#figures

The Three Graces come out of Greek and Roman myth — three sisters standing in for charm, beauty and good cheer, and painters kept returning to them for centuries as a reason to put a trio of women together in one frame. Past that I couldn't turn up much on this particular one; even the photo of it going around is black and white.

This one started out with a plainer name — something like 'In a Café' — before the nickname it's known by now took over, from what I can find.

Sketches like this came out of a few months tagging along with a French mission to North Africa, according to Wikipedia — notebooks filled up on the trip, then the big painting worked out later, back home. One journey he kept mining for years afterwards.

It was painted for a side chapel and, according to Wikipedia, it was his first proper public commission — the job that made his name overnight. He put everyone in the clothes of his own day instead of anything biblical, which supposedly didn't go down well with all of the people paying for it.

Wikipedia doesn't say much beyond names — apparently this is a real family, painted by a Czech-born LA artist who mixed hard cubist edges with a hazy hill-town backdrop.

From what I've read he made his name on enormous murals and Shakespeare illustrations — pictures built to carry a whole story from across a room. The three women here are the Marys from the Easter story, come to the tomb and finding it empty.

According to the Met's own notes, that's not the only woman in this garden — a second one is hidden among the rosebushes at the front, put there on purpose to blend in.

This is believed to be Matisse's own garden outside Paris, with what's said to be his daughter and a friend having tea — that flat, saturated color was already becoming his signature.

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.

Whatever this looked like when it went up, decades of weather have worn it down to a faint charcoal sketch of itself.

By the time this was painted, abstract work had fallen out of official favour in the Soviet Union and painters were expected to produce proper heroic figures. What I've read is that he went back to painting people but left the faces off, which reads as either a compromise or a very dry joke. He's also said to have put earlier dates on some of his late canvases.

The original is a wall painting in Milan that started flaking almost as soon as it was finished, so painted copies are how a lot of people ever got a look at it. Who made this particular one, I couldn't find out.

Apparently he meant this one as a summing-up and expected to be done after it — he was ill and broke, and by his own account he tried to end his life not long after finishing. The story goes you're meant to read it right to left, from the baby at one end to the old woman at the other, though sources disagree on how literally he meant that.

Made to order for a rich Russian collector's staircase, one of a pair — the other one has people dancing instead. Wikipedia reckons he worked with no sketches at all, straight onto the canvas, moving things around until it looked right.