Finders Keepers - A Winslow Homer on the Rubbish Tip

This is such an interesting story. I hope I can do it justice. I originally saw it on BBC's "Fake or Fortune". As a genealogy and art history buff, some of the research gave me goosebumps.

Ok. Back in 1987, a fisherman, Tony Varney, found some art left lying around near the gate of a rubbish tip in the south of Ireland. Even though one of the pieces was signed Winslow Homer, Tony didn't know what he had. He didn't bother to research it at all and gave the painting to his daughter Selina who gave house room to other things her dotty old dad collected.

The small watercolour was of three white children wearing ethnic costume. Somehow in 2008, Tony and Selina got their wits together and took it to The Antiques Roadshow where it was confirmed by expert Philip Mould to be a work by Winslow Homer, one of America's most important 19th century artists and valued it at £30,000.

Philip Mould, art aficionado extraordinaire, cleverly knew that this painting would realize a higher price in US, where Winslow Homer is more highly esteemed. Mould had the painting packaged and sent off to Sotheby's in New York.

Phillip Mould's team of researchers went through the rest of the contents of Tony's cardboard portfolio. They found interesting things like a ticket to a costume ball at the Governor's Mansion in the Bahamas, a painting done by the Bahamian Governor's wife. They determined that Sir Henry Arthur Blake, the Governor of the Bahamas from 1884-1887, had his ancestral home in Ireland. Myrtle Grove, County Cork, was about three miles from the rubbish tip where Grandpa Tony found the painting.

Mould's lawyer was left to do due diligence and related to Mould, and the viewers, that the descendents who lived at Myrtle Grove were unaware of the painting and ignorant of the fact that they even owned it.  They had never registered a burglary.

Philip Mould jetted off to the archives in the Bahamas where he found on microfilm newspaper details of the costume ball at the Governor's mansion. Who was in attendance? Mr. Homer.  What were the children wearing? The same pseudo-Turkish costumes as in the painting. A later social notice said that Winslow Homer intended to paint the Blake children in their Turkish costumes. Eureka!

By this time, Sotheby's in New York had authenticated the watercolour and because of the provenance, had estimated that the picture would now reach at least $250,000 - about 5 times the original estimation.

So everyone back home in Coventry, England was very excited. The painting had been professionally cleaned and framed. It appeared in Sotheby's catalogue. Selina and her dad Tony went to New York for the sale. Twenty four hours before the sale, the Blake family in Ireland decided that "hey, that's our painting. We could use some of that lovely lolly to fix the roof of our ancestral home" (I'm paraphrasing).

Magnanimously, (I'm being sarcastic) they tell Selina she can go ahead and auction off the painting and she can keep 25% of the proceeds as a finder's fee OR auction it off and Sotheby's could hang onto the money until they could work  out ownership later. Selina, rightly pissed off, said the sale should go on and ownership could be worked out later.

The next day, ten, ten minutes before her lot was going to come under the gavel,  Blake's great-great grandson Simon Murray appeared in New York and said that Selina would have to take a 30% finders fee, but with out an agreement as to who owned the painting, he could not let the sale go on. Selina Varney rejected the revised offer and Sotheby's decided to withdraw the painting as they could not guarantee a good title to any potential buyer.

After this fracas at Sotheby's, the painting, now dubbed Children Under a Palm Tree,  was placed on the Art Loss Register. Why, I don't know. Covering their behinds, methinks. They know where it is now - under lock and key in Sotheby's New York. The family believe it disappeared from Myrtle Grove after a series of robberies in the 1980s, although Philip Mould notes that there was no crime reported. According to Great Grandson Simon Murray, his family didn't know that the painting was stolen until it was put up for auction at Sotheby’s. Simon Murray conducted further research among his family's papers and found a letter which described in detail the circumstances under which the painting was produced. When the Fakes or Fortunes episode aired in June 2011 ownership was still the subject of a legal dispute.

