Saturday 6 March 2010

Eggs in the Morning?


A friend of mine owns a few paintings by Maxfield Parrish - but not 'Daybreak', above.

He was, as far as I know, the last painter to use the 'glazing' method and egg tempera together, producing wonderfully vibrant and luminous images like the one above. It's a shame that they were mostly chocolate-box illustrations, but they were not all like that. Some were dark and brooding, with the light seemingly coming from the painting itself - soft but intense.

The reason why these paintings seem to exude light, is because the ground for them is pure white, and the paint is applied in layers of pure colour (starting with the blues and ending with the reds) and between each colour layer, a coating of clear varnish is applied. This means that the natural light travels through all the layers, hits the white ground behind, then reflects back, so the entire painting behaves in much the same way as a stained-glass window does. It is also a similar technology to the offset-printing method, but there is a wider choice of primary colours. It can take months or years to complete a painting like this, and M. P. usually had about 10 on the go at any given time.

You know those Old Masters, which - although they seem to be almost a dark brown or black - seem to glow in ordinary light? Well, they were glazed egg tempera, which is why it is so utterly stupid to try to 'clean' them, as a lot of galleries attempt.

All the Egyptian tomb-paintings are either encaustic (beeswax medium), or egg tempera - it will last forever in the right conditions.

When I look at 'Daybreak', the taste of Restsina wine and the memories of a couple of American girlfriends come flooding back to me.

12 comments:

  1. What a beautiful painting, and an interesting post. I knew about the egg tempera, but not the beeswax. I'll have to remember to mention it to my daughter (she's an art history major).

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  2. You and I know only too well, Tom, that technique is not everything. Personally I would rather look at a messy Matisse, than a long-laboured look-alike Alma Tadema. Sorry; just a painter's view point.

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  3. Yes, I agree with you about that Cro, but it was only the technique I was talking about really. My friend who has a couple of the above, once asked me to give him a hand getting something upstairs that had just been delivered. I went down and found Alma Tadema's 'Moses in the Bull rushes' painting - the real thing! It's about 12 feet high.

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  4. Jeez. Who is your friend; Prince Charles?

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  5. He's a wealthy American who has lived in Bath for a long time. His house is big enough to hang the Alma Tadema. I don't know whether or not he still owns it, as it was delivered quite a few years ago. Whenever it comes up in illustrations, it's always marked 'In a private collection'.

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  6. Is it only you and me who like Retsina?

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  7. Probably. These days, the Greeks can't afford it. The ONLY bottle of Retsina I ever ordered in Greece, I had to send back, because it was cloudy and bad. That was the only bottle in the restaurant. How was your old-folks lunch? (or is it dinner, and yet to come?)

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  8. hey from canada

    that is the oddest thing.... i have a print of that painting, a bit creased, that i have NO idea where it came from. it just arrived in my house years ago, unframed, just in my stuff.
    and i always loved it.
    thx, now i know what it is!

    ~laura

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  9. There is a good, coffee-table book on Maxfield Parrish, Pooch. Like Cro says, the paintings are pretty awful, but they are extremely well done illustrations. I wonder how many repros of the above exist in the world!

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  10. Do you know George Tooker's paintings, Tom? He has worked almost exclusively in egg tempera all his life. I love his work.

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  11. No I don't, Cat. I'll look him up.

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  12. I've just had a quick look at Tooker, Cat. Some of them remind me of Hopper paintings, but Hopper's colours are a lot muckier - maybe the tempera makes the colours shine out a lot more?

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