Wednesday, November 8, 2017

European Portrait Drawings

Gustav Klimt
Portrait of a lady with cape and hat
1897-98
drawing
Albertina, Vienna

"Observing any human being from infancy, seeing someone come into existence, like a new flower in bud, each petal first tightly furled around another, and then the natural loosening and unfurling, the opening into a bloom, the life of that bloom, must be something wonderful to behold; to see experience collect in the eyes, around the corners of the mouth, the weighing down of the brow, the heaviness in heart and soul, the thick gathering around the waist, the breasts, the slowing down of footsteps not from old age but only with caution of life  all this is something so wonderful to observe, so wonderful to behold; the pleasure for the observer, the beholder, is an invisible current between the two, observed and observer, beheld and beholder, and I believe that no life is complete, no life is really whole, without this invisible current, which is in many ways a definition of love.  No one observed and beheld me, I observed and beheld myself; the invisible current went out and it came back to me.  I came to love myself in defiance, out of despair, because there was nothing else.  Such a love will do, but it will only do, it is not the best kind; it has the taste of something left out on a shelf too long that has turned rancid, and when eaten makes the stomach turn.  It will do, it will do, but only because there is nothing else to take its place; it is not to be recommended."

– Jamaica Kincaid, from The Autobiography of My Mother: a Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Portrait of a Marshal of France
ca. 1740
drawing on blue paper
Albertina, Vienna

Egon Schiele
Self-portrait, grimacing
1910
drawing, pigment
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Jan van Eyck
Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati
ca. 1435
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Portrait of Jane Morris
1871
drawing
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Henri Fantin-Latour
Self-portrait
1861
drawing
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Jean Clouet
Portrait of Jacques Ricard, called Galiot, Seigneur d'Assier en Quercy
ca. 1515
drawing
British Museum

François Clouet
Portrait of Henri II
ca. 1547
drawing
British Museum

John Hoppner
Portrait of a lady
1780s
drawing
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta
Self-portrait
1735
drawing
Albertina, Vienna

Jean-Louis Forain
Self-portrait
ca. 1900
drawing
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Maurice Quentin de La Tour
Portrait of Louis de Silvestre
ca. 1753
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Charles Samuel Keene
Self-portrait
ca. 1845
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Andrea Pozzo
Self-portrait
1703
drawing
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf