2014 Wedding Sampler

Held earlier this year, Belmont’s sixth annual Wedding Sampler was another successful bridal show.  We had twenty-three participating vendors and all who attended gave positive feedback.  It was a perfect gathering of vendors with samples and information on their products and services.  The guests received valuable information on planning their special day.

2014 Wedding Sampler Vendors:

Anytime Limousines, Cakes in Art, Caroline Street Catering, Charlotte Parish Photography, Classical Expressions Trio, David Weadon Photography, Eric Herod Entertainment, Fredericksburg Ayres Flute Quartet, Formal Envy, Hartwood Photography, Jane Guerin, K Pearlman Photography, Party Services by Dori,  R&R Catering, Richard Green Entertainment, Simply Sweet, Sodexo, The Icing Baking Co., TJs Catering, VA Wedding Belles, Weddings by Ginny, White House Catering, and Wolfcrest Photography.

Many thanks to all who made this another successful year! Some of the best caterers, photographers, cake specialists, DJs and florists participate in this annual event.

We are working hard to get ready for the January 18, 2015, Wedding Sampler.  The event will be held from 1:00pm – 4:00pm.  General admission is $10, University of Mary Washington Students only have to pay $5!

Let’s Face It! Remembering Gari Melchers

Hang around artists long enough and you’re bound to have your portrait painted. That explains why there are so many portraits of Gari Melchers by his friends in the collection at Belmont.

When an early portrait of Gari Melchers recently surfaced, I got to thinking about all the renderings of him I’d seen over the years. The variety of sketches, paintings and sculpture not only complements the photographic record we have of him, but as subjective invention, they also hint at the strong and affectionate bond that existed between Melchers and his associates. Here are several, but by no means all the examples.

Sometimes artists paint one another for amusement. Take for example the anonymous caricature of a dapper Gari Melchers. Is the artist poking fun at Melchers’ ears or his sartorial discomfort (Melchers professed a habitual preference for wearing an old pullover and clogs)?

Getting a live model to stay still is a perennial frustration for an artist, which is probably why a furtive companion couldn’t pass up the chance to document Melchers catching forty winks in this quick pen and ink sketch.

Melchers liked a good jest himself. In his 1897 rendition of Christ and His Pilgrims at Emmaus, he copied this profile portrait painted of himself by fellow American expatriate, James J. Shannon, for the face of Christ.

When models aren’t available or are too expensive, art students usually turn to their classmates as subjects. Melchers was a strikingly handsome young man, with soft grey eyes, a sculpted nose and cleft chin, and a pleasing bow-shaped mouth. No wonder he was sketched so often. By the time his training was complete, he sported a moustache and goatee, and possessed a decidedly cosmopolitan elegance, at least in the eyes of former classmates Fritz Strobentz, an unidentified classmate and Henry Hamel.

In commemoration of Melchers’ first international success, Strobentz again painted his old friend and classmate at work at the site of his award-winning painting, The Sermon, 1886. Perhaps Melchers and Strobentz anticipated a winning streak, for it deliberately documents Melchers at work on the concept for his next major salon entry, In Holland.

Which reminds me of the early portrait which recently came to light. A private dealer and art consultant brought another portrait to my attention that was painted by a classmate of Melchers, the Swiss Nabi painter, Felix Vallotton. The Melchers portrait was purchased by the dealer at a Paris sale in 1999 as one of six portraits by Vallotton of former classmates of the Academie Julian in Paris. You can already see in Vallotton’s portrait of Melchers something of the flat, simplified and strongly delineated figuration that typified his later avant-garde style. Melchers looks every bit the serious and introspective painter described by biographers in these years, when he was working so determinedly to make a name for himself at the Paris salon.

By the time of his marriage at age 43, Melchers was a critical and commercial success, and portraits of him convey a sense of his new found confidence and ease. I refer to James J. Shannon’s Portrait of Gari Melchers as an example. I tend to think of this as a wedding portrait, though that may not have been the official intent. Undoubtedly it was painted around the time of his vows, and his apparel is appropriately stylish and his wedding ring visible. Melchers’ likeness bears an air of dignity and taste, surrounded as he is by old world antiques like the Flemish portrait of an aristocratic girl and the Dutch candle sconce serving as decorative backdrop.

Melchers went on a driving tour of Southern France and Spain in 1904 with two wealthy industrialist brothers, Charles and James Deering. The road systems in Spain were still fairly primitive and the threesome was often beset by punctures and bad weather. Consequently a few occasions called for Melchers, ever the dedicated artist, to climb aboard a donkey and set out for the frontier in order to sketch the natives and surrounding countryside, as recorded here by one of his more artistically endowed traveling companions.

A decade later, while serving as a distinguished professor at the Grand Ducal Academy of Art in Weimar, Germany, Melchers’ German colleague Fritz Mackensen, director of the school, hastily produced a sketch of the artist with his eyes lowered over his reading. The newspapers at this time were full of bad news as the war in Europe escalated, eventually sending Melchers and his wife home to the United States for good.

Emil Fuchs was an Austrian-American painter and sculptor known for his portraits of wealthy socialites. While living in Great Britain in 1915, a wave of anti-German sentiment caused Fuchs to move permanently to New York. He produced this bust of Gari Melchers the following year. Fuchs had surgery for cancer in 1928, and in anticipation of a death with great suffering he shot himself at the Hotel des Artistes in New York on 13 January, 1929. The Brooklyn Museum owns the bronze bust, a plaster copy of which is in the Smithsonian.

