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| BIRTHS:
1638 SIRANI — 1826 ALMA~TADEMA |
| 1916: SUICIDE DE
BUGATTI |
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Born on 08 January 1638:
Elisabetta Sirani,
Italian artist, who, on 28 August 1665, died poisoned (according to her
father). — Sirani painted a wide range of subjects-portraits, allegories, religious themes- and she painted them fast. She painted so fast that it was commonly believed that she had help painting them. In order to refute the charges dignitaries from all over Europe were invited to watch her paint a portrait in one sitting. She seems to have developed her speed because of pressure from her father to make money(he took all her earnings). Also important as a teacher, she set up a painting school for women. In seventeenth-century Bologna, which boasted such well known women artists as Properzia de' Rossi and Lavinia Fontana, Elisabetta Sirani was considered a virtuoso. In Lives of Bolognese Painters, the biographer Carlo Cesare Malavasia praised Sirani for her merit "which in her was of supreme quality." Sirani's work reflects her familiarity with models from antiquity and a profound knowledge of the foremost sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian painters from Rome, Florence, and Bologna. Although Sirani learned to paint in the workshop of her father, Gian Andrea (1610-1670), it is said that he opposed his daughter pursuing a career. A professional painter and engraver by age seventeen, Sirani opened her own studio early in her career, supported chiefly by private commissions. She was so prodigious an artist that by the time of her death at 27, she had completed approximately 170 paintings, 14 etchings, and a number of drawings. Several stories recounted by Malavasia attest to Sirani's rapid working methods, such as when the Grand Duke Cosimo III de Medici visited her studio in 1664. After he watched her work on a portrait of his uncle Prince Leopold, Cosimo ordered a Madonna for himself, which Sirani allegedly executed quickly so that it could dry and be taken home with him. A prodigy with a vast oeuvre, Sirani built her reputation on the strength of her painting, which reflects lessons learned from the work of the Bolognese painter Guido Reni. One of the most influential Bolognese artists in the first half of the seventeenth century, Guido Reni was a natural artistic authority for Sirani who emulated the lucid organization and lyrical quality of his work as well as some of his artistic inventions. As an example, two paintings by Sirani are, Virgin and Child (1663) and Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, and two etchings are Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and The Holy Family with St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist. Executed by Sirani two years before her death for Signor Paolo Poggi, Virgin and Child depicts a sweet and intimate moment when the child has turned to crown his mother playfully with a garland of roses. Sirani subtly differentiates the child's soft pink skin from his mother's olive coloring. The broad, fluid brush strokes used to delineate the mother's bodice and sleeves contrast with the refined patterns of her headdress and loose curls of coarse brown hair. Sirani has effectively used a limited palette of different tones of white, red, and blue to highlight the mother and child against the dark background. Virgin and Child was featured on a Christmas stamp issued by the United States Postal Service in 1994. It was the first time that an historical work by a woman artist was depicted on a Christmas stamp. More than 1.1 billion were circulated. — Elisabetta Sirani was born in Bologna and was primarily a painter of religious and historical themes. Her father Giovanni Andrea Sirani was a painter and Elisabetta demonstrated early in her girlhood that she was gifted not only with artistic talents but those in music and poetry. By the age of seventeen she is reputed to have produced over a190 pieces of art. Sirani died at the age of twenty-seven under mysterious circumstances and a posthumous trial failed to reveal whether there were grounds for the accusation put forth by her father that she ahd been poisoned. — LINKS — Self-Portrait (1660) — Porcia Wounding Her Thigh — Virgin and Child (1663, 86x70cm) — The Holy Family with St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist (etching 30x22cm) |
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1916 Rembrandt Bugatti,
frère du constructeur automobile, sculpteur animalier, se suicide. Ettore
Bugatti, créa en 1907 à Molsheim (en Alsace), les usines, désormais célèbres,
de construction automobile. Il entrait ainsi dans la légende de l’automobile.
