Mr. Moon by way of Corot’s figure paintings

The Musée Marmottan-Monet currently has an exhibition of figure paintings of Corot.  While he is mainly celebrated as a visionary landscape painter, the figure paintings of Corot have never been neglected by posterity.  There is a sobriety and concentrated human presence in them that makes these paintings “incontournable.”  At their best, one sees the long tradition of Italian Renaissance portraiture from which they are rooted.  In fact, one senses Corot’s deep admiration and long contemplation of Leonardo da Vinci, Titian and Veronese, and it is as if the gestures of some of his models are pure distillations of the long moments of looking that he spent at the Louvre.

Perhaps the wonder of Corot’s figure paintings is that they are intimate, never pretentious, never a demonstration of star-making virtuosity, and never flattering.  We are so used to photoshopped perfection that it can be jarring to see the extreme underbite in some of his Italian models, or their plainness.  Corot’s sympathetic but never flattering gaze, his slowly accumulated pieces of painted flesh built up from the warm “vigorous” undertones, to finish in this pale neutral matte skin, so full of  calm melancholic thoughtfulness, are a testament to his great achievement.  One only need to recall the other portraiture practiced in High Society at the time, in the likes of Franz Xaver Winterhalter, to appreciate the magnitude of Corot’s contribution to figure painting.

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Mr. Moon

2010-2017

Oil on linen

46 x 33 cm

Painting the figure as Corot did, in a studio, without pretension, is not something I practice.  The closest thing to this in my upcoming show is a small painting that I have been off and on working on for over 7 years.  I had started the painting based on a drawing made during a nude figure drawing session that I participated in.  The model, a small bald man, had a humble presence which touched me and I had enjoyed drawing him enormously.  In the studio, I transcribed the drawing onto a canvas and it had gone through many different states and many years of being unfinished. I had difficulty finding any sort of satisfactory resolution to the piece.

My main problem with the painting was the fact that it was a posed figure in an interior, a model in the sterile setting of a group drawing session.  Why paint this at all?

The painting languished for a long time until I gave up on the figure drawing aspect of it this Fall while reworking the canvas.  I gave up on the modeling of the figure, I let go of the usual interior props figure models are posed in, and I let Mr. Moon disappear into the dark blue night.

It turns out, I discovered this yesterday, there is a precedent.  It is an illuminated manuscript illustration of God creating the stars, on view in the permanent collection at the Musée Marmottan-Monet: 

Dieu créant les Étoiles 

Initial O

Sano di Pietro

Sienne - XVe siècle 

Musée Marmottan-Monet INV. M6049