Master Crewe as Henry VIII
A recent rabbit hole in the peculiar world of “Cute Studies” led me to this unlikely and delightful eighteenth century painting by Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792),[1] which was inspired by Hans Holbein’s sixteenth century portrait of Henry VIII.
I was temped to share the two images with no commentary, but one rabbit hole led to another.
Reynolds painted Master John Crewe, three-year-old son of a British politician named John, 1st Baron Crewe , in the costume his parents had ordered made for him to wear to a children’s costume party.[2] Copies of Holbein’s portrait were widely available at the time. The tailor faithfully reproduced the details in Holbein’s painting, right down to the Order of the Garter on the king’s leg. Master Crewe faithfully reproduced the king’s stance.
The work was displayed in the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition of 1776[3], where it was an enormous success. Writer and connoisseur Horace Walpole, who was eighteenth century England’s equivalent of an influencer, praised the way Reynolds had taken “the swaggering and colossal haughtiness” of Holbein’s original and created the “boyish jollity of Master Crewe.”
Master Crewe grew up to become a soldier and took part in Lord Macartney’s embassy to China[4] in 1793. He succeeded his father as Baron Crew, though he was estranged from his family for reasons that my rabbit-holing did not reveal.
[1] For those of you who are unfamiliar with art history, Joshua Reynolds was one of the most important portrait painters of the eighteenth century.
[2] And I thought my neighbors created some elaborate Halloween costumes for their children!
[3] Not quite as big a deal as the annual Paris Salon, but still a big deal in the world of British art.
[4] A story for another time
From the Archives: The Swans of Harlem
As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been fascinated by ballet and its history for most of my life. So when I began to see notices for a book about the forgotten Black ballerinas who danced for the Dance Theatre of Harlem I was eager to get my hands on it. It lived up to my hopes.
Karen Valby’s The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood and the Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History is more than simple dance history. As its subtitle openly declares, it about how Black women’s stories are doubly erased from history and about the efforts of a group of women “to write themselves back into history.”
The Swans of Harlem begins in 2015, when Misty Copeland became the first Black woman to be promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. Stories about her undoubted accomplishment ignored those of Black ballerinas before her. Five of those women formed the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council, named after the home of the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) where they danced fifty years before Copeland. Their goal was to bring their story back to light; they succeeded with the help of Karen Valby. The extent to which the book is a collaboration between dancers and author is demonstrated by the fact that there are two acknowledgement pages, one for Valby and one for the Swans.
It would have been easy to tell the history of DTH as the creation of one heroic (male) figure, its founder Arthur Mitchell, who was determined to make art in general and ballet in particular accessible to black children—an impulse born from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. And, indeed, Mitchell strides across the pages of the book just as he strode through the lives of the dancers who worked for him—brilliant, beautiful, imperious, obsessed, generous, difficult, and angry. But he is the background against which Valby shares the stories of five important dancers, the paths they took to DTH, their experiences as dancers, their lives after DTH, and the legacies they have created. Their names: Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton.
The Swans of Harlem is alternatively instructive, heartbreaking, and inspiring. It demonstrates how easily groups of women and people of color are removed from history in favor of stories of individual exceptionalism. Not just for ballet fans. Honest.
Cecilia Beaux, Portrait Painter
Cecilia Beaux. Self-portrait. 1924
During her lifetime, Cecelia Beaux (1855-1942) was well-known in the social circles who had their portraits painted. She was often compared to John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), whose career overlapped with Beaux’s— both for her style and for her place as one of the leading society portrait painters of her day.[1] Both blended academic realism with impressionism to create works that combined technical mastery with psychological depth. Today Sargent is an art history rock star; Beaux is obscure at best.[2]
Beaux was born and raised in Philadelphia, which was a center of art education in the United States. At the age of sixteen, she took her first formal art lessons with Catherine Ann Drinker, who was a successful artist in her own right. Starting in 1875, she studied for three years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts,[3]
Over the next few years, Beaux found various ways of making a living as an artist. She was an art instructor at a girl’s school. She gave private lessons. She worked as a scientific illustrator, creating drawings of fossils for a multi-volume volume report by the U.S. Geological Survey under the auspices of scientist Edward Drinker Cope[4], but she found that the patience and accuracy required to do such work gave her a pain in her “solar plexus.”[5] She even worked for a time at painting porcelain, an accepted way for middle class women to make a living. She later described that period as “the lowest depth I ever reached in commercial art…I remember it with gloom and record it with shame.”