Son frère, Rembrandt, obtint une grande place dans le tout petit groupe
des sculpteurs animaliers européens du début du XXème siècle. Autodidacte mais initié à la sculpture par le prince Troubetzkoï, ancien élève de Rodin, le jeune Rembrandt découvrit tout de suite sa voie. En 1901, sa première œuvre fondue est une vache. À Paris, il va être pris en main par Adrien Hébrard qui possède à la fois le journal Le Temps, une fonderie et une galerie rue Royale. Rembrandt accepte de signer un contrat d’exclusivité : il touche un salaire régulier et un droit sur la vente de chaque sculpture. Littéralement envoûté par le monde animal, le jeune maître trouve insuffisant le parc zoologique du Jardin des Plantes de Paris. Il part pour Anvers où la direction du zoo se montre très accueillante à l’égard des artistes. Ce sera, de 1907 à 1914, la partie la plus créatrice de sa courte vie : une faune complète sortira de ses mains. De retour à Paris, au début de la guerre, Rembrandt se suicide dans son atelier de Montparnasse, le 08 janvier 1916. Ignoré des dictionnaires spécialisés, Rembrandt Bugatti a laissé un bestiaire qui égale celui de Barye ou de Pompon. Entre le réalisme et la stylisation, il y avait place pour une sorte d’impressionnisme sculptural et elle n’a appartenu qu’à lui. Ils étaient tous deux les fils d’un génie créateur des plus singuliers, Carlo Bugatti. |
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Born on 08 January 1836: Lawrence
Alma-Tadema, Dutch English Pre-Raphaelite
painter who died on 25 June 1912. — Alma-Tadema, the son of a Dutch notary, studied art at the Antwerp Academy under the Hendrik Leys. A visit to Italy in 1863 shifted Alma-Tadema's interest toward antiquity , and afterward he depicted imagery almost exclusively from Greek, Roman, and Egyptian sources. He became a British citizen in 1873 and was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1879. He was knighted in 1899. — Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the painter of "Victorians in togas", was one of the most successful artists of the XIX century. He was internationally famous and so immensely popular that scarcely a middle-class Victorian drawing room was without at least one print of Alma-Tadema's painting. Yet a few years after his death he was all but forgotten. Laurens (later he changed to the more English Lawrence) Tadema was born on 8 January 1836, in the small village of Dronrijp, which lies about 3 miles to the west of Leeuwarden, Holland. He was the sixth child of Pieter Jiltes Tadema, a notary. It is unclear when and why he affixed the name Alma to his last name, probably it was the name of his godfather. His parents wanted him to become a lawyer and Laurens was enrolled at the gymnasium of Leeuwarden. Although Laurens was a good student, he always wanted to be an artist and, with great enthusiasm he tried to pursue both courses. This caused a significant decline of his health that his doctors even predicted he would die shortly. His mother decided to allow him to spend his remaining days doing what he enjoyed most, to paint. But happily after that he recovered completely. This marked the beginning of a new period of his life. In 1851, he went to Antwerp to study in the Antwerp Academy, where he was taught first by Gustave Wappers and then by Nicaise de Keyser. He left the Academy in 1856 and continued to study art and also took up the history of Germany, early France and Belgium under the guidance of Louis de Taye, the Professor of Archaeology at the Academy of Antwerp. Faust and Marguerite (1857) was painted as a result of these studies. In 1859 Alma-Tadema became a pupil of Hendrik Leys, joining his studio in Antwerp. In 1861, Tadema's picture The Education of the Children of Clovis (1868) was exhibited and became a success. In 1862, Alma-Tadema left Leys's studio and started his own career. The period 1862-1870 is called his Continental period, he established himself as a significant contemporary European artist. His main works were of classical genre, dedicated to Ancient Egypt: An Egyptian Widow (1872) and Greek and Roman history: A Roman Family (1868), An Audience at Agrippa's (1876). In 1870, Alma-Tadema moved to England, where he was to spend the rest of his life. He became one of the most famous and highly paid artists of his time, acknowledged and rewarded by the fellow artists as well as by the governments of the European countries. In 1879, he was elected as a full member of the Royal Academy of Arts and in 1899 was knighted by Queen Victoria. Among his most famous works are An Apodyterium (1886), Spring (1894), The Coliseum (1896), The Baths of Caracalla (1899), Silver Favourites (1903), The Finding of Moses (1904), A Favourite Custom (1909). — Few artists enjoyed the success that the Dutch-born painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema achieved in the United Kingdom with his studies of semi-nudes, which were set against a background of daily life in ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt. Born in Dronryp, his art training began at the Antwerp Academy, and was completed with Baron Leys, an historical painter whose careful reconstructions of life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made him the ideal teacher for a painter like Alma-Tadema, whose choice of subject-matter had always been similar. But it was left to Ernst Gambert, the Belgian international art dealer to realise that in Alma-Tadema he had found himself a first-class artist. After seeing his work, Gambert immediately commissioned forty-four paintings which were eventually shown in England, where they caused an instant sensation. The Victorians had already been conditioned to accept nudes as an art form after Lord Leighton had exhibited his paintings in the 1860s. But Alma-Tadema's paintings went a step further. After painting a number of subjects in which his semi-nude females were merely decorative adjuncts to his vivid reconstructions of classical history, he overreached himself