Recent links of note:
“Constable: A Portrait by James Hamilton review—let’s reclaim the artist from the taste police”
Laura Freeman, The Times
By the twentieth century, John Constable’s landscapes of Stour Valley and Dedham Vale in Suffolk were regularly dismissed as quaint and old-fashioned. “Constable country,” writes Laura Freeman in a review of James Hamilton’s Constable: A Portrait, has come to mean “biscuit-tin country, jigsaw-puzzle country, calendar country.” In his new biography of the English painter, however, Hamilton argues that Constable was a revolutionary artist whose use of broken color and depiction of modern subjects predated similar innovations of Monet, Manet, and Pissarro later in the nineteenth century. Writing in the London Times, Freeman examines the artist’s fearless devotion to nature which stood behind his paintings. A friend of Constable’s, for instance, remembered how he once “sallied forth in a snowstorm,” while the son of the artist John Martin remarked that Constable was “constantly in the wild, plashy, wet, dripping woods, during storm, rain and wind.” One time, Constable even wrote to assure his wife Maria Bicknell that “landscape is my mistress. . . . ’Tis to her I look for fame and all that the warmth of imagination renders dear to Man.”
“The Human Body Laid Bare in Art”
Peter Saenger, The Wall Street Journal
In advance of “Flesh and Bones,” a new exhibition opening at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles on February 22, Peter Saenger explains in The Wall Street Journal how a renewed interest in anatomy during the Renaissance invigorated both art and science. Artists like Michaelangelo performed dissections to correctly portray the arrangement of muscles in the human body, while increasingly detailed anatomical diagrams “became powerful tools for physicians and surgeons.” One “early ancestor” of these anatomical illustrations, Saenger explains, was the Dance of Death: an artistic genre born during the Black Death and seen in books, reliefs, and paintings that depicted death, usually personified as a skeleton dancing or otherwise enticing figures from all walks of life, whether kings, merchants, peasants, or children. (Hans Holbein’s brilliant take on the genre in a series of tiny woodcuts can be seen in the new exhibition “Capturing Character” at the Morgan Library in New York.) An intensive study of anatomy was once considered necessary for art students, though the expectation faded in the twentieth century—Thomas Eakins, for instance, belonged to one of the last generations of art students to study at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.
Podcast:
“Roger Kimball introduces the February issue.” A new podcast from the Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion.
Dispatch:
“Mille lieux—here, just two,” by Clive Burrow. Remembering P. J. O’Rourke (1947–2022).