Designing Drapery II -171

6 months ago
10

Brief followup from questions/points in the earlier Drapery Design video based on the instruction of Gammell and the example of Ingres. The fold work of Sargent, Beaux and some Boston School painters are shown and discussed.

In Response to Joseph

QUESTION:In your video #166, "Designing Drapery", you said "get the drapery to define the form" and "watch the folds do something beautiful". You used several paintings to illustrate your instruction including Ingres’ “The Comtesse d'Haussonville “ and “The Princesse de Broglie”. I may not be correct, but in these paintings Ingres seemed to express the drapery folds primarily by varying tonal value. In comparison, a number of Boston School painters seem to express the dynamics of drapery through variation in hue and chroma as well as value. There are many examples of this, e.g.,: Sargent's "The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy" and "Lord Dalhousie" as well as Beaux’s “Man with the Cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker)”.
This leads me to the following question which I hope you will address at some point: Did these aforementioned artists: (1) follow some established rules or traditions that guided their choices, or (2) did they actually see the drapery "folds do something beautiful" and express it in their painting, or (3) did they mysteriously sense or experience the “folds doing something beautiful” from within themselves and then paint it?
Joseph

Loading comments...