This Day in Art History (John Constable, Masterful English Landscape Painter, Born)

June 11, 1776— John Constable, who labored for more than a quarter-century before the British art establishment and buyers recognized the uncommon sensitivity and beauty of his landscape paintings, was born at East Bergholt in Suffolk, England.

The contrast with the other great English landscape painter, J.M.W. Turner (only a year older), could hardly be starker:

* Constable, not elected to the Royal Academy till age 52, found considerable favor in his last decade; Turner, the youngest Academician when elected 25 years earlier, polarized the public with his late works.

*Constable was deeply devoted to his sickly wife Maria Bickness and their seven children; Turner was a perfectionist who often shunted aside those closest to him.

*Constable held traditional beliefs in the Anglican Church; Turner was a thoroughgoing iconoclast.

*Constable, according to art critic John Ruskin, was “an industrious and innocent amateur blundering his way to a superficial expression of one or two popular aspects of common nature,” while this influential Victorian not only bought works from Turner but watched him create in his studio.

(To understand how Constable and Turner became bitter rivals—including a pivotal 1831 incident involving placement of their paintings in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition—see this fine 2018 blog post by art historian and an independent lecturer Cindy Polemis.)

For the longest time, though several documentaries were made about him, Constable didn’t possess the kind of cantankerous, eccentric personality that attracted feature film creators, as his contemporary and rival did when Mike Leigh made his 2014 biographical drama Mr. Turner. He still hasn’t had an extended cinema treatment.

But in 2024, “The Painters,” a segment of the regionally distributed movie Once Upon a Time in Suffolk, dealt with Constable’s friendship with John Dunthorne, with whom he competed to impress a young lady in need of a new portrait.

In one sense, the personalities of Constable and Turner were expressed through their subject matter. The turbulent Turner was fascinated by stormy weather, as in his 1824 watercolor Brighthelmston, Sussex. Constable looked to the tranquil, lush English countryside, reflecting his belief, as noted in Robert Cumming’s Art: A Visual History, that “nature, with its freshness, sunlight, trees, shadows, streams, and so forth, was full of moral and spiritual goodness.”

For a nation plunging in earnest into the Industrial Revolution, such Constable paintings as The Hay Wain and Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree (1821), as well as The Leaping Horse (1825) depicted an exquisite but fragile natural landscape in danger of being lost.

This Day in Art History (Death of Benvenuto Cellini, Celebrated, Scandalous Renaissance Man)

Feb. 13, 1571— Benvenuto Cellini, an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, draftsman, soldier, and musician who chronicled his multiple creative interests and tumultuous escapades in a frank and celebrated autobiography, died at age 70 of pleurisy in his native Florence.

“Renaissance man” has come to be shorthand for a prodigiously talented individual who engages in multiple pursuits. But, aside from Michelangelo, who wrote commendable poetry, and Giorgio Vasari, a pioneering biographer, no other great craftsman of the period besides Cellini left a literary record that could be mentioned in the same breath as his visual one.

Unlike Michelangelo (who wrote verses on an unnamed love) and Vasari (who focused on other artists), Cellini was a born raconteur, holding forth in characteristic hot-tempered, boastful, witty, and loyal fashion on himself and, to a lesser extent, his views on the theory of art. He vented about his adventures voluminously, over nearly a decade, in his La Vita di Benvenuto di maestro Giovanni Cellini (“The Life of Benvenuto Cellini”)—and still hadn’t completed the project at his death, as he interspersed this with more than one hundred poems, two treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture, and several discourses on art.

Ironically, while defending his visual primacy among his peers (at a time when his contentious personality had sidelined him from new commissions), Cellini furnished a strong counterargument: that his real talent lay with the written word, rather than with his products as a goldsmith and sculptor.

In one chapter of his autobiography, Cellini catalogues his meticulous preparation for his bronze “Perseus” sculpture, followed by a description of how he save his creation from destruction by fire and was congratulated by his assistants for helping them to have “learned and seen things done which other masters judged impossible.”  

