Sargent's Repainting

I remember reading that John Singer Sargent would often require many sittings to get his portraits right, and that he was rarely satisfied with his first efforts.

But I always wondered: Did he scrape off each false start and then begin all over again? Or did he just work over the previous start after it had dried? How did he know when a painting was going wrong?

Thanks to two of his former pupils, Miss Heyneman and Mr. Henry Haley, we have an idea of his methods:


"He drew a full, large brush down the whole contour of a cheek (over one of her half-finished studies), obliterating apparently all the modeling underneath, but it was always further to simplify that he took these really dreadful risks, smiling at my ill concealed perturbation and quite sympathizing with it.

"The second painting taught me that the whole values of a portrait depends upon its first painting, and that no tinkering can ever rectify an initial failure. Provided every stage is correct, a painter of Mr. Sargent's caliber could paint for a week on one head and never retrace his steps -- but he never attempted to correct one. He held that it was as impossible for a painter to try to repaint a head where the understructure was wrong, as for a sculptor to remodel the features of a head that has not been understood in the mass. That is why Mr. Sargent often repainted the head a dozen times, he told me that he had done no less than sixteen of Mrs. Hammersley.

“When he was dissatisfied he never hesitated to destroy what he had done. He spent three weeks, for instance, painting Lady D' Abernon in a white dress. One morning, after a few minutes of what was to be the final setting, he suddenly set to work to scrape out what he had painted. The present portrait in a black dress (above), was done in three sittings.

“He did the same with the portrait of Mrs. Wedgwood, and many others. Miss Eliza Wedgwood relates that in 1896 he consented, at the insistence of Alfred Parsons, to paint her mother. She sat for him twelve times, but after the twelfth sitting he said she would both be the better for a rest.

“He then wrote to Miss Wedgwood that he was humiliated by his failure to catch the variable and fleeting charm of her mother's personality -- that looked like the end of the portrait. Some weeks later he saw Mrs. Wedgwood at Broadway, and struck with a new aspect he said:

‘If you will come up next week we will finish that portrait.’

“She came to Tite Street, a new canvas was produced, and in six sittings he completed the picture which was shown at the Memorial Exhibition.

“I have also seen the assertion that he painted a head always in one sitting. He painted a head always in one process, but that could be carried over several sittings. He never attempted to repaint one eye or to raise or lower it, for he held that the construction of a head prepared the place for the eye, and if it was wrongly placed, the understructure was wrong, and he ruthlessly scraped and repainted the head from the beginning. That is one reason why his brushwork looks so fluent and easy; he took more trouble to keep the unworried look of a fresh sketch than many a painter puts upon his whole canvas.

“The purpose of all this reworking was to: develop (in Sargent's words) ‘an appetite to attack the problem afresh at every sitting, each attempt resulting in a more complete visualization in the mind. The process is repeated until the canvas is completed.’”

Thanks, Walt Morton!

Waterhouse Expedition: Impressions

We spent the whole day at the Montreal Museum of Art, which has a large retrospective of J.W. Waterhouse's historical and mythological paintings. Instead of trying to do a big biography or thorough analysis or anything, here are a few notes and random impressions for people who are thinking of going. This is the last stop of the show, and it won't go to the U.S. It closes February 7.


Visitor Notes:
The show is dramatically set against black walls throughout, with a special room for drawings, sketchbooks and preliminary studies. It got pretty crowded on a Saturday, but everyone was really polite, and you could spend as long as you wanted. The audio tour has music from Faure, Debussy, and Wagner rather than a bunch of talk. Plan on taking at least a full day. We ran into an art friend who made the pilgrimage and was allowing three full days for seeing everything a few times. We drove up and stayed at the Holiday Inn midtown, which is in walking distance and not too expensive.

Impressions of the Show
--Many of the paintings are a revelation to see in the original. They're not only big (the figure of Mariamne above is life size), but they have a tremendous emotional presence, and they can be absorbed on so many levels: story, paint technique, color.
--Even though Waterhouse was methodical in his planning, the paintings show a lot of improvisation. There are passages painted over or heavily worked, scraped out--more like a manuscript by Beethoven than by Mozart.
--In his best works, such as Lady of Shalott, there's a tremendous feeling of dream and reality perfectly interwoven, with every element of the picture adding to the mood and the story. Not a single thing could be added or taken away.
--There's a lot of color interest that doesn't reproduce well, especially warm and cool passages in the darks, and pale tints and gradations in the lights. In particular I had read contemporary accounts of Ulysses and the Sirens that praised it for its color, but I've never found it very impressive in reproduction. It truly deserves its praise, as it has deep, rich blue-greens played off against warm passages.
--Because of the lack of letters, journals, or other biographical source material, there's a lot of speculation about his personal life. One of the captions suggested the theory that he may have burned all his papers because he was dabbling in spiritualism. Who knows?
--Pretty much all the heavy hitters are there, with the exception of Hylas and the Nymphs, Ophelia, Gather Ye Rosebuds, and Pandora.

