Skip to main content

The Baroque King

By

There's a wonderful segment on art and architecture on the History Channel that I enjoy watching.  The other night the host focused on King Charles.  He had lured Anthony van Dyck to London to be the court artist, and he painted numerous portraits of Charles, the royal family and other nobles during his time in England.  The host noted that van Dyck was favored because he usually applied a little artistic surgery to his subjects, making them look more elegant than they really were. This triptych was fascinating.  Unfortunately, van Dyck died young, replaced by William Dobson, who was an excellent portrait artist in his own right.  Dobson tended to be less flattering, which I suppose is why he ended up in the almshouse.  Of course, it was this extravagance that led to Charles' undoing, but as the host noted, Charles is responsible for bringing Baroque to England.


This is a fragment of a larger painting in the National Galleries of Scotland.  Artist unknown.

Comments

  1. TripplerSeptember 30, 2012 at 4:17 PM

    Ah, thanx for reminding me to tune into HERE OF A SUNDAY MORNING:

    http://www.wbai.org/

    http://www.wbai.org/playernew.html


    Chris Whent is a European born attorney living in NYC for many years. He plays classical music every Sunday including chamber music, Moravian liturgical music, and Spanish guitar. GREAT stuff

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more