Tumgik
#Gabrielle d’Estrées artist
ratatoskryggdrasil · 4 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Alireza Shojaian, Hamed Sinno et un de ses Frères, 2018
1K notes · View notes
poppyflo2 · 3 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Gabrielle D’Estrées and One of Her Sisters, c.1594. Louvre Museum, Paris, France. Artist unknown, School of Fontainebleau.
17 notes · View notes
sapphetti · 5 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses soeurs (1594) by Unknown Artist
! ATTENTION !
This is not a painting of two sapphic lovers as one might think. The title means “Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her sisters”. It depicts Gabrielle d’Estrées, who was a mistress of Henri IV of France, and her sister. The pinching of the nipple is said to represent lactation as Gabrielle is pregnant with the illegitimate child of Henri IV.
The reason this painting is included on this blog despite being a painting of sisters, not lovers, is because of the vibes. This has gay vibes and you cannot convince me otherwise. Also it’s really funny. But yeah, just thought I might add that. !We definitely do not support incest on this blog!
298 notes · View notes
nena-del-mal · 4 years
Photo
Tumblr media
inspo: Gabrielle d’Estrées y una de sus hermanas, artist desconocidx
2 notes · View notes
caveartfair · 5 years
Text
The Meaning behind One of the Most Oddly Erotic Paintings in Western Art
Tumblr media
Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d'Estrées et de sa sœur la duchesse de Villars (Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters), 16th century. Musée du Louvre
For much of history, queer works of art—that is, art that explores same-sex relationships, romances, and sexual encounters—have been scorned, altered, or simply hidden away. In recent years, there have been efforts to reclaim these works and to champion art whose queerness was once dismissed or disregarded.
It’s harder to know how to reclaim something as queer when its original creator—and the audience to whom it was first shown—not only lacked the terminology to discuss sexualities that deviated from the norm but intended for the work to mean something entirely different. It’s particularly difficult when those meanings become lost on modern viewers. Can we truly call something queer when it was never intended to be? Where is the line between fetishism and representation?
In the anonymous French painting Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters (ca. 1594), two women—one presumed to be Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress of King Henry IV of France, and the other her sister, the Duchess de Villars—turn half towards the viewer as they sit in a bathtub lined with silk. The women have faces the shape of upturned petals; thin, arched eyebrows; skin the same color as the pearls they both wear in their ears. They are naked from the waist up, and both women’s small, dark eyes are locked on the viewer, mouths tight and ambiguous.
But what everybody sees first—what viewers can’t help but fix their gazes on—is the hand of the woman on the left as it pinches the nipple of the woman on the right, her index finger and thumb forming a perfect “C.” Above them, ruched silk curtains, heavy as thunderclouds, are parted as though the audience is at a stage’s edge. The viewer’s voyeuristic position sets the scene as a performance.
There’s an obvious eroticism to the image: the fearlessness of their gazes, the soft curves of flesh, the erect nipples. The pinch itself constitutes the only moment in the painting where skin meets skin, where contact is between the subjects rather than with the audience. As scholar Chris Roulston notes, the composition employs the traditional artistic language of coupledom—one figure is light haired while the other is brunette figure dark—lending an added intimacy that makes the painting undeniably sapphic.
Tumblr media
A Lady in Her Bath, ca. 1571. François Clouet National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Tumblr media
Unknown, Portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées with Her Sister, c. 1590. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
As Rebecca Zorach notes in her essay “Desiring Things,” “Though it might be altogether too anachronistic to re-gender receptive looking as some sort of generalized lesbian gaze, we can […] assume the presence of female viewers as well as male.” Although modern conceptions of sexuality may differ greatly from their historical counterparts, the 16th-century French writer Pierre de Brantôme contended that “there are in many places and regions many such ladies and Lesbians, in France, in Italy, Turkey, Greece, and in other places…In France, such women are fairly common.”
