart Cary Welch an eccentric. In his office on the very top floor of the Fogg art museum, secluded among his collection of documents about Persian, Indian and Mughal painting, Welch thinks and writes about things that most people don't think and write about. He carries a battered Vuiton briefcase and wears J. Press shirts spackled with paint, spotted with holes, striped with tradition. He has a tendency, as one of his friends says, to "show up in sweaters that have been worn day in and day out." He is independently wealthy; there...
...Welch is also one of three or four people in the world who know anything about Persian paintings of the 16th century. About four years ago, he decided that it would be nice to bring together the works of that little known period. From his desk in the Fogg, Welch composed a letter to the director of the British Library reference division, the caretaker of one of the two great works of the early Safavid period, asking for his cooperation. "I thought they would scream with pain and say 'What do you mean?' " Welch says...
...Welch was dead wrong. The people at the British Museum liked his idea, as did a number of private donors and museums. Aided by a small yet fanatical team of academics and collectors, Welch traced the whereabouts of the early Safavid paintings, aiming to assemble the greatest collection of 16th century Iranian painting brought together since--surprise--the 16th century. Five years later, that exhibition has already made its way through the British Library in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Dubbed "Wonders of the Age" (from a manuscript of the period), the collection now occupies Gallery...
...their brushes from squirrel and kitten hairs. They worked for days on a single figure. The paintings are illuminated book plates; even on such a scale, they are subtler than works 30 times their size. Among the rocks and the sky hide contorted faces, tiny animals and endless innuendo. Welch, who's done work in the field for more than 20 years, says that he still finds figures in paintings that he's looked at since he began...
...more than art, the Safavid collection tells a story. It is a story of court intrigue and suspicion, of endless gore ("in a delightful way" says Welch), of fights against beasties (half-lions and half-apes) and hunting campaigns in the Iranian countryside. Beneath all of this lies a complicated story, one that Welch and his partner--Martin Bernard Dickson of Princeton--have deciphered after years of work. "People used to say it was impossible to say who painted what," Welch says, but all that has changed. "I looked harder and longer at paintings than most people do," he explains...