Word: painterly
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PERHAPS the most successful court painter of all time was Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velásquez. He had servants and slaves, was a palace chamberlain and a knight of the noble Order of Santiago. His sovereign, King Philip IV of Spain, thought so highly of him that he even consented to pose for him between battles at the front. But royal favorite though he was, Velásquez won greatness by his own unaffected naturalism. "I should prefer," he once said, "to be the leading painter of what are considered common subjects than the second best...
Tipplers & Cooks. It was on Aug. 30, 1623 that the 24-year-old painter from Seville walked through the great galleries of the Royal Palace near Madrid and knelt for the first time before his sovereign, the 17-year-old Philip IV. He won the King's heart right from the start, and from that time until his death at 61, he was a fixture of the court. Such a position might have stifled a man without genius, or tempted him into distortion through an effort to flatter his benefactors. For Velásquez it did neither...
...Painter Edwin Dickinson, 69, the reward that counts most for the artist is that other artists understand and respect him. A spry, sparrowlike man in a sea captain's beard, he has steadfastly kept his name out of the press, has rarely allowed his paintings to be reproduced. On these terms Dickinson has won admiration among traditionalists and avant gardists alike for paintings that defy fashion, time or classification. Last week Manhattan's Graham Gallery opened a major retrospective that should help in making Dickinson's name as familiar to the public as it has long been...
Pink & Sapphire. As critic, Soby wrote the first U.S. book on surrealism and neoromanticism, then turned out a study of Italian Painter Giorgio de Chirico that Alfred Barr calls "the best monograph on a living artist." His own nine De Chiricos are probably as good as anything the artist ever turned out. Yet it is hard to say they are the best of the collection...
...explode and splash, while the unearthly landscapes by the late Ives Tanguy. who was one of Soby's closest friends, are strewn with strange shapes, which led Tanguy to call one painting The Furniture of Time. The collection has a dung-colored landscape by Jean Dubuffet ("the strongest painter in postwar France"), a couple of childlike fantasies by Paul Klee ("the vigilant ally of accidental beauty"), an unusually appealing Liberation by Ben Shahn showing three small French girls swinging wildly in the air upon the liberation of France...