Posts Tagged ‘caricature’
“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”*…
… Still, there are bills to be paid. Mathilde Montpetit (and here) on how the young Claude Monet made bank…
At the age of fifteen, Claude Monet was, by his own account, one of the most successful artists in Le Havre. Crowds would gather in the Norman port city to gawk at the pictures he sold through a framing shop: not paintings of haystacks or of the sea or water lilies, but slightly cruel caricatures of local bigwigs and minor celebrities. He had already learned to commercialize, charging his customers 20 francs (around 200€ in today’s money). “If I had continued”, he claimed to an interviewer in Le Temps almost fifty years later, “I would have been a millionaire.”
Spurred by profits, the young Monet was productive, creating up to seven or eight of these caricatures a day; a small collection of them is now held at the Art Institute of Chicago, most donated by the former mayor Carter Harrison IV (1860–1953). The French art historian Rodolphe Walter has claimed that his caricatures constituted a “clandestine apprenticeship”, the first attempts by a son of Le Havre’s bourgeois shipbuilders to make his way in the art world.
The earliest are anonymous: the identities of The Man in the Small Hat or The Man with the Big Cigar are now lost, although the framing shop devotees may well have been able to name them. Some of the works are imitations, like the 1859 drawing of the French journalist August Vacquerie (1819–1895) that Monet seems to have copied from Nadar (1820–1910), probably the period’s most famous caricaturist.
Monet’s own 1858 caricature of Léon Manchon, the treasurer of Le Havre’s Société des amis des arts, captures his subject’s appearance but also, in the background, both his love of the arts and his work as a notary. Most fantastical is the 1858 caricature of Jules Didier (1831–1914), which shows the 1857 winner of the Prix de Rome as a “Butterfly Man” being led on a leash by a dog. Monet scholars remain divided as to the symbolic meaning of the iconography, though more obviously derisive is the drawing of a dejected fellow applicant to an 1858 Le Havre art subsidy, Henri Cassinelli. Monet has captioned it “Rufus Croutinelli”: a slightly forced pun on “croute”, meaning a daub of paint. Monet didn’t receive the subsidy either.
Sixty-year-old Monet’s claims about how he could have made his young fortune probably had more to do with his later difficulties in selling Impressionism than the actual fortunes to be made in portraits-charge, but it was the roughly 2,000 francs (20,000€) from selling these caricatures that allowed him to, against his father’s wishes, move to Paris and begin training as an artist. (He also received a pension from his wealthy aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, with whom he had been living since his mother’s death in 1857.)
Perhaps it helped him in other ways as well. In the Le Temps interview, Monet claimed that it was while admiring his admirers at the framing shop window that he first encountered the work of his mentor Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), whose paintings were also hung there. Boudin would later take him en plein air for the first time. Perhaps, too, there’s something in the quickness of the caricature that speaks to what Impressionism would become — a desire to capture not just the literal appearance of a thing, but its true essence…
“Doing Impressions: Monet’s Early Caricatures (ca. late 1850s)” from @mathildegm.bsky.social in @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
Re: the other end of Monet’s career, readers in (or visiting) the Bay Area might appreciate “Monet and Venice,” over a hundred works– mostly the fruits of Monet’s only visit to the City of Canals, but spiced with Venetian views from artists including Renoir, Sargent, and Canaletto– on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco through July 26.
* Kurt Vonnegut
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As we cherish cartoons, we might might send pointedly-insightful birthday greetings to Peter Fluck; he was born on this date in 1941. An artist, caricaturist, and puppeteer, he was half of the partnership known as Luck and Flaw (with Roger Law), creators of the epochal British satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image.
The show ran from 1984 through 1996. (It was revived, with a different crew, in 2020.) Here’s a BBC appreciation of the original…
“What’s in a name?”*…
Familiar to many will be that exasperating feeling that arises when accused of being that very thing you pride yourself on not being. It’s a feeling the English artist William Hogarth evidently felt acutely when critics derided him for being a mere “caricature” artist. So moved was he by this ongoing slight, that he produced this 1743 print explaining the difference between characters and caricatures — which Hogarth saw as radically different — and demonstrating his style as being firmly aligned with the former. For Hogarth the comic character face, with its subtle exploration of an individual’s human nature, was vastly superior to the gross formal exaggerations of the grotesque caricature…
More on Hogarth’s defense of his self-perception at “Characters and Caricaturas.”
* Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
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As we lament labels, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that Vesna Vulović entered the Guinness Book of Records. A stewardess for JAT Airlines, she survived a fall of 33,330 ft. when (what is believed to have been) a briefcase bomb exploded on her flight, and she was sucked through the resulting hole i the fuselage. She was the sole survivor of the incident.
“The world is a perpetual caricature of itself”*…
Lilian Lancaster was 15 when she drew a collection of 12 anthropomorphic maps of European countries to amuse her ailing younger brother. They were published in 1868 as Geographical Fun, with notes and an introduction by “Aleph” (the pseudonym of William Harvey, a City Press journalist, antiquarian, and family friend).
Take the Grand Tour with Lilian in the Library of Congress’ collection; read her fascinating story (she became an actress, and continued her cartography) at Barron Maps.
* George Santayana
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As we peruse personifications, we might note that, while folks in the U.S. are celebrating the signing, on this date in 1776, of the Declaration of Independence of the U.S. from Great Britain, it is also a day to spare a memorial thought for two of the drafters and signers of that document, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (respectively also, of course, the second and third Presidents of the United States); both died on this date 1826.
Adams and Jefferson
Out, out, damned spot…
As The Raw Story reports, newsstands in Poland now offer Egzorcysta:
With exorcism booming in Poland, Roman Catholic priests have joined forces with a publisher to launch what they claim is the world’s first monthly magazine focused exclusively on chasing out the devil.
“The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling,” Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist told reporters in Warsaw at the Monday launch of the Egzorcysta monthly.
Ironically, he attributed the rise in demonic possessions in what remains one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic nations partly to the switch from atheist communism to free market capitalism in 1989.
“It’s indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation,” Posacki said…
Turn on all of the lights, then read the whole story here.
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As we wonder where we can find Max von Sydow, we might send an ironically-drawn birthday card to George Cruikshank; he was born on this date in 1792. The “modern Hogarth,” Cruikshank was a caricaturist, cartoonist, and illustrator who worked with his friend Charles Dickens (Sketches by Boz, The Mudfog Papers, and Oliver Twist), Lawrence Sterne (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), and many others.
Cruikshank’s “Fagin in his cell”
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