Daphnis and Chloe by Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau

At one of the last Monday Night Painting sessions I attended, we worked from a model that struck me as the perfect Daphnis.  I did one two-hour oil sketch of him, then decided to redo it on a larger canvas the next week, so I could put the figure into a larger scene, having Daphnis and Chloe in mind.  I started to look at images of Daphnis and Chloe through the ages and found there are many, many of them and they are among the loveliest paintings of which there are art prints available.

Daphnis and Chloe is  a prose poem by Longus, a second century writer, perhaps the first novelist, who lived on the Aegean island of Lesbos (home of Sappho).  It’s the story of two foundlings, exposed separately  by their parents on a mountainside, who are raised by a goatherd and a shepherd,.  They grow up in a idyllic, pastoral playground, herding sheep and playing musical instruments and falling in love, but are too innocent to know what to do about it.  The path to marriage and rural domestic happiness is a rocky one, involving Chloe’s abduction by suitors and a raid from a neighboring city, and Daphnis being beaten up and sold to pirates.  It all works out in the end though.  What an irresistable tale to paint, or for that matter, write a ballet about, like Ravel!

I classify Daphnis and Chloe as an Arcadian type of romance.

Arcadia, although an actual region in Greece with mountainous topography and a scanty population, became in the minds of poets, reformers and artists  a sort of pagan Garden of Eden, where people lived in harmony with each other and the splendor of the natural world, populated by dryads, naiads and, of course, shepherds, and ruled by the god Pan.  Virgil set his Eclogues in Arcadia.

Arcadia by Thomas Eakins

 Arcadia came to represent not a man-made utopia, but the spontaneous result of life lived naturally, uncorrupted by civilization, sort of an 18th Century Enlightment holy-grail of a place.  Arcadia was represented in Renaissance Italian art, as they were the immediate heirs of the classical world, but was also taken up by the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney, in a long prose work by that title.  I’ve never read Sidney’s work, though I have read Longus, but whenever I encountered those Elizabethan sonnets addressed to some lady-fair named Chloris or Phillis or Celia, Diana, Cynthia, Aurora, Diaphenia,…Rosaline, I think, “Yep, those shepherdesses were a canny lot.  They knew when not to give into the blandishments of some honey-tongued shepherd whose ardor outstripped his fear of consequences.”  What a boon to poetry Arcadia was though!

I decided I must post some of the gorgeous paintings I found of Daphnis and Chloe to spur me on to a more ambitious work.

Daphnis and Chloe by Charles Gleyre

by Pedro Weingartner

by Louis Hersent

by L Bakst

by Louis Hersent

by Pierre Charles Comte

by Pierre Cabanel

by Pierre Auguste Cot

by Francois Pascal Simon Gerard

by Gaston Renault (I love this one, but can’t quite get used to the hat)

by Konstantin Somov

by Victor Borisov-Musatov

Some of my favorite images, I couldn’t copy and paste into this blog entry, so I’ll provide links instead:  Jean Leon Gerome,  and Jehan George Vibert  (this is one of my absolute favorites).

Two hour sketch, possible Daphnis

Aladdin’s Dream

Oil on Canvas, 10×14, Sold

Village and Pasture

8×10, Oil on Canvas

This small painting of my daughter’s horse, Pelee, and pasture mate, Tanner, was directly influenced by a painting by Alfred Munnings called Huntsman and Hounds Crossing a River (1909).  In Munnings Painting, the rider on a bay hunter stands out boldly in the foreground against a muted and lighter background of hounds fording a stream and a golden pasture beyond.  In honor of Munnings, I transported Pelee to England.

 Alfred Munnings Reading Aloud Outside on the Grass, circa 1911, by Harold Knight

I love this painting of Munnings as a young man, and wouldn’t have discovered Harold Knight if I hadn’t been looking for Munnings images.  That’ll be another Blog.

Munnings was a prolfic painter, whose works are scattered about the globe, many of them in private collections.  There is an Alfred Munnings Museum in Dedham, England, which doesn’t seem to have acquired a very large collection yet, at least insofar as I’m able to tell, but could be the first place to head for a looksee, if you happen to be in England.  He created naturalistic paintings by traveling the countryside, recording scenes like these:

Gypsies

Boy and Ponies

The Bush Inn

The Horse Fair

Zenmore Hill, Cornwall

Bagsworthy Water at Cloud

He also did many portraits and commissioned paintings, which are truly elegant and prized.

Miss Ruth Brady on Bugle Call

The Clark Sisters

Sir Raymond Greene, MP, on Horseback

The stage play and movie, War Horse, was loosely based on the story of an actual horse named Warrior owned by General Jack Seely from the Isle of Wight.  Seely wrote a memoir about his horse in 1934, which was illustrated by Alfred Munnings.

Seely on Warrior

Munnings himself served in The Great War, though not as a soldier.  He was blind in one eye and was judged unfit to fight, but served with a horse remount division on the Western Front.  He became war artist to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade and provides us with an eye-witness view of an historic tragedy, in which a generation of young men were destroyed.

Munnings captured the charm of British rural life at a time when it was in the process of vanishing.  I, personally, don’t find them sentimental.  The loveliness is real, for any who’ve seen the English counryside, and life was largely lived out of doors in a way that is healthier than it is now.

