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Richard Morris

@ahistoryinart.bsky.social

7.8K followers 95 following 2.5K posts

Art historian, dealer/art consultant 19thC and 20thC British/European art. Writing book on lesser known great artists. Seen in/on: CNN, NBC, The Spectator, The Times etc website: richardmorris.org [email protected]

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 17m

Thomas Rooke first visited Auxerre, France in 1886, having been sent by John Ruskin to record mediaeval carving and architecture of the city's cathedral. Ruskin later wrote: 'Not since seeing Turner's work has anything given me so much pleasure.'

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 5h

'Melun, Daybreak.' (c1860) Henry Mark Anthony was amongst the first artists to introduce plein air painting to England and was hailed as the heir to John Constable. He often used dramatic sunrise and sunset effects and stormy skies and seas as the subjects of his paintings.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 16h

Thanks, Alan

Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 16h

Thomas Dugdale Cantrell's 'The Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London,' (1936) depicts the 200 unemployed men who completed a near 300 mile walk to London to protest against the poverty suffered in Jarrow following the closure of its shipyard; the juxtaposition of society.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 16h

'Living room with my sister,' (1847) is one of several Adolph Menzel painted of rooms in his house at 18 Schöneberger Strasse in Berlin - private experiments in capturing different light sources, moonlight, late sun filtered through curtains and in this case, artificial light.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 17h

Good points.

Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 17h

Yes, most likely.

Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 17h

I entirely agree and it happens every day. It's common to have people commenting on pictures using Chatgpt. I was at a party recently where people were texting each other in the next room.

Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 17h

'Our Lady of the Hills.' (1921) The word anathemata, as David Jones unpicks it in his introduction to what later became an epic poem, means a lifting up and a setting apart of something for our particular savouring. A precise reading of what art is and always should be.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 21h

Thank you, I very much appreciate it.

Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 21h

'Senegalese gardener.' (1922) After a successful start to his career in London, Rudolph Ihlee journeyed to Collioure in the Mediterranean, where the 'blond light that suppresses shadows,' had a profound effect on his work as he experimented with a spontaneous style of painting.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 21h

Indeed.

Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 21h

Commonplace at the time sadly. The irony of how we teach art history is that many paintings by women artists (often attributed to men) will continue to be anonymous because there's so few people to recognise their style.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 21h

And a major influence on a young David Hockney as was Sickert for example, still a god well into the 1950s.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 22h

Yes, yet if you ask art history students about Spencer (as I have) the majority would look at you blank and this of one of our most important and original 20thC painters!

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 22h

Very kind of you, Laurie. I know Spencer's work very well and have been fortunate enough to buy several of his paintings and drawings which were unattributed. I got up and left the lecture. I should have stayed but the red mist was coming down.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 1d

Exactly.

Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 1d

My piece in @thespectator1828.bsky.social this week looks back at a lecture I attended this summer where a Cambridge art historian insisted paintings by Stanley Spencer were painted by David Jones. It revealed a weakness that stretches beyond one lecture; how we teach art history is woeful.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 1d

Matisse painted 'Pansies' (1903) during his ‘dark period,' as he went through near financial ruin and family scandal. He wrote of being moved by the pansy's melancholic grace; like Dutch flower painters of the 17thC, he saw the cut flower as a symbol of the vanity of human life.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 1d

'Sleeping Centurion,' (c1765) is a preparatory sketch for a sleeping soldier in Ubaldo Gandolfi's fresco of the Resurrection, painted in the eleventh chapel of the Portico di San Luca, Bologna. The fluid brushstrokes achieve a work of intimacy and great charm.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 1d

'Embroidery.' (1817) The paintings of Georg Friedrich Kersting have proved perennial objects of admiration, not only for their atmospheric use of colour, their meditative serenity and (what we all need from time to time) a sense of seclusion from the outside world.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 1d

It's been a favourite of mine since also studying the Dreyfuss Affair. Vallotton was a brilliant print maker.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 1d

This work by Félix Vallotton was on the cover of the satirical weekly newspaper Le Cri de Paris on January 23, 1898 - it was a reaction of immediate support for Émile Zola's famous J'accuse! letter after Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been found guilty of treason.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 1d

'Family Portrait,' (1904) was painted at the height of Albert Welti's career. He depicts himself leaning in front of architectural elements (bridge, staircase) that symbolize his awareness of being at a turning point. His wedding ring symbolises the importance of his family.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 2d

Albert Marquet's 'Lausanne and the Lake,' (1936) painted from the Hôtel Belvédère offers a view of the Lake Geneva landscape - a view approached with the same sense of pared-down minimalism and simplified forms as the rest of his work.

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