Paintings Worth Looking At

This is a cautionary tale. Not on my part, thankfully (at least not yet), but on the danger of leaping to conclusions.   The Baldwin Hamey portraits are an incredibly convoluted story involving at least five separate paintings (some lost, some found), which may or may not actually depict the same man and/or his extremely similar son. In fact, the prospect of untangling this whole thing is so spectacularly complex that it hasn’t been done yet. But let’s give it a shot anyway. The portrait known as Baldwin Hamey, Senior (on the right), is an astoundingly high-quality painting. It stands head and shoulders above standard formulaic portraiture of the era (pun not intended). It’s so good for its time, in fact, that I initially wondered if it had been mislabeled on ArtUK, but it’s credibly inscribed as 1633 and bears the Hamey family coat of arms. Its artistic authorship is a tantalizing, compelling mystery. 

I have to call your attention to some doodles.  Recently I stumbled across these : the wonderful drawings of Sir George Scharf, first director of the UK’s National Portrait Gallery, c. 1856-57. He made an effort to carry out an extensive survey of Old Masters and treasures in Britain, but it was a time before widespread photography, so he immortalized what he found by sketching it. He also recorded the portrait exhibitions the same way.   The resulting drawings are delightful in their simplicity and efficiency.

In which an investigation starts with folk art, visits the Netherlands, and ends up back at folk art. I'll admit, I got lucky with this one. I was looking on a stock photo website for “portrait painting” (as one does) and, several dozen pages into the mixed results, I stumbled upon this lovely lady.   Her slightly primitive rendering and sincere charm reminded me of American folk art pastel portraits, an area I’ve spent quite some time researching. I wondered if she might be connected to the works of New England itinerant artists, such as Micah Williams or James Martin . She’s not an exact match, but there’s a vague likeness in the direct eye contact, the soft flat shading of the skin, and the straightforward, almost confrontational, framing of the portrait subject.

In which a terrifying little boy goes missing, but winds up immortalized in a classic horror movie. The process of compiling an artist’s works is never easy. Especially in folk art, unsigned pieces are often scattered far and wide, identified only by stylistic quirks and a tenuous chain of linked names and family connections. So, for the sake of thoroughness, whenever I’m tracking down an artist, I scrounge around as many sites as I can get my hands on. You never know what might turn up.

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...