For more about Waterhouse, check out the link-rich overview on Lines and Colors and William Stout's impressions of the show.

There's a full-color exhibition catalog called "J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite."
-------
Addendum:
Videos of Peter Trippi talking about several paintings by Waterhouse (Thanks SVSART)

The Eyes Have It

Check out this abstract painting. It's full of energy and bravura. Brushstrokes are dancing with wild abandon.

By contrast, look at this detail of a portrait. It's very closely observed and controlled, right down to the structures of bone and flesh around the eyes and even the tiny highlights in the eyes.

Perhaps you've guessed it already: they're passages from the same painting. It's a portrait by Valentin Serov of his friend and mentor Ilya Repin. The first image in this post is the outer edges of the piece spliced together and turned sideways.

From the point of view of visual perception, Serov conveys the hierarchy of attention that we apply when we gaze at another person's face. We lock onto the eyes, the window to the soul, and nothing else matters as much--at least we don't tend to spend as much time looking at other parts of the portrait.

Eye tracking heatmaps of the face demonstrate this uneven distribution of our gaze. New studies show that the heatmap may vary slightly depending on whether we're looking at an angry or happy face.

From another point of view, Serov was absorbing new ideas in painting, and combining them with his realist training. The painting dates from 1892 when modern currents were sweeping through all of Europe.

Am I suggesting that all portraits should be painted in this way? Not at all! Painters like Holbein and Vermeer show the beauty and the power of an evenly distributed sense of finish. And no one should copy this manner as a technical trick. But it's worth considering this way of thinking, depending on whether the spirit moves you.

And it's important for anyone painting portraits to keep in mind that no matter what you do with the rest of the painting, the eyes will get the attention, and they had better be right!
--------
Related GJ post: "Stroke Module," with another portrait by Serov.
Heatmap of face from Institute Pompeu Fabra
Wikipedia on Serov.

Wayback Machine

Blog reader Gene Snyder has shared a great link for old art texts online. He says:

I'm a big geek when it comes to art books. I can't get enough of them, especially old ones that were written while the artists or techniques that they are talking about were alive and in full swing. There's a site at www.archive.org that has a HUGE collection of books that go way back. Here's a small list of some books that I've collected from the site so far:

- "Treatise on Painting - Leonardo da Vinci", Translated by John Riguad, 1877.
- "The Painter in Oil", by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst, 1898. (Neat thing about this book is Parkhurst was student of William Bouguereau).
- "Our American Artists", by S.G.W. Benjamin, 1879. (Has some great biographies of artists).
- "Asher B. Durand - A Memorial Address", by Daniel Huntington, 1887.
- "Velasquez", by R.A.M. Stevenson, 1906. (Goes into pretty good detail about Velasquez's technique).
Thanks, Gene!

To which I'd add:
"Aims and Ideals of Art" by George Clausen.
"The life of an artist, an autobiography" - Breton, Jules, 1827-1906
"The Science of Painting" - Jehan-Georges Vibert
"The Classic Point of View: Six Lectures on Painting." Kenyon Cox
"Cyclopedia of painters and paintings (Volume 1)" - Champlin, John Denison, 1834-1915
"Pictorial composition and the critical judgment of pictures" - Poore, Henry Rankin, 1859-1940

There's a complete annotated bibliography in the back of Imaginative Realism.
Visit Gene's website and blog.

Enchantment Symposium Tomorrow

Tomorrow the Joseloff Gallery of the University of Hartford in Connecticut will open the exhibition "Enchantment Then and Now: Drawing Connections."

The exhibition includes Briton Riviere (above), J.L. Gerome, William Bouguereau, Howard Pyle, NC Wyeth, Graydon Parrish, Walton Ford, and a selection of other contemporary painters whose work addresses the theme of enchantment, narrative, and romanticism.


Above: Howard Pyle, "Why Seek Ye the Living in the Place of the Dead?," 1905.