Back home in the post war years Melchers was depicted in a classically inspired low relief portrait by the eminent American sculptor Paul Manship. By now Melchers was a well-respected representative of the old guard of artists and a leader of several arts clubs and organizations. Manship casts him in profile like the face of a Roman emperor stamped on a coin, an honorable presentation for a distinguished man of arts.

But there’s more than one side to a man. The artist’s wife recorded a much older and beefier Melchers at his easel in a droll little pencil sketch from the late 1920s.

French vs. American

A young woman working on the topic of Gari Melchers recently asked me if French impressionism was different from the impressionism practiced by American painters. What a good question! Even in French impressionism there are many variants, so let me try to give you a simple explanation.

In the 1870s impressionism emerged as an art movement of Paris-based artists, with Claude Monet as its leading exponent. Because it was considered an anti-academic art movement, even a scam by some, it initially met with harsh opposition, criticism which ironically seemed to help bring it into prominence and acceptance. Once it took off, the world never looked back, and in the last 50 years the best examples have fetched record setting prices.

So what was all the original fuss about? The impressionists were really after an authentic picture of the contemporary world around them, but their approach was diametrically opposed to the painting conventions practiced by the old state-sponsored art academy. And if you didn’t conform to their standards, you were thrown out on your ear, which is why the impressionists were forced to exhibit together in shows independent of the state-sponsored salon system. Throughout the 19^th century, stylistic innovations typically spread quickly from Paris to other capitals of Europe. But it took a decade for impressionism to be accepted in the very place in which it was born.

How were the paintings of the impressionists different from the status quo? Firstly, the subjects they chose revolved around themselves and the leisure class, sometimes even the grittier side of life. Such themes were viewed by the academy as common compared to the elevated themes of history painting and the classical mythology they promoted, the themes of the impressionists certainly rankled them and their conventional tastes.

The impressionists often eschewed carefully balanced compositions in favor of cropped objects or things just out of view of the picture frame in order to heighten the impression of life captured in mid- action. These stylistic deviations also offended the conservatives.

And to further enhance the life-like immediacy of their subjects, which is at the heart of the most successful examples of impressionism, these art rebels aimed to convincingly reproduce observed light and its optical effects on reality, indoors and out.

Camille Pissarro, View of Bazincourt, Sunset, 1892, private collection

In order to accomplish this, they employed loose, gestural brushstrokes that suggested or gave an “impression” of things seen rather than a literal replication of things. What’s more, they painted strokes of strong, pure color side by side rather than mixed together. The results were paintings that presented a view of the world through a glittering sunlit veil of color or a suffused atmospheric mantle of dim light, depending on the subject. Some of the group even attempted to apply in the execution of their pictures the findings of contemporary scientific studies on the chromatic effects of light. So impressionism was a new way of depicting experience; it even borrowed from the new technology of photography to achieve its expressive effects.

American artists, who by the 1870s felt it obligatory to have Paris training, were compelled to begin their study in the conservative art academies. Gradually they loosened their adherence to the old ways with the growing popularity of impressionism. Stylistically American art lagged behind European innovations by a good 10 to 20 years.

Childe Hassam, Isle of Shoals, Broad Cove, 1911, Honolulu Museum of Art

Impressionism was stylistically adopted into American practice according to three main routes. 1)French dealers brought sales and exhibitions of French impressionists works to the U.S. East coast cities from which it spread. 2)Many European-trained American artists who fell under the spell of impressionism returned stateside to teaching positions, passing on the lessons of their exposure to the art movement, and finally, 3)Many Americans studied directly under artists such as Monet and though they never returned home to work, were imitated by admiring American artists who witnessed their paintings in American shows, art journals and press of the day.

How was American Impressionism different?

The only real difference is
1) the subject- While in Europe, Americans loved to paint the same subjects as their European counterparts, i.e., the boulevards, the dance halls, open air parks, rolling meadows and seascapes, landmarks of Paris such as the cathedrals and train stations etc., but for the most part, with the First World War, many had repatriated and so began to paint the American scene in earnest rather than the European scene.

and

2) optics, and I overstate this to make a point,

Many Americans were reluctant to break down the 3-dimensional illusion of things in the way in which the French sometimes did. Often in French impressionist paintings, the outlines or hard edges of things, the contours of things, and the illusion of three dimensional space, dissolve under the harsh glare of rendered light to the point where the illusion of materiality is lost.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1906, L’Orangerie, Paris

When you look at a Monet water lily pond, for example, sometimes you can’t be sure that what you are looking at has any basis in reality. The French tended to paint the canvas surface with vibrant sensuousness while Americans aimed for the same thing, but without losing a sense of the mass of things within a convincing illusion of space.

“Dance at Bougival” by Renoir, 1883, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Auguste Renoir was the least impressionist of the French group in that many of his figurative paintings (people) have such implied mass.

Gari Melchers, Saint George’s Church, ca. 1920, Gari Melchers Home and Studio

Melchers adopted the subjects, palette and brushwork of the Impressionists and readapted it to the American scene when he returned to the States, but his figures remain very much of the material world in the way that do Renoir’s.