But the artist can’t leave it at that: he must also write how the two men he suspected of trying to sabotage his latest masterwork said “was no man, but of a certainty some powerful devil, since I had accomplished what no craft of the art could do; indeed they did not believe a mere ordinary fiend could work such miracles as I in other ways had shown.”

At this late stage of the Renaissance, readers are beholding a new kind of artistic consciousness: a man unapologetically basking in his personal glory. Cellini has presented not just an advertisement for himself in his own time, but for his undying fame in the eyes of posterity.

His autobiography offers up a new persona: a creator passionately committed to his art, cynical in his fashion (“When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs,” he recalled the wife of a rich Roman banker telling him), and defiant of conventional morality. He even surpassed Caravaggio, whose aggressiveness (hitting waiters, slandering rivals) climaxed in flight from Rome for killing a man in a street fight. Cellini openly admitted to three killings: of his brother’s murderer, a rival goldsmith, and an innkeeper. Only the protection of Popes Clement VII and Paul III saved him from punishment.

(There were some limits to Cellini’s alarming candor: contemporary mores meant that he could cop to vainglory and murder, but not to bisexuality, even though several indictments and even convictions for sodomy were path of his rap sheet in both Italy and France.)

Other Renaissance artists have inspired novels and/or films (Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, Caravaggio in Derek Jarman’s 1986 movie named for the painter). But how many such figures have become the subject of operas?

Yet Cellini has—not once, but twice, in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Ascanio and Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. The dramatic, even over-the-top, elements of the artist’s personality lend themselves to the genre. Nevertheless, it would have disappointed the ego-driven Florentine that neither opera has entered the canon of musical theater (though the overture of Berlioz’s work is frequently performed in concert halls by orchestras, as seen in this YouTube clip).

For a fascinating overview of Cellini’s life, see Harold Sack’s November 2019 post from the blog SciHi (i.e., “Science, Technology and Art in History”).

(The self-portrait of Cellini in the image accompanying my post is a sketch now held in the Royal Library in Turin, believed to have been drawn sometime between 1540 and 1543.)

This Day in Art History (N. C. Wyeth, Painting Patriarch, Dies in Tragic Train Accident)

Oct. 19, 1945—Forty-three years to the day that the creative, adult part of his life began when he stepped off a train in the Brandywine River Valley, painter and illustrator N. C. Wyeth died when a train collided with his car a few miles from his home and studio in Chadds Ford, PA.

A powerful, sometimes overwhelming influence in his family, the 63-year-old Newell Convers Wyeth left his survivors—a wife and five grown children—devastated by the loss of him and the grandson/namesake in the car with him. 

For years, they—and local residents who had grown used to his longtime presence—wondered to what extent the accident represented a culmination of his last few years of mounting melancholy and self-doubt over an inability to be taken seriously as a producer of fine paintings rather than of popular commercial art.

Above all, several questions lingered afterward about the passing of this patriarch with three children and a grandson who followed him into the painting trade:

*Why did he take his grandson out of the car, point to two men husking corn in the morning light, and tell him, within earshot of onlookers: “Newell, you won’t see this again—remember this”?

*Had he been conducting an affair with daughter-in-law Caroline? If so, was a child conceived from that relationship, as local rumor had it?

*When Wyeth came to the railroad tracks, had he been blinded by the morning light, suffered a heart attack—or intentionally committed suicide?

Growing up in the 1960s. I never imagined that the artist behind the Scribner illustrated classics I was devouring (Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Jules Verne) could have been involved in an incident easily a match for the mystery and drama I was reading. 

Nor could I imagine in the mid-1980s, when I read the breathless accounts of the secret cache of nude “Helga” paintings by son Andrew, that the whiff of scandal had clung not only to him but to his father and even grandmother?

