It’s hard to imagine these days, but newspaper comics were once a place where adventure reigned.

Alongside genuinely funny humor strips (also hard to imagine in this day of watered-down, milquetoast comics pages where blandness seems a requirement), there were wonderful adventure comics, like Prince Valiant, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby, Wash Tubbs, Buzz Sawyer, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Red Ryder, and many others (some of which still exist as pale shodows of their former incarnations). Two of the best and most influential were Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, both created by Milton Caniff.

Caniff has been called “The Rembrandt of the comic strip”, fitting perhaps both because of his importance in the ranks of great comics artists and, in particular, for his mastery of chiaroscuro, the use of highly contrasting areas of dark and light.

Caniff was a pioneer of the adventure strip and one of the undisputed masters of the form. He was very influential on other comics artists (and illustrators) of his day, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1947.

Caniff’s remarkable high-contrast style, shared in part with his early collaborator Noel Sickles, also a fantastic adventure comics artist, has been a tremendous influence on modern comics artists like Alex Toth, Frank Robbins, Jamie Hernandez, Mike Mignola, David Mazzuchelli, Tim Sale and, in particular, Frank Miller, notably in his work in the Sin City books, as well as a number of other comics artists who are working in a high-contrast style (often influenced by Miller and perhaps unaware of how much he has carried over from Caniff).

Both Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon were adventure stories in the 30’s and 40’s adventure film mold (think Indiana Jones), about wild spirited pilots in search of adventure and trouble. Caniff left a successful 17 year run on doing Terry and the Pirates for the New York Daily News, and started Steve Canyon for for the Chicago Sun because he wanted more control over his work. During World War II, in the latter part of his run on Terry, Caniff also did a strip called Male Call, (strips online here) which ran in military newspapers and for which he accepted no payment; he considered it a contribution to the war effort.

While both Terry and Steve Canyon are great strips, I tend to prefer Terry and the Pirates (from which we get the term “Dragon Lady”) because of its atmospheric, far-Eastern strange-lands-and-pirates milieu; and despite its occasional unflattering portrayal of women, non-white races and otherwise politically incorrect leanings. These were perhaps more a reflection of the times than any intentional meanness on Caniff’s part, but criticism has been leveled in hindsight at Caniff for that, as well as his participation in such government sponsored weirdness as this illustrated WWII pamphlet fot the U.S. Army called How to Spot a Jap.

Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon are both terrific top-of-the-form classic adventure comics. Most of the Reprints of Terry that I’m aware of are out of print, but worth looking for. Steve Canyon, on the other hand, is available in a number of inexpensive volumes. Unfortunately, the strips, though printed OK, are small. Early daily comic strips were printed large, often at the full width of a newspaper page, as contrasted to the tiny splotches they’ve been reduced to by modern newspapers as part of their concerted campaign to drive away readers.

There is a new biography and analysis of Caniff’s work, not yet published but due soon, Meanwhile…: Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates, and Steve Canyon by R.C. Harvey, that also promises to be a fascinating look at the art and business of newspaper comics in their heyday. You can read bit more on Harvey’s site about his previous book on Caniff, Milton Caniff Conversations.

There are some extensive bio pages The King of the Comic Strips, Milton Caniff (page 2 here) from Steve Stiles. There is also a good short bio on Comiclopedia (from which I borrowed two of the clippings shown above).

A special treat right now is that the original Steve Canyon strips are being made available online, with permission from the artist’s estate, on the Humorus Maximus site. They start here. (There is no “Next page” button, click on the next date, in this case January 22, to advance.) This is a rare opportunity to read one of the great newspaper adventure strips day-by-day, as if it were a currently running strip. Compare it to what passes for newspaper comics today and be amazed.

I love New Yorker covers. For years the venerable magazine has been featuring illustrations, often by cartoonists and illustrators working in a cartoon-like line and color style, that can be funny, poignant, beautiful, wistful and, at their best, reminders of the beautiful in the ordinary, glimpses of commonplace scenes that are suddenly brought into light as remarkable and worthy of attention.

