#american

Apparently that's his own family and friends in their own sitting room. Painting your relatives is cheaper than hiring models — though from the faces, the sitting went on a while.

From what I've read, he spent his last summers teaching and painting around a fishing harbor in Massachusetts, and the pictures from those years got looser and looser — apparently people argued even then about whether some were done. He died not long after this one.

Apparently he ran a painters' colony in a little Connecticut town and got tagged as the leader of the 'American Barbizon' crowd — the idea, from what I've read, being that a quiet patch of woods was worth more than any grand mountain view.

Apparently he spent summer after summer painting people idling by the New England shore — same trees, same water, a different crowd each time. They say he made dozens of these and barely changed the recipe.

According to the museum's blurb, he specialised in painting things so real they fool your eye — burnt-down candles, battered lamps, stuff on its way to the bin. They say he stopped showing in galleries by 1890 and just painted for neighbours near his New Jersey home.

The title's a whole sentence, which I've never seen before. They say he and his wife were both painters working in Los Angeles — I couldn't find out for sure whether that's the two of them standing there, but everyone seems to assume it is.

According to Wikipedia he spent most of his life in Paris painting rich Americans abroad. His father had made a fortune in sugar, so he had the run of that world rather than having to talk his way into it. Portraits like this were partly a business — you paid to be seen looking like this.

The story goes that he spent years painting quiet, brownish landscapes, then late in life switched almost overnight to thick, crusted paint like this — and apparently it baffled the people who'd been happily buying the brown ones.

From what I've read, he did a lot of paintings in black and white on purpose — they were headed for magazine pages, which could only print grey anyway.

Apparently he lived across the street from a club that staged fights like this, so he was more or less painting what went on next door. Prizefighting was illegal in New York at the time, they say, and signing both fighters up as 'members' for the night was the loophole.