ART CRITICISM PAPER
“The Grafin von Schonfeld with her Daughter” by Elizabeth Louise Vigee-LeBrun
In the University Of Arizona Museum Of Art, the Pfeiffer Gallery is displaying many art pieces of oil on canvas paintings. These paintings are mostly portraits of people, both famous and not. They are painted by a variety of artists of European decent and American decent between the mid 1700’s and the early 1900’s. The painting by Elizabeth Louise Vigee-Lebrun caught my eye and drew me in to look closely at its composition.
“The Grafin von Scholfeld with her Daughter” is oil on canvas art piece painted in 1793. It is a painting of a woman holding her daughter on her lap, the woman being “The Grafin von Schonfeld.” The woman is dressed in clothing that is from the upper class or a royalty stature in the late 1700’s. The clothing looks rich in material and sleek like silk in the colors of wine and a rich green. She has a covering on her head that looks like an extravagant scarf that drapes over her shoulder on one side, also made of the same silky material used for her dress. The woman has pale skin, reddish brown hair, bluish eyes, and rosy cheeks. Her eyes look very real and penetrating when you examine the painting. The daughter is about the age of 5 or 6 years old. Her arms are around her mother’s neck and legs draped across her mother’s lap. The daughter is wearing a white fluid dress that looks thin in material with a red sash around her midsection. The daughter has the same reddish brown hair and rosy cheeks. The mothers and daughters eyes are equally as big in size, while the child’s eyes seem also very real and youthful.
The mother and daughter are sitting on a bench of some sort on a ledge of a window with a portion of the window open. Outside the window there is landscape of mountains, trees, and a stormy sky. The sky is rich with a high value of grays including the whites of the clouds. The technique for creating the landscape out the window, the painter used an atmospheric perspective. The outside is slightly less focused and very fluid compared to the detail used for the mother and daughter.
The colors used in the painting are very vivid yet rich in depth. A combination of high chroma and low chroma gives the picture its dep...
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...oul. Maybe Vigee-LeBrun had this idea when painting and wanted the eyes of the people she painted to show the souls and the life of the people instead focusing on features that were less valuable.
“The Grafin von Schonfeld with her Daughter” is very interesting to look at. It shows history and context of the lives of the 1700’s. The textures of the dresses are beautiful and very alluring to the eye. The porcelain skin of the mother and daughter give the painting innocence and purity, along with the loving nature between the mother and the daughter. This is a very good piece of artwork because it draws you to it with you knowing why. Once looking at the painting you find yourself looking into the eyes of the subject being painted and seeing another life with in the portrait. The eyes can almost be eerie as well as breathtaking at the same time. The painting produces richness and a feeling of royalty that people in the 21st century do not understand but yearn just the same. I was very impressed of the classic style of the painting and my own yearning to have the same richness and “classiness” as the lives that were portrayed in Vigee-LeBrun’s painting.
The double Portrait ( Happy Birthday, Dear Eshter) was created by Abraham Rattner in1974. It’s an oil paint on Masonite and the size of artwork is 29.5 x 28 in. This painting has two figures who are Rattner’s second wife, Eshter and Rattner himself. The scene is Rattner is painting the portrait of Eshter and Rattner, himself is half of the paining. Rattner is stadning foreground. He is holding paint pallet by left hand and he is facing sideway. Eshter is painted in the painting frame, thus she is a kind of slightly background position. This was a part of her birthday gift from Rattner. The year painted for this double portrait was their 25th wedding anniversary after they married in 1949 and he was 81 years old. He painted on Masonite which is made from a mixture of wood fibers that have been broken down and molded into a board using heat, pressure and the natural adhesion
The color palate in Portrait of My Grandmother has low saturations or intensity of color. The values of color or tint is low using shades of grey, white, and brown. For example, the clothes that the grandmo...
