Hello, my darling, little wildlings. How's everyone doing? Are you feeling delicious today? It's been a week of digging around in old papers, sorting through the junk, losing time with the treasures. Hopefully the clutter reduction will be continuing in the coming weeks. Bound to be some reorganizing going on in my lair this weekend.
This week, I've got none of my own art to share. What I do have is a few photos I took of an unprecedented exhibition of the paintings of Petr Brandl.
But first, there's going to be an hour wait to get into the gallery …
It was a rainy day that Mrs the Werelynx and I chose to visit the gallery. Apparently we weren't the only people who had waited until the last week of the exhibit. I told Mrs the Werelynx on the bus on our way downtown that I wouldn't want to wait a half hour in the rain. Turned out to be 45 minutes and while we waited the line grew behind us and the security guard at the door came out with a little sign to inform the folks at the end of the line that they could expect to be waiting to get in for an hour.
Petr Brandl was born in 1668 in the Lesser Quarter of Prague. His father struggled to make a living as a tailor and supplemented the family income with a job at a local tavern. Petr was an unruly student at the local Jesuit school, but it was there that his talent for drawing was discovered and, at 15, he began informal training under Kristián Schröder, the caretaker of the picture gallery of Prague Castle. Brandl learned basic painting techniques and the rudiments of composition under Schröder. He also gained access to the picture gallery, where he could study the works of Renaissance and early Baroque masters like Rubens, Tintoretto and Veronese. Brandl's mastery of color and light and his unfettered technique quickly gained many influential admirers. Because of his lack of formal education in the arts, Brandl was at first snubbed by the artist guilds. A year after he was married though, he joined the Old Town Painter's Guild. He was quickly becoming the highest paid artist in Bohemia.
He also failed to pay the guild any membership dues. He wasn't bringing money home to his family either. Gambling, wine, tobacco, fine clothing … his commissions vanished as fast as he earned them. He was incarcerated several times. His wife appealed to the Emperor himself for help. Brandl however, was a hopeless case. He was said to have painted his own legs standing on the scaffolding into one of the massive altar paintings he was working on, so that when the monks came into the room to check on his progress they'd see him diligently working, while in actuality he was down at the local tavern or brothel. Desperate for funds at one point he tried his hand at gold mining. He befriended and worked with one of my favorite sculptors, Matyáš Bernard Braun and, like Braun, worked for Count Franz Anton von Sporck for a time. It may not be the most significant chapter of his creative life, but I visit Sporck's home of Kuks a couple of times a year, so I particularly enjoyed learning of the connection. The quality of Brandl’s work varied a lot toward the end of his life. Just a couple years after he finished his work for Sporck he died, his body found outside a tavern in Kutná Hora in 1735. He was 66 years old.
The dramatic contrast of light and dark called chiaroscuro and mastered by Caravaggio, was readily apparent in many of Brandl's works.
Thanks for stopping by.
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