There will also be a panel discussion tomorrow, Friday, Nov. 6th, 1:30-3:00 p.m moderated by former Dahesh Museum director and current editor of Fine Art Connoisseur Peter Trippi. The panel includes Alison Moritsugu, Graydon Parrish, Patricia Watwood, the Director of the Dahesh Museum of Art, David Farmer, and me. The opening reception will be Friday from 5-7.
-------
Review of the exhibtion in the Hartford Courant.

Preview all the art in the exhibition at the Joseloff Gallery's Flickr Page.
Information about the symposium and the opening reception on Friday.

Soviet War Art

Here’s a interesting gallery of Soviet war art, showing how great is the cost of war, and how universal the eye of the artist.

Link to Soviet War Paintings.
Thanks, k-tron

Women, Water, and Death

In his essay for the new book on John William Waterhouse, art historian Peter Trippi observes that during the Victorian period there were a lot of paintings that associated women, water, and death. (Below: John Everett Millais “Ophelia”)

Some of these images showed women as tragic figures or martyrs; others took the form of the seductive femme fatale, who emerged from the water to lure men to their deaths. (Below: Herbert Draper “Ulysses and the Sirens”)…


…or sorceresses who poison rivals. (Waterhouse “Circe Invidiosa”)

This topic is explored in some detail by Barbara Gates, Professor of English at the University of Delaware. (Below: Delaroche “Young Christian Martyr.”



In this web article, Dr. Gates explores the subject of female drownings in the larger context of Victorian women and suicide. "Women were fictionalized and mythologized much as were monsters in Victorian England," she writes. "They too were made into "others" -- weaker vessels or demons, angels in the house or fallen angels."

Midday Near Moscow

Russian landscape painter Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898) painted Midday in the Outskirts of Moscow after doing countless plein-air studies in the countryside.

According to Henk Van Os, “In it laborers are seen returning home through the fields of rye at the close of day. In the distance we see houses, a country church and a winding river….The painting is an awesome experience of the liberating effect of space.”

The painting dates from 1869, soon after the group of painters called the Peredvizhniki (Itinerants or Wanderers) declared independence from the constrictions of the academies, and brought their work to the common people by means of traveling exhibitions.

Few in Russia had painted landscape on such a grand scale before—and rarely with such deep feeling. The work had a galvanizing effect on later generations of Russian landscape painters, who realized all at once the potential for landscape to be the vehicle for expressing the deepest stirrings of the human soul.
-----
160 images by Ivan Shishkin at The Athenaeum.org, link.
Essay by Henk Van Os appeared in in the exhibition catalog Russian Landscape, (2003), edited by David Jackson, link.
Wikipedia on Ivan Shishkin, link.
Illustrated essay, "The Immortal Itinerants," link.

Daguerre, Painter

Louis Daguerre is best known as one of the pioneers of photography, but he was first a painter.

In 1803 he became a pupil of Degotti, a scene painter for the Paris Opera, and soon began he working on panorama paintings. He created enormous realistic depictions of cities and historical scenes.

To add to the illusion of reality, Daguerre’s paintings were arranged in rotundas lit from above. In 1822 he invented the diorama, a form of scenic entertainment that combined the panorama with a “diaphanorama,” which used translucent oiled paper lit from the side in subtly changing vistas.

To audiences of his day, these spectacles must have held the same “gee-whiz” appeal of HDTV or 3D movies in our time.

Waterhouse in London

On June 23, The Royal Academy of Arts in London will present the largest retrospective ever assembled on the art of John William Waterhouse (1849-1917).

This exhibition includes 92 paintings and drawings, along with sketchbooks. The London exhibition will continue through September 13, after which it will continue at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada from October 1, 2009 – 7 February 2010.
------
Royal Academy website, link.

Clotheslines

Clotheslines are beautiful things.


Charles Curran painted these sheets drying on the line, using the cloth as a back projection screen for the cast shadows of the nearby foliage.

Clothes dried on the line smell fresher. Hanging laundry floods the soul with joyful light. And it uses free energy.


So why don’t we see more clotheslines in America? The energy and appliance companies ran a relentless series of ads in the 1950s and 1960s brainwashing people into thinking clotheslines are ugly or old fashioned. Many communities have laws against clotheslines. You could get fined for hanging out your laundry.

The Düsseldorf School

The Düsseldorf School of painting had a big influence on 19th century landscape painting from the 1830s through the 1860s.

The school was notable for its dramatically lit historical subjects, often featuring scenes like shipwrecks, noble peasants, or epic mountainscapes.

