Category: Human Creativity

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Go West Young Man

I remember as a young man when I first saw the landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt, I yearned to go west.

And so I have. Many times.

Here is the most important painting of his early career inspired by the Swiss Alps.

Lake Lucerne, 1858
Albert Bierstadt
Overview

Best known for his panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains, Albert Bierstadt began his career as a painter of European landscapes. In 1856, during a period of study abroad, he spent time in Switzerland and completed the plein air sketches he would later use to compose Lake Lucerne, the most important painting of his early career.

In the spring of 1858 he sent the painting to New York for the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design. The picture caused a sensation. Bierstadt was hailed as a bright new star on the American art stage and was elected an honorary member of the Academy.

Bierstadt’s painting offers a sweeping view of Lake Lucerne with the village of Brunnen in the middle distance and the alpine peaks Ematten, Oberbauen, Uri–Rotstock and St. Gotthard in the distance. Though an image of mountain grandeur, Lake Lucerne also contains numerous pastoral vignettes—a harvest scene near the center, a religious procession at the right, and a camp of Roma people at the left.

One year after completing Lake Lucerne Bierstadt traveled to the Rocky Mountains for the first time. During the decade that followed he produced the western landscapes that brought him his greatest success. These views of the West, so often described as distinctly American, were born of Bierstadt’s experience abroad and frequently duplicate the composition of the first of his large-scale landscapes, Lake Lucerne.

Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

Grand Tetons, September 2020
blueridgemountain_man

God created a beautiful world for us to enjoy. So get out there and enjoy it!

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Show Me The 3rd Gamete, And We Can Talk

So says the witty Helen Joyce with her Twitter tag. That’s slightly snarky, but it points to a fundamental reality. There are only two human gametes. Sperm for males. Ova for females.

That’s it folks.

If you produce many small gametes, sperm, with an intense desire to swim upstream, you are indisputably male. If you produce relatively few large gametes, ovum (eggs), which await the most qualified mating partner, you are indisputably female.

And nothing you do or desire can change that fundamental reality.

Nothing.

Anything else is trans-humanist confusion. [See this post!]

The Natchez by Delacroix – 1835
Oil on Canvas
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

For those who would point to Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD’s) as reason enough to throw out the male – female sex binary, please read:

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I’m a Classic Christian and regard Gender Ideology as anti-creational to the core. This blog is about “God’s Good Creation.” That’s why I’m writing about Gender Ideology. And “speaking up” as I’m confident Jesus would.

"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female.'" [Matt 19:4]

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A Pastoral Visit

I love great art.

So, I’ve decided to add a new category of posts to my collection. I’m going to call it “Human Creativity”.

According to Jewish and Christian beliefs, humans possess great gifts from God. And a great capacity to bear witness to Truth, Goodness, & Beauty. After all, we were created in God’s image and after God’s likeness. Our vocational call is to be angled mirrors, reflecting God’s attributes to the world, and then gathering up the praises of the world and offering them in worship back to God.

Great art leans in that direction. It can give witness to what is real. Even when created by those who don’t “call on the name of the Lord.”

But it requires that you stop and see as you submit to the real. Contemplation is a good word for this activity. Attention to the real. Attention to something higher. Producing a yearning for more. Art can help you cultivate a sense of wonder as you observe and respect what you see. So submit to the stretch. And gaze at beauty.

I hope you enjoy them. [Click on art work. Wide screen works best]

A Pastoral Visit, 1881
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Public Domain

By Richard Norris Brooke (painter) American, 1847 – 1920

Oil on Canvas

Overview

A Pastoral Visit, the most celebrated of Richard Norris Brooke’s genre scenes, or views of everyday life, depicts a family welcoming their elderly pastor to Sunday dinner—a frequent occurrence in both black and white rural parishes that could not afford parsonages. According to tradition, the pastor is served first and, following the meal, he will be presented with both the cigar box containing the congregation’s weekly contribution (duly protected by the family patriarch) and the cloth-wrapped fruit at right. The banjo, prominently placed at the center of the composition symbolizing its importance in African American culture, may indicate an after-dinner musical interlude.

The family’s home, rustic but comfortable, features a sturdy cupboard housing pottery and glass and brick fireplace on whose mantel are neatly arranged a coffee grinder, a ginger jar, and clothes irons. Decorating the corner near a damaged window are a circus poster and a string of dried chilies. Brooke had ample opportunity to study the interior depicted; it was located in a residence near his home in Warrenton, Virginia, where he painted the canvas. Likewise, the features of the figures resulted from the artist’s use of his Warrenton neighbors as models: George Washington, Georgianna Weeks, and Daniel Brown.

Brooke was one of many artists to depict African American life in the 1870s and 1880s, inspired by the dramatic social change during Reconstruction, when blacks achieved citizenship, voting rights, and protection under the Constitution. Unlike many of his peers, he portrayed his subjects with a degree of humanity and dignity rare in contemporary depictions of African Americans. In his letter offering the painting to the Corcoran Gallery of Art for purchase, Brooke criticized such renderings as “works of flimsy treatment and vulgar exaggeration.” He also referenced his recent French academic training, stating that he wished to elevate his rural subject “to that plane of sober and truthful treatment which … has dignified the Peasant subjects of [his French contemporary] Jules Breton, and should characterize every work of art.”

Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
https://www.nga.gov

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