#wealth
Art the community tagged “wealth” — see what people make of it.
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Mäda Primavesi (1903–2000) by Gustav Klimt, 1912
This was a commission — her parents were rich Viennese patrons who put money behind a lot of the design world there. The story goes she was nine, and that she picked how she wanted to stand herself.
Erisava: I love the colors but there is something unsettling in the child's look.
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Amédée-David, the Comte de Pastoret by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1823
The man in it was a rich young aristocrat with a habit of ordering paintings of himself — this was one of several he commissioned from the same painter, going by the museum's own notes. His father, I gather, had been a heavyweight in French law and politics, so the family was well used to being looked at.
Erisava: He paid someone to make him look this pleased with himself.
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Madame Moitessier by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1851
Supposedly the commission was turned down flat at first, and only accepted after an actual meeting with her — then it dragged on for something like a decade, with a whole second painting of her finished years after this one. Nobody, it seems, was in any hurry.
Erisava: There's a fortune hanging off her and she still looks miserable. What's that about?
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Portrait of Mrs. Francis Stanton Blake by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, 1908
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.
Erisava: Is this any different from paying for a really good photo?