Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
THE death of Henry Moore has prompted innumerable tributes to his special qualities as a man. We have read of his abilities as a winning ambassador for modern sculpture through the honesty and directness of his responses, and glimpsed examples of his generosity not only with his own work but also in his encouragement of younger artists. Throughout the spectacular rise of his international reputation, following the success of his exhibition at the 1948 Venice Biennale, Moore remained unaffected and modest, sturdily aloof from the pressures of world-wide celebrity. With Picasso and Dali he became one of the most famous living artists, but one whose own work was more visible than theirs, through the conspicuous placing of his sculptures on terraces and hillsides, in corporate plazas and the busy forecourts of skyscraping offices. Nearly fifty of his works can be seen out of doors in Britain alone, from the twelve-inch limestone head-stops on Much Hadham Parish Church to the massive Sheep piece bronze unexpectedly situated in the grounds of a Somerset shoe factory.
IT has long been established that Blake's designs are full of borrowings from earlier art and that traces can be found in particular of the influence of the Italian renaissance and classical antiquity. In his extensive and unveiled use of such sources Blake is at one with contemporary history painters like James Barry and Henry Fuseli, whom Blake saw as fellow-martyrs in the struggle against the domination of Reynolds. Yet it is equally clear that he had hopes of reaching an audience beyond those with the cultural background to understand the Elevated Style. Reynolds had conceived of history-painting as restricted to the classically educated, to whom 'the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history ... [were by] early education and the usual course of reading, . .. made familiar and interesting. Blake on the other hand persistently claimed that all men could find the path to redemption through his art and was 'happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions, & Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped'.
THIS article brings together for analysis as far as possible all the extant documentary evidence concerning the lives and work of Gerard Horenbout or Hornebolt and his son and daughter Lucas and Susanna, a family of artists of Netherlandish origin, all of whom were at some time in the second quarter of the sixteenth century resident in England. Susanna in particular has received little attention, and the references to her are more numerous and substantial than has hitherto been realised, while the references in Netherlandish documents to Gerard's work have not before been brought together with those referring to his career in England. The full text of a neglected document which appears to describe several works by Lucas Horenbout is published in the Appendix; one of these works, it is here argued, may be linked with a woodcut design (Fig. 15) previously associated with Hans Holbein the Younger.
THAT there are a great many English portraits which defy attribution is evident from country house collections and routine sales of British pictures. Equally, documentary sources disclose the names of not a few painters to whom nothing can be ascribed. Identifying the authorship of English portraits, especially those by secondary or obviously provincial hands, can often be frustrated by the apparently complete disappearance of any record of an artist's existence or of any work to which a name can be attached. It may, therefore, be of some significance when one such painter emerges from virtually total obscurity, however elusively. A portrait painter, active around the middle years of the seventeenth century towards the end of the Commonwealth period and about the time of the Restoration, whose work is signed 'W. Baylis', affords an example of the kind of 'rediscovery' that occasionally occurs. From the style of three portraits certainly by the artist which are reproduced here, it is possible to establish the personality of a modestly accomplished painter whose manner seems to have been formed on the fashionable example set by Robert Walker in the 1650s, while from the identities of the sitters (together with that of a fourth picture known to exist but which cannot at present be traced) some idea of the patrons for whom Baylis seems to have worked might be deduced.
IN 1698-99 the young 'Hofbaumeister und Ingenieur' at the Electoral Brandenburg-Prussian Court of Berlin, Christian Eltester (1671-1700), made a tour of Holland, England, and France, having been in Italy from 1690 to 1696. He arrived in London from Amsterdam in November 1698. Here, according to the biography, appended to the printed sermon given at his funeral by Philipp Jacob Spener:
IN 1798 a book of architectural plans and elevations of existing and proposed buildings appeared in Leipzig and Paris as Les Plans et Desseins tirés de la Belle Architecture. The publishers were Voss et Compagnie and it contained an introductory essay by the Leipzig classicist and architectural historian Christian Stieglitz. Its authorship has since been given to the latter on the strength of this essay though it was in fact little more than a precis of the first chapter of his Geschichted er Baukunstd er Alten, published in Leipzig in 1796. A more intriguing aspect of the book is the problematic authorship of the various schemes that make up a large part of the work and are signed by the draughtsman and engraver alone. It now seems clear that the anonymous designer was the seventh Earl of Findlater and Seafield, a Scottish peer of dubious reputation, who conducted a ramshackle architectural career from self-imposed exile in Dresden.