"I think we would rather keep it," said Simon Murray, who, as a lawyer, is still representing his family's interests. "It is such a special picture. The colours are wonderful. It's a very significant part of my family's history and we really want it back." Riiight...

youghalonline.com

The Varney's had the painting in their possession for two decades with no claim on its ownership and no report of any burglary on the part of the Blake/Murrays. I say that unless they can prove that Grandpa Tony stole the painting then tough titty. I say Finders Keepers.

The Clever Pup's Guide to Making Christmas Work - Meaningful Gifts - Child's Own Studio

The title of these posts is a bit grandiose, but Christmas has changed in my house. My companions for the holidays are  three adult males - my son, my husband and my brother. I love them to bits but Christmas is sinking into a blur of late mornings, too much beer and the Godfather trilogy. They don't even eat my baking! So for the next month I'm going to post about what I think captures the true essence of the season. So wonder as I wander. Follow me. 

Vancouver artist Wendy Tsao creates custom-made toys based on children's quirky drawings. Her company is called Child's Own Studio, and just look at what she can do. Wendy has been making these "softies" since 2007 and has created about 400 of these little wonders since then. They are an uncanny representation of what the little Picassos have drawn. Her waiting list is probably about as long as my arm, but maybe for next Christmas....I think this is an idea that would be a welcome gift for mums too. These creations  are a wonderful expression of childhood. The following is an article from the Daily Mail about Wendy's creations.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2151007/Brainchild-Mother-starts-business-making-real-life-cuddly-toys-kids-paintings.html

I remember little monsters like this.

All photos Child's Own Studios. All rights reserved.

Pays to Listen to your mother - Renoir found at Flea Market

Renoir found at Virginia Flea Market

Possible Renoir found: Virginia woman's flea market find for sale at Potomack Company

Personally we've made a couple of interesting flea market/auction purchases that are probably worth a little more than what we originally paid. A Robert Swain Gifford etching of "The Path by the Shore" is worth 3X the $50 I paid for it.

A faded print by The Group of Seven's Varley was bought for $38 and I determined that it was framed by the National Gallery of Canada's master framer circa 1962. And a printer's proof by Jean Carzou bought at auction for $100 is worth a lot more, although NO ONE at the Carzou Museum in the south of France is interested in evaluating it for me.

But this find by an American woman takes the cake. The little plaque says "Renoir"  but she almost threw out the painting in favour of the frame. Please read more from Art Daily News at the link below.

Possible Renoir found: Virginia woman's flea market find for sale at Potomack Company

Undone

An intimate warmth predominates James Tissot’s The Shop Girl (1883-1885). The shaded interior makes the viewer feel like an elite insider. The black-clad girl opening the shop’s door onto a lively Paris street is the focus of the work. Inside, a hushed serenity is achieved through the muted light and the gentle shadows on the girl’s face. The world outside the shop is hustling and bustling and is depicted as such through Tissot’s slapdash brush strokes, whereas his work on the young lady is barely decipherable.

The viewer’s eye first alights to the central shop girl and the pink package she holds and is then drawn to the recurring black figure on the left. This repetitive design element bounces us back from the edge of the frame to the busyness in the window and the pile of ribbon on the counter. The open door seems less important than what has just transpired in the shop.

This nineteenth century slice of life is as accurately detailed as a photograph. However, Tissot used a palette of oil paints to subtly blend colours necessary for warm skin and ribbons. Slow-drying oil paint was a necessity for Tissot, who took two years to complete this work. Unlike a photo, the painting is large, about 1x1.5 metres. From the perspective of a gallery goer standing about a metre away,  Tissot’s  shop girl seems almost life-sized.

Tissot places the viewer into the shoes of a male who has just purchased something for a woman.  Men are gazing at the shop girls through the window, as if they too were commodities or confections. A woman from a higher place in society passes with her eyes demurely averted. There is a lot of masculine attention going on. The central girl has met the male gaze of the viewer and is intensely maintaining it. She’s about to hand the gentleman shopper his package as he joins his chauffeur and horses outside. 

The somberly-clad shop girl contrasts with the tumble of pink ribbons on the countertop revealing, perhaps, that the high-buttoned girl could just as easily become “undone” as the pink mess left on the counter. Tissot’s painting contains other elements that could allude to hidden pleasures: the cupped “V” of the rosy package pointing to the girl’s lap where there lays a barely decipherable pocket; the wooden gargoyle lasciviously pointing his tongue; and the ribbon artfully fallen into a heart shape on the floor. 

