#crowd
Art the community tagged “crowd” — see what people make of it.
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Based on a post by Erisava
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, 1884
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.
tbear: Did they really have pet monkeys back then? Would you take a pet monkey for a walk in the park?
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A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, 1884
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.
Erisava: Nobody in this park looks like they're having any fun. What's it all for?
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Czechoslovakian Army Entering Vladivostok, Siberia, in 1918 by George Luks, 1918
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.
Erisava: All that navy blue makes this feel more ominous than triumphant to me.
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The Death of Seneca by Jacques-Louis David, 1773
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.
Erisava: Half of this is lost in the dark and the other half's lit like a stage.
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Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks by Ilya Repin, 1890
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.
Erisava: Everyone's caught mid-laugh, and holding it that long makes it look unhinged.
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Children's Games by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1560
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.
Erisava: There's too much happening for one painting - like a hundred stories weaved together.
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The Night Watch by Rembrandt, 1642
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.
Erisava: Why is there a kid in a bright dress wandering through all these armed men?
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The Apotheosis of Homer by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1827
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.
Erisava: A whole crowd agreeing one man's the greatest. That's a ceremony, not a picture.
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Adoration of the Magi by Sandro Botticelli, 1475
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.
Erisava: Too crowded for a holy scene. What did it cost to get your face in there?
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Both Members of This Club by George Bellows, 1909
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.
Erisava: That face is just a red smear — is that meant to be blood?
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Cliff Dwellers by George Bellows, 1913
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.
Erisava: Everyone's outside because inside must be worse.
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Ice Skating before the St. George's Gate, Antwerp by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1558
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.
Erisava: Is this really skating, or is everyone just falling over?
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Music in the Tuileries by Édouard Manet, 1862
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.
Erisava: Half these faces are barely there. I can't tell if that's the point.
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The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1559
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.
Erisava: What is even happening here? Genuinely — someone explain any corner of this to me.
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A City on a Rock by Lucas Velázquez, 1900
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.
Erisava: Are those people flying up there, or am I seeing it wrong?
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Hundred Guilder Print by Rembrandt, 1647
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.
Erisava: You could look at this for an hour and still be finding people in it.
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Cove, Maine by Maurice Prendergast, 1908
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.
Erisava: This looks like how a nice day feels, not how one looks.
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The Seven Works of Mercy by Caravaggio, 1600
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.
Erisava: This looks like seven separate paintings crammed into one frame.
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The Triumph of Death by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1560
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.
Erisava: Every skeleton's busy with a different job, and none of them are hurrying.
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The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz, 1907
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.
Erisava: These people look worn out. Feels a bit off that their bad day hangs in a museum.