Saturday, May 27, 2017

Expressive Draperies at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Gerrit Dou
Woman playing a clavichord
ca. 1665
oil on panel
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Charles Jervas
Portrait of Dorothy, Viscountess Townshend
1718
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Godfrey Kneller
Portrait called The Howard Children
1695
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

"The use of cloth as an element expressive in itself has developed within a large number of pictorial conventions, creating a kind of visionary history of fabric, traceable entirely through its poetic life in pictures and sculpture. Representative art has always dwelt on the fascinating capacity of cloth to bunch, stretch, hang, or flutter, to be smooth and unsmooth under different circumstances, to be wrought upon and then restored, and wrought upon differently another time."

 Anne Hollander, from Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting (London: National Gallery, 2002)

Anthony van Dyck
Charity
1630s
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Anonymous Bolognese painter
St Cecilia
17th century
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

"The baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. Yet the baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The baroque unfurls all the way to infinity."  

 Gilles Deleuze, from The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (University of Minnesota Press, 1993)

Antonio Bellucci
St Sebastian
ca. 1716-18
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Sisto Badalocchio
Christ carried to the Tomb
ca. 1607
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Agostino Carracci
Last Communion of St Francis
before 1596
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Paolo Veronese
St Jerome with Donor
1563
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Peter Paul Rubens
St Barbara fleeing her Father
ca. 1620
oil on panel (modello)
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Nicolas Poussin
Rinaldo and Armida
ca. 1625
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Nicolas Poussin
Nurture of Jupiter
ca. 1636-37
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Nicolas Poussin
Return of the Holy Family from Egypt
ca. 1628-38
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Nicolas Poussin
Translation of St Rita of Cascia
ca. 1635
oil on panel
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London