To me, The Shop Girl is reminiscent of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergere (1882). In both, a black clad server with something to offer locks eyes with the viewer. Each contains a disconcerting back view of another in black: in Tissot’s, an identically-dressed assistant; in Manet’s, a skewed reflection. These strange dopplegangers may be alluding to the fact that even though these working girls give the illusion that they are of the same class as the men they are serving, in reality, they are removed from it. Here the similarity with Manet’s Impressionistic style ends as Tissot’s small, mannered brush strokes realistically portray the shop girl’s face and the shop’s interior. Although completed at the height of Impressionism, Tissot’s work does not reflect the style of the day.

Copyright Hazel Smith, 2011

Proviso -FAH 245 should probably not copy this.

Sunday in the Olympic Park with Neville

Neville Gabie, artist in residence at London's Olympic Park has paid tribute to the construction workers at the 2012 Games site by interpreting French post-impressionist Georges Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres in his own way.

Landscapers, engineers, designers and security staff inhabit the photograph recreating the 1884 painting.

From what little I know of Seurat, he was enamoured with France's industrial age. He makes an effort to include the factories and their bellowing smoke stacks in the background when he could just as easily glossed over them. I'm guessing Georges would be tickled with this "post-industrial" take on his "Bathers".

(ODA via Getty Image)

Every Kitchen Needs One

And I'll take two. Not in my wildest dreams unfortunately. But any of these posters would trump the somber Schiele reproduction we bought for our kitchen. Four hundred food- and wine-related vintage posters will go under the hammer in New York on February 12. Hosting this sale is  Poster Auctions International and it should be a smorgasbord of food and drink advertising. The culinary arts will be celebrated through posters from the eras of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Modern design. 

150 years of gastronomy will be covered in these original advertisements for wine, beer, liqueur and chocolate plus a myriad of other household staples. Some of these iconic images include those designed by Cappiello, Nizzoli’s Campari poster, menu designs by Alphonse Mucha, and a unique image by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for a celebratory banquet. Wonder how much that will go for?

This show will be on view, free to the public beginning Friday, January 27 through Saturday, February 11. For those of us not lucky enough to live in NYC the 160-page catalogue ($40) is available at www.posterauctions.com.  

Vintage posters can also be purchased through the auction' parent site, The International Poster Center. Prices range from the low thousands to the many thousands. Trial proofs of Toulouse-Lautrecs iconic posters are offered in the $30,000 range

Although without a website in this day and age, Alternative Arts at 491 Bloor Street West in Toronto have catalogues upon catalogues of reproductions of this stuff. I'm guessing the end result would be cheaper. Just guessing. Another website for vintage art posters is vintagearte.artehouse.com and there are thousands to pick from at allposters.ca. 


with thanks to artdaily.com for the images and the original article

The Elephant and the Dove - Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo at the AGO

In the autumn of 2012  the Art Gallery of Ontario will exhibit works by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her on again, off again husband Diego Rivera. Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting will feature works by the two artists, primarily drawn from the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico city. The works to be exhibited will highlight Rivera and Kahlo’s lives, both together and apart, their politics and how their passionate views and activism influenced their work. The exhibition will be at the AGO from Oct. 20, 2012 through Jan. 20, 2013. Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting is presented in collaboration with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, which will display the exhibition in February 2013. 

Photo by Carl van Vechten via Wikipedia

 Frida Kahlo is a fascinating woman who should never be dismissed as the lady with the eyebrows who painted only portraits of herself. Her paintings were described by the Surrealist André Breton as “a ribbon around a bomb,” She was called a Surrealist by some, but she resisted the label and claimed she painted her reality, not her dreams. Rivera's and Kahlo's work show their support for the Communist movement, as well as the concept of Mexicanidad, an identification with Mexico’s indigenous roots.

