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ART “4” “2”-DAY 19 December
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BIRTH: 1869 REDFIELD

DEATH: 1851 TURNER

RETURN OF A PICASSO IS DEMANDED

^ Born on 19 December 1869: Edward Willis Redfield, Pennsylvania Impressionist painter who died in 1965.
— LINKS
— The Burning of Center Bridge (1928) _ Edward Willis Redfield was one of the leaders of Bucks County's nationally known group of visual artists who lived and worked in the New Hope area beginning in the early 1900's. This group was best known for the school of landscape painting they founded called Pennsylvania Impressionism. Redfield, along with Daniel Garber, is considered one of the leading artists of the group, receiving dozens of major awards. His paintings are found in the collections of many of the most important museums in America. On Sunday, 22 July 1923, lightning struck the wood-covered, 112-year-old Center Bridge, located just north of New Hope, Pennsylvania, very close to Redfield's home. Redfield, his son Laurent, and daughter-in-law Dorothy, were returning home from a visit to painter Joseph Pearson in Huntingdon Valley, PA. When they approached Center Bridge, they saw smoke and Redfield feared his house was on fire. He rushed home and found it was not his house that was on fire, but the nearby covered bridge. He gathered his family and went to watch. There, Redfield joined another Pennsylvania landscape painter, William Lathrop, to view the burning bridge from the river bank as firemen feverishly attempted to extinguish the blaze. Redfield later remarked, "Lathrop said it was a pity it couldn't be painted. So I took out an envelope and made some notes and painted all the next day. The following day, I painted it again." The Burning of Center Bridge is one of two resulting versions by Redfield. It is an unusual work for him, as it is his only known painting done from memory; most of his other works were landscapes done on-site in one sitting.
— The Island.

^ Died on 19 December 1851: Joseph Mallord William Turner, British artist born on 23 April 1775, specialized in landscapes and seascapes, considered by the French Impressionists as a precursor..
— Romantic landscape painter and engraver whose expressionistic studies of light, color, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity. His marine paintings are particularly notable.
— One of the finest landscape artists was J.M.W. Turner, whose work was exhibited when he was still a teenager. His entire life was devoted to his art. Unlike many artists of his era, he was successful throughout his career.
      Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London. His father was a barber. His mother died when he was very young. The boy received little schooling. His father taught him how to read, but this was the extent of his education except for the study of art. By the age of 13 he was making drawings at home and exhibiting them in his father's shop window for sale.
      Turner was 15 years old when he received a rare honor--one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was 18 he had his own studio. Before he was 20 print sellers were eagerly buying his drawings for reproduction. He quickly achieved a fine reputation and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. In 1802, when he was only 27, Turner became a full member. He then began traveling widely in Europe.
      Venice was the inspiration of some of Turner's finest work. Wherever he visited he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. His early training had been as a topographic draftsman. With the years, however, he developed a painting technique all his own. Instead of merely recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a light-filled expression of his own romantic feelings.
      As he grew older Turner became an eccentric. Except for his father, with whom he lived for 30 years, he had no close friends. He allowed no one to watch him while he painted. He gave up attending the meetings of the academy. None of his acquaintances saw him for months at a time. Turner continued to travel but always alone. He still held exhibitions, but he usually refused to sell his paintings. When he was persuaded to sell one, he was dejected for days. In 1850 he exhibited for the last time. One day Turner disappeared from his house. His housekeeper, after a search of many months, found him hiding in a house in Chelsea. He had been ill for a long time. He died the following day.
      Turner left a large fortune that he hoped would be used to support what he called “decaying artists.” His collection of paintings was bequeathed to his country. At his request he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.
      Although known for his oils, Turner is regarded as one of the founders of English watercolor landscape painting. Some of his most famous works are Calais Pier, Dido Building Carthage, Rain, Steam and Speed, Burial at Sea, and The Grand Canal, Venice.

