Day 3 and Final, "Pierre Louis Alexandre" by Kerin Bergöö Larsson

I knew that this painting would be finished either today or next visit, and I felt a little sad, because I've really enjoyed copying this one! It felt like painting from a live model. I didn't have too much I wanted to do - I wanted to correct the anatomy of his arm a little bit, and put the stripes on his shorts, and lighten his shirt. I did all of that, and also ended up putting highlights on his face and darkening his hair. Also repainted his hand, which I had just roughed in. I also scumbled a lighter, warmer color over the blue background to the right of his face. It got a little bit too yellow at the top, but it doesn't really bother me.

I was stepping back to look at it when a museum visitor told me he thought it was really good, and I asked him if I needed to do anything else. He said he thought the forehead needed to be lighter, and he was right! So I did that.

Here is the completed copy:

copy by Amy Mann after "Pierre Louis Alexandre" by Kerin Bergöö Larsson

Pierre Louis Alexandre escaped slavery in a French colony in South America and fled to Sweden, where he worked on the docks and posed for the art academy in the winter when the harbor was frozen. On the NGA's website, under Artwork History and Provenance, I learned that this painting stayed in Kerin Bergöö's family until it was given as payment to the family lawyer. Then it was passed down to Mats Werner, who eventually put it up for sale, and the National Gallery recently bought it.

Here's another interesting thing! I googled Pierre Louis Alexandre's name, and I found this article about him: https://www.athenaartfoundation.org/pierre-louis-alexandre. Since he was a model at an art academy, there are a LOT of paintings of him in the world. After looking at the others, I decided that this one by Kerin Bergöö Larsson is the best! And on the same website, Mats Werner, who owned this painting, wrote an article about Alexandre. He's been on a quest to find all of the other existing paintings of Alexandre. It's a great article, and you can read it here.

I also found this! A sculptor named Verner Åkerman made a gorgeous terra-cotta sculptor of Alexandre. You can read about that here.

I so enjoyed this copy that I decided to look for another portrait to copy. I will let you know if it's approved. In the meantime, I'll take a couple of weeks off from copying to give myself time to stretch a new canvas.

Thanks for reading! Click the pictures for a larger view

Day Two, copy after "Pierre Louis Alexandre" by Karin Bergöö Larsson

I didn't have a great night's sleep last night and got in a little late, but I got right to work correcting the color of the background of this painting. Today I used only Sevres Blue + white. Last week I used some ultramarine blue, which was the wrong choice. Sevres Blue is a color made by Williamsburg paints. The tube says it consists of Phthalo blue and white, which is more greenish in hue than ultramarine. I think it's a little improved, but still seems a little wrong. While I was painting over the blue today, I saw that Larsson had painted over a warmer, darker color, which I did not do. Oh well.

While I was painting the blue around the head, I slightly shifted the head back to the left a little. I had made it too jutting forward towards the right, and I realized that it wasn't like that. so I painted the back of the head a little to the left, and I brought the blue background a little over the face on the right. I also slightly changed the placement of the ear, and painted in some of the ear anatomy. (I think ears are very hard to paint! Larsson did an excellent job!)

Then I started working on his features. This is almost a profile, but you can see just a tiny bit of his eye on the far side of his face, so that makes it a 3/4 view, or maybe a 7/8 view! His head is tilted slightly up, or maybe it's just that the model stand was above Larsson's eye level. So the perspective on the head is pretty complicated and difficult. I changed the mouth a bit, because mine was too horizontal and his went up a little more to the left. I mixed a dark color and painted his hair and beard. I don't have any black on my palette, so I made the dark by mixing Dioxizine purple, Phthalo green, and cadmium red. 

Then, I couldn't avoid the eyes any longer, so I went for it. Starting with the far eye, I painted them in an abstract way, just copying the shapes and colors that I saw and not thinking too much about anatomy. I don't hate them. I think my copy looks like it could be the same individual, but with a slightly different expression on his face. I decided not to go further today, and I won't be in for the next couple of weeks, but the next time I'm there, I'm going to work on the shirt and pants, and make some corrections to his arm and hands.

I'm so impressed with how good a portrait painter Karin Bergöö Larson was, and yet we haven't heard of her. She's totally eclipsed by her famous painter husband, Carl Larsson. She has a Wikipedia page, but much of the space there is actually devoted to her husband's paintings of her! I edited the page to include this painting - the first time I've edited a Wikipedia page. I didn't know how to do it right - the painting I uploaded is too small, but at least it's there! If anybody knows how to make it larger, feel free to tweak my edit.

Here is my progress from today:

I'm really enjoying painting this model. As I said in my first post last week, I feel like I'm painting directly from the model - I think it's because Larsson made him so close to the picture plane and filled the whole painting with him. It feels like he's really there in front of me. And it just has the feel of art school about it, so I'm thoroughly enjoying it!

Thanks for reading! Click the images for a larger view.