Lord Strathcona’s Horse on the March

Charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron

 Munnings captured the charm of British rural life at a time when it was vanishing.  I personally don’t find them sentimental.  The loveliness is real, for those who’ve seen the English countryside, and life was lived out of doors in a way that is healthier than it is now.  Munnings was an opponent of Modern Art.  There is an anecdote about a conversation between him and Winston Churchill in which Churchill asked him, “Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his… something something?” to which Munnings said he replied “Yes Sir, I would.”  Munnings apparently told this anecdote during his departing speech as President of the Royal Academy of Art in 1949, which was broadcastover the radio by the BBC.  He was apparently a little the worse for drink.  (I like him even better for that story.)

Venus with Blue Pillows

This little nude (9×12)was painted in 6 hours, the fourth of my Monday Night Paintings.  As a group, we kept commenting about how the outline of her form reminded us of the Rokeby Venus (below) by Diego Velasquez, certainly the most attractive of all the Venuses painted by the old masters, at least the one most conforming to modern tastes of beauty.  It is actually physically impossible for us to see the image that Venus is apparently looking at in that painting.  It’s called the Venus Effect, after Velasquez’ Venus and another by Veronese (although that one gives me an uncomfortable exorcist feeling).  For her head to be framed as it apparently is in the mirror, her head  would have to be between the mirror and ourselves, blocking our view.  I’ve seen this painting in person at the National Gallery in London and was completely unconscious of it being a problem.

The Rokeby Venus by Diego Velasquez

I like that — Artist’ license.  The reflected  image is also too large.  In reality it would be smaller.  I realized something like that while painting the Angel of Music.  The Phantom is meant to standing behind the mirror, in a corridor beyond Christine’s room.  At the true distance of at least 3 feet, he would appear smaller than I have portrayed him, but putting him at that distance would have wrecked the feeling of intimacy I wanted to portray.  My original intention for that painting was to have Christine facing the mirror and reaching out towards it.  However, the actual size of the reflected image in mirror, with my model standing in front of it and reaching her hand towards it, as well as the problem of angle  (the Venus Effect) caused me to paint her with her back to the mirror and very close to it.  I needed to establish that there was a reflection, but in order to see the reflection I wanted to see, Christine would have had to be transparent.

The Angel of Music

Ginger Cat

Oil on Canvas, 9×12

My Sargent Crab in bloom

Today, as I was headed down to the studio, to work on a small equestrian painting, I was bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t painting from life and how I really had to start plein air painting.  So, I about-faced and took my easle and palette out into the windy yard.  My yard has been gorgeous during the past several weeks, all the apple trees flowering in turn and the lilacs down by the northern fence.  I’ve sniffed the apple blossoms several times, but haven’t even been down to view the lilacs close-up.  What a crime!

Today was indeed windy.  It certainly got no warmer than 50 degrees.  I kept thrusting my hands into my pockets to warm them up between brush strokes, muttering “Levitan, Levitan, Levitan…,” channeling the artist’s hardiness, like Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality chanting, “Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama.”  After about two hours, I had to give it up for the day.  The wind was picking up and I’m a shoo-in for hypothermia.

This is how far I got.  It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, but it’s been supposed to rain for the past two days.  I’m hoping I can get back to it before all the petals are gone.

I’ve just deleted a picture because I frankly didn’t like it.  It was a nude, seated figure of a woman.

However. the canvas was primed with an acrylic craft paint in a medium brown.  I often prime a canvas with a glossy Mod Podge, which prevents the oils from being absorbed into a matte ground and allows one to go for a finished product more quickly.   To the Mod Podge, one can add a few drops of acrylic paint, a light green being my favorite.  I learned these tips from Timothy C Tyler, who taught a Workshop in Rising Sun, Indiana a few years back.  (More on that in a moment.)  This canvas was primed with acrylic paint with no admixture of Mod Podge.  It was more opaque than I would have liked and was also a matte surface.

This model was quite tanned.  I found, when painting upon that opaque brown, that I was giving her skin too brown a tone.  I could see it once I had the bluish white tones of the background blocked in.  I think it was because the true tones of her skin looked too orange on that brown background and I instinctively toned them down, only to find later that I’d taken too much gold out.  I had then to try to put the warmer tones back in.  Also, her shadows were rather olive.  I can only imagine that this was due to the cool tones of the walls, but that too tipped my palate away from the warmer colors.  I would have loved to start over on this figure and use a canvas with a more familiarly colored ground.

These painting sessions are practice sessions though.  We keep learning.

The workshop I attended in Rising Sun — gosh, how many years back was that?  2006?  — was one of a number of workshops sponsored by Dick Blick called Art Now.  I’ve googled Art Now and it seems to be a defunct program.  This workshop was not only extremely fun, it was also a very productive  experience for me.  Tim is a good instructor.  He taught me how to do hair. (I painted Girl Without a Pearl Earring and The Sun on her Face in the aftermath of that workshop.)   He taught me how to paint reflections into a wet ground and how to leave the skin’s highlights for last.  I wish he was still teaching within driving range.  He offers workshops in Italy now.

We had four days, two devoted to painting a still life, two devoted to painting a portrait.   On two of the evenings, we drove into nearby Cincinnati to visit the Taft Art Museum, which is a small gem, and a gallery where Tim was having a show.   His painting of Persephone was particularly exciting to see.

A portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargent, Taft Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH

It was at the Taft that I saw my first Daubignys.  Have I mentioned that I adore Daubigny?

Monday Night Painting #2, 10x14

This is my second Monday Night painting.  I worked on it at the Green Lantern for 4 hours.   You can see how it looked when I brought it home below.  The carpet looked a bit like it was going to take off and give him a ride, so I repainted the corner.

Monday Night Painting, 10x14