Over the years some of the most effective of the latter have been by Arthur Getz. Getz was an illustrator and painter who created more New Yorker covers than any other artist (213). His palette ranged from the darks of night scenes to the bright, almost bleached out light of sunny days. He had a knack for composing paintings out of scenes that other artists might never notice and painting them with a deceptively casual style that actually reveals a superb eye for composition, color and the effects of light.

In addition to his New Yorker covers, Getz did hundreds of pen and ink spot illustrations for the magazine, as well as illustrations for Esquire, Fortune, The Nation and other publications. He also created murals for public spaces, including one for the 1939 World’s Fair. He was also a well-respected instructor at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, the University of Connecticut and other schools.

Feeling his name as an illustrator would interfere with his gallery work, he exhibited his gallery paintings for many years under the pseudonym of his middle name, “Kimmig”.

Getz also illustrated children’s books, including four he wrote himself. There is a web site devoted to Getz’ work, maintained by his daughter, Sarah. One of the best places to see work is in the CartoonBank archive, from which you can purchase original artwork as well as prints of his remarkable New Yorker covers. There was also a nice piece about Getz in the New Yorker in 2002, called Cover Gallery: Glimpses of Light.

Link suggestion courtesy of Don O’Shea

I received a review copy of The New Creative Artist: A Guide to Developing Your Creative Spirit by Nita Leland from North Light Books. Leland is the author of several popular books including Exploring Color, Creative Collage Techniques, and The Creative Artist, her first book, of which The New Creative Artist is a considerably revised and expanded version.

Leland has long had a presence on the web. Her blog Exploring Color and Creativity, which is one of the oldest links on the lines and colors blogroll, covers a variety of art related topics, as does her web site, which contains an extensive, if loosely arranged, array of resources, from a succinct description of split-primary color mixing, to an extensive list of art related books and mini book reviews. (Her site is perhaps best navigated through the site map.)

Leland often brings her resources to bear in service of those who need some help or guidance getting started down an artistic path. She has been teaching workshops since the ’70s, and her books, in particular The New Creative Artist, work hard at building a bridge onto that path, either for beginners or even seasoned artists who are struggling with being “blocked” or are in need of a recharge for their artistic confidence.

The New Creative Artist is a compendium of suggestions, exercises, and short articles on various ways to jump start the creative process. Like Bert Dodson’s Keys to Drawing with Imagination, also from North Light Books, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, Leland’s creativity enhancement principles are not new, the value is in her choice and presentation of them.

Like Keys to Drawing With Imagination, The New Creative Artist makes those techniques specific to artistic creation, as opposed to the many creativity enhancement books that try to cover all bases and include business and office creativity in the mix. Also like that book, this one is bound as a spiral/hardback hybrid meant to lay open flat on your drawing table while you work. Unlike Keys, which is specifically related to drawing, Leland’s book is more generally oriented to a variety of artistic endeavors, including painting, drawing, collage, and even crafts like fiber arts, papermaking and decorative painting.

In the process, The New Creative Artist serves as a brief introduction to a multitude of artistic techniques. Various mediums and working methods are mentioned briefly, but with enough detail to engage in them. Her section on Drawing Methods, for example, gives you short but workable descriptions of contour drawing, gesture drawing, portraiture, figure drawing and even the Surrealists’ specialty of automatic drawing. She also talks about design in relation to composing works, and the importance of elements like shape, value, rhythm, contrast and balance.

Design is perhaps an issue in the appreciation of the book, The book itself is an intense exercise in book design (by Wendy Dunning, possibly in collaboration with Leland). It is full of colors, patterns, textures and graphic elements meant to look like notes or scraps of paper, with exercises and quotes written on them, scattered about as if lying on top of the pages. It’s illustrated with works from a number of artists, in addition to Leland’s own, that generally use a bright palette. While sure to be delightful to some, The overall effect is, to my eye, a bit feminine, and may be off-putting to hard bitten concept artists, comic book artists and dyed-in-the-wool starving-in-a-garret bohemian painters. If you can get past that initial impression, and the cheery, informal, hand-holding tone of the text, you may find that the techniques are just as valid as if printed in plain Garamond on stark white pages.

