ROBERT HENRI

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SUNDAY feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

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Robert Henri -Cozad (1865-1929 born Cincinnati, Ohio ), was one of the most influential American landscape, portraitist and figure painter. Henri enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and later the École des Beaux Arts, Paris.

He was essentially a realist painter, who first identified with the Impressionists style. He together with a small team of enthusiastic followers, pioneered the Ashcan School of American realism. They depicted urban life in an uncompromising Brutalist, but a realist manner. The group members were determined to depict directly their own time and experience.

For several years, Henri divided his time between Philadelphia and Paris. Over the years, Henry painted figures and portraits of non elite people, like Native Americans, African, Chinese and Mexican migrants. He became strongly influenced by the colour theories, and experimented with the tonal effects of mixed colours. He also began to use subdued tones. He moved around New York and painted the suburbs.

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CARL CARUS GUSTAV

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) was a German landscape painter and art critic. He was born in Leipzig, where he studied chemistry and then medicine. He was also a physician, biologist, Professor for Obstetrics and philosopher. He was a pioneer for experimental work in comparative osteology, insect anatomy, and zootomy. In 1811 he graduated as a doctor of medicine and a doctor of philosophy.

Carus painted in his leisure time, but it was his writing on art theory that made him a leading scholar of the period. Carus's philosophy was essentially Aristotelian in that he followed ‘the unfolding or elaboration of an idea in experience from an unorganized multiplicity to an organized unity.’

From 1814 to 1817 he taught himself oil painting working under Caspar David Friedrich, a Dresden landscape painter. Later he studied under Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld at the Oeser drawing academy.

Carus was appointed a physician in attendance, when King of Saxony, Frederick Augustus II, made an informal tour of Britain in 1844. Carus had chance to visit sights in London and the university cities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Carus developed a theory of landscape painting whose objective was the ‘visualization of the inner workings of geological phenomena’, which he called Erdlebenbildkunst = pictorial art of the life of the earth.

Carus was a plein air painter through whole career. In some of his later works, the traces of impressionism seeps in, perhaps due to the fast capture of the evolving scene. Yet he was a meticulous detailing person.

 

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JEAN FRANCOIS RAFFAELLI

 

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah 

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Jean Francois Raffaelli (French, 1850-1924) was a Painter, Print-maker and a Writer. He had an interest in theatre and music. But to try his hand on painting, he had a short training in art. Interest in theatre art influenced his career. He took up painting in 1870, primarily producing costume pictures until 1876. He also began to draw in a realistic style, figures of ordinary people in the suburbs of Paris, like, peasants, workers, and rag-pickers. He also sketched landscapes of Paris, besides the portraits. He said ‘my subject is all Paris . . . I aim to paint the beauty of Paris as well as its wretchedness.’

He shifted to a studio on the Rue de Courcelles in Paris in 1892. This prompted him to a new direction in his art. He now used more colours and lighter scapes of Paris. His scenes of streets and boulevards reflect new inclination towards expressionism. His collection shows experiments in various styles of painting, subjects and composition.

He experimented with five-plate colour print-making. He preferred dry-point hatching. Print making taught him delineation of objects and people with edging high-light. 

 

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