Frida's relationship with the muralist Diego Rivera was a tempestuous one. They married in 1929. They divorced in November 1939 only to remarry in November of 1940. It seemed to be a case of "can't live with him, can't live without him". Early in their relationship they had a double studio/house built in San Angel; separate living quarters joined by a bridge. Rivera, despite his 300 pounds, was catnip for the ladies. Frida had many affairs with both men and women including Leon Trotsky, sculptor Isamu Noguchi and Jaqueline Lamba, the wife of André Breton. Many photos of Diego and Frida can be viewed on the PBS site.

riveraexperts.com

Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida Kahlo is an excellent read. Adapted from Herrera's book was the equally-excellent 2002 biographical film Frida. The movie was directed by Julie Taymor, currently avoiding brickbats for the Spiderman play. The movie is up there on my list of top 20 films and it's worth seeing.

Can't wait for October.

Hey, I Could Do That or Lemieux Breaks Record for Canadian Art

1910 Remembered (1962) depicts artist Jean Paul Lemieux as a child, standing between his parents who were soon to separate. Looking out from the canvas between his two stern, statue-like parents, Lemieux seems both hopeful and sad. The light on the parents seems cloudy, unclear, perhaps reflecting their mood at the time. I'm joking when I said I could do that, but they do looking amazingly simple, don't they.  Here are a few more examples of Lemieux. I love this one called Summer. Unfortunately the only repro I could find was on a postage stamp. I would definitely give this one house room.

Julie et l'Universe

The Evening Visitor

Lemieux (1904-1990) was a master of placing his subjects on the canvas. His stark horizons and his fields of snow or grass recreate a feeling of immensity I remember as a small child. Lemieux's work came from his imagination. He painted indoors without live models. To me his people are just another element of shape and colour. Although they do have such sweet faces.

I should be working on my other art paper today but my brother distracted me with the news that Nineteen Ten Remembered sold for $2.34 million, breaking a record for post-war,contemporary Canadian art sold at auction. Here are some details, pre-sale. Heffel.com has a listing of some of the other prices realized

Jean Paul Lemieux's northern views are an easy sell 

By John Pohl, Montreal Gazette Visual Arts critic
 
November 18, 2011< MONTREAL - The auction sale last spring of a Jean Paul Lemieux painting, Les Moniales, for $1.02 million has brought a number of the artist's works off the walls of collectors' homes and onto the market. One of them is Nineteen Ten Remembered, a painting well known through reproductions. It shows the artist as a boy with his soon-to-be-split-up parents, who are placed on either edge of the painting. The scene is set in the cold, barren northern landscape, overhung with the grey sky that Lemieux made his own.

This painting and eight others by Lemieux will be sold by Heffel Fine Art Auction House in Toronto on Thursday. The estimated selling price of Nineteen Ten Remembered has not been divulged, but it is likely to be more than $1 million, meaning the only way it will ever find an honoured place in a public museum in Canada is if the buyer donates it.

As popular as Lemieux's paintings of landscapes and figures are in Quebec, it may be fitting for one of his greatest works to find a home outside Quebec, or even Canada. For Lemieux shunned his reputation for being a Québécois painter par excellence, as art historian François-Marc Gagnon pointed out in an interview and in a short essay he wrote for the Heffel catalogue. Lemieux wanted to be known as a painter of the "north," not as a painter of a certain locale, and was exhilarated by the recognition he won in Moscow and Prague when his paintings were exhibited there in 1974. It proved to Lemieux that his art was universal, Gagnon said.

At home, Lemieux was at odds with his contemporaries, the Automatistes. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts collected the abstract paintings of the Automatistes, and the Musée nationale des beaux-arts du Québec collected Lemieux. Gagnon suggested that the museum in Quebec City or the National Gallery in Ottawa would be a more likely home for Nineteen Ten Remembered, should it ever make its way to a public institution.

But, of course, anyone willing to spend more than $1 million on a painting should be able to enjoy it in the privacy of his or her home, sitting on a sofa, as Gagnon said, "with tears in their eyes.
 