Other works attributed to the French School of Fontainebleau—and other intimate, nude paintings depicting Gabrielle—seem to support this claim. The huge variety of cultural artefacts from the time—from Shakespeare’s cross-dressing women characters to lesbian pornography—demonstrate a societal knowledge of same-sex female relationships. In any case, it’s clear that throughout history the painting has been received as though it depicts a lesbian relationship. In the 19th century, for instance, a Louvre museum official reportedly covered up the “lewd” painting with a sheet.
Despite what it might look like to the contemporary viewer, a purely queer reading of the work would be misguided. Rather than a depiction of lesbian foreplay, most art historians interpret the painting as an announcement that Gabrielle is pregnant with the King’s illegitimate son. It’s her sister who is signaling this to the audience, not her lover. The fingers wrapped around Gabrielle’s nipple symbolizes the latter’s fertility, an allusion emphasized by the presence of the figure sewing baby’s clothes in the back of the painting.
It seems naive to believe that both readings can’t simultaneously be true. Its original audience, however ignorant of modern definitions of sexuality, couldn’t fail to recognize the erotic potential of the painting. In another of Brantôme’s writings, he details a woman so aroused by the painting that she has to immediately leave the room to have sex with her (male) courtier.
Far more difficult for a queer interpretation of the work is its fetishistic portrayal of the women. With its emphasis on the erotic possibilities between sisters, and Gabrielle’s status as a mistress—sexualized and stripped even when relaying a pregnancy announcement—the work seems to slide from a representation of queerness to an object of the straight gaze. Commenting on Brantôme’s story, Zorach voices how these depictions of lesbian arousal “are always in the eventual service of heterosexuality.”
The complex reality is that all of these seemingly conflicting views are valid: Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters is simultaneously a sexualized queer scene, a coded announcement of a royal pregnancy, and an erotic fantasy meant to entice straight audiences. To prioritize one reading over the others would be an injustice, a smoothing over of the very complexities that both enrich and frustrate queer histories.
from Artsy News
2 notes · View notes
hadarlaskey · 3 years
Text
The story behind The Grand Budapest Hotel’s ‘Boy with Apple’ painting
In Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ralph Fiennes’ debonair, dowager-bothering concierge, M Gustave, becomes embroiled in a bitter family feud after he inherits a supposedly priceless work of art. You may have presumed that the painting in question, ‘Boy with Apple’, was a genuine relic from the Renaissance era; a lesser-known portrait by one of the Dutch Masters, perhaps. In fact, it was commissioned especially for the film, with Anderson creating a backstory plausible enough to fool many viewers.
This month The Grand Budapest Hotel is being released in the UK as part of the Criterion Collection, and to mark the occasion we reached out to British artist Michael Taylor to find out more about the making of this iconic movie prop, which the art critic Jonathan Jones has described as: “The kind of painting you can expect to see in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest or the picture gallery of Prague Castle.”
Below, Taylor provides a detailed first-hand account of how ‘Boy with Apple’ came into being, along with a selection of behind-the-scenes images and a rare, never-before-seen drawing believed to be the only authentic study for the painting still in existence.
“I was approached initially by one of the film’s producers, and shortly after Wes called me up. He gave me an outline of the plot and a rough idea of what he was looking for. I was then sent the script with my name watermarked all through it, along with a contract to sign. Quite why he settled on me I can’t say, but anyway, I got the gig.
“The brief was quite vague: something a bit Renaissance, maybe with a castle, and ‘a little bit of paper… we must have the little bit of paper.’ Oh, and it had to be funny. ‘Not very funny, just a bit funny’. As it progressed the castle went in, then got painted out, the wall was changed around a bit, a curtain rail arrived and came out again, but the hands always remained the same. There was initially a rather nice pewter plate with a bird skull, but that ended up on the painting equivalent of the cutting room floor too.
