Fruity - our annual holiday card, 2023 edition

 

Just a simple "reveal" of the seasonal-holiday-of-your-choice card that we've sent out this year. We alternate the design duties, and this year the job fell to G. Her most excellent and perverse brain conjured this fruitcake extravaganza, a group portrait of the artist Jan Brueghel the Elder and his family by Rubens serving as the base for the transformation. As she is currently crazy busy with a huge, teetering stack of freelance design jobs, in addition to her full-time day-job, I offered to do a little fine tuning of the image before handing it back for her to deliver the final polish. 

I must say I fared better in the "face/off". She took a rather flattering picture of me and pretty much just dropped it onto the original image; only Bruegel's ears are still showing. The image G used of herself was decidedly not so flattering. And it was not helped by her having to change the lighting to better fit the lighting in the painting underneath, and having the side of madame Bruegel's grayish cheek showing through. When I first saw the Photoshopped image, I commented on how ungenerous she'd been to herself. And I also asked if her rather grumpy expression was intentional. You know, for humor's sake. I mean, she has a gigantic fruitcake around her neck. I think a certain degree of grumpiness would not be an entirely unreasonable reaction if one found oneself so encumbered. But she only said, "That's just the way I look." Gentle readers, I am here to tell you that that is quite false! I see the very dear woman every day, and I can testify that she's actually a most attractive human who smiles frequently and generally possesses a very pleasant demeaner. Very.

Other than being gifted with a pair of inexplicable hands, I think Nicholas came off pretty well.

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Portrait of Jan Brueghel the Elder and his family, by Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1613-15.

"... Something nice with swans" - visions of Leda and her avian friend

 

(Note: This post, its title taken from my beloved "Sunday in the Park with George", was finished and scheduled well before Sondheim's death... a strange and poignant coincidence.)

Heinrich Lossow, before 1897.

...And often not so nice. Leda's coupling with that randy Zeus - this go 'round disguised as an elegant but aggressive water fowl - is one of mythology's many weird and decidedly icky stories. Right from the very beginning, though, artists have been inspired to retell the scandalous tale; countless interpretations of the story exist. Many of them are quite graphic, the story itself being a ready excuse. Told in paint and stone and metal. With Ledas tender and confused, ecstatic and traumatized. This is just a tiny selection.

Odilon Redon, 1910.

Unknown artist, third century AD.

Veronese, circa 1585.

Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1506.

Paul Cézanne, circa 1880.

Théodore Géricault, circa 1817.

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, circa 1870.

Arturo Michelena, 1887.

François Lemoyne, before 1737.

Francisco Viera Portuense, circa 1800.

Copy of a lost painting by Michelangelo, after 1530.

Peter Paul Rubens - obviously based on the same lost Michelangelo - before 1600.

Paul Mathias Padua, 1939.

Attributed to Gillis Coignet, circa 1592-99. (Unrestored and restored.)

Franz Russ the Younger, circa second half of the nineteenth century.

François Boucher, 1742.

Léon François Comerre, 1908.

Étienne-Maurice Falconet, circa 1764-66.

Gianbettino Cignaroli, circa second quarter of the eighteenth century.

Lelio Orsi, circa 1560.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1895.

Hans Zatzka, before 1945.

Correggio, circa 1530-31.

Louis Frederick Grell, 1937.

 François-Édouard Picot, 1832.

Antoine Coypel, before 1722.

Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, 1783.

Georg Pencz, circa first half of the sixteenth century.

Louis Icart, 1934.

Cesare da Sesto, after Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1515.

 Francesco d'Ubertino Verdi, called Bachiacca, circa 1518-20.

Henri Paul Motte, 1900.

William Shackleton, 1928.

Unknown artist, circa third or fourth century AD.

Adolf Erbslöh, 1909.

Wilfred Gabriel de Glehn, circa first half of the twentieth century. 

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Perhaps understandable considering the subject matter - ? - this appears to have a subject only rarely taken up by women artists. Marie Laurencin - whose work I don't honestly care for - painted a handful of Ledas; sadly, hers were actually the only examples by a female hand that I could find.

Marie Laurencin, 1923.

À l'aurore - for the first day of the new year, a selection of paintings of sunrise

 

Ostermorgen (Easter Morning), by Caspar David Friedrich, circa 1828-35.

 Sunrise Among the Rocks of Paradise, Newport, by John Ffederick Kensett, 1859.

 Bords de l'Oise à l'aube (Banks of the Oise at Dawn), by Louis Hayet, 1888.

 Soluppgång över taken. Motiv från Stockholm (Sunrise over the Rooftops. Motif from Stockholm), by Eugène Jansson, 1903.

 A Wooded River Landscape at Sunrise with Figures in a Boat, a Village Beyond, Circle of Aert van der Neer, circa mid-seventeenth century.

Before Sunrise, June, by Dwight William Tryon, 1905.

Venice: San Giorgio Maggiore at Dawn, by Joseph Mallord WilliamTurner, 1819.

(The images available online for this watercolor vary quite radically. I hope that here I'm sharing something like the original.)

Juste avant le lever du soleil (Just Before Sunrise), by Camille Corot, circa mid-nineteenth century.

A Forest at Dawn with a Deer Hunt, by Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1635.

 Meules près de Chailly, soleil levant (Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise), by Claude Monet, 1865.

Gryning över Riddarfjärden (Dawn over Riddarfjärden), by Eugène Jansson, 1899.

Sunrise over the Oka River, by Victor Ivanovich Ivanov, circa mid-twentieth century.

 Forest Sunrise, by Albert Bierstadt, circa second half of the nineteenth century.

New England Sunrise, by John Frederick Kensett, 1859.

Le Lever du soleil (Sunrise), by Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée), circa 1646-47.

Sunrise in the Woods, by George Inness, 1887.

Capri Sunrise, by Frederic, Lord Leighton, 1859.

 Norham Castle, Sunrise, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, circa 1845.

Das Riesengebirge (The Giant Mountains), by Caspar David Friedrich, circa 1830-35.

Wheat Fields with Reaper at Sunrise, by Vincent van Gogh, 1889.

La Seine à l'aube (The Seine at Dawn), by Charles Angrand, 1889.

 L’Aube (Dawn), by Camille Corot, circa 1865-70.

The Rooftops of Venice, with the Campanile of San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore, from the Hotel Europa (Palazzo Giustinian) at Sunrise, by Turner, 1840.

Soloppgang i Åsgårdstrand (Sunrise in Åsgårdstrand), by Edvard Munch, circa 1893-94.

La Muse au lever du soleil (The Muse at Sunrise), by Alphonse Osbert, 1918.

Windsor Castle at Sunrise, by Sanford Robinson Gifford, circa 1860.

Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), by Claude Monet, 1872.

By far, the most famous painting of a sunrise, and whose title inspired the name of the Impressionist movement.

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On this first day of this new year, leaving the wretched year of 2020 behind, I wish all of us a much brighter, healthier, and happier 2021.

Solen (The Sun), by Edvard Munch, circa 1910-13.