The artists associated with the school include Wilhelm von Schadow, Karl Friedrich Lessing, the brothers Andreas and Oswald Achenbach, and Hans Fredrik Gude. Johann Wilhelm Schirmer is shown above. Some of them had experience painting theatrical backdrops, and they took some of those sensibilities into their easel paintings. Some of those pictorial features include:

Realistic and detailed treatment of form.
Strongest accents and focal point in middle ground.
Dark framing masses at the sides of the compositions.
Stormy skies and dramatic lighting.
Road or trail leading into the picture.
Filmy or atmospheric distances.
Literary references in genre scenes.

Americans who studied there included George Caleb Bingham, Eastman Johnson, Worthington Whittredge, William Stanley Haseltine, James McDougal Hart, and William Morris Hunt, and Emanuel Leutze, who painted "Washington Crossing the Delaware" in Germany using American Dusseldorf students as models.

Although he wasn’t formally enrolled at the academy, Albert Bierstadt worked and studied among the community of artists, and became probably the best exponent of the style. The Russian painter Ivan Shishkin also spent time there soaking up the landscape vocabulary.

Above: Oswald Achenbach, "The Bay of Naples."

The goal of the Dusseldorf artists was to infuse the landscape with “stimmung” (mood). Their romantic sensibilities were tied to “Volkskarakter” or national character. According to Henk Van Os,

“The idea is that the soul of a people is expressed through its countryside, its landscape; painters make this soul visible. This was to become the cornerstone of realistic landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century.”

------
Quote from Russian Landscape, National Gallery exhibition, link.

Menzel: Beyond Appearances

He was small in stature, only four feet, six inches tall. When he was young, his peers called him the “Little Mushroom.” When he got mad and fought back they called him the “Poisonous Mushroom.”

Although he was intelligent and witty, he spoke gruffly, not wanting to be pitied. He kept to himself and never married. (Portrait of Menzel by Boldini).

Adolph von Menzel (1815-1905) did have one constant companion: his sketchbook. An acquaintance recalled:

“In his overcoat he had eight pockets, which were partially filled with sketchbooks, and he could not comprehend that there are artists who make the smallest outings without having a sketchbook in their pocket. On the lower left side of his coat, an especially large pocket was installed, just large enough to hold a leather case, which held a pad, a couple of shading stumps and a gum eraser.”

He was self-taught. He didn’t care for the idealization of the academies. He wanted to draw things as they were. He worked in all media, but his drawings, generally made with soft graphite are the most surprising and disarming.

He did innumerable studies of poor people. He was one of the first artists to portray the inside of a factory.

He also painted royalty. In this scene of a fancy ball, he couldn’t resist including a group of gentlemen gobbling food (lower left), an undignified, but very human act.

His drawings show a universal empathy. Perhaps because of his own unusual appearance, he was fascinated with chronicling the physiognomies of his fellow humans with a fusion of frankness and compassion.

In Menzel’s work, grace often lies hidden behind unglamorous appearances. He once said, “A person not only acts with, but also has, a certain external appearance, and the latter is as inconsequential as it is accidental.”

Quote is from “Adolph Menzel, Master Drawings from East Berlin.”
-------
Links added later:
Menzel post on Bearded Roman, link.
Wikimedia Commons gallery, link.

Easel on Rails

In this photo of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, the artist is leaning on crutches in front of a very unusual easel arrangement. He seems to be in an indoor-outdoor space. There is at least a partial greenhouse window or frosted glass diffuser overhead and a drape behind him to cut down on reflections.

The easel is mounted on four small railroad wheels resting on a track. There’s also a circular ring under the easel which might allow the easel to turn sideways.

I asked Professor Gabriel Weisberg, one of the world authorities on Dagnan, to comment. He said no specific information has surfaced about this particular photo.

About the crutches, he said, “I don't think he was debilitated in any way when this was taken. It all is part of his steadying himself.” About the rails he speculated that “perhaps he wanted to get closer to actual models or move with changing light conditions as he worked partially outside.”

The only thing I can figure is that he got the idea for using rails from the practice of some sculptors, who rely on railed carriages to move very heavy stones or bronzes in and out of the studio.

Photo from Against the Modern by Gabriel Weisberg

Sotheby's 19th Century Preview

The rain and wind joined forces during our visit to New York City yesterday. As my umbrella turned inside out, I looked a bit like this watercolor by Maurice Leloir.

We got to Sotheby's auction house, which is currently hosting a preview exhibition of approximately 120 lots of 19th century European painting, including "A Bashi-Basouk and His Dog" by Jean-Léon Gérôme, (1824 - 1904).