There is an online preview of the book, which allows you to thumb through small but legible examples of over 30 pages.

Though of potential benefit to almost any artist who wants a source of techniques for unblocking and reviving artistic confidence, (one the best of which, I feel, is to break from what you are used to doing and explore another approach, medium or set of tools, as this book suggests), the The New Creative Artist is more directly aimed at those who are working to get started, and who will find it full of gentle encouragement and a wide array of approaches to creative exploration.

Jonny Duddle is, as far as I can determine, a concept artist for the gaming industry who lives in the UK. The “Who” section of his website just has a “More info soon” line above a row of photos that look a bit like a criminal line up; but we’ll ignore that in light of the fact that the “How” section, right next door, has nice step-by-step breakdowns of the creation of three of his wonderfully silly and exaggerated images, including the image shown here.

Duddle’s images have the feeling of highly rendered cartoons, brushed out with plenty of texture, lots of color and a good dose of flippant attitude. Monkeys and/or apes feature prominently in many of them, including a series of astronaut chimp images and a series he calls “Monkey Girl” of which the image at left is a part.

Some of the work on the site, notably in the “Games” section, is from his professional work on games like Milo and the Rainbow Nasties, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and E.T.: Return to the Green Planet. The brief bit of text in that section tells us we can’t expect to see more games images from him for a some time for contractual reasons; but we’ll ignore that in light of the “Stories” and “Gumph” sections, which are chock-full of fun stuff, apparently done for his own amusement. The former featuring work done around story-like themes, if not for actual stories, and the latter a place to fit things that don’t fit the former.

In addition to the detail images you can find in the course of the step-by-step breakdowns in the “How” section, you will occasionally see icons next to images that say “Big?”, and link to some genuinely large close-ups of the images.

For reasons that elude me, Duddle’s site opens in a pop-up window, uses frames and is too big for its window at times; but we’ll ignore that in light of the fact that his opening page indicates that his site is due for a major overhaul.

Duddle paints digitally. Only one of his step-by-step sequences includes any commentary at all, and it’s pretty breezy; but we’ll ignore that in light of the fact that Duddle is now a regular contributor to ImagineFX, a UK magazine devoted to digital fantasy and science fiction art, and the magazine’s web site includes several of his workshops, including Go Berserk in Photoshop and Perfect Brushes in Photoshop, followed, ironically, by Defecting to Painter, and Painter related posts like Getting Messy with Oils and Mixed Media Experiments (part 3), in which he uses both apps together.

In the course of this post, I’ve probably told you less about Duddle’s work than I have about the structure of his web site; but we’ll ignore that.

David M. Bowers started his career as a studio staff artist, transitioned into illustration and then into gallery painting. He has been splitting his time between illustration and his personal work and is now concentrating more on the later.

Over the course of his successful illustration career he has received a number of awards from the Society of Illustrators, including a Gold Medal, several Silver Medals and a “Best of Show”, and has been featured in Communication Arts and the Spectrum fantastic art collections (for which the image above, left and detail, top, was chosen as the cover for last year’s Spectrum 12).

Two of his paintings for Time magazine covers are in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

His beautifully refined oil paintings carry the feeling of Renaissance and Baroque masters, imbued with layers of implied meaning and spiced with imaginative imagery characteristic of the symbolists and surrealists.

His carefully composed and subtly lighted images can appear almost starkly realistic at times, but there always seems to be an undercurrent of meaning, or a suggestion that something is not as it seems, like his scene of normal looking patrons at an apparently ordinary bar, that just happens to have Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring hanging on the wall between the beer signs. At other times Bowers’ images can be overtly fantastic, and are sometimes wickedly funny, like his wonderful pumpkin headed version of Ingres’ portrait of Comtesse d’Haussonville (image above, right).

