The Artist’s Sketchbook

Let us first consider what a sketch is not.  A sketch is not a finished drawing; a finished drawing is often a work of painstaking effort and an artistic product in-and-of-itself – a drawing is its own thing.  A sketch is not a preparatory drawing for a larger work per se; preparatory drawings during the Renaissance, for instance, were works that were made to be used to transfer finished compositions to larger canvases or onto the wet plaster of a fresco.

No.  A sketch, simply, is an artist’s first draft, a rough idea, the idle result of his drawing implement(s) and spare paper.  They are not finished works of art, but, rather, places where he is thinking on paper.  Most every artist of any importance (and most who are not) have kept sketch books – Your Correspondent has been guilty of this, as well.  Artists carry sketch books on vacations, on the subway, at the café or restaurant, at the concert or to the market.  In short, wherever there is life (or landscape!), the working artist takes his sketchbook, ready to think on paper.

And that’s what an artist’s sketchbook is – thinking on paper.  Sketches are not made for the general public, or even for small audiences – they are reference works for the artist as he is working out his ideas, planning out his compositions, or explaining his ideas.

Artists will also add sketches to the darndest things.  Much to the horror of restaurateurs everywhere, I am an inveterate tablecloth sketcher.  Can’t help it – but I do make sure that I doodle in pencil, so as not to ruin the cloth.  I have also added little sketches to the bottom of bills and receipts, and in letters.

Many artists, in fact, have loved to put little drawings in their letters.  Here is a typical letter from Van Gogh:

These are not finished drawings, and are just tossed into the text as an illustration.

Look, here, at Thomas Eakins, who sought to illustrate his letter about furnishings he admired with some quick sketches:

What I find most interesting about the sketches of even the greatest artists is that they are not often all that good.  And that’s the point – a sketch is simply the artist thinking pictorially, because that’s the way artists think.

That was what came to mind during a recent visit to Rome, where I saw a sonnet Michelangelo wrote to a friend (essentially, a poetic letter), about the experience of painting the Sistine Chapel.  (See above.)  The sonnet also has a very loose sketch of himself, arms overhead, brush in hand, performing an impossible task of artistic creation.  The sonnet reads:

Here like a cat in a Lombardy sewer! Swelter and toil!

With my neck puffed out like a pigeon,

belly hanging like an empty sack,

beard pointing at the ceiling, and my brain

fallen backwards in my head!

Breastbone bulging like a harpy’s

and my face, from drips and droplets,

patterned like a marble pavement.

Ribs are poking in my guts; the only way

to counterweight my shoulders is to stick

my butt out. Don’t know where my feet are -

they’re just dancing by themselves!

In front I’ve sagged and stretched; behind,

my back is tauter than an archer’s bow!

This is not an impressive sketch (and, perhaps, not an impressive sonnet), but it is a perfect example of the artist working out his ideas on paper.

More on sketches tomorrow!

Au Lavoir (The Washhouse), by Léon Augustin Lhermitte

After a brief hiatus, The Jade Sphinx returns with a weeklong look at artist Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844 – 1925).  Lhermitte was a French painter and etcher who primarily depicted rural scenes and peasant workers.  He was born in Mont-Saint-Père, and was student of Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1838-1912).  Lhermitte gained recognition after his show in the Paris Salon in 1864.  His many awards include the French Legion of Honour (1884) and the Grand Prize at the Exposition Universelle in 1889. Lhermitte died in Paris in 1925.

Lhermitte lived in the Aisne until he was about 20, developing a deep and abiding love of rural life, which became the focus of his work – often creating images of the work and daily life in the countryside of his time.

He came from a humble family and for many years earned his living with minor engraving work in France and England, before winning recognition at the Salon from 1874. Fame came after 1880, when the artist successively entered several large paintings depicting the life and people of his native village of Mont-Saint-Père. His pictures The Cabaret in 1881, Paying the Harvesters in 1882, and The Harvest in 1883, used the same figures which can be identified from one painting to another.