The mystery surrounding Wyeth’s death is ironic, considering that so many other aspects of his life were so extensively documented. Not only is his Chadds Ford studio intact, but he left a trove of correspondence culled by Andrew’s wife Betsy and published as The Wyeths:The Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901-1945—a thumping volume of more than 800 pages.

Figuring out what led to the accident is difficult, as the following needs to be weighed:

*Wyeth, when he pointed out the cornhuskers to his grandson, may have been urging him to absorb the physical elements of every experience—something he constantly urged his sons to do—or he may have been voicing his last desperate thoughts;

*Wyeth may well have been having an affair with Caroline, but a pregnancy was less likely, concluded David Michaelis in his 1998 biography of the painter—and, in any case, a child from that liaison would not necessarily have led Wyeth to take his own life;

*Wyeth may well have had a heart attack, since, with more than 300 pounds on his 6-ft., 1-in. frame, he had become badly overweight; but, on the other hand, the additional pounds may also have contributed to a helplessness that preceded suicide.

Moreover, suicide would not have been out of character for a man traumatized by a mother who was overprotective and chronically depressed. When not boosting his artistic inclinations, Hattie Wyeth manipulated him into feelings of guilt, and N.C. adopted the same behavior with his own children—instilling his artistic precepts on the one hand while building more space for his children on his property even after they married so he could control their destinies into adulthood.

So far, what I have written explains why Wyeth’s life was tragic. But we remember him because, despite his fears about its ultimate merit, his work was indeed distinguished.

For starters, the lucrative commissions that Wyeth disparaged (“You’ll grow out of that,” he responded when Betsy told him how much he admired them)—his illustrations for Scribners—enriched the texts on which he worked, adding elements not always readily apparent from the written word. For instance, Robert Louis Stevenson described Jim Hawkins’ departure from home tersely in Treasure Island. But Wyeth’s illustration of the scene depicts Mrs. Hawkins looking away in tears, while Jim walking into the foreground with a blank expression that scarcely conceals his anxiety for the future.

This and other works benefit from a realism so powerful that, for example, Wyeth kept costumes, cutlasses, and flintlocks in his studio for reference and inspiration. The works show up to even better advantage on the walls of the Brandywine River Museum of Art, as the book illustrations are at heart smaller reproductions of larger paintings.

Like his teacher, Norman Pyle, and Norman Rockwell, Wyeth was a master of narrative art whose work, unlike that of so many contemporaries, endures more than a century after their original creation. His versatility extends beyond the printed page, as he also created murals on display in the Federal Reserve Bank, Boston, Hotel Roosevelt and Franklin Savings Bank, both in New York City, as well as magazine advertisements and calendars.

It may take a while, but in time Wyeth may also be remembered for his late-career paintings as well, and not just indirectly, as the father of Andrew and grandfather of Jamie Wyeth.

This Day in Art History (Daniel Chester French, Sculptor of Lincoln and Minute Man Memorials, Born)

Apr. 20, 1850—Daniel Chester French, who created sculptures that symbolized American resolve and righteousness for a reunited, more self-confident nation—most famously, statues of “The Minute Man”: in Concord, Mass., and Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C.—was born in Exeter, N.H.

Previously, I have posted on two of his works, The Lincoln Memorial and the George Westinghouse Memorial in Pittsburgh. But these are only two commissions for bronze and marble statues and monuments that he executed in his lifetime. French’s career as a whole is worth celebrating.

A combined studio-museum commemorating French’s grand achievement is located in Stockbridge, Mass., the same town where Norman Rockwell created illustrations that likewise imprinted themselves on the American imagination. 

French, earning his money primarily through public commissions, molded larger-than-life figures who flourished in extraordinary circumstances. Rockwell, working in the heyday of mass commercial art, caught the man on the street in his everyday world—at work, at home, at play. 