Bowers’ painting technique is very much in the classical tradition. He devotes a page on his site to describing of his painstaking painting process, which I’ll attempt to summarize here because it makes a nice brief account of the traditional academic painting techniques that have been handed down since the Renaissance.

He starts with a ground of real gesso, prepared with rabbit skin glue, chalk and zinc (as opposed to acrylic “gesso” which should more properly be called acrylic primer and is not actually the best surface for oil based paint). Rabbit skin glue smells terrible, has to be heated up in a double-boiler pan, takes a lot of time an effort and is a PITA to work with, but it actually sizes the canvas, and, properly primed, makes a superior surface for painting.

He then paints a monochromatic underpainting, which separates the painting of value from color, as has been tradition since oil painting was first in common use (see my post on Jan van Eyck). Bowers paints his underpainting in earth colors. The greenish cast of the burnt umber in the skin areas is reinforced with a transparent layer of green. This is a traditional Renaissance technique that gives the final reddish skin tones variation, depth and strength. Similarly, a green tree will have a reddish undercolor.

He then layers in the final colors, working carefully from background to foreground, finally applying layers of translucent glazes, sanding the layers as they dry with pumice stone powder. The final painting is sanded again and varnished to bring out the luster and depth of the glazes. This meticulous process has yielded results for generations of painters and it serves Bowers well.

When viewing the paintings in the galleries and Exhibitions sections of his site, don’t miss the Prints section, which includes detail images.

Link suggestion courtesy of Jack Harris

Illustrator, calligrapher and puzzle maven Leah Palmer Preiss lists her influences as “medieval manuscripts, Mad magazine, art nouveau, Alice in Wonderland, Morse code, Persian miniatures, Monty Python, scientific illustration, 17th Century poetry, Flemish Renaissance paintings and the art of the insane”.

If that sounds like an insane combination, it’s wonderfully so, and her quirky, funny, highly textured, obsessively detailed, lovingly rendered and richly imaginative illustrations bear that out.

Her client list includes HarperCollins, Macmillan, Viking, the Utne Reader, New York Life, Woman’s Day and a list of advertising agencies and greeting card companies.

In addition to her mainstream editorial illustration an children’s book illustration, she has something of a specialty in the form of illustrations that are also visual puzzles. Done primarily for children’s periodicals, these are detailed images that combine her illustration and calligraphy skills with her fascination with brain teasers to create one-stop entertainments for the brain and eye.

You will also find “messages” in her other editorial work, like the “Fever Dreams” piece shown above. Included in the Illustration section of her site, she lists “Maniatures”, though she doesn’t include indications of the size of these, presumably small, expressions of visual mania.

The images on the site are just big enough to get some feeling for the intricacy and detail in her work, but can be a little small for appreciating the puzzles. Unfortunately, there isn’t a collection of her work yet that would allow us to see them together in print.

Also unfortunately, her web site is a bit of an unintentional puzzle at the moment. The imagemaps that provide the links for the main navigation elements on the left side of her site are flawed, and you can sometimes click on part of the section title and not get a response (and I can’t give you direct links because the site is in frames). Just move your mouse and try again, it’s worth the trouble.

Preiss has taken “curiouser and curiouser” as her motto, and her fascinating images can leave you curiouser for more.

Now here’s a great idea from a group of artists for an informal series of creative projects that also translates into a fun web site.

I can’t sum it up any more succinctly than they do themselves in the first paragraph of their FAQ: “DrawerGeeks is a fun thing we do every other Friday, where professional artists (mostly from the animation, comic book, illustration and design fields) all draw their own version of a chosen fictional character.”

