I'm so happy I decided to resume copying at the National Gallery! Today was my first day on my copy of Jean-Baptiste Oudry's painting, "Misse and Luttine". Oudry was a court painter to King Louis XV of France.
Painted in 1729, "Misse and Luttine" was one of several portraits of hunting dogs commissioned by the king, who was an avid hunter, and wanted his dogs immortalized in paintings to decorate his many homes and hunting lodges.
Here is the painting, "Misse and Luttine":
The original painting is 38 1/2" x 51 3/4". The largest we are allowed to copy (without special permission) is 40", so using my handy-dandy Painting Resizer excel spreadsheet created by my husband Hal, I found that 30" x 40" came very close to the proportions (height x width) of the original.
I had prepared the canvas by drawing a pencil grid on it, dividing it into halves and quarters. I printed the image from the National Gallery website, and folded the printout into halves and quarters also.
I intended to copy the painting directly in the museum, so I didn't predraw the image on at home, which would have made life easier. But part of the fun for me is figuring it out when I'm there in front of it. I spent a solid two hours this morning carefully measuring and re-measuring, holding my brush out at arm's length to compare sizes, finding centers and angles, and checking negative spaces. I used the printout (which you can see lying in my paintbox in the photos below) to check and make sure I had done it correctly.
This is the end result of my morning's work. I broke for lunch and enjoyed perusing the book store. When I went back upstairs, I decided not to paint any more on it today. I will start on laying in the color when I'm here next, which will be in four weeks.
