fleurdulys: Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children – John Singer…
Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children – John Singer Sargent
1896
Sargent painted a number of portraits showing parents with their children. I love them all, but this one is my favorite.
When you look at a Sargent portrait, you don’t just see a beautiful rendering of the human form dressed in a particular way in a particular place. You see an actual person. You see someone you can imagine talking to, with dreams and opinions and emotions. And when he painted families he captured the relationships, the shared history, frozen at a moment in time.
All these people are gone now. When this portrait was painted Adele Meyer’s two children were 11 years old (the girl, Elsie Charlotte) and 10 (the boy, Frank). Elsie grew up to marry, was widowed, and remarried; Frank fought in World War I and was elected to Parliament in the 1920s before dying in a hunting accident in 1935. The web doesn’t say how or when Adele and Elsie died, though they surely grew old and passed away many years ago.
Yet there they are, alive, in layers of sticky oil on canvas.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1bcmaro.
Tags: john singer sargent, mrs. carl meyer and her children.