Though many 19^th Century artists relied on imagery introduced by earlier generations of painters, they also re-envisioned these older themes by executing them with progressive techniques.  Lhermitte took the recognized imagery of peasant and rural life and revitalized these themes by using more contemporary media, such as pastels.  His impact was felt on artists of the time -- Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) who wrote that, If every month Le Monde llustré published one of his compositions … it would be a great pleasure for me to be able to follow it.  It is certain that for years I have not seen anything as beautiful as this scene by Lhermitte … I am too preoccupied by Lhermitte this evening to be able to talk of other things.

Lhermitte’s passion for the rural landscape was shared by fellow-artists and modern audiences alike, and his work helped perpetuate the image of rural life and landscape into the 20^th Century.    

In today’s picture, Au Lavoir (The Washhouse), we see Lhermette’s masterful command of the rural idiom.  This is charcoal and pastel on paper (19x24), and the artist creates a touching and homey scene with these basic materials.  Four women are doing the chore of cleaning clothes for their families – and from the poses of women, it is clear that this is a regular ritual.  The women position themselves to reduce the wear-and-tear on themselves, and they look at one-another to exchange the latest gossip. 

For this picture, Lhermette’s worked on beige-toned paper, allowing the paper itself to create the clay-colored background of the earth and the stones of the cistern.  The stones are mostly suggested, rather than slavishly depicted, and the trees and sod of the rolling hillside are a few deft touches of charcoal and pastel. 

Lhermette uses white chalk to create a little pathway from the countryside to the cistern, creating a distinctive social space within the countryside.  The Washhouse of Lhermette’s imagination is a social square of the simplest sort, where housework, gossip and simple country connections take place.

What is amazing about this piece is that with these component parts, Lhermette creates a whole life.  We know these women, and their lives, and the day-to-day  routines on which they run.  It is a remarkably human and subtle piece of work.

More Lhermette tomorrow!

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche (1834)

Gad, I love this picture; behold the wonders of 19^th Century Academic Art in all its glory.  Be warned, though: the current art establishment believes The Execution of Lady Jane Grey to be little better than kitsch, and admiration for Delaroche’s technical virtuosity, theatrical sense and incomparable draftsmanship a sign of antiqued and louche taste. 

Paul Delaroche’s (1797-1857) remarkable drawing and sense of composition, the picture’s almost licked finish, and its sense of history tinged with Romanticism is everything that Modernism has rejected.  Delaroche, in fact, was too brilliant too late.  The very earliest proponents of Modernism began to disdain his achievement – Van Gogh called Delaroche one of the “very bad history painters” and affected to hate his work.  If we make a riposte to Van Gough through the mists of time, we must make sure to address his good ear…

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey was bequeathed to the Tate Gallery in the early 20^th Century, and had been banished to storage by 1928.  In 1974, the picture was resurrected for show at the National Gallery.  And there, something quite remarkable happened.  The public, neither interested in, nor gulled by, mainstream art historians discovered the picture and lined up to see it.  Delaroche’s work has proven so popular that the wooden floor before it must be polished far more often than other spots in the gallery.

And no wonder.  Look at everything that Delaroche does in this picture.  There are only five life-size figures, and they are superbly and dramatically placed within the frame.   Lady Jane Grey was the great-grand-daughter of Henry VII, and, at 17, she was named successor to the throne of England by her cousin, Edward VI.  The plan, at least, was that the crowning of Protestant Jane would shore up Protestantism and keep Catholic influence at bay.  However, her claim on the crown was too weak, and she reigned for a scant nine days, after which she was deposed and executed for treason by the rightful monarch, Edward’s half-sister, Mary Tudor.  Delaroche sets his scene in the Tower of London on the morning of the execution, February 12, 1554. 

The girl (little more than a child) is behaving with magnificent poise, which makes the emotional scene more poignant.  She is on the scaffold and dressed only her undergarments.  Her clothes are piled beside her lady-in-waiting, who has collapsed in grief against the left wall.  Her other handmaiden faces the wall, the horror to come too much to bear. 

