Word: painterly
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Occasionally a craftsman of exceptional talent-a Matthew Pratt or Charles Willson Peale-would take up painting as a career. But producing folk art remained largely a part-time occupation of the village cabinetmaker, sign painter, stonecutter or shipwright-or was carried on by the womenfolk at home. The practitioners were nearly always self-taught, untrained in technique or even perspective, and tended to thrive far from urban cultural centers. But they made up for their deficiencies with sharp-eyed observation, an infectious joyousness in their labor, and a remarkable freshness of vision (see color...
Leonardo da Vinci during his lifetime was renowned as the very embodiment of the Renaissance ideal, the "universal man," at once a brilliant painter, muralist, draftsman, engineer and architect. But he was almost as well known for his inability to see his projects through. "Alas," cried Pope Leo X, "Leonardo will never finish anything. He thinks of the end even before he has begun." As a result, while some 6,000 pages of his notes and casual sketches survive, there are only 15 known Leonardo paintings-and some experts place the number as low as nine...
Though Genovès lives and works in suburban Madrid, he does not consider his work a critique of the Franco regime. "I want to be a universal painter," he says. "What I am trying to show is that a multitude is not an anonymous mass, but a collection of individuals who would, in an ideal world, each be authentically free...
Charles Willson Peale, for all his fame as a portrait painter, was a practical soul. He started his adult life in the 1760s as a saddle maker and clock mender, switched to portraiture only after he discovered that he could earn as much as ?10 per painting, which was much "better than with my other trades." When he went to London to perfect his technique with Benjamin West, he was irritated by the highflown esthetic palaver that he heard. "It is generally an adopted opinion," he noted disdainfully, "that genius for the fine arts is a particular gift...
...first Peale relied principally on his youngest brother, James, to aid him in his flourishing portrait studio: C. W. did the full-length oils; James specialized in precise but ethereal miniatures. Then James's younger daughter, Miriam, came along to become the U.S.'s first professional woman painter. Six of Charles Willson's children died in infancy, but among the survivors, ambitiously christened for the Renaissance greats, were Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and Raphaelle. Both Rembrandt and Raphaelle went into the family business. Rembrandt traveled extensively in Europe, acquiring a glossy, Continental technique, became highly successful and portrayed...