Rene Magritte

I always got a kick out of the paintings of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte (1898-1967). I was looking over my Mom's shoulder today at a furniture catalog she was perusing and saw some styles of what I like to call "fainting couches." They immediately reminded me of Magritte's portrait of Madame Recamier (top), which parodies an unfinished portrait from 1800 by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825). But to my delight, I have found that she was not the only subject to be depicted as a coffin by Magritte. Above are two similar paintings from a series called "Perspective" and the originals which they parodied: "Portrait of Madame Recamier," 1802 by Francois Gerard (1770-1837) and "The Balcony," c. 1868-1869 by Edouard Manet (1832-1883). Ironically, it is David's painting that springs to mind first, though the painter left it unfinished when he found out Gerard was painting the same subject. The surname of the woman in question, Jeanne-Francoise Julie Adelaide Recamier* (1777-1849), has become synonymous with the couch upon which she sat.

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*Unfortunately, the new version of Internet Explorer that I downloaded no longer allows me to copy diacritics to my posts, so please excuse the lack of accents in the French names.

Vanitas paintings

"Memento mori" ("Remember you must die") was the theme of the address I gave at the Museum of Funeral Customs. My slideshow included images like these, some of them trompe-l'œil (trick the eye) paintings, some of them vanitas, all of them reminders of our mortality--warnings against excessive pride. The first image is an illustration "All is Vanity" (1892) by C. Allan Gilbert. The second is a painting "The Ambassadors" (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger - the anamorphosed skull in the foreground would look like this if it weren't stretched out. The third is a painting called "Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life" (c. 1640) by Harmen Steenwyck. And the last is a print "Eye" (1946) by M.C. Escher.