— Turner was an English landscape painter who is renowned especially for his dynamic treatment of natural light effects in land and marine subjects. His work is of direct importance in the development of impressionism.
      Turner was born in London and educated at the Royal Academy of Arts. At the age of 15 he exhibited his paintings at the academy and continued to show his work there until 1850. He was elected an associate of the academy in 1799 and a full member three years later. He traveled widely throughout his career, extensively touring England and Scotland and later France, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1807 he became professor of perspective at the Royal Academy and in 1845 was appointed deputy professor. Turner's early paintings were predominantly watercolors and his subjects mostly landscapes. By the late 1790s he had started exhibiting his first oil paintings, eventually transferring to the oils the same vibrance of color that had proved so successful in his watercolors. His mature work falls into three periods.
      During the first period (1800-20) Turner painted many picturesque mythological and historical scenes in which the coloring was subdued and details and contours were emphasized. He was influenced by the 17th-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, notably in the use of atmospheric effects, as in The Sun Rising Through Vapor (1807), and in the treatment of architectural forms, as in Dido Building Carthage (The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire) (1815). Turner also produced numerous engravings for his unfinished collection Liber Studiorum (1806-19).
      The paintings of the artist's second period (1820-35) are characterized by more brilliant coloring and by diffusion of light. In two of Turner's best works, Bay of Baiae with Apollo and the Sibyl (1823) and Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829), his use of light lends radiance to the colors and softens architectural and topographical forms and shadows. During this period he also executed a number of illustrations for books on topography and a collection of watercolors depicting Venetian scenes.
      Turner's artistic genius reached its culmination during his third period (1835-45). In such works as Snow Storm: Steam Boat Off a Harbor's Mouth (1842), Peace – Burial at Sea (1842), and Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844), he achieved a vibrant sense of force by presenting objects as indistinct masses within a glowing haze of color. Some of the forces represented are the strength of the sea and the rhythm of rain. Other famous works of this period include The Fighting Téméraire (1839), The Sun of Venice Going to Sea (1843), and The Approach to Venice (1844). Turner died in London.
—      Turner was only fourteen years old when he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. He started his career by painting watercolors and producing mezzotints under the strong influence of John Robert Cozen's work. Then, in 1796, he launched into oil painting, working in the neoclassical manner of Richard Wilson and Nicolas Poussin, with results that found wide acclaim. He exhibited his first picture Fishermen at Sea (1796) in the Royal Academy exhibition in 1796. He was elected an Associate in 1799 and in 1802 a full member of the Royal Academy. Turner was one of the most prolific painters of his time. He traveled extensively in England, Scotland and Ireland, and also on the Continent (France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy).
      In 1802, he visited Paris for the first time, where he studied the Old Masters in the Louvre, above all Dutch seascapes and Claude Lorrain's compositions, which lastingly influenced him. Turner's first private showing, at his own house, took place in 1804. During this period, thanks to the increasing concentration on the atmospheric effects of light, his original style began to evolve, a process that culminated during trips to Italy between 1819 and 1829.
      Like the works of Constable, Turner's seemingly effortless watercolors and oil sketches were based on impressions of nature. But his perception of the world differed vastly from Constable's. Turner's pictures transcend ordinary appearances, conveying a visionary sense of the forces at work in the universe.
     In his atmospheric depictions of shipwrecks and natural disasters such as The Shipwreck (1805), Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812), A Storm (Shipwreck) (1823), Shipwreck off Hastings (1825), Fire at Sea (1835), Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842) reality and fantasy merge and color is used to metaphorically evoke the power of natural phenomena. By abandoning form or merely outlining it, Turner lent color autonomy and endowed it with a power of its own. This achievement was to be especially influential on XX century art. Turner's other best works are The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory (1808), The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (1817), Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1823), A Ship Aground (1828), The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken up (1838), Peace - Burial at Sea (1842), The Dogana, San Giorgio, Citella, From the Steps of the Europa (1842), Light and Color (Goethe's Theory) - The Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843), Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844).
— MORE
— LINKS — The Unpaid Bill (The Dentist Reproving his Son's Prodigality) (1808, 59x80cm) — The Grand Canal, Venice (1830) — View of Kenilworth Castle (1830)

Died on a 19 December:
1931 Raffaelo Sorbi, Italian artist born on 24 February 1844.
1890 Eugène Louis Lami, French artist born on 12 January 1800. — LINKS
1873 Henri Pierre Pharamond Blanchard, French artist born on 27 February 1805.
1851 Marie-Philippe Coupin de la Couperie, French artist born in 1773. [Existe-t-il un Copin de la Copinerie? un Coquin de la Coquinerie?]
1665 Gerard Pieterszoon Zyl, Dutch artist born in 1607.

Born on a 19 December:
1816 Franz Rheinhold, Austrian artist who died on 19 May 1893.
1793 Lorenzo Quaglio, German artist who died on 15 March 1869.
some year between 1774 and 1777 Pierre Antoine Augustin Vafflard, French artist who died at age 63.

Happened on a 19 December:

^ 2002 Return of Picasso painting looted by the Nazis is demanded.
      Thomas Bennigson sues in Los Angeles Superior Court for the return of Picasso's Femme en Blanc (aka Femme assise) of 1922, which belonged to his late grandmother (of which he is the only heir) and was looted by the Nazis in 1940.
      His grandmother, Carlota Landberg, a Jew, managed to escape from Berlin and the Nazi persecution in 1938. She entrusted the painting to a Paris art dealer, J. K. Thannhauser. But the next year Word War II broke out, and in June 1940 the German troops occupied Paris and over half of France. Immediately they started to persecute Jews there, just as they had been doing in Germany, and confiscating all Jewish property on which they could lay their hands. This included the Picasso painting, according to a letter Mrs. Landberg received from the art dealer in 1958 when after searching for 13 years she was at last able to locate him. Mrs. Landberg tried in vain to find out what had happened to her painting, until she died in 1994.
     It had probably been sold several times by 1975, when, what Mrs. Landberg never found out, it ended up at the Hahn Gallery in Manhattan, from which James Alsdorf bought it in 1975 for $375'000 and took it home to Chicago. After he died, his widow, Marilyn Alsdorf, in 2001, placed it to be sold by Los Angeles art dealer David Tunkl. Tunkl took the painting to Paris where he had a potential buyer, who, prudently, contacted the the Art Loss Register in London, which maintains a database of some 120'000 lost or stolen works of art. They had listed the painting and its owner, Carlota Landsberg. Failing to sell the painting, Tunkl took it back to Los Angeles.
      The Art Loss Registry managed to locate Mrs. Landberg's grandson in Oakland, California, where he is living while studying law at UC Berkeley. He knew nothing of his grandmother's painting.
      For much of 2002, Bennigson tried to settle out of court with Mrs. Alsdorf, who refused to give up the painting, and with Tunkl. On 18 December 2002, Tunkl sent the painting back to Chicago.
     So, on 19 December 2002, Thomas Bennigson sues Alsdorf and Tunkl in Los Angeles Superior Court, asking for the return of his grandmother's painting, or $10 million. He alleges that they sent Femme en Blanc to Illinois to avoid a California law to take effect on 01 January 2003. It extends the statute of limitations for claims against galleries for the recovery of art looted by the Nazis until 31 December 2010.

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