In 1884, Beaux set out to proved herself as a serious artist. She entered a large painting of her sister and infant nephew, titled Les Derniers Jours d’Enfance in the Pennsylvania Academy’s annual exhibition. It won the prize for the best painting by a female artist. [Sigh] Her days of painting porcelain were over. Over the next three years, she received more than 50 commissions from notable Philadelphians, earning fees equal to those charged by Thomas Eakins, a founder of the Ashcan School and an acclaimed portraitist , who was then an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Equally important, at the urging of a friend, she sent Les Derniers to Paris, where it appeared in the Paris Salon of 1887, a professional turning point for any American painter of the period.[6]
Despite her success in Philadelphia, Beaux decided she needed more advanced training. In 1888, like hundreds of other American artists at the time, she went to Paris to study.[7] She studied for two years at the Académie Julian, a famous private art school that was established as an alternative to the official École des Beaux-Arts, which did not admit women as students at the time.[8] When the academy closed for the summer, she went to a seaside town in Brittany, where she experimented with the en plein air techniques developed by the Impressionists.
When Beaux returned in the United States, her portraits were even more highly sought after.. She became the first woman faculty member at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she taught portrait painting and drawing for twenty years. Her works appeared in important exhibitions, including the Women’s Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She had solo exhibitions at major galleries. A group of her paintings appeared at the Paris Salon in 1896.
By 1900, the demand for Beaux’s paintings had spread beyond Philadelphia, inspiring her to spend winters in New York and summers in a home and studio that she built in Gloucester, Massachusetts. During this period she painted portraits of successful professional women and social elites, including First Lady Edith Roosevelt.
At the end of World War I, Beaux traveled to Europe as an official portrait painter for the United States War Portraits Commission. Her assignment was to paint portraits of three European war heroes: Cardinal Mercier of Belgium, Admiral Sir David Beatty of Great Britain, and Georges Clemenceau of France. (She had to paint her portrait of Clemenceau from a single sketch. The premier hated having his portrait painted and only gave her one sitting.)
In 1924, the Uffizi gallery in Florence invited her to contribute a self-portrait for the Medici collection. That same year she broke her hip while walking in Paris. Although she continued to paint, the injury meant she was less prolific.
By the time she died in 1942 at the age of 87, the achievements of her long and fertile career were almost forgotten.
[1] At one exhibition, art connoisseur Bernard Berenson joked that her paintings were the best Sargents in the room.
[2] I find it hard to describe a painter as forgotten who has work hanging in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
[3] An institution that has been popping up in my reading a lot lately. Founded in 1805, it was the first art school in the United States.
[4] Best known as one of the protagonist in the fossil hunting competition known as the Bone Wars, a story for another day.
[5] I can sympathize. I feel the same way about interviewing people. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean it’s the right job for you.
[6]Art historian Lois Marie Fink, writing about the Salons, described the exhibitions as the equivalent of the Oscars for artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
[7] According to the American Register, a paper for and about American expatriates in Paris, there were more than 800 women art students in Paris that year.
[8] Just because Julian admitted women as students didn’t mean they got the same education as their male counterparts. They paid double the tuition, but worked in segregated studios so that they weren’t exposed to male nudes in figures study classes. And since they were in separate studios, they received less instruction than their male peers. Proving once again that separate is seldom equal.
Beaux recognized the inequities and wrote home “I want these men…to know me and recognize that I can do something.”