I had the chance to travel to Quimper this weekend, from my trip to the beaux arts museum two paintings particular grabbed my attention, I tried to take decent pictures of them at the highest possible resolution.
1853 - Alexander Harrison - Marine, clair de lune
1884 - Evariste Vital Luminais - La Fuite de Gradlon
There is not much to be found on the web about Alexis Axilette, a french painter born in 1860. Even if he won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1885 and was a Gérome student. You can still find some of his work, some commissions and studies if you dig a little.
Ramon Hurtado was the first to told me about him, and that the Angers museum had some of his artworks but they weren’t displayed. The website of the Angers Musée des Beaux-Arts did not display any high resolution pictures of this work sadly, but I asked the museum if they could send me better pictures of them.
After some mails exchanges they accepted to ask a photograph to come take new pictures of the paintings and send them to me.
So without further talk here are the paintings.
Please credit the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers & David Riou if you want to display the photos.
Académie, étude de nu - Alexis Axilette, 1882 - Oil paint on canvas - © Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers - David Riou
Académie de nègre [sic] - Alexis Axilette, 1881 - Oil paint on canvas - © Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers - David Riou
Portrait de Madame Axilette - Alexis Axilette, 1910- Oil paint on canvas - © Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers - David Riou
Académie d’homme - Alexis Axilette, 1920 - Pastel on paper - © Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers - David Riou
I’m really intrigued by the evolution of the brushstrokes between what seems a smooth academic art study of a nude from 1882 and the Portrait of Madame Axilette from 1910 which displays a very clear brushstroke work, see the close-up below :
Close up from two Alexis Axilette paintings from 1882 & 1910
Special thanks to Ramon Hurtado and the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Angers.
I have always been quite a lover of J.W. Waterhouse work, those soft eerie figures in heavily textured environments affected me a lot when I was growing as an artist; and of course the mysteries of the mythical subjects were inflaming my imagination.
While you can find some books with a catalog of his work and his life, I couldn’t find much on his technique and process of painting. So I thought, here we go, let’s get on an adventure and try to solve some of those questions. I will try whenever I can to differentiate my own theories from the factual proofs that can be found in historical letters and research.
Waterhouse studied at the Royal Academy in London after having paint under his father, also a painter. From there we can deduce that even if he entered the school as a sculptor (which must have helped a lot when he painted), must have learn how to paint from the « academic » method dispensed then, a method similar to the “French Academic” method of this century. He probably used a more and more personal method as he became more experienced, has most painter do.
As we can learn from the few books on his work, Waterhouse had the tendency to “use the pose of the figure idea as a basis for his paintings”, he usually started with simple sketches to illustrate the composition:
There are some mentions of lot sketchbooks filled with studies and sketches, I couldn’t find them but some drawings were available online.
Once the composition was defined, he worked with models to pose for him and did some more complete drawing studies from life.
Then he started working on small oil comp as color studies and sometimes with watercolor, trying new ideas:
I’m not exactly sure if he used some kind of drawing reporting process from studies or if he did some advanced drawing directly on the canvas with chalk or charcoal. But we can definitely see that he used broad dark painting strokes to establish some parts of the drawing and then laid midtones/local colors of the elements before starting to sculpt them.
Waterhouse, JW - The Rose Bower (1910)
“They seem to have no idea of setting a palette and are too much addicted to the use of small brushes.”
Final notes:
John William Waterhouse process and techniques seems not to be so different from the usual process of this time, as we can easily find similarity with other painters’process such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, another favorite of mine:
Lawrence Alma-Tadema - unfinished painting
Sources and thanks:
The art and life of J.W. Waterhouse, R A, 1849-1917 by Hobson, Anthony, 1920
J.W. Waterhouse by Anthony Hobson, 1989
https://johnwilliamwaterhouse.home.blog/
https://www.muddycolors.com/2018/09/studies-and-unfinished-works/
Ramon Hurtado advices
I had the pleasure to go to the Hispanic Society of America show and the National Gallery in London the 28th march 2023. I took some pictures there as reference, you can find them below.
Diego Velázquez – Portrait of a Little Girl – c1638 – 51x41cm – Hispanic Society of America
Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa – Brurrian girls – 1910 – 148x211cm – The Hispanic Society of America
Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida – Sea Idyll – 1908 – 151x199cm – Hispanic Society of America
All right reserved to :
The Hispanic Society of America – https://hispanicsociety.org/
The National Gallery – https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
Both Sargent and Sorolla were fascinated by the work of Velazquez, they each did a study of his Legend of Arachne / The spinners. It’s fascinating to see how they both handled the copy differently, I sadly couldn’t find any decent picture of the Sargent study, so please excuse the pixels!
The fable of Arachne / The spinners by Velazquez, by order : original, John Singer Sargent study & Joaquim Sorolla study