Grey, blindfolded, reaches out for the chopping block where, moments later, her head will be cleaved from her body.  Sir John Brydges, the lieutenant of the Tower, gently guides her to her death; his heart-breaking solicitude increases the emotional pitch of the picture.  Even the executioner directs his gaze away, awed by the enormity of the sin he is about to commit.  Look at how he shifts his weight to one leg, his right hand almost releasing the axe.  Delaroche manages to depict different emotional reactions from the players of this tragedy, inspiring a multitude of emotional responses from us, the viewer. 

Preparatory Drawing By Delaroche 

If yesterday’s picture, The Children of Edward, fills us with melancholy, Jane Grey is deeply, wrenchingly, viscerally moving.

Wisely, Delaroche keeps the representation of their surroundings to minimal gray-tones and subtle stone carvings.  The bare stage, if you will, maintains focus on the figures and the deeply human connection is never lost.  The one non-human touch of any significance is the straw surrounding the block; this, if nothing else, underscores the horror to come when we realize that it is there to soak up the young girl’s blood.

If we wonder how or why Delaroche was able to connect so viscerally with this particular historical incident, it would do well to remember that only a scant 40 years earlier, Delaroche’s countrymen cut off the heads of their own aristocracy.

By any cultural yardstick, this is a magnificent and moving painting.   

More Delaroche tomorrow.

Atkinson Grimshaw’s November Moonlight

One of the sadder side effects of the way art history is written is that great masters of light and color are under-appreciated when critical rhetoric moves in a different direction.  Case in point: John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893).

Grimshaw’s story is an interesting one.  Born in Leeds to a working class family (his father was a policeman), Grimshaw first found employment as a railway clerk.  However, he dreamed of becoming an artist, a choice that did not sit well with his father.  Grimshaw did have a London studio for a brief time, but, mostly, he recorded life in Northern England and parts of Scotland.  He bought Knostrop Hall on the outskirts of Leeds and was a prolific painter until his early death from cancer in 1893.  Four of his children would themselves become painters.  (A well-read man, Grimshaw named all of his children after characters in Tennyson poems.)

Though Grimshaw painted many types of pictures (portraits, ‘society’ pictures and even the odd fairy painting), it is his landscape work examining different types of light and weather that best exemplified his talents.  Grimshaw had a genius for weather, and his use of light allowed him to capture both mood and appearance in his landscapes.  He had a unique sense of twilight, of moonlight, of fog and rain – where lesser painters would create mud, his brush left limpid delineations of light and tone.

Grimshaw lived and worked during an interesting time in art history.  His contemporaries included, for example, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.  Grimshaw was not part of an avant-garde, had no particular or dramatic ‘story’ of his life, and he created little controversy.  Art history moved on without him – a great mistake even without the benefit of hindsight.  Now that representational painting and artistic expertise are having their own renaissance, Grimshaw once again is attracting notoriety.  A new retrospective exhibit called Atkinson Grimshaw – Painter of Moonlight is running from 16 April 2011 to 4 September 2011 at Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate.

Let’s close the week with a look at Grimshaw’s November Moonlight.  The cold, grayish-blue of the moonlight illuminates this streetscape.  The rutted, damp road reflects this cold light, and the dead trees stand out in dramatic relief.  The cart rider is alone, which underscores the unforgiving nature of the season.  Everything about this picture says late autumn, chilly air and the onset of winter.  However, Grimshaw brings a vital element of life by employing yellowish light to the parlor windows, creating a sense of warmth, of hearth and of refuge.  The stone wall, however, which is clearly illuminated by the cold moon, separates our rider from the home – he is alone, with only the cold moonlight for company.

This is a type of painting seldom done today, filled with quiet mastery, human connection to landscape and sublime emotion.  We could do much worse than reconsidering John Atkinson Grimshaw.