Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [55]
PAINTING THE CHARACTER OF THE COLONIES. Copley’s portrayal of his friend, a shirt-sleeved Paul Revere, was an innovation for its time, when a portrait never pictured manual labor. Yet Copley posed the silversmith holding a teapot he had made, his tools in clear sight. Revere had not yet taken the midnight ride that Longfellow set to verse but was already a leading opponent of British rule. His shrewd, uncompromising gaze and the informal setting without courtly trappings summed up the Revolution’s call for independence.
STUART: THE FIRST DISTINCTIVE AMERICAN STYLE. Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) was America’s other great painter of the Neoclassic period. Stuart refused to follow established recipes for painting flesh, saying he would not bow to any master, but “find out what nature is for myself, and see her with my own eyes.” He used all the colors to approximate flesh but without blending, which he believed made skin look muddy, like saddle leather. Something of a pre-Impressionist, Stuart made skin seem luminous, almost transparent, through quick brushstrokes rather than layered glazes. Each stroke shone through the others like blood through skin, giving a pearly brilliance to his faces. Flesh, Stuart said, is “like no other substance under heaven. It has all the gaiety of a silk mercer’s shop without its gaudiness and gloss, and all the soberness of old mahogany without its sadness.”
Stuart was the equivalent of court painter for the new republic. His contribution was in simplifying portraiture, discarding togas and passing gestures to emphasize timeless aspects. Stuart painted faces with such accuracy that Benjamin West said Stuart “nails the face to the canvas.
Stuart, “George Washington,” (The Athenaeum Portrait), 1796, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Stuart’s portraits of George Washington demonstrate how the painter went beyond the European tradition. By stripping away all nonessentials (the background was never completed), Stuart implies that greatness springs only from individual character. The portrait omits Washington’s smallpox scars but hints at his endurance in the firm line of his mouth. Some have questioned whether the tightly clamped lips indicated not the fortitude to survive Valley Forge but the general’s uncomfortable wooden teeth. In any event, this image has become the most famous American portrait of all time. A victim of his own success, Stuart came to hate the job of duplicating the likeness, which he called his “hundred dollar bills. ” Now this national icon stares from its niche on the one-dollar bill.
GOYA: MAN WITHOUT AN “ISM”
The paintings of the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) fit no category. His work was indebted only to the realism of Velázquez, the insight of Rembrandt, and, as he said, to “nature.” Goya was a lifelong rebel. A libertarian fiercely opposed to tyranny of all sorts, the Spanish artist began as a semi-Rococo designer of amusing scenes for tapestries. Then he became painter to Charles IV of Spain, whose court was notorious for corruption and repression. Goya’s observation of royal viciousness and the church’s fanaticism turned him into a bitter satirist and misanthrope.
His work was subjective like the nineteenth-century Romantics’, yet Goya is hailed as the first modern painter. His nightmarish visions exposing the evil of human nature and his original technique of slashing brushstrokes made him a forerunner of anguished twentieth-century art.
Goya’s “Family of Charles IV” is a court painting like no other. The stout, red-faced king, loaded with medals, appears piggish; the sharp-eyed trio at left (including an old lady with a birthmark) seems downright predatory; and the queen insipidly vacant. Critics have marveled at the stupidity of the thirteen family members of three generations for not having realized how blatantly Goya exposed their pomposity. One critic termed the group a “grocer and his family who have just won the big lottery prize.” The painting was the artist