Del Sarto, Canaletto, Titian
| Date: | 1995
|
| Medium: | Oil on canvas |
| Size inches: | 40 x 32 |
| Size cm: | 101.6 x 81.3
|
| Signature: | Signed and dated lower right |
| |
| Location: | New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut |
New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Gift of the Estate of George Deem, 2013. Accession Number 2013.54.27
Del Sarto, Canaletto, Titian, 1995
Del Sarto, Canaletto, Titian quotes three paintings in the collection of the National Gallery in London. Andreas del Sarto's
Portrait of a Young Man (1517) and Titian's
Portrait of a Man (1512) are mirror images of each other. When I put the two figures back to back in an oil study on paper, I liked the resulting image -- the battle of the sleeves, the eyes following the viewer. But I preferred a vertical composition that would retain the format of a portrait. A third painting in the National Gallery's collection gave me my unifying image:
Venice: Piazza San Marco (after 1756) by Canaletto. I also enjoyed the art-historical pleasantry of moving the Florentine painter Del Sarto to Venice for his meeting with the Venetian master Titian.
The sitter in Titian's
Portrait of a Man rests his arm on a stone ledge, a parapet which defines the picture plane and locates the figure behind it. I have replaced Titian's stone ledge with a wood sill into which I have carved the names of the three painters whose works I have quoted:
Del Sarto Canaletto Titian. (George Deem,
How To Paint A Vermeer: A Painter's History of Art, Thames & Hudson, New York, 2004).
Del Sarto Canaletto Titian ... has started me on a new series of paintings. The first was
The Studio of Jacques Louis David, a big 70 by 58 inch painting with figures from Corot to Degas sitting about in David's studio. The second painting is
The National Gallery, Washington, with figures from paintings in the collection assembled around the fountain in the rotunda of the National Gallery and with a Fantin-Latour still life up front. I am now working on
The Museé D'Orsay, Paris. It too will be a 70 by 58 inch canvas, the same size as the others, a suitable museum-size format. (George Deem, letter to Patricia Williams, November 29, 1996).