The emotions they evoked—heroism, patriotism, sentimentality—often appear to be relics of a bygone era. Yet the sight of these works summon forth more than a glimmer of recognition; they also induce stabs of wistful nostalgia and dreams of a more innocent, more reverend time. “I fear my inclination,” French confessed to a friend in 1919, “is to ignore too much the gloom and emphasize the beauty and joy of life—leaving out the snake which alas! was devised with Paradise.”

Together, the lives of French and Rockwell spanned a century and a quarter. They shared several common traits, besides their unabashed attachment to America and to Stockbridge;

*Both were born in New York City but came to Stockbridge in middle age when they were already well established in their careers. 

*Both became famous while still only in their 20s and remained famous and productive into their 70s. 

*Both achieved their enormous success through a fierce work ethic and a Yankee sense of thrift.

Today, only three-quarters of a mile from each other, two museums honoring these artists have become major tourist attractions in Stockbridge. Chesterwood, the summer home, studio and garden of French, is a historic home museum of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Norman Rockwell Museum opened in 1993, the successor to a smaller museum on the town’s Main Street that even years ago could no longer accommodate the flood of tourists making their way here. 

I have visited Chesterwood twice, most recently in 2017. Walking through it while looking about at the nearby Berkshire Mountains, I felt as enthralled as French did a century ago. I also felt it a great opportunity to reflect on the values that, more than clay, provided the binding agent for his greatest work.

French: Sculptor of a Nation Ascendant

As creative as he was, French was also a practical businessman, equally adept at securing clients, balancing the books, and bringing the work to fruition. 

In his youth, two neighbors in Concord, Massachusetts, Abigail May Alcott (sister of novelist Louisa May, and an artist in her own right) and Ralph Waldo Emerson, lent him material support and promoted his work. Later, Berkshire neighbors and artist friends continued to provide him with an excellent network of clients when he moved to Stockbridge in 1897. 

You begin to appreciate how important these visitors were when you see the reception room just off the studio in Chesterwood. The fact that he would make time for visitors, whether they were clients or just fellow artists who could provide feedback, is reinforced by their proximity to his work.

Nevertheless, French was careful to separate the creative and the social sides of his work. He always kept careful track of his business, down to the most copious notes on expenditures (a practice that proved a godsend to the estate’s staff in recent years as they sought to catalogue their holdings). 

Equally important was French’s self-discipline—an iron commitment to, and passion for, his work. “I’d like to live to be two thousand years old and sculpt all the time!” he once exulted to his son-in-law, William Penn Cresson. (As it happened, French worked all the way to the end of his life—Andromeda, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1931, is on display in the studio.)

Chesterwood's studio, residence, barn gallery, and collections gallery contain almost 500 statues, 23 oil paintings, and 13 portrait pastels by French—including an early version, in the garden, of his Standing Lincoln, on display in the Nebraska State House. (A detail of this is in the photo I took accompanying this post.)

These creations responded to—and, in turn, helped shape—a grandiose style of public urban art. It was no accident that even in its own day, the late 19th and early 20th century became known as the American Renaissance in the art world. The Industrial Revolution swelled the population of many American cities, feeding their desire to become the new Athens, Rome, or Florence. Public squares, municipal parks, and sweeping boulevards proliferated. 

The event that ensured public statuary for these civic improvements was the Civil War. Veterans’ groups and civic commissions felt the need to pay tribute to departed heroes of the conflict, to ensure that they had not died in vain. By this time, too, a generation of American-born sculptors had gained valuable training in Italy and Paris, increasing their versatility with bronze as well as marble. 

Thus, a confluence of available money, a deeply appreciative public, and more skilled sculptors produced a golden age of American public monuments, generally agreed as stretching from Saint-Gaudens’ David Farragut Memorial in New York in 1881 to French’s Abraham Lincoln in 1922.

As passionately dedicated as he was to his work, French still found time for other pursuits at Chesterwood. After living in the farmhouse for four years, French and his wife had a villa built by his friend Henry Bacon, an architect who worked with French on a number of projects throughout his career, including the Lincoln Memorial. 

