Using LACMA’s Free Image Library
At a family wedding in Seattle, I met the grandmother of the bride, Elaine—an artist with a love of European painting. After some small talk, I discovered that Elaine’s daughter-in-law had recently visited LACMA and quickly fell in love with Portrait of Madame Paul Duchesne-Fournet, by Jean-Jacques Henner. Upon returning home, this daughter-in-law found a small image of the painting and forwarded it to Elaine—with the desire to have her paint a full-size oil of it...
The Dashing Second Lieutenant
The viewing of art is, in most cases, a deeply private adventure, and so it was for me upon my first time really seeing Baron Antoine-Jean Gros’ Portrait of Second Lieutenant Charles Legrand. I first viewed the painting not in its majestic place on the third level of the Ahmanson Building but in a small book about Romanticism by Norbert Wolf that I picked up after leaving a wonderful exhibition featuring English Romantic-era painters at the Tate Britain. Not only was Romanticism the most elusive and diffuse of all the art movements, but the word itself fell into a vast no-man’s land. Magically, this is where my adventure began—with the Romantic movement and Baron Gros’ masterpiece...
