The Flapper Era

Without a doubt when we think of the Flapper - young women in the 1920s who wore dresses with low waistlines and bobbed their air – we have the artist John Held, Jr. to thank for the images etched into our minds.

You’ve see his work before.  You just might not have known it was his.  He has been described as the right artist at the right time to capture the essence of the Roaring 20s – the decade of the Flapper.   He created the wonderful cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald's book:

Selling his first drawing at age 9, Held was known as a child prodigy, and by age 15 he had sold his first illustration to Life.   In 1918, he was recruited by U.S. Naval Intelligence to accompany a pair of archaeologist on an expedition to Central America to study Mayan art forms.  Their real mission was to sketch the coastline and scout for sites for military operations

From 1925 to 1936 many of his woodcut cartoons and faux maps were published in The New Yorker.  It certainly didn’t hurt that one of Held’s boyhood friends had begun the magazine.  Held had a running feature called Gay Nineties that made fun of past generations.

Prior to 1936 his work appeared on many Life magazine covers.

During the 1920s his drawings usually showed characters dancing, driving, drinking - just doing fun things.  Held was so popular during the 1920s people would send him a blank check begging him for a drawing.  His work appeared in six magazines, he designed sets and costumes for Broadway plays and published two newspaper strips - Margie and Rah Rah Rosalie.  

He even used his popularity by running for Congress at one point.

By 1952, people were nostalgic for the Roaring 20s and his work was popular once more and a book Held published along with Frank B. Gilbreath, Jr. titled Held’s Angels certain helped to bring raccoon coats, bobbed hair, short skirts and Charleston back to the forefront again.

Held passed away in 1958.

The Treaty of Paris, 1783

This painting is titled The Treaty of Paris, 1783 by Benjamin West.   From left to right John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin are shown.

Why is the painting unfinished?


ElementaryHistoryTeacher over at History Is Elementary provides a wonderful explanation regarding the painting and shares how she would use it in the classroom in her post, An Ending or a Preview.

When the Painter Overshadows the Painting

The title of this painting is The Expansionist (The Well Traveled Man) by Frank D. Millet (1899).  The painting is part of the collection at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.  This painting was in several exhibitions, before ending up in Atlanta, but the most poignant was a memorial exhibition in 1912 after the Titanic disaster.

Try as I might I could not locate any details regarding this painting other than details regard Millet’s life….which were quite interesting all by themselves. 

Millet is often referred to as a Renaissance man because he had so many interests and talents.   He was a host to the Boston Colony of artists who gathered outside of London. 

His resume included illustrator, writer, war correspondent, he translated Tolstoy and was friends with Mark Twain and John Singer Sargent.

Tragically Millet died in the Titantic disaster at the age of 66
.

There’s a fountain near the White House on the Ellipse in Washington D.C. dedicated to Millet and Archibald W. Butt.  Both men died in the Titanic disaster. 

An Ordinary Life Leads to the World's Most Famous Painting

In the late 1970s my parents had an opportunity to visit Europe a couple of times.  During one trip they toured the Louvre in Paris, France mainly to see what everyone else goes there to see – Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous painting.

When I asked my mother what she thought of it she said, “It wasn’t as big as I thought it should be since everyone makes such a big deal about it.”

Compared to other famous paintings and based on today’s standards it might be small.  Basing it on the standard of the day when someone commissioned a painting it WAS pretty big.

There has always been an aura of mystery surrounding the painting with the prime question being who in the world was Mona Lisa?

The mysteries just seemed to add to its popularity.

Today, art historians have identified the woman immortalized on canvas as Lisa del Giocondo, the third and much younger wife of a wealthy silk merchant.

Supposedly, Da Vinci was commissioned to paint Giocondo’s wife to celebrate the birth of a second son or moving to a new home.

Though the Giocondo family was wealthy the accounts I’ve read don’t paint them as fabulously wealthy.  Most accounts state Lisa Giocondo’s life was very ordinary – which is so ironic since the painting is so famous. 

Lisa Giocondo was finally indentified when a researcher noticed a margin note in some documents written in 1503 by Agostino Vespucci.  He made the margin note in a 1477 edition of Cicero’s Epostulae ad Familiares held at the Heidelberg University.  Vespucci was a chancellery official, clerk, and assistant to Machiavelli.

Da Vinci took a few years to finish the painting and didn’t do so until he had moved to France in 1519.  The king of France, Francois I, bought the painting and upon his death it belonged to the French Royal Family until the French Revolution.

Why wasn’t the painting delivered to the Giocondo family?  Was it because the painting was never finished?   Were they unhappy with it?  Did they refuse to pay?


In April, 2011 a group attempted to locate Lisa Giocondo’s remains at the convent where she is supposedly is buried.  By May, a skull and some bone fragments were found

This site advises that a battery of tests such as carbon-14 dating and a comparison of DNA with two of Giocondo’s children buried in Florence’s Santissma Annunziata church will be required to prove the skeleton belonged to Mona Lisa’s real-life model.

It would seem the more we discover the more we still have a mystery.

Beauford Delaney

I love the color in both of these paintings.  They are both from 1946.   The top painting is called Can Fire in the Park and the second is titled Jazz Quartet.   The artist for both is Beauford Delaney.   While both paintings have the same colorful style both represent different situations – one being the downtrodden and the other depicting the wonderful contribution Jazz has made to the American music scene.

Beauford Delaney was an American Modernist who hailed from the South but worked in New York and later Paris.   He studied art in Boston and was introduced to black activism through people like Butler Wilson a board member for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Delaney loved living in New York City among people from various ethnic backgrounds.   His subjects were the people he saw all around him in parks and cafes yet his work doesn’t depict a vision of life in the city.   It’s more than that.   Delaney’s work shows what it FELT like to live in the city.   While living in America’s greatest city Delaney worked as a bellhop and janitor.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum describes Can Fire in the Park as a disturbing contemporary vignette [which] conveys a legacy of deprivation linked not only to the depression years after 1929 but also to the longstanding disenfranchisement of black American portrayed as social outcasts.

Style portrays musical rhythms and bold color use “hovers between representation and abstraction”

The biography, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beaford Delaney written by David Leeming states he led a very compartmentalized life and was rather isolated.   He had friends but managed to keep much of his life private.   He lived in Greenwich Village and had many white friends yet he also fit in with Harlem because of his ethnicity.   Most certainly due to the times he kept his homosexuality secret.

Beauford Delaney moved to Paris in 1953 where his work finally evolved into abstract expressionism.

The Pilgrims in Art

It’s pretty easy to pick out a Pilgrim in art even though many of the images are not factual and tend to be romanticized.

The first image we have of the Pilgrims is an engraving by Samuel Hall.

Michel Felice Corne used the Hall engraving to create his painting, “The Landing of the Pilgrims seen below.



Notice the Pilgrims are not wearing what we usually think of.  Instead of the 1600s their clothing is more in line with the 1800s.

There is also a group of Native Americans greeting the Pilgrims.  This didn’t actually happen.    In fact, it was almost four months before there was an actual meet-up.

This is most certainly one example when the artwork does not portray actual history.

This particular article provides more information regarding the Pilgrims in art.