Gods and Foolish Grandeur

Friday, February 21, 2020

A mother and sons - two family groups by William Oliphant Hutchison, 1925 and 1929

Reading aloud, Marjory and the boys, 1929. The children are Robert Edward (Robin), born in 1922, and Henry Peter, born in 1919.

Family Group, 1926. A third child, a daughter, Helen Elizabeth Anne, was born in 1935.

Sir William Oliphant Hutchison (2 July 1889, Kirkcaldy – 5 February 1970, London), Scottish portrait and landscape painter. He attended the Edinburgh College of Art between 1909 and 1912; on leaving he started the Edinburgh Group. He also worked and studied in Paris for a time, mainly painting portraits, though also producing landscape and figure paintings. He enlisted during the First World War, serving with the Royal Garrison Artillery, and later being badly wounded in France. He married painter Edward Arthur Walton's youngest daughter Margery in 1918. He and his wife occupied a studio flat in Edinburgh until 1921, before moving to London. There he successfully worked as a portrait painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy, becoming a member of the Savage Club, and enjoying a large circle of friends, mainly from the art world. He then became Director of the Glasgow School of Art from 1933 until 1943. He would also serve in numerous art-related positions: Committee member of The Edinburgh College of Art, President of The Glasgow Art Club, Vice-president of The Scottish Modern Arts Association, member of the Royal Society of Arts, Honorary Member of the Royal Academy. And he served as President of the Royal Scottish Academy from 1950 to 1959. He was knighted in 1953 and died seventeen years later at the age of eighty.

The couple's daughter, Helen Elizabeth Anne, 1949.

Sunday, February 16, 2020

The curve of light - photographs by Raymond Voinquel

Hommage au Bronzino, 1940.

Circa 1940.

Narcisse - pour le poème de Valéry, 1947.

Gerard Philipe in Le Diable au Corps, 1947.

Jean Marais, 1938.

Jean Cocteau sur son lit de mort et Vilmos Szécsi, 1963.

Étude de torse, 1940.

L'Ouvrier, 1946.

Serge Reggiani, circa 1945.

Louis Jourdan, 1939.

Le Dormeur, circa 1945.

Torse d'homme, 1939.

Le Repos pour Michel Ange, 1942.

Jean Marais, 1938.

Yves Montand in Les Portes de la nuit, 1946.

Circa 1940s.

1942.

Jean Marais and Edwige Feuillère in L'Aigle à deux têtes, 1948.

Antonin Artaud, 1931.

Jacques Sernas, 1947.

Jacques Sernas, circa 1947.

Raymond Voinquel (11 January 1912, Fraize - 15 July 1994, Paris), French photographer. Specializing in portraits and male nudes, he is probably best remembered as the still photographer on upwards of one hundred and sixty films. During a span of more than forty years, beginning in the Thirties, he worked with the likes of Marcel Carné, Jean Cocteau, Yves Allégret, Max Ophüls, Jean-Pierre Melville, Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, Marcel L'Herbier, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Self-portrait, 1938.

Friday, February 14, 2020

Ernie and Onor - portraits of the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Hesse by de László, 1907

Unfinished variant of the above portrait; the line around the figure suggests that there was thought to reshape the canvas into an oval format.

The very artistic Grand Duke got up in a fancy-dress turban.

In 1894 Ernst Ludwig of Hesse and by Rhine had been fairly railroaded into marriage with his first cousin Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha by their mutual grandmother Queen Victoria. The union was a disaster almost from the start, and the couple divorced in 1901 on grounds of "invincible mutual antipathy." Four years later, Victoria Melita married another first cousin, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich while, that same year, Ernst Ludwig married Princess Eleonore of Solms-Hohensolms-Lich. Called Ernie and Onor in the family, the pair's first son, Georg Donatus, was born in 1906 and their second, Louis, two years later. The grand ducal couple endured war and political turmoil - and perhaps Ernst Ludwig's homosexual affairs - but lived very happily together until the Grand Duke's death in October of 1937. Only a month later, the dowager Grand Duchess was killed in a horrific plane crash that also claimed the lives of her eldest son, his pregnant wife Cecile - sister of the present Duke of Edinburgh - and their two young sons, Ludwig and Alexander.