#crowd

Took him something like two years, from what I can find — a pile of small studies done out at the park, then the big one built up indoors. The speckled border round the edge is his as well; he added it later so the thing wouldn't have to sit inside somebody else's gold frame.

This shows Czech Legion troops marching into Vladivostok in 1918, deep in the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Luks was usually known for gritty city scenes, not history painting on this scale.

This was, from what I've read, his third try at a big Paris student prize, and he lost again — to a rival painting the exact same death scene, only plainer and darker. The judges apparently wanted fewer people waving their arms about.

The story goes that a Turkish sultan sent these men a demand to surrender and they wrote back something so filthy it stayed famous for centuries — nobody seems sure the letter ever really existed. Repin kept at this for something like a decade, from what I can find, using friends and neighbours as models; the one bent over the paper was apparently a historian he knew who fed him the details.

Historians have reportedly counted somewhere close to ninety separate games hidden in this one board - tug of war, leapfrog, hoop-rolling, plus a few nobody's been able to name for sure.

They say the title's a bit of a mix-up — old varnish darkened over the centuries until the scene looked like night, though it's really broad daylight. It was also trimmed down on all four sides at some point, apparently to fit between two doors.

This was made to order as a ceiling for one of the Louvre's own rooms — a museum commissioning itself a giant tribute to the classics, more or less. The crowd is supposedly a roll-call of great names from across the centuries, all painted turning up to worship one man.

The man who paid for this was, from what I've read, a broker who wanted everyone to know how close he stood to the Medici — so a good number of the faces crowding in are theirs, painted in as kings and hangers-on. It went up on a church wall, which is a very polite place to put an advert for yourself.

He is believed to have 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.

From what I've read he ran with a crowd of painters who went after New York's rough streets at a time when nobody wanted rough streets on a wall — critics called them the Ashcan school, and it wasn't meant kindly.

This one's a print, not a painting — the credit line lists an engraver and a publisher too, so it sounds like a team job, not just one person's work behind it.

The crowd is apparently packed with people he actually knew — family, writers, musicians, himself tucked in at one edge — put together from sketches made at open-air concerts. Critics at the time complained it looked slapped on rather than finished.

The whole square is apparently one big argument — the feast season on one side, the fasting season on the other, the inn and the church facing off across the middle. Nearly two hundred people in there, from what I've read, and supposedly almost every one of them is doing something you could put a name to, if you knew the customs.

This hung as a Goya for years, apparently, before the name underneath got moved to a painter who worked in much the same manner. Same picture, different label.

The name it goes by comes from money — the story is that a copy once changed hands for a sum that was outrageous for a print, and it stuck. It isn't one moment either: from what I've read he packed several separate things from the same chapter of the Bible into a single scene, so people are being healed, argued with and turned away all at once.

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.

This was commissioned for a Naples charity that apparently still exists today, and instead of splitting the seven acts of mercy into separate scenes like usual, all seven got crammed into one dark room.

Supposedly death coming for everyone regardless of rank was a stock subject back then — a 'dance of death' you'd see on church walls and in cheap prints — and this drags it out of the church and into open country. It went through a long restoration not many years ago, which is apparently why the colours come across as strong as they do now.

Apparently he was travelling first class and took this looking down at the cheaper decks. They say he spent his whole life arguing that photography counted as art, and rated this one the best thing he ever made.

Apparently this reworks the same crowd and shoreline from a painting he'd made the year before, and he returned to these same faces again in prints a couple years later. It was one piece in a much bigger series he kept adding to for decades, loosely tracking stages of a life.