When not sculpting from nine to five, French enjoyed painting, planting fields, tending gardens, and holding parties and relaxing with his wife and daughter Margaret.

Margaret, herself an artist, remained committed to her father’s memory throughout her life. Before she died at age 84 in 1973, she bequeathed the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, along with its art collection and an archive of more than 100,000 items.

This Day in Art History (Benjamin Franklin Waggishly Laments Bald Eagle as Symbol)

Jan. 26, 1784—Watching the rise of an American fraternal military organization with a mixture of trepidation and mockery from his diplomatic posting in France, Benjamin Franklin put his thoughts to paper about the bird symbol that the group chose for itself, inadvertently giving birth to an amusing story that has become an urban myth.

If you’re like me, you tried to catch the musical 1776 whenever it came on TV when you were growing up. If you weren’t lucky enough to see the show about the creation of the Declaration of Independence onstage, then, like me, you bought the soundtrack album and played it constantly. You might, in that case, recall one especially spirited scene created by playwright Peter Stone and lyricist-composer Sherman Edwards. 

In “The Egg,” Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as they contemplate “playing midwives to an egg” (i.e., “the birth of a new nation,’ Franklin translates), hash out their differences over the bird to be chosen as the symbol of America. Jefferson, the junior and quietest member of the trio, is quickly drowned out when he suggests the dove. In a microcosm of the main action of the musical, the loudly insistent Adams carries the day for the eagle, “a majestic bird,” despite its rather fierce qualities.

But in the 50 years since the musical premiered on Broadway, audiences have chortled over Franklin’s defense of the turkey. Only one problem: Perhaps more than any other element in the show (even more than its depiction of the solemn Richard Henry Lee as a grinning Southern idiot), it’s a distortion of actual events and motives. 

One element in this comes from the thinnest of historical justifications: On the same day that the resolution for American independence passed in the Continental Congress, Franklin, Adams and Jefferson were commissioned by the other delegates to design a seal for the new nation, and, as they did onstage, each had his own ideas for it. But none involved a bird of any kind. 

The proposal they submitted in August 1776 went nowhere, as did others submitted by a second and third committee over the next six years. (Hmmm…nothing happening among our nation’s lawmakers. Stop me if this sounds familiar!) 

In 1782, Charles Thomson, the longtime secretary of the Congress, submitted a proposal that combined elements of the three committees’ work. But the bald eagle we know was not the handiwork of Franklin, Adams and Jefferson.

A 1962 New Yorker cover illustration by Anatole Kovarsky substituted a turkey for the bald eagle in the Great Seal. That planted one seed for the stage actions that took place by the end of the decade.

The basic rationale (though not the exact verbiage) used by Franklin in the play derives from his letter to daughter Sarah Bache, written 235 years ago today. When you read the first half of that explanation, it will certainly remind you of the scientist-politician’s denunciation of the eagle in the musical:

“Others object to the Bald Eagle, as looking too much like a Dindon, or Turkey. For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. With all this injustice, he is never in good case, but like those among men who live by sharping and robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward: the little king bird not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the king birds from our country…”

Okay, stop right there! What’s this “Cincinnati” stuff?

With the American Revolution winding down, Henry Knox, Washington’s Chief of Artillery, helped found The Society of the Cincinnati, a fraternal organization composed of veterans of the Continental Army. While one of the group’s aims—assisting former soldiers who had fallen on hard times—was charitable, another provision—heredity membership, to be passed down to descendants of veterans—struck observers such as Adams and Jefferson to be a portent for nobility and, therefore, an undermining of the republic in its crib.

But irony was Franklin’s dominant spirit, so rather than take on the group itself, he decided to mock its seal. With tongue in cheek, he went after all the reasons why the bird in the seal, the bald eagle, was so wrong for a group of veterans: notably, that it was cowardly. Why couldn’t the Cincinnati have tried a different bird?

