There are moments in which you feel an experience of a sudden and striking realization, as an ephiphany, in which you discover the importance of painters unknown to the general public.
This happen to me recently following the English art market in which it was sold by the Gallery Philip Mould & Company for £65.000 a work of Oswald Birley entitled The Nurse.
This beautiful portrait depicts a young woman gazing out over her left shoulder at the viewer and it is illuminated by the light coming from the right side.
The nurse’s face, lit by the light, shows an extraordinary beauty: her right eye is masterfully rendered in the shadow of her fringe, which falls from her headwrap. Her gaze confidently and snob diffuses out from the canvas simultaneously inviting and arresting.
The portrait is modern as it is depicting a young woman with a profession but in the same time pays homage to the old master as Diego Velázquez, Birley’s much-admired artistic hero, with its delicate colours.
The girl is Margaret Elizabeth Barrett, born on the 8th of February 1903, was 18 years old when this portrait was painted in 1921.
Her father, Dr. Edmund Howard Barrett (1842-1921), was a physician who treated Oswald Birley, and in lieu of payment, Birley suggested that he might paint Dr. Barrett’s portrait. Dr. Barrett responded, “I am to old and ugly, paint my daughter instead!” The result is the present work, one of Birley’s most captivating portraits from the early 1920s.
Margaret is wearing with proudness the nurse’s white uniform associated with FANY (Female Army Nursing Yeomanry).
Birley was famous for producing paintings that were masterfully executed, for which the present painting is an unparalleled example, combining an enriching aesthetic with psychological realism.
Birley was born in 1880 in New Zealand while his parents were on a world tour, graduated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled to Paris and Madrid to study art.
During the First war World he served with the Royal Fusiliers, later he was transferred to the Intelligence Corps, obtaining the rank of captain and being awarded the Military Cross in 1919.
After Birley had met American Military officers in Paris, he decided to go to America as a land of plenty and promise to find a financial security.
By 1921, he had caught the attention of the great American art dealer and taste-maker, Lord Duveen, in part due to his involvement in a joint exhibition held in New York at Knoedler on Fifth Avenue. Money was tight during these early visit to America and it is this financial instability which engendered the present picture as payment as it is inscribed on the top left of the canvas reads “To Edmond Barrett from Oswald Birley Dec 1921”.
Back in England he became one of the most fashionable painters capturing the essence of the sitters and following the tradition of old masters as Hans Holbein, Van Dyck, Vermeer, Velázquez e Caravaggio.
He portrayed king George V and others members of the Royal family as a very young Queen Elizabeth, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Eisenhower. He became famous for his portraits of the theatre’s stars and of his wife Rhoda as The Green Mask.
In the same pose of The Nurse in 1921 Birley did his Self-portrait in profile. The painter depicted
himself in white clothes with a strong light coming from the right side, shadowing completely his face.
He was much attracted to painting profile portraits, he regarded conveying character and personality through the partial display of a face as a stimulating challenge.
This type of portraits has a really long tradition started by Leonardo and grown up with the Flemish painters and it is known as tronie, examples of certain types of faces and facial expressions.
Studies of tronies were realized and collected by artists in the XVII century no just as portraits but as expression– of a child, woman or man, young, mature or old, etc. – and facial expressions depicting various psychological states.
Tronies were made and used not only by the master painter but also by apprentices.
The practise of copying character heads, in a drawing or painting, formed an important part of an artist’s training in the XVI and XVII centuries. Tronies were especially useful to artists who ran a workshop with the help of studio assistants and in Flanders it was customary to execute such character studies on panel to make them more resistant to damage incurred by frequent handling in the studio.
Artists turned to the tronies for many reasons. For example, it presents a unique opportunity to experiment with facial expressions and lighting. The painter has an opportunity to enhance or display his/her skills through certain challenging aspects of the painting such as an extravagant facial expression.
Rubens, Van Dyck e Vermeer painted tronies, Lievens e Rembrandt established this character heads as an independent art form, but for all “tronies” were painted for the open art market.
If we look closely the face of The Nurse, we probably would think about the most famous tronie in the art history, The Girl with a Pearl Earring 1665 by Jan Vermeer.
The painting depicts a Dutch girl dressed in oriental costume with a turban and an excessively big pearl earring.
Artists favored garments that looked particularly exotic which would offer an opportunity to show off painterly technique, one of the strongest calling cards of the professional artist.
Vermeer is known to have painted three tronies in all.
In this portrait he displays his mastery over light, seen in the softness of the girl’s features, the shine on the pearl and the flickering light on her parted lips.
Another tronie by Vermeer is Girl with a Red Hat, one of his smallest works. A girl wearing a lavish red hat along with the lush blue of her clothes are the most arresting features of the painting, emitting a sense of warmth. The light caresses her face and puts a shine on the pearl earrings she is wearing. The young woman’s lips are parted in an expectant expression.
Rembrandt elevated this genre to art and on oh his famous of tronie Man with a Feathered Beret, 1635-1640.
A man turns his head and looks at the viewer with a surprised expression. Rembrandt imagined an eclectic, old fashioned costume for this character, a soldier as marked by the metal collar, called a gorget, on his neck. He is dressed in a grand black feathered beret with an ostrich feather, highlighted by the monochrome background, a cloak with gold embroidery and a gold earring. Each element of the costume is used to demonstrate the painter’s skillful technique. It seems that Rembrandt used his own features as a template for the character’s face as he bears a resemblance to the painter.
Rembrandt is famous for the way he painted the different stages of life in his subjects.
Bust an Old Man with Turban (1627-28), it is a study in lighting, a way for the artist to experiment with lighting effects. Here the light comes from the background casting a strong shadow on half of the man’s face. The transition from light to shadow is subtle and masterfully executed. Strong contrasts shape the figure’s face as his lines and wrinkles catch the light; his nose and beard reflect light as well. The old man is wearing an ornate turban with sparkling gold embroidery while the red gem on the clasp brightens the shadow area.
Van Dyck, one of the favourite painters of Birley, painted one of his first tronie at the age of 20 in the studio of his master Peter Paul Rubens. The work Study of a Bearded Old Man in Profile, Facing Left has an exceptional artistic value because it is a unique witness to the young artist’s outstanding maturity.
Van Dyck reveals himself to have been a confident artistic personality with keen powers of observation. This is reflected in the highlights that accentuate the anatomy of the master, a Bearded Old because it master, Peter Paul age of quick brushwork skull, cheekbones, nose and ear. Like no other, he knows how to depict the tanned skin of the old man using perfectly blended gradations of brown, grey, ochre and pink. This tronie is a masterpiece in miniature, and it reused it for one of the characters of the Crowning with Thorns in the Prado (Madrid) and the Crowning with Thorns from the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum (Berlin)
Another artist really famous for his tronie painted for his studio and for other artists was Peter Paul Rubens.
One of the most delicate and incredible beautiful tronie is the portrait of his son Nicolas 1620 in the Graphische Sammlung Albertina Vienne. In this drawing we can admire the great ability of Rubens as draftsman with black and red chalk and the way he captured the sweet and angelic expression of his little son with a coral neckless.
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