James Carroll Beckwith
Beckwith c. 1880

Today is the birthday of James Carroll Beckwith (Hannibal, Missouri; September 23, 1852 – October 24, 1917 New York); landscape, portrait and genre painter whose Naturalist style led to his recognition in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth century as a respected figure in American art.

Beckwith died of a heart attack in his apartment at the Hotel Schuyler on West Forty-fifth Street in New York City, after having taken a taxi cab ride with his wife in Central Park.

His papers, including his sketchbooks and the diaries he kept from 1871 until his death in 1917 are held by the National Academy of Design in New York City.

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  Woman with Guitar

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  Portrait of Evelyn Nesbitt, c. 1901.

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  Sylvan Toilette, c. 1898

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  A Wistful Look.

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  Mark Twain, 1890.

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  Bassin de Neptune Versailles.

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  L’empereur.

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  The Palace of the Popes and Pont d’Avignon.

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  Cathédrale Notre-Dame du Puy (Le Puy-en-Velay).

   

  

   Pekka Halonen in 1899

  Today is the birthday of Pekka Halonen (Linnasalmi, Lapinlahti; 23 September 1865 – 1 December 1933 Tuusula); painter of Finnish landscapes and people in the national romantic style.  His favorite subjects were the Finnish landscape and its people which he depicted in his Realist style.

  In 1895 Halonen married a young music student, Maija Mäkinen.  In the beginning of their marriage, the couple lived in several places before settling down in a house with a studio on Lake Tuusula in Tuusula, Finland in 1895.  Here the Halonen family lived in an imposing pinewood villa known as ‘Halosenniemi’.  Halosenniemi was designed by Halonen himself and his brother Antti and was completed in 1902.

  Gallery

  

   The Kantele Player

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    Washing on the Ice, 1900

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      The Violinist, 1900

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      Autumn Landscape, 1914

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     Mowers men, 1891

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     Holiday in the new house, 1894

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    I In the Sauna, 1925

    Suzanne Valadon
    Valadon as a young woman

    Today is the birthday of Suzanne Valadon (Bessines-sur-Gartempe; 23 September 1865 – 7 April 1938 Paris); painter and artists’ model, born Marie-Clémentine Valadon.  In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.  The subjects of her drawings and paintings included mostly female nudes, female portraits, still lifes, and landscapes.  She never attended the academy and was never confined within a tradition.

    Valadon debuted as a model in 1880 in Montmartre at age 15.  She modeled for over 10 years for many different artists including: Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, Théophile Steinlen, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.  She modeled under the name “Maria” and was thought to have had affairs with the artists she modeled for.  She was considered seductive, provocative, comely, voluptuous, and flighty.  Toulouse-Lautrec nicknamed her “Suzanne” after the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders.  She was considered a very focused, ambitious, rebellious, determined, self-confident, and passionate woman.  She was also known to be good friends with Edgar Degas.

    Perhaps the most recognizable image of Valadon would be in Renoir’s Dance at Bougival from 1883, the same year that she posed for City Dance.  In 1885, Renoir painted her portrait again as Girl Braiding Her Hair.  Another of his portraits of her in 1885, Suzanne Valadon, is of her head and shoulders in profile.  Valadon frequented the bars and taverns of Paris along with her fellow painters, and she was Toulouse-Lautrec’s subject in his oil painting The Hangover.

    In 1896, Valadon became a full-time painter after her marriage to Paul Moussis.  She made a shift from drawing to painting during her initial affair with Andre Utter starting in 1909.

    In 1883 Valadon gave birth to her illegitimate son, Maurice Utrillo, at the age of 18.  Valadon’s friend Miguel Utrillo would sign papers recognizing Maurice as his son, although his true paternity is uncertain.  In 1893, Valadon began a short-lived affair with composer Erik Satie, moving to a room next to his on the Rue Cortot.  Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui, writing impassioned notes about “her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet”, but after six months she left, leaving him devastated.  Valadon married stockbroker Paul Moussis in 1895, leading a bourgeois life for 13 years at an apartment in Paris and a house in the outlying region.  In 1909, Valadon began an affair with the painter André Utter, age 23 and a friend of her son, divorcing Moussis in 1913.  Valadon married Utter in 1914, and he managed her career as well as her son’s.  Valadon and Utter regularly exhibited work together until the couple divorced in 1934, in which year she turned 69 and he 48.

    Valadon died of a stroke, at age 72, and was buried in the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen in Paris.  Among those in attendance at her funeral were her friends and colleagues André Derain, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque.

     Gallery

    

     Dance at Bougival, by Renoir; the female dancer is Valadon.

    

     Casting of the Net, 1914

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      Self-Portrait, 1883

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      My Son at 7 Years Old

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      Self-Portrait, 1893

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      Nude, 1895

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      Portrait of Erik Satie, 1893

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      The Bath, 1908

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      Nudes, 1919

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      Flowers on a Round Table, 1920

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      Portrait of Maurice Utrillo

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      Portrait of the Painter Maurice Utrillo, 1921

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      Still Life with Tulips and Fruit Bowl, 1924

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      Bouquet of Flowers, 1928

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      Still Life with Basket of Apples Vase of Flowers, 1928

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      Young Girl in Front of a Window, 1930

    Portraits of Valadon

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      The Hangover (Valadon), by Toulouse-Lautrec.

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      Profile portrait by Renoir.

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      Portrait by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

And on this day: Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera) a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux was first published as a serialisation in Le Gaulois from September 23, 1909, to January 8, 1910.  It was published in volume form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte.  The novel is partly inspired by historical events at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century and an apocryphal tale concerning the use of a former ballet pupil’s skeleton in Carl Maria von Weber’s 1841 production of Der Freischütz.  It has been successfully adapted into various stage and film adaptations, most notable of which are the 1925 film depiction featuring Lon Chaney and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical.  One of my all-time favorite books, and my all-time favorite musical.

Excerpts

• THE Opera Ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade.

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Erik’s emotion was so great that he had to tell the Persian not to look at him, for he was choking and must take off his mask. The daroga went to the window and opened it. His heart was full of pity, but he took care to keep his eyes fixed on the trees in the Tuileries gardens, lest he should see the monster’s face.

“I went and released the young man,” Erik continued, “and told him to come with me to Christine…. They kissed before me in the Louis-Philippe room…. Christine had my ring…. I made Christine swear to come back, one night, when I was dead, crossing the lake from the Rue-Scribe side, and bury me in the greatest secrecy with the gold ring, which she was to wear until that moment…. I told her where she would find my body and what to do with it. … Then Christine kissed me, for the first time, herself, here, on the forehead—don’t look, daroga!—here, on the forehead … on my forehead, mine—don’t look, daroga!—and they went off together…. Christine had stopped crying…. I alone cried…. Daroga, daroga, if Christine keeps her promise, she will come back soon!…”