Riopelle Grande fête

Lemieux gave Nineteen Ten Remembered to his daughters, who sold it to a member of the Archambault family, who sold it to the neighbour who has consigned it to the auction. That collector is also putting a Riopelle on the market with an estimated value of $900,000 to $1.2 million.  Grande fête is an abstract made of strokes of red-brown, blue and yellow organized by black and white lines. Riopelle painted it in 1952, when his reputation in Paris was beginning to take off, Gagnon wrote. Grande fête is one of six Riopelles in the auction.

More than 25 well-known Quebec artists are represented in the auction, accounting for almost half the 179 paintings. One group of 16 paintings came out of a bank vault in Old Montreal, the property of François Dupré, who owned Montreal's Ritz-Carlton Hotel until his death in 1966. Dupré collected works by Canadian Impressionists and displayed them in the hotel; they went into storage in 1987. David Heffel, president of the auction house, said a family member contacted Heffel about the paintings. "It was a great surprise," he said. "It was a nice call to get from Europe."

The Dupré collection includes paintings by Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, Cornelius Krieghoff, Maurice Cullen, Clarence Gagnon, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté and James Wilson Morrice, whose Régates à Saint-Malo from 1904-05 is expected to fetch $200,000 to $300,000.Heffel said the estimates are conservative. The average sale price has been twice the low estimate, he said. The paintings were on display at Galerie Heffel on Sherbrooke St. last week. To see them now, in reproduction, go to heffel.com

Work - I Could Watch It All Day Long

And so could essayist Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle promoted the nobleness of work in his 1843 essay Past and Present. Ever the critic, Carlyle can be seen sneering in the bottom right of Ford Madox Brown's Work, but I think he would have liked the result.

Madox Brown started Work in 1852 and finished it in 1863. It was the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic. Those in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, despite their radical thinking in artistic matters, wanted to be seen as hardworking members of the middle-class, not bohemian layabouts. To Madox Brown, the navvies at the centre of the painting were the heroes of the time. At the top of the painting on horseback is a Member of Parliament. His work is deemed irrelevant compared to that of the Hampstead ditch diggers. He and his wife are relegated to the shadows.

This painting reminds me very much of one of the singing and dancing tableaux from the film Oliver!  There is a hierarchy to the placement of people in Madox Brown's painting. The rich are at the top, the workers front and centre, women to the left. Carlyle and his colleague Rev. F.D. Maurice, the founder of the Working Man's College, represent the intellectuals. On the shady bank on the right, the unemployed sleep and picnic under a tree. To a modern eye, the people wearing sandwich boards in the far distance could represent strikers. There even seems to be a pecking order between the dogs in the foreground. The terrier with the the rope leash, a real ratter, seems to be ready to give the sweatered whippet "the what for".

There's an urchin in the foreground who looks no more than 12. She's wearing her mother's hand-me-down dress. She's not with the women on the left. She knows her place one day will be with someone like the labourers highlighted in the painting. She's perhaps getting a head start on her flirting.

The women on the left depict "women's work". The lady in the violet bonnet is distributing temperance brochures much to the chagrin of the man in the hole who's just had a leaflet drift by his face and the thirsty worker polishing off a pint.

The woman with the parasol manages to avoid work. And the flower seller at the front of the procession, well she's another piece of 'work'. Upon a closer look she is a he and the shifty eyes reveal that he has shirked the labour that Madox Brown idealizes. He is the antithesis of the hardworking navvies.

Ohh! Rococo!

 

Even the cherubs look dismayed.

Baron de St. Julien asked Fragonard to depict him in the foreground of his 1766 painting, where he could "see the legs of this charming girl, and more, if you want to enliven your picture still further." The Baron was the Receiver General of the French Clergy; a tax collector. He is seen in the shrubbery by the rake, whereas his mistress's clueless husband, plays the cuckold, swinging his wife ever higher.

Fragonard's The Swing stands for the values of the time. Infidelity was a privilege of the 18th century French aristocracy. This promiscuity stood  for how courtly life was perceived. The idle rich running about sexually rampant seemed decadent. And it was corrupt, decadent and decaying. Rococo style would soon be replaced by the more moralizing Neoclassicism. Shimmering boudoirs gave way to solidity. Rococo curlicues smoothed into bold flat planes of colour.