There was also a large Jules Breton, called "Washerwomen of the Breton Coast" estimated to fetch between $400,000 and $600,000. Bouguereau, Waterhouse, Godward, Sanchez-Perrier, and Monsted are also well represented on the upcoming April 24 auction.

If you like the kind of art on this blog, I recommend checking out Sotheby's previews, where you can see the kind of paintings that museums often don't feature.

More about the 19th C. auction at ArtDaily, link.
Event details and browse catalog at Sotheby's.com, link.
The Leloir is not in the auction, but the other two paintings are.

Solomon J. Solomon

The most popular painting in yesterday’s Samson and Delilah poll was Solomon Solomon (60 votes), the artist who was so nice they named him twice.

I was impressed with all your comments about that painting and the others. The next highest vote-getter was the Matthias Stom (39 votes). The best known old masters: Rubens (13), Van Dyck 2 (11), and Rembrandt (6) were far behind, but as some of you pointed out, I overlooked an important Rembrandt, "The Blinding of Samson," link.

So who is this guy Solomon Solomon, and why are there are no books on him?

Well, the good news is that there’s a book by him, and it’s one of the best books on classical painting. It’s got the rather clunky title: “The Practice of Oil Painting and of Drawing As Associated With It.”

What’s even better, Solomon’s manual on oil painting is available for a free download here. To give you an idea of the content, here’s a plate showing “A Method of Painting for Grisaille Preparation or for Direct Colour.”


1. The outline brushed in.
2. The middle tones.
3. Higher lights and shadows added while wet.
4. The whole brushed together, broadened, and completed with a full brush.

Here's what Wikipedia says about him:

Solomon's painting was grounded in his influence from his teacher Alexandre Cabanel, but was also influenced by Frederic Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Solomon painted mainly portraits to earn a living, but also painted dramatic, theatrical scenes from mythology and the bible on large canvasses. These scenes include some of his more popular paintings. One of Solomon's most popular works was Samson (1887), depicting a scene from the biblical story of Samson and Delilah.[3] This painting was praised for its use of multiple male nudes in active poses.[4] Samson is one of few Solomon paintings on regular display, at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.[3] Some other Solomon paintings that have received significant attention include Ajax and Cassandra and The Birth of Love (1896).

More on Solomon Solomon at Wikipedia, link.
Seven images by SJS at ARC: link.

En Loge Competition

Drawing plaster casts and nude models from observation was only a part of the French academic art curriculum in the 19th century.

The ultimate goal for most students, and the surest way to fame, was to win the Prix de Rome competition. If you won this contest, you were sent to Rome at government expense to study the old masters.

But winning it required a combination of memory and imagination.

To enter the Prix de Rome competition, you had to qualify by winning the concours d’esquisse, where students composed a painted sketch based on a theme provided by the professors. If you made it this far, you had already been sifted out of a large bunch of aspirants.

Then you went on to a captive sketch competition called the the concours de dessin, or ‘en loges,’ (the loge was an area of cubicles, illustrated above.)

The finalists were ranked and then sequestered into the little stalls. They were all assigned the same surprise theme, usually from Greek or Roman history, mythology, or the Bible.

They were given twelve hours to complete an outline drawing. They could not leave their cubicles, nor could they talk to anyone. (I assume they were given some bread, water, and a chamber pot.)

In 1876, the assignment was a scene from the Iliad: “Priam pleading for the body of his son Hector from Achilles.” The drawing below was submitted by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

When they finished the session, the professor signed and stamped their entry. The supervising professor in 1876 was W.A. Bouguereau, who won the contest himself with "Zenobia Discovered by Shepherds on the Banks of the Araxes" (below) in 1850.

Then the students each were given 72 days to complete their paintings, using the full benefit of models, costumes, and props. But they could not deviate in any significant way from their sketches.

The paintings were then publicly exhibited and received the full scrutiny of critics, fellow students, professors, and the public. Joseph Wencker was criticized for changing the pose of the head of Achilles, but he won anyway.

Dagnan-Bouveret took second place.

Success in this competition required the ability to draw figures and compositions from memory and imagination. It also required a familiarity with hundreds of possible stories from the standard myths and biblical texts.

Most ateliers offered some form of imaginative sketch practice, and, according to A. Boime, “the results often reflected a verve and expression lacking in the other studies.”

