James Perry Wilson’s Dioramas, Part 1

When you stand in front of a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it feels like you’re looking into miles of real space.


But just beyond the taxidermied animals and the fake twigs and leaves, you’re really gazing at a painting on a vertical wall just a few feet away from you. The slightest wrong color note or eyecatching brushstroke would jump out and shatter the effect.

The artist who painted these illusions was James Perry Wilson (1889-1976), who established the highest standard ever reached in diorama backdrop painting.


His first training was in architecture. He was mainly self-taught as a landscape painter. He traveled to study the environments that he sought to portray, making stereo photographs and plein air paintings on location, often using a “widescreen” format with two or more adjacent canvases.

According to contemporary accounts, he occasionally removed his clothes in remote locations and painted in the nude.

He captured both the artistic and scientific truth of a particular locale, with painstaking accuracy of botanical, atmospheric, and geological detail.

In addition to his work in New York, he painted some of the dioramas for the Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut, The Museum of Science in Boston, and the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.



Every diorama has a “tie-in” area where the 3-D foreground comes up against the painted back wall. Nay-sayers had claimed that it’s impossible to represent water along the tie-in line. Rising to the challenge, Wilson designed the Connecticut shoreline diorama to feature a couple of areas with tie-ins crossing water areas, including the section above, where the painted illusion begins just beyond the turtle.

The full backdrop was often 35 feet wide or more, with a dome-shaped ceiling. This required large amounts of paint and careful mixtures. To make the perspective accurate across such a oddly curving surface, Wilson worked out a unique grid system that he called “the unsquare square” to compensate the foreshortening of the side sections.



Every backdrop was carefully planned using maquettes, color sketches, and full-size charcoals drawn on the backdrop before the final paint was applied. The tie-in area was the last section to be completed, and had to be painted with four-foot brushes after the foreground elements were in place.

Tomorrow I’ll share some rare notes and technical tips from JPW.
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More on Wilson
Wilson’s dioramas have been lovingly preserved thanks to the efforts of Michael Anderson of the Yale Peabody Museum, link,
Stephen Quinn of the American MNH, link,
and Ruth Morrill, JPW’s former assistant and the widow of dioramist Ralph Morrill.

Stephen Quinn’s book Windows on Nature chronicles the story of the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History.

Continuation of this post: James Perry Wilson's Diorama's, Part 2.

Mr. Moha of Aït Benhaddou

Beyond the Grand Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the kasbahs are made from a reddish brown mudbrick, what we would call adobe in North America.



In the fortified city of Aït Benhaddou, I met Assofi Moha, a Berber man who sold leather and brass handicrafts to the occasional tourist.


He sat on a short stool in the sunny alley. I sat across from him, and when he saw me sitting on the ground, he took the little cushion off his own stool and offered it to me. We got talking and he agreed to pose for a quick watercolor portrait. The bright sun cast dark shadows from his features.



When the portrait was finished, I handed him a fountain pen, and he wrote his name.

Nacreous Cloud

Laurent Alquier, a connoisseur of unusual atmospheric phenomena, sent me this photo from his collection, with the following comment:

This is a case of Nacreous Cloud, horizontal rainbow diffused throughout a cloud layer. Apparently, these can be seen in northern countries closer to the pole.

More on nacreous or polar stratospheric clouds, link.
This photo is from the website Dark Roasted Blend, link

Spherical Panoramas

If you’re a visual person, and you haven’t yet experienced a spherical panorama, you’re in for a treat. It's also called Quicktime VR or QTVR.

A spherical panorama is a photographic representation of the full 360-degree field of vision. Using a special camera apparatus and a photo-stitching technique, an array of photos taken from a single point of observation are seamlessly mapped across the surface of a sphere or cube surrounding the viewer.


The photo above is really just a flattened cylindrical panorama, because it's just as hard to convey a spherical panorama in one illustration as it is to show a map of the globe on a flat piece of paper.

Using a special plugin from QuickTime (resident on a Mac, and downloadable for other computers), you can control your direction of view, and in some cases, you can zoom closer to any given region of the picture.
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A good place to start is the website “spherical panoramas” Link.
You can also find various images on “Fullscreen Quicktime Virtual Reality” Link.
Quicktime site: link.

Sprezzatura

Elvis didn't invent "cool."


“Sprezzatura” is a term coined by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528 in The Book of the Courtier. It describes the cool, confident attitude often expressed in the portraiture of the time. The classic example is Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione himself.


Illustrator Shirley Hughes, in her memoir A Life Drawing suggests that discoveries of serious-looking Roman busts during the Renaissance led to a taste for the "devil may care" look in portraiture.

The word is related to the Italian “sprezzante,” meaning contemptuous or scornful, used here in the sense of disdaining effort. The goal is a certain nonchalance or carelessness, as if one’s mastery arrived almost by accident, and certainly not through any struggle.


At various times in history, artists have tried to capture this particular attitude, both in the disposition of their subjects and in their handling of paint. Sargent accomplished it in his portrait of his teacher Carolus Duran.

Rearranging Art Books

Today I rearranged the art books in my home library.



Before this, I had the monographs segregated in separate sections, the way they do in bookstores and libraries. There was one section for illustrators and another for 19th Century European artists and another old masters and another for children’s book artists.

But I had a feeling that all of my artist heroes would have enjoyed each other’s company if they were sitting together in the same pub. So why not put the books together under one alphabetical listing? They're also much easier to find this way.

Now Hals is rubbing shoulders with Homer, Rockwell is sitting next to Sargent, and Shepard is consorting with Sorolla. I wish I could hear what they’re talking to each other about.

The Humdrum Life

Kirsten, an art student in San Francisco, wrote to ask what life is really like as a freelance artist.



Well, Kirsten, not all of my time is spent at the easel. And not much of it is spent in limousines, private jets, or with butlers or masseuses. Here’s a little slice of ordinary life, starting with a slide down the driveway to the post office.



The little package in our mailbox arrived from the “Sweatshop Elves,” who are occasional commentators on this blog. Thanks, Elves!

They have perfected a mysterious culture-jamming craze using origami cranes. The little package contained 26 tiny cranes, which we’ll hide in plain sight during our future travels. Watch for them!