The rising middle class in France preferred Neoclassicism and the moral enlightenment it was pointing toward. In a generation many of Rococo's patrons would have a date with Madame Guillotine.

Napoleon

Napoleon crops up a lot in my Art History and Paris Salon classes. The 19th-century French exalted him and then seemed cringingly embarrassed by him. Hindsight is 20/20. Byron seemed to prefer that Napoleon just fall on his sword, so distraught was he that Napoleon had been defeated and sent into exile. Despite the death of millions of Europeans after 17 years of war, Napoleon manages to remain a cultural icon. Many towns, streets and ships, even a pastry are named after Napoleon and his victories. Napoleon was just under 5 ft 7. (1.686m) Nelson was known to be 5 ft 6 and regarded as average in height. Heck, the average Frenchmen today is just 5'8". What gives?

Years ago, back in the days when I used to have fun, I was at a meeting of the Ontario Archaeological Society. The speaker was promoting the idea that Napoleon had been poisoned by arsenic which was evidenced, apparently, in his hair. So I was able to  hold a ziploc bag of Napoleon's reddish-brown hair in my hands. Talk about six-degrees of separation.

Note the differences in the pictures below. 

Napoleon Crossing the Alps J.L David, 1800.

Bonaparte Crossing the Alps, Delaroche, 1850

Napoleon on His Imperial Throne, Ingres 1806

Napoleon on His Imperial Throne, OOOPS,  
Napoleon at Fontainebleau, Delaroche, 1840

Here's one I couldn't resist. He must be Napoleon Bone-Apart.

corgiaddict.com

and

frenchpastrychef.com

There's a very enjoyable 2001 film called The Emperor's New Clothes starring Ian Holm as Napoleon. During Napoleon's exile on St. Helena, loyalists hire a doppelganger to swap places with him. While the imposter lives in luxury on the island, the real Napoleon returns to Paris in order to retake the throne. During Napoleon's journey back to France, the imposter dies. When Napoleon, Ian Holm, sets foot on French soil France is in mourning for him but he can't make anybody believe he is the real Napoleon. Antics ensue. Napoleon lodges with a widowed pumpkin seller and shows her little boy magic lantern slides of his exploits. I recommend this film if you have the chance.

Tempus Fugit

I can't believe it's been a more than a year. Before winter falls, here are some more pictures of Giverny.

Jacques-Louis David, The Tennis Court Oath [1791]

(Close to 6,000 hits on this post. I'm the must be the go-to-girl on The Tennis Court Oath.)

This pen and ink sketch by David was a precursor to a large scale painting that was left unfinished. It was to be painted on the basis of subscription and not enough subscriptions were sold to finish the work.

This is one of the most famous works of the French Revolution. A group forming an early sort of  representative government had been locked out of France's General Assembly. On June 20th, 1789, this group, dubbed the National Assembly, found their chamber door locked. They congregated at the nearby tennis court at Versailles and made an oath not to disband until the constitution of the France was settled. The oath signified the first time that French citizens formally stood in oppostion to Louis XVI.

The winds of change are blowing throw the window on the left. In the background and ominous bolt of lightning hits Versailles.

This fervid event may have been an overreaction as it was found that the doors to the Salle des Etats were closed because the King was still in mourning over the death of the Dauphin two weeks earlier. Hmmm. Riiight.... The Tennis Court Oath definitely greased the wheels on the road to the French Revolution.

The Oath was signed by 576 out of 577 members. In the bottom right of David's sketch one can see the lone dissenter, Joseph Martin-Dauch with his arms crossed and his head bowed.

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii [1774]

Another attempt to get names and dates firmly entrenched before my mid-term. I'm starting to dislike this uber-masculine painting; too much like Charleton Heston. 

Jacques-Louis David's The Oath of the Horatii is regarded as a paradigm of neoclassical art. The details are much sparser than those of Rococo painting and it is as if we have been transported back to 7th century Rome.

At the urging of their father, stoic sons swear an oath on their swords to defend their city at the cost of their own lives. David is beginning to depict political desires leading to the French Revolution and reaches back into classical history for a theme to represent a new ideal of politics; in this case, a scene from a Roman legend where sons from one of two warring cities agree to end the dispute by fighting the other.

