Stubbs, Vernet & Boucher Share a Canvas: Workshops, Authorship & the Status of Painting

Stubbs, Vernet & Boucher Share a Canvas: Workshops, Authorship & the Status of Painting

David Pullins

A horse stands in profile against a bucolic landscape populated by two pastoral figures, a flock of sheep and a dog (Fig. 1). Visual analysis confirms the content of an eighteenth-century label once affixed to the painting’s stretcher: “The horse was recently painted by [George] Stubbs in London, the background of the picture by [Claude-Joseph] Vernet, the celebrated marine painter, and the two figures, the dog and the sheep, by [François] Boucher, Principal Painter to the King of France.”[1] The tightly knit strokes of the horse contrast with the looser blending of tones in the landscape and sky that come just short of meeting the animal’s outline, resulting in a halo that heightens the sense of this central element as a kind of cut-out affixed somewhat unconvincingly to the canvas. The most rapidly applied brushstrokes have been used to represent the human figures, sheep and dog, all cleverly folded into the landscape at a break between foreground and background, a line that is sutured further through lightly applied lichen-green paint along the crest of the hill and blades of grass that sprout between the horse’s legs.

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China and Greco-Roman Antiquity: Overture to a Study of the Vase in Eighteenth-Century France

China and Greco-Roman Antiquity: Overture to a Study of the Vase in Eighteenth-Century France

Kristel Smentek   One of the more remarkable aspects of eighteenth-century European art is the proliferation of vases, both as physical objects and design ideas. From the illustrated volume dedicated to them in Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s historical survey of architecture, Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (1721), to the near…

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