==========
For this post I drew information and images from three books that I've mentioned before: "The Studios of Paris" by John Milner, "The Academy and French Painting in the 19th Century" by Albert Boime, and "Against the Modern" by Gabriel Weisberg.

The painting at the top is by W.A. Bouguereau, "The Battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs" from 1852 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, link.
-------
Added later: Gallery of Prix de Rome subjects and images, Link. (Thanks, Saskia)

Book on Grand Prix de Rome, (Thanks, Darren) link.
Wikipedia on Prix de Rome, link.

Edwin Austin Abbey

I've been a bit out of reach from the Internet, so let me just offer a picture by one of my favorite overlooked masters, Edwin Austin Abbey. Abbey was an American expatriate artist famous for his pen and ink illlustrations, his murals at the Boston Public Library and the Harrisburg, PA capitol, and also for his unsurpassed illustrations from the plays of Shakespeare.

He was good friends with Lawrence Alma Tadema and John Singer Sargent, who taught him to paint after age 40. It helps to have teachers like that! The painting is called "Fair is My Love," from 1900.
------
Lines and Colors post about Abbey, Link.
Bio on Butler Art, link.
Ciudad de la Pintura, Link.

Orientalist and Academic Exhibitions

While the Dahesh Museum is looking for a new permanent home for its collection of academic painting, it is loaning works to other museums.


The Joseph I. Lubin House at Syracuse University is currently exhibiting "In Pursuit of the Exotic: Artists Abroad in 19th Century Egypt and the Holy Land." The show will be up until April 30, 2009, and the museum is open Monday - Saturday, 11 a.m. until 4 p.m.

Lubin House Link..
Image is by Fräre "Along the Nile at Gyzeh."

The other exhibition of work from the Dahesh is "Academic Allure: Art and Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Paris" at the Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery at Lebanon Valley College through April 19, 2009, link.

Dahesh Museum, link.
Thanks, Steve!

Using Photo Reference

Yesterday’s post about “Drawing from Maquettes,” brought up some really interesting comments about the pros and cons of using reference, especially photo reference.

Some realist painters scrupulously avoid photo reference altogether, including Jacob Collins and his group of artists studying with the Hudson River Fellowship, mentioned in an earlier post yesterday. They get fine results by concentrating on purely observational work.

Other artists in the comics and fantasy field, such as Moebius and Frazetta, achieve extraordinary artwork by drawing entirely from their imaginations, creating forms from their visual memory.

And some artists use photo reference extensively and unabashedly, especially for action poses and effects that are difficult to observe, such as water effects, explosions, or action poses.

An interesting historical note is that some realist artists, including artists in the academic tradition, have been using photos for nearly a century and a half. According to art historian Ross King, forty percent of all photographs taken in Paris in the later part of the nineteenth century were commissioned by artists, usually taking photographs of nude models for “academies” or figure reference studies.

When Pascal Dagnan Bouveret painted “Breton Women at a Pardon” in 1887 (above), he took photos of women sitting outdoors. But in his final composition he clearly didn’t use the photo literally, and was in control of the design of his picture.

In this photo you can see that he drew each of the figures on a separate piece of tracing paper, a method I’ve discussed in a previous post.

My own views on this topic are moderate and pragmatic. There’s no right or wrong method: the final result is the test, and you should choose a process that will give you the results you want.

I have done some paintings without photo reference and others with it. I use photos as one kind of reference, along with traditional charcoal studies from observation, maquettes, and scrap file reference.

The caution I feel about using photos is that I’m easily lured into copying their
random details. Photos are compelling. Without conscious effort, I tend to forget what I had in my mind’s eye at the beginning of the picturemaking process. Characters based on photos of friends or neighbors sometimes have a mundane snapshot quality, rather than an otherworldly “storybook” feeling.

There’s also the danger of copying the colors and the black shadows literally from the photos.

If you want to work only from observation or only from imagination, more power to you! But if you want to use photos, let me suggest the following four safeguards:

1. Do your initial sketches purely from your imagination and develop those sketches as much as you can before going after reference. Even if those sketches don’t look that great, trust your mental image and let it guide you later.

2. Try using the photos only for the comprehensive stage, and put them away for the final painting.

3. Print your photos in black and white to avoid being influenced by the color.

4. Take lots of photos, and use more than one model or more than one costume.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts on this topic.
-----------
I am indebted to art historian Gabriel Weisberg’s article on Dagnan’s use of photography, link.

GJ post on tone paper studies, link.
GJ post on action poses and photography, link.
GJ post on tracing paper as a compositional tool, link.

More in my book: Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter