What Pinterest Can Do, or, Asher Durand

On December 22, 2012 By kittycalashIn History, Museums2 Comments

At the Brandywine River Museum, I saw an Asher B. Durand landscape and said, “I haven’t thought about Asher Durand in a long time.” My mother, ever the realist, muttered just-loud-enough, “Well, why would you?!” She studied art history for real, me, I only went to art school. It’s a wonder I can even feed myself.

Getting my stimulating-image fix last night on Pinterest: lo and behold, Asher B. Durand! Buddy! Good to see you! Even better, the side of Asher Durand you never get in those American Art History classes taught by a disheartened adjunct on a three-year contract trying to beat Manifest Destiny into you.

If you’re like me, Asher Durand’s the original Jersey Boy member of the Hudson River School, all Thanatopsis and metaphors, machine-in-the-garden, acolyte of Thomas Cole. But it’s better than that–he’s also Mr. Awesome Portrait.

Thanks to Cassidy, Mrs. Winfield Scott gazed calmly from the screen last night, lovely in her golden silk gown with fine silk over sleeves not even as heavy as butterfly wings. Lovely Mrs. Scott, against a backdrop of a…finely painted river scene, highly detailed and with a looming cloud… That painter guy seems to know what he’s doing, why, Asher B. Durand, you scamp! You worked landscape magic into the background of that money-making, pay-the-bills portrait.

Cows won’t pay for portraits of themselves, so the history and landscape painters of the past generally had to shill the portraits (G.C. Bingham did it, but without Asher B’s grace). Lucky for us, they were good at people, too, though I think you can tell their first love is landscape.

Art History Secrets Revealed: I have a friend who paints rocks in streams (and other things), but Ken’s paintings of rocks are incredibly beautiful. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which is home to…did you guess? Asher B. Durand’s painting of rocks in a stream.

So while Pinterest can be home to horrors (go see for yourself, I’m not looking), it can lead you to places you didn’t expect to go, or back to things you’d forgotten about, like Asher B. Durand. He was useful to know about when I worked in the Midwest, photo editing a history journal. I’m glad I’ve met him again.

Caps and Randomness

On December 20, 2012December 20, 2012 By kittycalashIn Clothing, History, Museums

Sweet cap, right? It all started because it’s cold this morning here in RI and I thought about skating when I went out to get the Times, and that led to Gilbert Stuart, which led to the National Gallery.

They have a fun search option, similar to the Tate Britain’s subject-search, but not quite as elegant.
You can start with a subject search, and then add a sub category. Results (stability not guaranteed) show you things you would not have otherwise expected, and that’s one more reason to love online catalogs & databases.

The results give you little unexpected galleries, and the juxtaposition or similarities of the thumbnails help you see the work differently. Black dresses and white collars are prevalent on this page: why? Is this fashion alone, or are these mourning garments? they’re earlier than the Civil War, but maybe it’s time to re-read This Republic of Suffering.

But wait–who is this? It’s Probably Sarah Cook Arnold, Knitting. (Probably is not her name, smartypants, it’s an adverb.)

She’s knitting in the round, by the way, on three incredibly tiny pins from an invisible ball of yarn, possibly swallowed by the cat hidden in her skirts. (I know a woman who can knit with these skinny quadruple-ought pins, but they are a hazard in my hands.)

I would not have found Sarah Cook Arnold knitting without using the random subject search, nor would I have found Fabulous Cap at the top. Sometimes you need to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.

Smibert Smitten

On December 19, 2012December 19, 2012 By kittycalashIn History, Museums5 Comments

John Smibert made me laugh. He’s been dead since 1751, so it wasn’t easy.

The day I went to the MFA and walked into the gallery with Mrs Tyng on wall, I laughed, and said, “I know her!” while my son died a small interior death. Then I pulled up the record and image for Mrs Browne, and showed him how I knew Mrs Tyng.

Follow Smibert’s pictorial advice if you’re reenacting an American woman of means between 1729 and 1732, and you’re wearing blue silk. You may have a red silk wrapper/shawl. Your shift will show at the center front and sleeves to show off your fine linen. You look like you might be a little cold, but perhaps that explains the “I store oranges in my bodice” look.

See for yourself:

After a while, you start to wonder if there was only one woman in the colonies in 1730… And then you wonder how she got into every painting…

I know, style and conventions helped create these portraits as much as Smibert’s skill. And the portraits only get weird when you do the thing that was never supposed to happen. We were never meant to see all of these portraits all together, all at once, anywhere.

So, what’s she wearing? Probably this dress. No, not this exact dress, though if it was same woman in all those paintings, maybe the Met does have her actual dress. (Sometimes I have these weird museum-y ideas, and that’s generally when I need a vacation or come up with a new program idea.)

The robe volante shows up in paintings of women dressing, and in informal scenes, as below. She’s clearly wearing stays, which is helpful to know, because while I knew the women in the Smibert paintings ought to be wearing stays, and they had conical torsos, the orange-smuggling look was confusing.

Galerie Dreyfus- Scène galante dans un parc, ca 1725

In fact, it confuses me still.

Seriously, the 18th century was a pretty sexy place, if you like oranges and silk.

Look, there’s Mrs Tyng again! She’s left the MFA and taken a chair at Yale.

Linings, perhaps not Silver

On December 17, 2012 By kittycalashIn Clothing, History, Museums1 Comment

MMA, 2011.104a–c, Silk & linen suit, 1780-1790

The house is cleaned up for Christmas, which means all the sewing things have been put away, which is rather sad. Cassandra is banished to the basement, fabric stashed and stacked. It’s only ten days: better if I don’t count all that lost time when I could be pleating! Better to finish up some portable plain sewing, like shift and shirt.

On Friday, I spent part of the morning in the Cave of Wonders known as Textile Storage with a historical costume expert who specializes in men’s clothing. He had already promised to leave and sworn not move in before I opened the door, and that was probably a good thing. But I got a chance to ask some questions and here are the answers.

The frock coat tail linings of calendered linen: Nancy wanted to know if they didn’t stick to men’s breeches, linen catching on broadcloth, in the plainer suits. No, my source says, because the linings were slick. That was the point of the glazing. When it was new and fresh, it was much slicker than it is now. After 220+ years, slickness will fade. Calendered fabric has been pressed and heated, and that process makes it slick. If you’ve ever pressed a wool dress with too hot an iron, you might have achieved a glossy, slick finish that you weren’t expecting. Calendering is similar, but on purpose.

And then there’s padding. Sabine made an amazingly beautiful jacket based on an original. The lining is really interesting, because it is padded. Well, that padding is about style. In the plate at left, the shoulder line of the jacket is high, and the collar rises up as well. The chest is rounded, as we can see along the side. The way to achieve that look is through tailoring, including the use of padding.

The militia jackets in the collection at work include one with some pretty intense (several inches thick) padding in the front. That was for line, not repelling bullets, or even so much for warmth. The padding we find in men’s and women’s tailored clothes is about style, and maintaining a line. You’ll see this often in women’s riding habits or “Amazones.”

On pages 160-161 of Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail, there are two examples of padding used to shape garments. The first is a riding habit, seen here in detail and in overview. (Click for the record & larger views.) The padding here has been used to create the smooth, conical silhouette.

Kirsten Hammerstrom

Tag: Research

What Pinterest Can Do, or, Asher Durand

Caps and Randomness

Smibert Smitten

Linings, perhaps not Silver