Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (1723-1792) Studio Experiments in Colour and Media, oil on canvas, c. 1770s-1780s

This canvas, onto which Reynolds has 'arranged specimens of various pigments for experimental purposes' was bought by the RA in 1878. It was originally presented to Sir Thomas Lawrence by its previous owner, who had lived in Reynolds' house in Great Newport Street and had preserved a number of these experimental canvases. It disappeared after Lawrence's death, reappearing again in the late-nineteenth century.

http://www.racollection.org.uk/object_of_the_month

monument mobbed

The equestrian statue of Frederick the Great in Berlin is decorated – and mobbed – in celebration of the German victory over the French at the Battle of Sedan, September 1-2, 1870.

Lost allegorical sculpture /// work of Francois Willeme // l'angleterre venant au secours de la France 


At no point in time, no matter how utopian, will anyone win the masses over to a higher art; they can be won over only to one that is nearer to them. And the difficulty consists precisely in finding a form for that art such that, with the best conscience in the world, one could hold that it is a higher art. This will never happen with most of what is propagated by the avant-garde of the bourgeoisie. … The masses positively require from the work of art … something that is warming. Here the flame most readily kindled is hatred.   WB konvolut K

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.  GMH

 

lost nails

L'Hypothèse du tableau volé /// Ruiz

painting with thirty pieces of silver

“Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?”

“A component, like a capacitor?” *

A capacitor stores a charge in an electrical field. It might be subject to resistance, crossed wires, open circuit; signals are lost. There could be a residual spark in the system. This is a pre-digital painting. It didn’t anticipate its future as a google-able image. I don’t think it considered itself as image at all and it barely holds together as painting. It is a makeshift, improvisational structure something like a vernacular circuit board cobbled together from discarded pieces. It is a washed-up, wasteland assembly of hard and soft structures, trying to find a position somewhere against the vast wave of commodification about to break all over the new decade that was the ‘90s.

*William Gibson Count Zero 1986

Painting in the RCA Collection, currently up in the SCR I hear

Doctrine of similarity?

Portrait of Perceval Hart as child, in fawn costume

Lot 12 - Sotheby's, London (May 22, 1968)

Old Master Paintings

$ 2,520 USD
£ 1,050 GBP

Original Currency of Sale: £ 1,050 GBP Hammer

Robert Peake the Elder (British, Circa1551 - 1619)

Portrait of Perceval Hart as child, in fawn costume

MEASUREMENTS: 40.00 in. (101.60 cm.) (height) by 26.00 in. (66.04 cm.) (width)

DESCRIPTION: i.d.1602

MARKINGS: dated, inscribed

…………

The fifty-first generation of Maas-Neotek biochips conjured up an indistinct figure on the seat beside her, a boy out of some faded hunting print, legs crossed casually in tan breeches and riding boots.

Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson p9