1 work, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Studio of Sir Peter Lely’s Portrait of Queen Catherine of Braganza, with Footnotes. #152

Studio of Sir Peter Lely (SOEST 1618-1680 LONDON)
Portrait of Queen Catherine of Braganza
Oil on canvas
101.8 x 78.8cm (40 1/16 x 31in).
Private collection

Catherine Of Braganza, (born Nov. 25, 1638, Vila Viçosa, Port.—died Dec. 31, 1705, Lisbon), Portuguese Roman Catholic wife of King Charles II of England (ruled 1660–85). A pawn in diplomatic dealings and anti-papal intrigues, she was married to Charles as part of an important alliance between England and Portugal.Catherine’s father became King John IV of Portugal in 1640. Her marriage, which took place in May 1662, brought England valuable trading privileges and the port cities of Tangier (in Morocco) and Bombay. In return, England pledged to help Portugal maintain its independence from Spain.

The young queen had little personal charm, and, despite her deep affection for Charles, he paid less attention to her than to his mistresses. When it became apparent that she would bear the King no children, opponents of his brother, James, duke of York, urged him to divorce her in the hope that Charles could then be induced to wed a Protestant. In 1678 they accused Catherine of scheming to poison the King and place his Roman Catholic brother James on the throne. But Charles, who never doubted his wife’s innocence, stood by her until she was cleared of the charges. Catherine helped convert Charles to the Roman Catholic Church shortly before he died in 1685, and in 1692 she returned to Portugal. In 1704 she became regent of Portugal for her ailing brother, King Pedro II. More on Catherine Of Braganza

Peter Lely, Dutch, British, English (Born Soest, Westphalia, 14 September 1618; died London, 30 November 1680). Painter of Dutch origin who spent almost all his career in England and was naturalized in 1662. His family name was originally van der Faes, and the name Lely is said to have come from a lily carved on the house in The Hague where his father was born. Lely was born in Germany and trained in Haarlem.

He moved to England in the early 1640s, and although he first painted figure compositions in landscapes (Sleeping Nymphs, c.1650, Dulwich Picture Gal., London), he soon turned to the more profitable field of portraiture. 

Fortune shone on him, for within a few years of his arrival the best portraitists in England disappeared from the scene: van Dyck and William Dobson died in 1641 and 1646 respectively, and Cornelius Johnson returned to Holland in 1643. In 1654 he was described as ‘the best artist in England’. Lely portrayed Charles I and his children, Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard, and other leading figures of the Interregnum. With the aid of a team of assistants he maintained an enormous output, and his fleshy, sleepy beauties clad in exquisite silks and his bewigged courtiers have created the popular image of Restoration England. More on Peter Lely

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01 Paintings, The amorous game, Part 17 – With Footnotes

Frederick Arthur Bridgman, 1847 – 1928, AMERICAN

Queen of the Brigands, c. 1882

Oil on canvas

Private collection

Brigandage refers to the life and practice of brigands: highway robbery and plunder. A brigand is a person who usually lives in a gang and lives by pillage and robbery.

The brigand is an outlaw who conducts warfare after the manner of an irregular or partisan soldier by skirmishes and surprises, who makes the war support itself by plunder, by extortion, by capturing prisoners and holding them to ransom, who enforces his demands by violence, and kills the prisoners who cannot pay. More on the Brigandage 

Frederick Arthur Bridgman (November 10, 1847 – 1928) was an American artist, born in Tuskegee, Alabama. The son of a physician, Bridgman would become one of the United States’ most well-known and well-regarded painters and become known as one of the world’s most talented “Orientalist” painters. He began as a draughtsman in New York City, for the American Bank Note Company in 1864-1865, and studied art in the same years at the Brooklyn Art Association and at the National Academy of Design; but he went to Paris in 1866 and became a pupil of Jean-Leon Gerome. Paris then became his headquarters. A trip to Egypt in 1873-1874 resulted in pictures of the East that attracted immediate attention, and his large and important composition, The Funeral Procession of a Mummy on the Nile, in the Paris Salon (1877), bought by James Gordon Bennett, brought him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Other paintings by him were An American Circus in Normandy, Procession of the Bull Apis (now in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and a Rumanian Lady (in the Temple collection, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). More on Frederick Arthur Bridgman,

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09 Paintings, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, from the 18th & 19th C., with Footnotes. #3a

Master John (floruit 1544-1545)

Portrait of Queen Mary I (1516-1558)

“Bloody Mary”

Oil on panel

711 × 508 cm (279.9 × 200 in)

National Portrait Gallery, London, UK

Mary I (18 February 1516 – 17 November 1558) was the Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death. Her executions of Protestants led to the posthumous sobriquet “Bloody Mary”.

She was the only child of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon to survive to adulthood. Her younger half-brother Edward VI (son of Henry and Jane Seymour) succeeded their father in 1547.

When Edward became mortally ill in 1553, he attempted to remove Mary from the line of succession because of religious differences. On his death their first cousin once removed, Lady Jane Grey, was proclaimed queen. Mary assembled a force in East Anglia and deposed Jane, who was ultimately beheaded. Mary was—excluding the disputed reigns of Jane and the Empress Matilda—the first queen regnant of England. In 1554, Mary married Philip of Spain, becoming queen consort of Habsburg Spain on his accession in 1556.

Mary is remembered for her restoration of Roman Catholicism after her half-brother’s short-lived Protestant reign. During her five-year reign, she had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake in the Marian persecutions. After her death in 1558, her re-establishment of Roman Catholicism was reversed by her younger half-sister and successor Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn.

Master John was an English Tudor court painter (active 1544/45). More

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01 Paintings, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, of the 18th & 19th C., with Footnotes. #23

Marco Battaglini, Costa Rica

God Save The Queen

Oil on canvas

Size: 51.2 H x 41.3 W x 0 in

Private collection

Through an interplay of multiple realities overlapping in the chronotope, Battaglini evidences the contradictions in mental models about the temporal contrast (chronological), and the cultural and linguistic barriers.

Battaglini invites us to think that in today’s global village, with the ‘democratization’ of culture, the evolution of knowledge, information immediacy, immersed in the heterogeneity, the Patchwork Culture forces us to confront with a need understanding beyond our geographical boundaries of time.

Probably the uniqueness is to conceptualize the possible coexistence of the ideals of classical beauty with the anti-aesthetic, the combination of the divine and refined with the vulgar, through a composition that can complement different realities in an eternal instant. Multidimensionality leads him to overlap different temporal, spatial and cultural realities, where everything seems to make sense… More on this painting

Costa Rican artist Marco Battaglini uses his artwork to explore the evolution of culture and knowledge. In some works, he combines classical paintings with modern pop-art references and graffiti for a modern renaissance look.  While the imagery appears almost collaged at first glance, looking at the paintings I find subtle details that really add to the ideas behind the pieces, like finding brand names tattooed on the cherubic figures that frequent these scenes. More on Marco Battaglini 

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