with his painting A Sculptor's Model (1877). This uncomprising, full-frontal nude of the model deeply offended the prudes and caused something of a furore, and from then Alma-Tadema confined himself to portraying his models semi-draped. His work became enormously popular in the United States, where it did much to forge Hollywood's conception of life in ancient times. His pictures were all numbered with Roman numerals, starting with No I when he was 15, and ending with CCCCVIII. A genial and uncomplicated man, Alma-Tadema enjoyed his success and money, living in extravagant life-style at Townshend House in Tichfield Terrace, Regent's Park, which he redesigned to resemble a Pompeiian villa. Unfortunately, it was partially destroyed in 1874, when a barge carrying gunpowder on Regent's Canal exploded near the house. After the house was rebuilt, Alma-Tadema moved to a larger house in St John's Wood, which had once been owned by the French artist Tissot (1836-1902). Tissot had left England abruptly in 1882 after the tragic death of his mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton. Alma-Tadema's life was an enormously sucessful one in which he was made an RA, knighted and showered with honors from many countries. By 1911, however, his popularity began to wane. Realising that his work was becoming unfashionable he resigned from the Royal Academy committee, after serving on it for thirty-one years. In the following year he went to take the waters at Wiesbaden, Germany where he was suddenly taken ill and died on 25 June 1912. His body was brought back to England and interred in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral (London), where it lies in the company of fellow artists, Millais, Holman Hunt and Lord Leighton. Like so many artists before him, the grim realities of World War I helped to finish off whatever popularity his work had enjoyed, and it is only recently that his reputation as a major Victorian artist has been restored. Alma-Tadema's wife Laura was also a talented artist in her own right, as was their daughter Anna. Alma-Tadema's paintings are often criticised as lacking emotion and spirituality. The Art Journal complained that there was 'no spirituality and little intellect in the faces of men and women in his world.' In the 1920s the Bloomsbury Group singled out Alma-Tadema's work as an illustration of all that was wrong with Victorian art, accusing him of wasting his technical skill on subjects so futile, pointless and superficial. However, Alma-Tadema's paintings, like most of his Victorian contemporaries, are now back in fashion again — The Finding of Moses sold for £1.5 million in 1995. |
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LINKS — Death of the Pharaoh's Firstborn Son (1872) — The Phyrric Dance (1869) _ The Pyrrhic Dance was a Spartan war dance, performed at the Spartan and Athenian games. This picture was Alma-Tadema's first picture to be shown at the Royal Academy. It was generally well received. The notable exception was the art critic and champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin, who complained that it was 'a detachment of beetles looking for dead rat'. — Sappho and Alcaeus (1881, 66x122cm) _ Sappho and Alcaeus were ancient Greek poets who lived in Mytilene on the Isle of Lesbos in the 7th century BC. — Antony and Cleopatra (1883) _ In this picture Alma-Tadema envisions a meeting between Anthony and Cleopatra. Anthony was a Roman general; Cleopatra was the Queen of Egypt. — The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888, 132x214cm) _ Marcus Aurelius Antonius - better known by his adopted name of Heliogabalus or Elagabalus was one of the most debauched of all the Roman emperors. He ascended the throne in AD 218 and, according to Gibbon, 'abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.' He attempted to introduce the cult of the oriental sun god of Emesa to Rome and ran an oriental style court. His elaborate banquets were said to have included the brains of 600 ostriches, powdered glass and camel dung. He was eventually murdered, at the age of eighteen (10 March 222), by the Praetorian Guard; his body dragged through the streets and flung in the River Tiber. Alma Tadema's painting depicts the emperor's most celebrated practical joke. One of his whims was to have a feast in which his entire court were smothered in a cascade of roses. At a given signal, a canopy above was unleashed, releasing tons of rose petals which suffocated the unwitting guests below. In the painting, Heliogabalus in pontifical robes watches the spectacle from the upper table with his mother and other favourites. Behind him is a statue (now in the Vatican) of Dionysos and a young faun, symbolic of the 'forbidden love' which numbered among the emperor's many excesses. The be-petalled guests look more annoyed than suffocated, although the oil sketch for the painting shows a more constricting view of the incident. Alma Tadema sold the painting to the MP Sir John Aird, for the then enormous sum of £4000. The artist had roses sent weekly from the French Riviera during the four winter months that he worked upon the picture. He was still painting highlights onto the canvas on Varnishing Day when the painting was exhibited at the RA in 1888. The rose petals littered the floor of his studio for many months afterwards. — A Dedication to Bacchus (1889) _ Bacchus was the Roman god of wine; the Greek god of wine was Dionysus. — Caracalla and Geta (1907; 123x154cm) _ Caracalla (188-217) was the elder of the two sons of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus. He succeeded in AD 211 and is best-known for arranging the murder of his brother Geta after the two engaged in a power struggle in the months after their father's death. This painting depicts a gala performance in the Colosseum by Septimius Severus on the occasion of bestowing the title of Antonius Caesar on Caracalla. — A Favorite Custom (1909) |
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