"Still Looking"

[fiefoe]

'Nature His Only Instructor'

• What Copley's many female subjects lack in conventional beauty they make up in nervous energy, expressed as a certain alert tension when young and as a collusive wryness when older.
• The dreaming, introspective attitude reserved, in European portraiture, for philosophers and poets, (Copley) extended this thoughtful pose to women. 
• The portrait is so full of flair and bravado as to lack the intimacy of the anecdote.
• History paintings are, like verse epics and MGM musical comedies, built on conventions based on suppositions to which we have lost the key.
  

Watson and the Shark (1778): its naive weirdness lodges it in the mind.. American literalism meets European history-painting in a Gothic, virtually Boschian dream.  <This is where John Updike won me over.>

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'O Beautiful for Spacious Skies'

• The pious idea, or hope, behind much of mid-century landscape painting: Nature is our friend and looking-glass, our bigger, wordless Bible.
• In Europe, landscape painting per se was a relatively recent, early-sixteenth-century development.
  
• The wilderness, examined with the proper intensity, shows itself to be compacted of many small violences.
• No amount of conceptual ambition and patient dabbling at details quite annuls the touch of absurdity, of innocent concoction, when an American attempts the Grand Manner.
  

Kensett: his mature style, suppressing any trace of the brush, has an unearthly glaze... strip the world to a few pellucid elements.
Lane: his meticulous portraits of boats.. achieved.. atmospheric effects of enchanting delicacy.

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'Heade Storms'

Approaching Thunder: a sunlit man and dog have a cartoonish sharpness... as if transposed from a Brueghel... It is a plangent but beautiful, firmly plotted picture.

Approaching Storm, Beach near Newport: lunar starkness,
__ the overlapping lops of shallow spilling water on the beach are excellently observed
__ the blunt end of the curve subtly offends correct perspective, though the pictorial logic is impeccable

• The teeming schools of industrious, capable artists who catered to the romantic tastes of the burgeoning bourgeoisie held a number of odd fish that appeal, with the right critical sauces and careful filleting, to the stringent tastes of this later century.
• Like Vermeer, Heade blended into the art of his time and needed posterity to recognize the exceptional quality and concentration beneath his paintings' surface quiet. American analogies might be with Emily Dickinson, whose lonely oddity emerged as a profound intergrity.
• The moment when rain approaches or recedes,.. is dramatically freighted with implications of a past and future, of a life in time that the landscape leads. 
• Though... he acquired more representational sophistication, there remains in even his late work a formalizing impulse and a fudging of some illusionistic challenges that Church would have brought off with an imperious ease.
• Nor was his calm the pearly calm of J F Kensett or the celestially glassy calm of F H Lane. Heade's calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful.

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