Stephen Scheding
Teoksen A small unsigned painting tekijä
Tekijän teokset
Merkitty avainsanalla
Yleistieto
- Sukupuoli
- male
Jäseniä
Kirja-arvosteluja
Meh. Not nearly as interesting as I'd hoped.
Written in diary style, this is the attempted search for provenance/artist of a small painting the author found at auction. It was twice as long as it needed to be and rambled a lot as the author speculated on styles, framers, owners, phone directories, geography or got completely distracted by the questioned provenance of a completely different painting.
The ending was incredibly disappointing.
Die hard students of art might appreciate this a lot more, but I'd argue it could have been done better.… (lisätietoja)
Written in diary style, this is the attempted search for provenance/artist of a small painting the author found at auction. It was twice as long as it needed to be and rambled a lot as the author speculated on styles, framers, owners, phone directories, geography or got completely distracted by the questioned provenance of a completely different painting.
The ending was incredibly disappointing.
Die hard students of art might appreciate this a lot more, but I'd argue it could have been done better.… (lisätietoja)
I love art world mysteries and this is a doozy. Collector finds small, unsigned painting at an auction abelieves it to be possibly a work by iconic Australian painter Lloyd Rees. His attempt to verify the painting's origin leads him into the heart of Rees' world and his circle and a bizarre story of love and death among the past owners of the painting. In the end, he cant prove conclusively that the painting is by Rees, but its doesnt matter, because he has uncovered one hell of a story along the way. Thoroughly recommended… (lisätietoja)
Tilastot
- Teokset
- 4
- Jäseniä
- 52
- Suosituimmuussija
- #307,430
- Arvio (tähdet)
- 4.0
- Kirja-arvosteluja
- 3
- ISBN:t
- 8
and representation of First Nations people in artworks.
Stephen Scheding's The National Picture has been wrongly shelved with my fiction books for ages. I thought it was a novel, an Australian version of Michael Frayn's hugely enjoyable Headlong (1999) which was about an obsessive art scholar's quest to gain fame and fortune by finding a missing painting. But The National Picture turned out to be much more interesting than that.
Written in the form of a first person memoir of the quest, the book begins with the narrator's ambition to locate the missing 'National Picture', a history painting of great signifiance in Australian art history. If he finds it, he can not only pay off his mortgage and more, he will also have enhanced his professional reputation as an artworks sleuth, which began with his publication of A Small Unsigned Painting (Vintage, 1998).
According to Wikipedia, a 'history painting' is
It goes on to say that in the 19th century there was a shift in the type of 'moments' depicted:
If you've been to the art museums and galleries of Europe you've seen plenty of these 19th century history paintings, depicting wars, revolutions, coronations etc. Google French history paintings,for instance, and there they are on screen, including The Raft of Medusa, which represents a shocking moment in French naval history. That particular history painting makes an appearance in Scheding's story because when it toured London it fired the imagination of a somewhat obscure watchmaker, artist and engraver called Benjamin Duterrau. When he later made his way to Van Dieman's Land along with his daughter, to take up posts that never eventuated, he determined that he was going to paint Australia's first history painting.
There is plenty of evidence that Duterrau said he was going to paint it. The mystery traced in Scheding's book is whether Duterrau ever did actually paint it, and if so, where is it?
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/10/10/the-national-picture-by-stephen-scheding/… (lisätietoja)