Paintings Worth Looking At

In which the straightforward descends into the surreal. Whenever I forage around on artuk.org , I’m usually plumbing the depths of the “Unknown Artist” search. After all, beautiful works of art by talented painters are frequently mislaid, lose their labels, or simply wind up forgotten in somebody’s basement. ArtUK serves the invaluable function of being the United Kingdom’s digital basement (in the most complimentary way), and it brings me great joy to turn up something worth looking at.

In which a mysterious floating head is reattached to a Dutch nobleman, and a grandson copies his grandfather to impersonate him postmortem. It started out, back then, as “Portrait That Has Something A Bit Off.”  This humble yet striking picture originally turned up on a stock photo website , uploaded — in the infinite wisdom of automatic titling — as “Man In Black Jacket Holding White Plastic Tube.”  It’s a mystery where a gentleman from 1648 in the Netherlands might have got hold of plastic.  So I stashed it in my digital notes, with the aforementioned label. There is something a bit off: it’s remarkably good. Despite the gap in centuries, the man feels relatable. He tiredly and wistfully gazes out of his frame, choked by his stifling starched ruff. (Some sitters wear the ruff. For other sitters, the ruff wears them.) Fashion aside, it’s clearly a picture of great quality. The execution is intricate, the brushwork precise, the fabric crisply and delicately rendered. The man’s ruddy s