The canvas is divided between men and women. The limp wives and children of the Horatii are on the right of the canvas. They are distraught, disbelieving. Their posture reveals them to be private, sentimental, maybe even hysterical. A boy is being cradled by his mother. Maybe she is trying to plug his ears against what the men are pledging. The boy, however, is interested; making eye contact with the men who make the oath.The men are erect, the women meltingly weak.

David's world would have been peopled by men. His friends, pupils and teachers were all male. He married late. To him, women were excluded from the virtues of bravery. Considering David was a big proponent for social change, his idea of woman was somewhat backward.

Jacques-Louis David, Belisarius Receiving Alms [1781]

While I don't like Neo-Classicism at all, "small R" republicans ate this stuff up in Revolutionary France.

Here is Jacques-Louis David in full Neo-Classicism. The people of late 18th century France loved Neo-Classicism. Through coded allegories these paintings were an attack on the French Monarchy.  Here Belisaurius, a victorious Byzantine general, is depicted by David. Belisaurius was falsely accused of treason and was blinded by Emperor Justinian. Belisaurius fell from grace, was banished and reduced to begging. David uses an ancient or antique visual style in order to summon up Greek or Roman heroic themes. In the painting he is recognized by one of his former soldiers who is shocked to see him in such a position. The woman embodies mercy.

Around 1781  a similar scenario happened to a count who had a dispute with the monarchy. I've forgotten the Compte's name but instead of being blinded and banished he was executed. People of the day would have known exactly was David was trying to say in his painting. David was a radical Jacobin and a member of the Committee of Public Safety, another way of saying he was a republican. He voted for the death of King Louis XVI which caused his monarchist wife to divorce him.

François Boucher, The Chinese Fishing Party [1742]

Boucher's painting, The Chinese Fishing Party, represents the exotic East and the luxury objects that were associated with it. In the 18th century Chinese silk, porcelain, spices and tea were objects of desire. They were an indication of one's social standing. 

François Boucher had a limited, superficial knowledge of Chinese culture. He has applied his ideals of Chinese iconography to a pre-existing mode of painting. 

Across the Road from Jack the Ripper?

My family of Smiths is pretty messed up. My father was orphaned 2 days before Christmas 1936 and none of the multitude of available aunts and uncles took him in. He and his brother Ivan were sent to live in a "Children's Home", an orphanage, while his sisters were raised by their dead father's boss.

Back a further generation and my grandmother was shuffled off to be raised by her aunts while her birth mother and father went on to have more children. The 1901 English Census indicates that she was "deaf". I can only guess this is the reason they didn't keep her.

Not my Great-Grandfarther, but close - his brother Cecil

So my Dad grew up - and I grew up - knowing very little about his side of the family. Over the years I've dug about in Ancestry.com, following rumours and leads and confirming some of them. Smiths marrying Smiths, for example, a widowed daughter-in-law marrying her new step-father-in-law's unmarried son. The mind boggles. I did find out a couple of indisputable facts. My great-grandfather, Walter Alfred Thomas Penny Smith was a London bobby. In 1901 Constable Walter Smith lived at 55 Broadhurst Gardens in London's district of South Hampstead. I don't know how long he lived there, I just know from the 1901 Census that that's where he and his wife and one of my great-uncles lived.

The infamous artist Walter Sickert, prime suspect for the Jack the Ripper murders, once lived across the road at number 54 Broadhurst Gardens with his wife.  From this article it looks as if he and his wife remained at 54 Broadhurst Gardens until they divorced in 1899 and he moved to Dieppe. My great-grandfather may have moved into Broadhurst Gardens after the Sickerts had moved away from the street, but boy oh boy, what a coup that would have been. I wish I could definitively prove that my ancestor, Walter Smith,  twitched the curtains when Sickert walked by.

55 Broadhurst Gardens, found on Picasa, photographer unknown.

Whether Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper or not, I don't know. I know that he did have a penchant, easily found on Google, for painting of bosomy nudes sprawled uncomfortably on iron-frame beds.You're free to make up you own mind.