Word: waistcoat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...vivid epitomes of social standing as he did so. His portrait of Lord Ribblesdale, for instance, remains the definitive image of the late-Victorian equestrian male: superbly grave and self-contained, tall as a tree, and yet with a touch of carelessness in the flare of his buff hunting waistcoat and the dashing arabesque of paint with which, in a single loaded stroke, Sargent conveyed the fold of his breeches--a gesture as assured, in its way, as any brushstroke by de Kooning. With women Sargent was in his element, and icons of late-Victorian and Edwardian femininity rise from...
...image of Louis-Francois Bertin (1832), the anti-Jacobin journalist who had survived exile and the disapproval of Napoleon to become, during the reign of Louis-Philippe, a press lord--the owner of an influential newspaper, the Journal des debats. His belly strains against the confines of a wrinkled waistcoat; he leans slightly forward, fixing you with a sharply assessing stare; his hands are planted immovably on his knees. It is a pose of total self-confidence. He looks so massive that a cannonball wouldn't budge him, and yet a bit rumpled. Bertin's gray hair is disordered...
...generous. Unlike many tyrants, he did not crave a tyrant's riches. Even when we strip Lenin of the cult that was created all around him after his death, when we strip away the myths of his "superhuman kindness," he remains a peculiarly modest figure who wore a shabby waistcoat, worked 16-hour days and read extensively. (By contrast, Stalin did not know that the Netherlands and Holland were the same country, and no one in the Kremlin inner circle was brave enough to set him straight...
...deliciously droll, comic actor in Scottish movies (Local Hero) and West End musicals (Mr. Cinders). Young Ewan, the son of teachers, got the itch to act from Lawson. "I was brought up in Crieff, a small, conservative town," McGregor says, "and he had long hair, beads and a furry waistcoat. I aspired to be as different as he seemed...
...closest he came to the rococo sparkle of English portraiture was in his 1767 portrait of Nicholas Boylston, Boston's biggest luxury-goods importer: blue-chinned, sharp-eyed and relaxed in his morning panoply of damask dressing gown, unbuttoned waistcoat (showing the careless ease of the gentleman) and velvet turban. His ships ply the sea behind him, and his arm rests on an account ledger. As art historian Paul Staiti observes in an excellent catalog essay, Copley's clients liked his style because it was so embedded in the world of substance and inventories that had made them what they...