Tea at Trianon: Winter is for Wyeth

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 11, 2016

Winter is for Wyeth

From Under the Gables:

Dead of Winter is a scene that any of us who have tramped around fields or the outskirts of towns in the winter might see. It is a commonplace scene that brings to mind nothing of note in the passing of it. Yet, such is the power of art that Wyeth nearly takes our breath away with the detailed beauty of this painting--the graceful and fragile grasses on the lower left, the scraggy bark of the tree, the green on its branches, the sturdy stalks of grasses and weeds.

Here we see the Wyeth method at work, whose purpose was not to capture an objective reality but to capture his own excitement and love of the object he was painting. I don't know the history of this particular painting in pre-studies, but Wyeth rarely painted only what he saw or did so only in fast, on-the-scene watercolors. This painting displays lavish attention to detail painted in the studio. (Read more.)