Displaying items by tag: selfportrait

A Lucian Freud drawing not seen in public for nearly 70 years has emerged having been largely unknown to experts, thought to be the only self-portrait to also feature his first wife Kitty Garman.

Freud drew the startlingly intense work, Flyda and Arvid, in 1947 and gave it shortly afterwards to his friend Sonia Brownell, best known for marrying George Orwell on his deathbed in 1949 and who was almost certainly the model for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces a major gift of over 500 photographs from photographer, curator, and collector Jack Shear. 

Shear’s extensive donation serves as a visual history of photography from its inception in the 1840s to the present day. The collection chronicles different photographic processes, techniques, and artistic approaches from an early half-plate ambrotype of Niagara Falls to a Polaroid self-portrait by a young Robert Mapplethorpe. Historic works include important examples by photographic pioneers such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

Two rarely-seen royal paintings by Van Dyck from the Prime Minister’s country house Chequers are to be displayed alongside the artist’s last self-portrait in a new display at the National Portrait Gallery.

The portraits of King Charles I and Henrietta Maria are expected to be star attractions at the Van Dyck: Transforming British Art exhibition, which has been curated to mark the temporary return of the artist’s recently acquired self-portrait part-way through its nationwide tour.

A rare early portrait by Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), a self-portrait by Jan Miense Molenaer (1610–1668), a groundbreaking work by Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), and a remarkable photograph of Alice and Lorina Liddell by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), better known as Lewis Carroll, are among works recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Three rare illustrated books and a portfolio, all highlighting aspects of the New World, were donated by Harry W. Havemeyer in memory of his father, Horace Havemeyer. Harry W. Havemeyer also pledged an extraordinary collection of 117 early American views and historical prints assembled by him and his father, in whose memory the pledge was made.

Opening today, on what would have been Leonardo da Vinci's 563rd birthday, the exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The show will feature a recently rediscovered self-portrait of the artist and a suite of masterpieces by Leonardo including the long-admired "Head of a Young Woman (Study for the Angel in the 'Virgin of the Rocks')," a metalpoint drawing from the 1480s, widely renowned for its naturalism, and which art historian Kenneth Clark called the “most beautiful . . . in the world."

The exhibition marks a rare opportunity to see "Head of a Young Woman," in the US. The work, which Bernard Berenson believed was “one of the finest achievements of all draughtsmanship," belongs to the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Italy.

Alice Neel is best known for her portraits which, with their controlled painterly drama and psychological nuance, are complete and polished formal statements in a classical genre. Her drawings and watercolors, or at least the 62 in this absorbing show, are closer to diary entries. Ruminative, confiding, sometimes startlingly unguarded in emotion, they add up to a self-portrait sketched in private over some 50 years.

The earliest watercolors from the 1920s establish a period mood; they present the New York City that greeted a young artist when she arrived there at age 27 with a Cuban-born husband who would soon leave her and their infant, a daughter, who would soon die.

A self-portrait by Van Dyck that was dismissed a decade ago as a copy is now hanging in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota, as an original work. The painting, which has been authenticated by experts, was quietly put on display in February, having been lent by a US collector based on the West Coast.

An unpublished paper on the self-portrait, prepared for the owner, dates the work to around 1629 and states that the attribution is accepted by four key experts: Susan Barnes, a co-author of the 2004 Van Dyck catalogue raisonné, Christopher Brown, the former director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, David Jaffé, a former senior curator at the National Gallery in London, and Malcolm Rogers, the outgoing director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Restoration Service of the Museums of France (RSMF) has authenticated a rare self-portrait by the Spanish master Francisco de Goya owned by the Musée Bonnat in the small town of Bayonne, in Southwest France, "Le Figaro" reports.

The authentication of "Self-Portrait with Spectacles" (circa 1800) is sensational news for the already well-reputed museum, but not so much for the neighboring Musée Goya, in the southeastern town of Castres, which holds a version of that same painting, thought to be the real deal and now deemed a mere copy.

A sketch of Van Gogh has been discovered in an album of drawings by his friend, the French artist Emile Bernard (1868-1941). Other than self-portraits, there are very few depictions of Van Gogh, so this represents a remarkable find. It is being published for the first time by "The Art Newspaper" and will be unveiled during a coming exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremen.

Bernard’s hasty sketch captures Van Gogh in a Parisian café, probably in Montmartre. He is drinking with two women, most likely prostitutes. Van Gogh has a short beard, moustache and slightly receding hair. Most noticeable are the piercing eyes. The sketch has spontaneity, suggesting that Bernard drew it while they were out for an evening.

The National Portrait Gallery's recently acquired self-portrait of Sir Anthony van Dyck was today displayed at Turner Contemporary, Margate, the first venue in its nationwide tour. It is set to be one of the star attractions of the Kent gallery's new exhibition "Self: Image and identity - self-portraiture from Van Dyck to Louise Bourgeois" which opens to visitors on Saturday, January 24, 2015.

The portrait will be on public view for the first time since August 2014 when it was on display at the National Portrait Gallery prior to a period of conservation which is detailed in specially commissioned films on the Gallery's website.