The result is a delightful amalgam of divers styles, techniques and artistic approaches that is pulled together with a common theme. The characters are often drawn (if you’ll excuse the expression) from mainstream comics, e.g. Thor, Captain America, Wonder Woman and Bizarro; but you’ll also find characters from movies, literature, fairy tales and other areas of pop culture, like King Kong, King Authur, Little Red Riding Hood and Cereal Mascots.

The artists sometimes make the themes bit broader than they seem by giving them an open-minded interpretation; Iron Man, for example, can be the Iron Man, the Marvel Comics character, or an iron man. Keeping to the chosen character is one of only two rules the artists apply to themselves, the other being to “keep it clean”.

There’s no requirement or limit on the amount of time devoted to the piece, and you will see examples from both ends of the spectrum, though most tend to be quite finished and some are very elaborate.

This seems a tremendous way for these artists to have fun and encourage themselves to indulge in playful creation, unrestrained by the demands of art directors and deadlines, but within a framework of a collegial atmosphere and perhaps a bit of friendly competition.

I’ve chosen a few images from the Cavemen topic to show here (from top: Cedric Hohnstadt, Mike Maihack, Jim Bradshaw, Sarah Mensinga, Jeremy Vanhoozer).

Before you run off looking for how to join, DrawerGeeks is more or less a closed circle. In order to try to keep this as a fun thing for the original participants, and not burden someone with administering a giant web site, participation is limited to invitation only.

The idea to take from this, beyond enjoying the fruits of their project by following the site every other week, would be to initiate a similar project among your own circle of artist friends.

Or, if you want an already established framework for creating a themed illustration on a regular basis and sharing it with a large group, check out Illustration Friday.

The other thing to take from DrawerGeeks is to check out the page that lists the participating artists and visit their individual web sites — something I’m just starting to do. Enjoy.

Suggestion courtesy of Meg Levitt

In addition to his famous portraits of our first president, George “father of his country but not exactly the handsomest guy” Washington, Gilbert Stuart, who has been rightly called the father of American portraiture, did less-well-known portraits of the next four presidents, First Ladies Dolley Madison and Abigail Adams, artists Benjamin West, Joshua Reynolds, John Trumbull and John Singleton Copley, as well as numerous members of high society in American and England.

After initial study with the Scottish painter Cosmo Alexander, he became a student of Benjamin West, an American painter who had become very successful in England and was eventually elected president of the Royal Academy there. Stuart studied with West for five years, returned to the States and set up shop in Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia (later incorporated into the city). He later settled in Boston, and museums in that city, as well as Philadelphia and New York, hold much of his work.

Stuart painted three portraits of Washington from life, but then, due to great demand, turned out over 100 replicas of them, starting a successful cottage industry in presidential portraits (and perhaps laying the groundwork for Presidents Day sales).

The most renowned of these portrait series is the “Lansdowne” type, based on a full length portrait painted in Philadelphia, the most famous version of which was painted for the White House, and the original version of which hangs here in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (image at left, top). It’s interesting to look at the differences in the handling of the draperies, the faces, and the rainbow arcing across the sky in these two versions.

Many other copies of this painting hang in state houses in other states. The White House version of the painting was rescued from the White House by Dolley Madison, when that structure was burned during the War of 1812.

The most famous of Stuart’s Washington portraits is the “Athenaeum Head“, the unfinished portrait of Washington facing to his right that was commissioned by Martha Washington, an engraved version of which faces the other direction as he stares out at us from the front of the one dollar bill (talk about painting money). The other major Washington portrait type is the “Vaughn” type, with washington facing to his left, which was actually the first painted and of which there are at least 15 of his replicas known. (You can see couple of them on the ARC site.)

Stuart’s style, though directly influenced by West, carried a lot of the feeling of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, who were very influential at the time. Some of Stuart’s society portraits feel stiff, showing pasty-faced rich folk with dour expressions that look a bit like the portraits, and their subjects, have been gathering dust for some time. Others, however, are bright and engaging, showing a remarkable flair for color, lively brushwork and a forceful sense of the sitter’s personality, like his portrait of Rachel Harvey Montgomery, or his beautiful dual portrait of Mrs. Samuel Gratliff and her Daughter (image at left, middle and detail, bottom). These paintings are also here in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

There is also a nice online feature on the site for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, based on an exhibition from 2004, that gives a good overview of Stuart’s work.

