Joan of Arc

 

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

You have to zoom in on her face because these may be the most beautiful eyes ever put on canvas, and once you understand what she is looking at, they become almost unbearable... The painting is Joan of Arc, made by the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1879, and it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is enormous, more than eight feet tall, and it shows Joan not as a warrior in armor, but as what she actually was before any of it: a peasant girl of thirteen, standing in her parents' garden in the French countryside. The Met describes her eyes as wide open and clear blue, her cheeks feverishly flushed, her gaze turned upward and away, and they are right, this is the face of someone who is no longer fully in the garden... She has just heard the voices and behind her, among the trees, Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine have appeared, and they are telling this teenage girl the impossible thing she was born to do: leave home, take up a sword, and drive an army of invaders out of France. Her eyes are fixed on something the rest of us cannot see, but her bare feet are digging into the earth, and one hand grips a branch beside her. She is being called toward something vast and terrifying, and every muscle in her is trying to stay rooted to the ground she knows. The artist caught the precise moment a girl is torn between the life she has and the fate she cannot refuse. And everyone knows how the story ends: she would follow those voices, she would lead armies, crown a king, and be captured, and at nineteen she would be burned alive as a heretic, still insisting the voices were real. Everything that was coming for her is already there, waiting, behind those wide blue eyes in this peaceful garden...

Joseph Pickett

@Pastpassport

Her figure is his cousin's, Marie-Adèle Robert, who modeled for him more than once. Critics at the 1880 Salon praised her face but disliked the saints floating behind her. He finished it in 1879, eight years after Germany annexed part of Lorraine, Joan's home province. France was still raw from the defeat, and Joan had become the symbol of getting it back. So a Lorraine girl stood in a Lorraine garden, playing the girl who saved France.

Preston Tsao

@PrestonTsao

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1h

Decades ago this painting was very prominently displayed in one of the main hallways at the Met. Then it was banished to the basement for being to realistic and sentimental. Not it’s back to where it belongs. ( I wasn’t sure my 50 year memory was correct, so checked with Grok. It was.

St. Lo art museum

 St. Lo in Normandy has a fascinating history and an excellent museum.

This is a small version of a statue that the Germans melted down when they took over the city during World War II.

Starry night

 

https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/2097263966921605204?s=20

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

Reading the comments on this post told me everything I need to know about art. So many of you wrote to say you felt the exact same thing I did standing in front of the Starry Night. That strange pull, the sense that the painting is somehow alive... It turns out the feeling is completely universal. I am not someone who gets emotional easily. But every so often a piece of art really gets to me. And that is exactly what happened the first time i walked up to Van Gogh's magnum opus. I know how that sounds, it is one of the most famous paintings on earth, almost a cliché to be moved by it. But maybe it is that famous for a reason... It genuinely looks like it is moving while you stand there, shifting in a way I cannot explain and have never seen in any of the thousands of paintings I have looked at in my life. The same day I took the photo below, I also filmed this short video. It still comes nowhere near the real thing, but you can at least catch a little more of it here, the thick ridges of paint, the way the stars and swirls lift right off the canvas. This technique is called "impasto", from the Italian for mixture. It means paint laid on so thickly that every brushstroke and ridge stays visible on the surface. Van Gogh piled it on with a loaded brush, building the stars up thick so they would blaze as bright as possible against the dark. But no video and no explanation of technique can really convey what it feels like to stand in front of it. And the fact that so many of you felt the very same thing says something true about what art is really for. Tolstoy said it best: "The receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s, as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist. In this uniting of it with others lies the great attractive force of art."

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

I took this photo four years ago, standing right in front of it at the MoMA in New York, and nothing had prepared me for the real thing. Seeing The Starry Night in person is still one of the most magical things art has ever done to me... What a screen can never show you is the paint itself: Van Gogh squeezed it straight from the tube onto the canvas, building the sky in thick, raised ridges you can practically feel, so the stars and swirls stand up off the surface and catch the light as you walk by. It's not just a picture of the night sky, it's a physical storm of paint, and standing before it, everything seems to move. He made it in 1889, from the barred window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, during one of the darkest moments of his life. He wrote to his brother Theo that the night was "more alive and more richly colored than the day," and once you have seen it with your own eyes, you understand exactly what he meant...

Jean-François Millet

We visited the Normandy birthplace of Jean-François Millet recently, which is now a museum. It's about 30 minutes west from where we are living in Cherbourg.

Millet was influential on Van Gogh, Monet, etc.

Good overview on Wikipedia here, along with links to his most famous paintings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Millet

Influence on Van Gogh

https://mymodernmet.com/jean-francois-millet-inspired-vincent-van-gogh/

Left: Jean-François Millet, “Shearing Sheep,” 1852–3 (Photo: Museum of Fine Arts via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Right: Vincent van Gogh, “The Sheep-Shearer (after Millet),” 1889 (Photo: Van Gogh Museum via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

While Millet was a pioneering Realist painter in his own right, he became even more renowned through his influence on Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). The Post-Impressionist painter—who was active more than a decade after Millet's death—made numerous references in letters, drawings, and paintings to Millet's oeuvre, finding creative inspiration in his depictions of working-class people.

Van Gogh felt a strong connection to farmers and laborers, who he believed lived noble lives, working with the land.

Left: Jean-François Millet, “The Sower,” 1850 (Photo: Museum of Fine Arts via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Right: Vincent van Gogh, “The Sower (after Millet,” 1881 (Photo: Van Gogh Museum via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

One of the motifs that frequently reappears in Van Gogh's art is a depiction of a man sowing a field. Based on Millet's painting The Sower from 1850, Van Gogh made over 30 works inspired by this figure during his lifetime. To Van Gogh—who found spiritual meaning in the environment—this image conveyed the dignity of cultivating the land.

While Van Gogh often copied this portrait directly as a source of comfort, he also included it in paintings, like two from 1888; one merged his admiration for Millet with his love of Japanese prints—two hallmarks of his style.

https://www.coolstoriesabout.art/p/how-millet-shaped-van-gogh