The composition of this painting forces the eye to the woman, and specifically to her face. Although the white wedding dress is large and takes up most of the woman’s figure, the white contrasts with her face and dark hair, forcing the viewer to look more closely into the woman’s face. She smokes a cigarette and rests her chin on her hands. She does not appear to be a very young woman and her eyes are cast down and seem sad. In general, her face appears to show a sense of disillusionment with life and specifically with her own life. Although this is apparently her wedding day, she does not seem to be happy.
Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun was one of the most successful painters of her time. Over the course of her life, spanning from 1755-1842, she painted over 900 works. She enjoyed painting self portraits, completing almost 40 throughout her career, in the style of artists she admired such as Peter Paul Rubens (Montfort). However, the majority of her paintings were beautiful, colorful, idealized likenesses of the aristocrats of her time, the most well known of these being the Queen of France Marie Antoinette, whom she painted from 1779-1789. Not only was Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun the Queen’s portrait painter for ten years, but she also became her close, personal friend. She saw only the luxurious, carefree, colorful, and fabulous lifestyle the aristocracy lived in, rather than the poverty and suffrage much of the rest of the country was going through. Elisabeth kept the ideals of the aristocracy she saw through Marie Antoinette throughout her life, painting a picture of them that she believed to be practically perfect. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s relationship with Marie Antoinette affected her social standing, politics, painting style, and career.
Many human beings contain opposite forces within him or herself; an alter ego that hides behind one’s polite facade. In the novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are in fact a single character. It is not until towards the end of the novel that the two personas seem nothing alike. Dr. Jekyll is the well-established, moral, doctor and Mr. Hyde is a nefarious weird looking man whose appearance looks so strange that it is hard to explain. Their relationship involves a complicated dilemma. While it is true dr. Jekyll appears to us as a moral and courteous man, he does not exemplify honor and integrity the way that Hyde exemplifies evil. Although Jekyll engages in in the experiment to attempt to isolate the good
Even though the United States government was already making improvements to the healthcare system, they excluded African Americans from all the progress that they made. Most believed that African Americans brought it upon themselves and that they inherited their sicknesses, and diseases. “Richmond's city officials were also aware that the high death rate of the city's African Americans, usually about twice that of whites, inflated the average for the city as a whole and negatively affected the health of all of Richm ” (Hoffman, 2001, p.177). Officials in Richmond Virginia first started to notice at how bad their death rates were when other states started to comment on it. African Americans made up the majority population in Richmond and even when they brought attention to problems they were excluded from the solutions, and the government was mostly worried about how the state looked overall. Eventually the government did have to step in and help them some. “Only in those programs administered by the Health Department's nurses did Richmond's African Americans receive anything like an equitable share ofthe benefits ofthe city's conversion to modern public health policies and practices, and even practices, and even there, the results were limited ” (Hoffman, 2001, p 188). Africans Americans were helped eventually but at a very limited amount compared to
Though most works of art have some underlying, deeper meaning attached to them, our first impression of their significance comes through our initial visual interpretation. When we first view a painting or a statue or other piece of art, we notice first the visual details – its size, its medium, its color, and its condition, for example – before we begin to ponder its greater significance. Indeed, these visual clues are just as important as any other interpretation or meaning of a work, for they allow us to understand just what that deeper meaning is. The expression on a statue’s face tells us the emotion and message that the artist is trying to convey. Its color, too, can provide clues: darker or lighter colors can play a role in how we judge a piece of art. The type of lines used in a piece can send different messages. A sculpture, for example, may have been carved with hard, rough lines or it may have been carved with smoother, more flowing lines that portray a kind of gentleness.
The painting depicts two figures, the one of a woman and of a man. The dominating central figure is the one of the woman. We see her profile as she looks to the left. Her hands are crossed in a graceful manner. She has blonde hair and her figure is lit by what seems to be natur...