Stuart was well-liked by his patrons, very popular and quite successful in his career, with the slight exception of the fact that he tended to live beyond his means, neglected his financial affairs and was often under threat of being sent to debtor’s prison. Since he didn’t actually have the ability to paint money, he moved to Ireland to avoid his creditors, and wound up in financial trouble there as well.

I guess he just couldn’t wait for credit cards and Presidents Day sales.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been following the “painting-a-day” phenomenon, in which painters do one small (usually postcard-sized) painting a day, post them on a blog and offer them for sale directly to the public, most often through the means of an eBay auction. When I started covering the practice only two or three painters were following it. Since then, numerous painters have jumped on the bandwagon and the numbers are still increasing.

Sarah Wimperis, a UK artist living in France that I mentioned in my “Painting a Day” Blogs (Round 4) post last July, has jumped off the bandwagon and no longer bills herself as a daily painter.

She says this is not due to the demands of the discipline, she still paints daily (but often devotes her painting time to larger works), posts her work on her blog(s) and offers it for sale to the public directly. Her disenchantment with the “painting a day” label stems from her feeling that the spirit of the practice has been watered down.

Wimperis has also changed many aspects of her approach, transitioned from watercolor to oils, become established in galleries in the UK and the US, and is getting additional galleries interested. Unlike many of the other painter/bloggers she doesn’t like the eBay auction process and prefers to to offer her work at a simply stated price, balancing her time and effort with a desire to keep her work accessible and affordable. So far, it looks like her new path is serving her well.

Wimperis’ oils are colorful and still reflect much of the immediacy of the painting a day regimen in her choice of subjects, often everyday scenes and simple objects that happen to catch her eye. She usually accompanies her posted images with a brief paragraph describing the approach, subject or other thoughts related to the painting. She seems to be developing a style that leans toward broken color, particularly where chunks of color can represent patches of light or reflections. She has posted a video of one of her small paintings in progress here.

Her internet presence is a bit spread out and a little confusing. She apparently has three blogs. The Red Shoes, which features posts of her smaller, daily painting style work, The Red Shoe Box, showcasing her larger works, and Muddy Red Shoes, which chronicles her day to day thoughts and sketches (and, for reasons that escape me, throws music at you, unbidden, when you open it, forcing you to leave quickly — hopefully a temporary lapse in judgement). Confusingly, The Red Shoes blog is at muddyredshoes.blogspot.com while The Muddy Red Shoes is at sarahwimperis.blogspot.com. This is further complicated by her actual web site, a Flickr gallery, her presence online on the site of the Gillian Jones Gallery in Ohio, and the lack of a consistent and clearly defined navigation between them.

Personally, I think artists who spread themselves thinly would benefit from a more concentrated, or coordinated, web presence. (I’m a fine one to talk, but my various sites are aimed at very different audiences.) This is one of the many interesting challenges facing artists like Wimperis who are finding their way through this new world in which the net allows artists to connect directly with those interested in their work.

The thing about opinions, as the saying goes, is that everyone has one. When it comes to William-Adolphe Bouguereau (sometimes called Adolphe-William Bouguereau), those who are have an opinion usually have a strong one.

Depending on who you ask, Bouguereau was either a purveyor of sentimental treacle, suitable only for reproductions on calendars, or one of the greatest geniuses in the history of Western art.

Fred Ross, founder of the Art Renewal Center, the impressive online museum of representational art that was the subject of my very first post on lines and colors, seems intent on elevating him to the status of a demi-god.