“[I]n truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours, the first of the species seen in Europe being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the ninth. He is besides, (though a little vain and silly tis true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.”

This letter to his daughter was never sent: a Frenchman to whom Franklin showed it persuaded the 78-year-old diplomat to avoid involvement in another controversy. In fact, its contents would not be revealed until 1817, another 27 years after his death. In time, the dust-up over the Society of the Cincinnati faded, too. And there matters stood, for nearly another century and a half, until creative types, hoping to have some fun with our nation’s history, took Dr. Franklin literally.

For more details on this whole thing, I suggest that you read this post by Emily Sneff from the Declaration Resources Project blog, run by Harvard University.

This Day in Art History (Birth of Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic Rebel)

Apr. 26, 1798— Eugène Delacroix, a French Romantic painter who moved his country in a different artistic direction through works abounding in exotic, extravagant color, was born Charenton (Saint-Maurice), Val de Marne departement, in the Ile de France region near Paris. 

Instability marked the painter’s youth and early manhood. In short order, France experienced Napoleon Bonaparte, at his zenith, in defeat and exile; the overthrow of the revived Bourbon monarchy; and the acquisitive desires of a bourgeoisie unleashed after the French Revolution and a quarter-century of war with the rest of Europe. 

The fortunes of his family mirrored the national unrest. It was widely believed that his father, Charles Delacroix, was infertile, and that his real male parent was Talleyrand, successor to Charles as minister of foreign affairs. With his debt-ridden father dying when Eugene was seven, his mother following nine years later, and Eugene himself suffering from various medical conditions that would plague him for years, it was no wonder that the boy grew up solitary and intense.

Make that solitary, intense and independent. Though excelling in his studies of the classics and drawing at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, he left to pursue painting. A short stint with the influential painter Pierre-Narcisse Guerin likewise left little impression.

Widespread notice—bur hardly the approval of the French artistic establishment—came to him in his twenties with two paintings that caused scandals: The Massacre at Chios (1824), which alluded to the repressive Bourbon restoration, and The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), which depicted a decadent Assyrian king ordering the murder of his servants, concubines and animals. 

Anti-monarchical sentiment also informed what might be Delacroix’s most famous painting, Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which the Goddess of Liberty, triumphantly holding aloft France’s national flag, leads a vanguard of French citizens moving forward, even as soldiers lying dead in the foreground demonstrate the tumult and cost of freedom. 

Before long, an alternative source of non-French, non-classical subject matter began to appeal to Delacroix. Unlike prior French artists, who traveled to Italy for their models, he went in another direction, toward Morocco, where he found an atmosphere that spurred his interest in sensual environments. (He met with less success in convincing women of this region to pose for him, because of traditional Moslem strictures mandating that women be covered.)

A contemporary of Honore de Balzac, the painter gave the novelist through his work an example of how to use color in the short novel La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl With the Golden Eyes) that formed the final portion of The History of the Thirteen. Yet, while Balzac acknowledged the debt by dedicating the novella to him, Delacroix did not reciprocate the affection, at times scathingly criticizing him.

“I dislike rational painting,” Delacroix once observed—and, indeed, intense emotion burst beyond the frames of his paintings. It wasn’t only in his sensational, even melodramatic, subject matter (e.g., massacres), but also in the bold brush strokes that anticipated Van Gogh and Gaugain.

Because much of  Delacroix’s work—particularly in the latter part of his career—consisted of public art, a visit to France is still the best way to view much of his work. But New Yorkers will soon get to experience firsthand a large portion of it, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts an exhibit of 180 of his works that had been first on display at the Musee du Louvre. The exhibit will run at the Met from September 17, 2018 to January 6, 2019. 

There, we should understand anew what Delacroix meant by “The great artist roams his own domain, and there he offers you a feast to his own taste.”

(The image accompanying this post is Delacroix's self-portrait, painted in 1837.)