The first artist that I would like to discuss is named Nehemiah Partridge and his painting during the 17th century. Nehemiah Partridge is a painter from the 17th century and he painted colonial art. The painting that I chose is named “Portrait of Catherine Ten Broeck”, and was created in 1719 on oil canvas. The painting is of a young girl holding a rose in her right hand while holding a bird in her left hand. The girl in the painting is very young, and she seems to be very happy being painted. The painting illustrates every-day life in the 1700s. The artist chose very earthy tones for the color scheme, but the light is focused on the young girl. The elements were very calm and peaceful in this painting. In addition, the background of this painting focuses on a young girl named Catherine who was painted by Nehemiah Partridge. The painting has descended by Edward L. Ford from the family’s great-great-great-granddaughter in New York City. This style of painting reflects “reflects Partridge's style of quick, prominent brush strokes with a palette of black, brown, blue, and rust. The sket...
Page, Norman. "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson." Encyclopedia of the Novel. Eds. Paul Schellinger, Christopher Hudson, and Marijke Rijsberman. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998.
“We all have good and bad inside of us. It’s what side we choose to follow that defines who we really are” (J.K. Rowling). This quote closely ties with the theme of good and evil that is present throughout the short story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. In the story, the third-person narration follows Mr. Utterson around on his investigation of Dr. Jekyll’s seemingly uncalled for disappearances and Mr. Hyde’s evil and suspicious antics. Throughout Stevenson’s mystery-thriller short story, I concluded that Dr. Jekyll really did have to seclude himself in order to protect his friends (or face the possibility of one of them getting hurt), he could have ultimately prevented his own death if he had not attempted to create Mr. Hyde (intentionally or unintentionally) in the first place, and Dr. Jekyll would have gone mad with power if the attempt to separate his good and evil sides had succeeded.
The novel ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ was written by Robert Louis Stevenson in the Victorian era, which had a very different culture from today. The book was first published in 1886 in England and it brought success to the author. The Victorians had strict moral codes to live under as middle class people and had to be well respected to be considered as a good person. The character’s reputation emerges throughout the novel as an essential tool to success in the society of the era. Another Victorian value expected of them was to live a life without any sin and to obey the Bible as literalists. However, this only prompted people to keep certain thoughts secluded, behind closed doors instead of eliminating them.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, creates an atmosphere of constant suspense and perplexity. The context of the book promotes an intriguing plot that highlights a man with a struggle between his dual identities, one of these being Dr. Jekyll whose intentions are essentially for good, and the other being Mr. Hyde whom Jekyll is attempting to prevent from overtaking him completely. The exploration of this “dual identity” is truly the main aspect of what Stevenson tries to convey towards his readers. This thriller portrays the uphill battle Jekyll faces as he fights the inherent evil nature of man, the multiplex personality that enslaves him at times, and the uncertainty of the way that he perceives himself all contribute to the rise of Mr. Hyde and his reign of evil.
African Americans are less likely to use healthcare. They tend to not visit the doctor. Their reasoning could be the barriers that were just defined but African Americans tend to wait until it’s too late to do many preventative measures. For example, obese African American patients are less likely to receive counseling about diet and exercise. They would not be able to afford exercise equipment or a gym membership to increase exercise. It is also expensive to buy food especially that is low sodium for a well-balanced meal. Society has made it cheap and easy for fast food stores which is unhealthy for someone watching their salt intake and weight. The biggest barrier of all is medical mistrust. If an African American mistrusts the healthcare than they are more likely not to go to a healthcare provider, they will not be compliant with medication and/or take their medication. Therefore, will only go seek medical attention in an emergency situation. Low literacy can also be a struggle in this community, this can cause distress if they cannot read the instructions or able to truly understand their well-being. The need for health promotion is at a critical high and needs to be
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a scientist, Dr. Jekyll, creates an alter ego using a draught in order to escape the harsh views of society. As Mr. Hyde, he commits heinous crimes against citizens and becomes addicted to the perception of freedom from Victorian laws. Best stated by Norman Kerr about addiction, “there is an inebriety derangement of the mental faculties, so that the consciousness, perception, reasoning, power, and conscience are impaired” (Kerr 138). The character Dr. Jekyll illustrates the condition of addiction in the Victorian era through the motifs of the obsession with appearance and duality.