Tumblr media
“To paint ‘Boy with Apple’, I commandeered the wonderful Jacobean Hanford House, a girl’s boarding school near my home in Dorset while the girls were away for the summer holidays. A young dancer from London, Ed Munro, was engaged to sit, and after a rummage in the film studio’s dressing-up box a costume was settled on. This evolved somewhat over time, with the red velvet sleeves borrowed from a different outfit in the end. Ed would stay with us during sittings, and I built a little set for him in one corner of the Harry Potter-like dining hall, which lent the project a nice Renaissance baronial ambience.
“Wes emailed me an assortment of reference pictures: 16th century mannerist portraits by Bronzino, some German Northern Renaissance works, photos of castles, cakes, postcards of hotels and so forth. It was all very eclectic. I had always been fascinated by the hand in that portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées in the Louvre, so for my part I knew right from the start that I wanted the hands holding the apple as they are.
“In the 16th and 17th centuries it was a gesture quite often used in paintings, and although it probably didn’t look funny to people then, I think it does to us now. It gives the boy a faintly ridiculous pomposity. The splendidly named Johannes Van Hoytl suggested to me Northern rather than Italian Renaissance, so I took it away from Bronzino and more towards Holbein or Cranach. It was pointed out to me later that there is in fact a drawing by Durer using just just such a hand gesture.
Tumblr media
“The painting took about three months to complete, on and off. I had never attempted anything like it before, or been involved with films in any way, so I had to learn on the job; much to Wes’ understandable anxiety, particularly as filming approached and there was no painting. When I finally let him see it there were several aspects that had rather drifted away from the script which he wanted altered. Although not my usual practice to change paintings to order, I had to concede that this was after all his invention and his film, so asking for some more time I was able to make the changes he asked for.
“The drifting off began shortly after I got the script when we had some people coming to stay. I’d hidden the script somewhere for safety, but unknown to me my wife then hid it somewhere else, so when I needed to refer to it later I couldn’t find it. I didn’t dare confess to the studio that I’d lost it, nor was I keen to mention it to my wife, so I just kind of drifted on, busking it and hoping I could remember what I was supposed to do! I think it worked out okay in the end though.
Tumblr media
A rare, never-before-seen drawing believed to be the only authentic study for ‘Boy with Apple’ still in existence
Tumblr media
‘Boy with Apple’
“The first time I saw the completed film, I thought it was absolutely tremendous. Funny, rather dark in places, went like a train from start to finish. And of course it looked wonderful. I felt very fortunate to have played a small part of its creation. In the film the painting is described as ‘priceless’, although as far as I am aware, it was never actually valued. I suspect it would be more than I got paid for it! Another MacGuffin, the Maltese Falcon statuette, recently sold for over two million dollars, so who knows?
“Where the painting is now, I couldn’t say. When it was finished, I sent it off to Wes in a nice padded case to protect it from the rough and tumble of life on set, and haven’t seen it since, apart from in the film. [N.B. We checked with Wes and he told us, ‘I have the picture and always will.’] I like the way that after you let them go, paintings have a life of their own out in the world, but I’ve never had one turn into a movie star before.”
The Grand Budapest Hotel is now available on Blu-ray courtesy of the Criterion Collection.
The post The story behind The Grand Budapest Hotel’s ‘Boy with Apple’ painting appeared first on Little White Lies.
source https://lwlies.com/articles/the-grand-budapest-hotel-boy-with-apple-painting/
0 notes
ansichtkaartjes · 5 years
Photo
Tumblr media
‘Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses soeurs’ (’Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters’), c. 1594, unknown artist.
0 notes
Text
Museé du Louvre
Museé du Louvre deserves more time than what you can expect, a recent research says that you need to spend at least one month to see every single detail and enjoy with time. There is much more to see than Mona Lisa, you can see the painting about Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix's, or Gabrielle d’Estrées and Her Sister, The Duchess of Villars, a famous painting from 1594, by an unknown artist, Great Sphinx of Tanis (Old Kingdom, 2600 BC) those are the largest sphinxes outside Egypt, the sculpture of Venus de Milo, from Greece, and a lot more, from every part of the world and every year of history!
0 notes