The mirrored gaze - inspired by Rubens

Narcisse - acrylic on panel - 24x18 - 2014.

Venus at her Mirror, by Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1614-15.

I came across Rubens' wonderful self-gazing Venus again the other day; as is already obvious, this lovely painting was the inspiration for one of my own from three years ago. The history of beauty in art has largely been based on the depiction and objectification of the female face and form. I always enjoy honoring/subverting that history by taking the iconic images of sensual beauty and placing a male face and form in the woman's former pose; I think men still have plenty of catching up to do where objectification is concerned.

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And because scans, for all their many virtues, often seem to flatten out modeling and texture, skew color balance, limit the range of color, here are photographs - which obviously have their own limitations - taken at the painting's completion, and which maybe give more of an idea of the actual modeling, texture, and color balance and range; if there were only some way to blend the two processes...?

Portraits of King Charles I by Daniël Mijtens

1628.

1631.

1626.

1629.

1633. (Copy?)

With his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, 1631.

As Prince of Wales, 1624.

As Prince of Wales, 1624.

1632.

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Daniël Mijtens (circa 1590, Delft – 1647, The Hague), known in England as Daniel Mytens the Elder, Dutch portrait painter who spent most of his career in England. Born into a family of artists, he trained in The Hague, possibly with Van Mierevelt. No paintings are known to survive from his early Dutch period. By 1618, he had moved to London, where he found patronage with the important art collector Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel. He was soon commissioned to paint King James I and his son, Charles, Prince of Wales. In 1625, at the accession of Charles I, he was appointed painter to the king.

He was kept extremely busy with portraits of the royal family and the British aristocracy, also making copies of earlier works by other artists. But in 1626 and 1630 he made visits to the Netherlands, most likely to familiarize himself the latest advancements in his field, most particularly with the work of Rubens and Rubens' former pupil van Dyck.

Mijtins can be credited with bringing a far greater naturalism to English portraiture, but with van Dyck's arrival in England in 1632, he was soon supplanted as court painter by the latter artist, the suaveness and glamour of whose work he couldn't approach. He appears to have returned permanently to the Netherlands around 1634. From that point he would work primarily as an art dealer in the Hague; only four paintings survive from this second Dutch period.