Boston Museum of Fine Arts...

I like the way this woman, by Rembrandt, is so very happy with herself!
Renoir and I love orange!
The squiggly little one is an Egyptian seal, 4000 years old! After being immersed in ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome, the European paintings seemed relatively recent! This Turner was enigmatic, in that he combined beauty and horror, the reverent oranges of sunset with stray limbs and chains of slaves who had been thrown into the sea. It seems the beautiful could not redeem the ugly in this painting. Yet it exposed murder very effectively, in a genre reaching people who otherwise would ignore slavery.
About his woman, Van Gogh said: "I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our colouring." YUM!

The cherubs deep in concentration on their books reminded me of my cherubs (one of whom just snuck into the kitchen and is hiding...)

Comments

baker st jones said…
Simon Schama did one of his TV shows on that Turner painting.
In fact, thanks to google, if you type 'schama turner', you get this quote:

"In 1840 in London, an international convention of the Great and Good was planned to express righteous indignation against slavery in the United States. Turner, initiated into the cause many years before by his patron, Walter Fawkes, wanted to have his say in paint. So how does he do it? By being a thorn in the side of self congratulation.

He reaches back 60 years to resurrect one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the British Empire when 132 Africans - men, women and children, their hands and feet fettered - were thrown overboard into the shark infested waters of the Caribbean. And Turner has drowned you in this moment, pulled you into this terrifying chasm in the ocean, drenched you in this bloody light - exactly the hue you sense in your blood filled optic nerves when you close your eyes in blinding sunlight.

Though almost all of his critics believed that the painting represented an all time low in Turner's reckless disregard for the rules of art, it was in fact his greatest triumph in the sculptural carving of space."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/powerofart/turner.shtml

As I remember it, the slaves were murdered for the sake of some compensation claim.

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