James Lucas engagement report

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• Jul 30, 202615x their median

  This is one of the most famous paintings in America, and most people have no idea what they are actually looking at... The painting is Christina's World, made by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, and the woman was real: her name was Anna Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbour in Cushing, Maine. Since childhood a degenerative condition had slowly taken the strength from her legs, until walking was no longer possible. She refused a wheelchair, and for her entire adult life she chose to drag herself across the ground with her arms instead, going wherever she wanted to go under her own power. Wyeth saw her one afternoon from an upstairs window, alone in that vast field, crawling slowly toward the house on the hill. He said the painting was an attempt to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. Her world, he said, was limited physically but by no means spiritually. That is what turns this painting from a portrait of frailty into one of the most triumphant images ever made... Look at it long enough and it stops being about what her body took from her, and becomes about what she would not stop doing anyway. The field is enormous and she is small and the house is far away, and still she goes, because the alternative, to be carried, to give up, to let the distance win, was something she simply would not accept. There is one more thing: Christina loved this painting. Pink was her favorite color, and Wyeth had placed her exactly where she most wanted to be, out in the open, in her own field, under her own sky. Late in her life, when she could no longer even crawl out to that field, she said something that holds the whole meaning of art inside it: "Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture, and I’m there."

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• Jul 31, 202612x their median

  This is one of the most beloved paintings in America, and it puts its finger on something we all pass through, first as the child, and one day as the parent left behind... The painting is Breaking Home Ties, by Norman Rockwell, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1954. A father and his teenage son sit side by side on the running board of a battered farm truck, waiting at a railway stop. A single track runs along the bottom of the picture. A ticket pokes from the boy's pocket. His suitcase is stacked with schoolbooks and wears a "State U" pennant. The train is coming to carry him off to college, away from home, for the first time in his life. Everything is in the way they sit. The son sits upright, scrubbed and dressed in his best, eyes fixed on the horizon, on the track, on the future rushing toward him. He is already half gone. For him that train is the beginning of everything. His father sits beside him in worn work clothes and scuffed boots, looking the other way, down the line, as if he cannot bear to watch it arrive. The same train means the opposite thing to him. For the son it is the start of a life. For the father it is the day the house grows quieter, the chair at the table sits empty, and the person he built his world around walks out into a life that no longer has him at its centre. Look at his hands. He is holding two hats. His own battered one, and resting on top of it, his son's crisp new one, held carefully together, because it is the last small thing he can still do for the boy... And then the dog, its head laid in the son's lap, gazing up, refusing to look away. Rockwell knew exactly what that was for: "The father couldn't show how he felt about the boy's leaving," he said. "The dog did." It has moved people for 70 years because every leaving is a beginning for one person and an ending for another. The child steps out into the world, as they should. And someone stays behind, watching them go, and loving them enough to let them go anyway...

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• Sep 5, 202610x their median

  This is not a photograph, and it's not an oil painting. It might be the most unbelievable watercolor ever made... It's called Sommarnöje, which means something like Summer Delight, and Anders Zorn painted it in 1886. Look at the water, the gentle ripples, the reflections, the wet sheen of it, and then look at the two people, the fine detail of the wooden rowboat, the woman's white dress, the light on her face. It has the near-photographic realism of an oil painting, and it was done in watercolor, a medium so unforgiving that a single wrong stroke ruins the entire piece. Zorn painted this in the first summer of his marriage: the woman in white waiting on the pier is his new wife, Emma, whom he had married only months before. They had just come back from their honeymoon and were staying with her family at Dalarö near Stockholm, still looking for the home where they would spend their life. The man rowing toward her is their friend Carl Gustav Dahlström. It is a real moment from the happiest season of a young couple's life, caught and held forever. In 2010 this single sheet of watercolor sold for twenty-six million Swedish kronor, over three million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a Swedish painting. In his own lifetime, Zorn was celebrated above all for two things: his handling of light, and his ability to paint water. Sommarnöje is where you see exactly why...

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• Aug 14, 202610x their median

  This is real footage from 81 years ago Penn Station in 1945 https://t.co/3ALp7sGr5y

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• Sep 13, 20267.8x their median

  Anyone who has ever had a dog knows this look. It's the one they give you when they can tell something is wrong, and they have decided they are not leaving your side... This beautiful painting is called Fidelity, and it was made by British artist Briton Rivière in 1869. A young man sits in the corner of a cold prison cell, awaiting trial. He is a poacher, caught taking game in an age when that could ruin a life. And pressed against his knee, gazing up into his face, is his dog, who has followed him even here. You cannot see the man's face, Rivière hides it so that the entire emotional weight of the painting falls onto the dog. We are left to read the man's sadness in the animal's eyes. The dog knows nothing of poaching or laws. It only knows that its person is hurting. And anyone who has ever loved a dog knows that look: "I don’t understand what has happened, but I know you are sad, and wherever you go, I will go too." The cold, the fear, the locked cell, none of it matters. Leaving him was never even a choice... That is the meaning of the title Rivière chose for the painting: Fidelity. Faithfulness that asks for no reason and no reward. As American humorist Josh Billings once said: "A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself."