To say I come down somewhere in the middle of a range like that is pointless, of course; but I can narrow it to somewhere on the side of “superb painter”, with reservations on the rest of it, and a surprising lack of emphasis. Perhaps it is because I haven’t had Fred Ross’s experience, apparently life-changing, of standing in front of Bouguereau’s 1873 work Nymphs et Satyre (Nymphs and Satyr) at the Clark Art Institute (whose curators apparently come down on the other side of the fence, and denigrate a piece in their own collection by stating that it “exhibits the hackneyed mythological subject matter and glossy realistic style typical of French academic painting”).

Bouguereau was one of the most popular artists of the 19th Century, certainly the most popular French artist of his time. His popularity was with his patrons, who purchased his elaborate paintings glorifying nymphs and satyrs, and his simple but elegantly painted images of peasant girls, for huge sums, and with the general populace of art lovers who, though they couldn’t afford to buy his work, would line up to see it at the Salon. Critics, on the other hand, even in his day, disparaged him as slick and facile, pandering and irredeemably shallow.

The reaction of critics in his own day was nothing in comparison to the way he was essentially exorcised from existence by the 20th Century modernists, who reviled figurative art in general and Bouguereau in particular. The post-war modernist critics, in particular, waged a concerted campaign to denigrate representational art and elevate modernism as the pinnacle of artistic achievement to which the previous 2000 years of artistic achievement were a mere prelude. (This is where you picture me rolling my eyes and moving my hand back and forth in a rude gesture.)

Bouguereau was all but forgotten until a revival of interest in 19th Century academic art over the last 20 years or so brought him into renewed light and favor. You will find many books on 19th Century art in which the most popular painter of the time is reduced to a mere footnote, if mentioned at all. Fortunately, there are a few monographs available today, including the inexpensive and quite nice Bouguereau by Fronia E. Wissman,

It’s hard to isolate Bouguereau from the barrage of opinions for and against. On one hand, he used his influential position with the Academé des Beaux-Arts to champion the cause of allowing women to train as artists, and counted among his students Cecille Beaux and Elizabeth Jane Gardner (who he later married). On the other hand he used that same position to help exclude the Impressionist painters, who he despised, from exhibiting at the Salon. (You can take the art out of politics, but you can’t take the politics out of art.)

If you find that you like Bouguereau, the Art Renewal Center is the place to go, it’s essentially Bouguereau Central on the web in addition to its other goals of reviving interest in 19th Century academic art in particular and representational art in general. Though I’m a strong proponent of the last two, and a definite fan of 19th Century academic art, as you may know if you’ve been reading lines and colors for any length of time, I still have trouble getting enthused, one way or the other, about Bouguereau.

I do like Bouguereau, and I will say that I think he was a superb painter with a masterful technique. I definitely admire him for that, but I’m not quite ready to park him in the Pantheon of artistic gods next to Rembrandt, Vermeer and Velazquez just yet. (This is where you picture me coughing into my hand and smirking.)

For all of Bouguereau’s dazzling technique, his subjects leave me unaffected. It’s not that they’re sentimental, it’s that there’s not enough sentiment. Even his supposedly sympathetic portrayals of peasant girls, which I prefer to his more elaborate mythological works, seem lacking in emotion or drama.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, another 19th Century academic against whom the charge of proficiency without substance is often leveled, is more to my liking. His work conveys at the very least an invitation to step into another world of visual wonders, while Bouguereau’s work feels more like a finely crafted artifact displayed in a vacuum-sealed display case, beautiful to look at, but difficult, for me at least, to enter.

It may be because the originals I have seen of his are definitely not among his most renowned works that I have not had my “life-changing experience” with Bougereau. (You may have noticed, though, that even though I profess no strong opinion about Bouguereau, I’ve wound up with a rather lengthy post on him.)

I remain distinctly impressed with his extraordinary facility as a painter, but Bougereau feels to me like an eloquent orator with a wonderful voice, who just has little to say, and no strong opinions. He is certainly worth checking out, though, even if only to see if he elicits a strong opinion from you.