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• Aug 19, 20264.8x their median

  Van Gogh painted this in one of the darkest years of his life, and it might be the most hopeful thing he ever made... The painting is Almond Blossoms, made by Vincent in 1890. Branches of white blossom open against a clear blue sky, and there is nothing sad in it anywhere, which is remarkable, because of when he painted it. His brother Theo, the person who had loved and supported him his whole life, had just had a son, and named the boy Vincent, after his struggling uncle. When the news reached Van Gogh, he started painting right away. He chose almond blossom on purpose. In the south of France the almond is the first tree to flower, sometimes as early as February, breaking into blossom while winter is barely over. It is the tree that announces that life is starting again. For a new baby carrying his own name, Van Gogh painted the most beautiful symbol he knew for new life. He was, at that very moment, seriously ill. This was the period of his breakdowns in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and not long after finishing the picture he suffered one of his worst attacks and could not paint for weeks. And yet what he made for his nephew has no shadow in it at all. He gathered whatever strength he had and poured all of it into something joyful, a gift for a child he wanted to welcome into the world. Theo and his wife hung it above the piano in their home, and it stayed one of the most treasured paintings the family owned. The baby it was painted for, Vincent Willem van Gogh, grew up, kept it safe, and went on to found the museum in Amsterdam that holds most of his uncle's work to this day. This, to me, is what makes the painting extraordinary: a man at the limits of his strength, who would be gone within months, looked at a new life just beginning and painted hope. He reached past everything that was breaking in him and made, for a baby, a picture that says the same thing the almond tree says every year: winter does not get the last word. Something is starting again…

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• Jul 28, 20264.7x their median

  This is real footage from nearly 100 years ago A street in Shanghai, China https://t.co/UH0J0NUTI0

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• Sep 14, 20264.5x their median

  This statue is over 2300 years old. It's one of the very few ancient sculptures left with its original eyes, and I can’t get over how real they look... The statue is the Antikythera Ephebe, a Greek bronze of a young man made around 340 to 330 BC, and strangely enough, the reason it survived is because it sank. In antiquity, bronze statues were constantly melted down for their metal, turned into weapons and coins, which is why almost none survive. This one went to the bottom of the sea in a shipwreck around 60 BC and lay there for nearly two thousand years, until sponge divers found it in 1900. But let’s go back to my favorite detail: the eyes. When a bronze statue is made, the eyes are often set separately, inlaid with glass, stone, and colored paste to make them lifelike, and over the centuries almost every ancient bronze has lost them, leaving those hollow, blank sockets we think of as classical. The Ephebe still has his original eyes, made of glass paste, one of only a handful of ancient Greek bronzes in the world that do. And it changes everything because he does not gaze blankly into nothing, he seems to be looking, intently, at something that vanished more than two thousand years ago...

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• Sep 9, 20264.0x their median

  Picasso was 15 years old when he painted this. It looks nothing like a Picasso, and the reason why is one of the most beautiful things he ever said... It's called First Communion, made in 1896, and it was the first large canvas he ever completed. There are no strange angles here, no fractured faces, none of the wild reinvention his name now brings to mind. It is a stunning and technically flawless scene: a young girl kneeling at the altar in a white dress, about to take her first communion, the moment a child is meant to step toward adulthood. The translucence of the girl's veil, the altar boy's surplice, the light falling from a source outside the frame, all of it revealing a command of paint startling for his age. He built the whole picture around whiteness, linking the white of Lola's dress to the white of the altar cloth and the candlelight, so the eye reads the whole scene as a passage from one life into another. He was only 15, and he understood that... It was shown at a major exhibition in Barcelona, where the local press marveled that a boy not yet old enough to shave had painted like a master of the academy. At fifteen Picasso could already do this, the thing that thousands of trained artists spend their entire lives trying and failing to do. He had it as a boy. And he would spend the rest of his life trying to get back the one thing this perfect painting does not have: the freedom of a child, who paints without fear, without rules, and without yet knowing what is supposed to be impossible... He said it himself: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

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• Aug 16, 20263.8x their median

  This is one of the most beautiful paintings of Christ ever made, and for over a century people have walked past the one detail that holds its entire meaning... It is called The Light of the World, painted by the English Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt. Christ stands at night in an overgrown garden, holding a lantern, his hand raised to knock at a wooden door. It illustrates a line from the Book of Revelation: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock." The door is choked with ivy and weeds. It has clearly not been opened in a very long time. Now look at the door itself, and you will see what holds the key to understanding the entire artwork… there is no handle. No latch, no knob, nothing on the outside at all. Hunt left it off on purpose: this door can only be opened from within. The door is the human soul, and the point is that Christ can stand there and knock forever, but he cannot let himself in. The handle is on the other side. It has to be you who opens it. The ivy has grown thick over the frame because this particular door has stayed shut for years, and yet his lantern is still burning, and he is still standing there, still knocking, waiting for a door that may never open. Fifty years after he painted it, Hunt felt he had to spell the meaning out: the shut door, he said, was “the obstinately shut mind.” The light has not gone out and whether that door ever opens was always, only, up to you...

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