Tag Archives: famous portraits

The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau

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If you are a Harry Potter fan, you may remember those portraits on the wall that came to life.  Before the “Fat Lady” was grudgingly opens the door to Gryffindor Tower, Jon Agee had created living portraits in his children’s book – The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau.  

When Felix, an unknown French painter, enters his painting of a duck in the “Grand Contest of Art,” others ridicule his simplicity – until the duck quacks – earning Clousseau the grand prize.  With illustrations that are reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s style, Agee continues the incredible story with a boa constrictor that slithers out of the frame and a cannon that fires out of the picture – until the poor artist is sent to jail and all his pictures confiscated.

The one portrait of a dog still hanging in the royal palace wakes up one night to catch a thief trying to steal the crown.  Clousseau is exonerated and awarded the Medal of Honor.  The last page may be the best – with the old painter walking into the frame.

Children’s author Kristin Cashore listed The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau as a book with a “perfect ending.”  I agree; have you read it?

Love, Fiercely – Manhattan Romance in the Gilded Age

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Edith Minturn’s face was immortalized as the “New American Girl” in a portrait by a John Singer Sargent, and she was the model for the famous 65 foot high statue of Daniel Chester French’s Republic displayed at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition. Using the painting as her inspiration, Jean Zimmerman reveals the lives of  Edith Minturn, heir to a shipping magnate, (nicknamed Fiercely by her brother) and her husband, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, in a story that reads like a fictional romance in Love, Fiercely.

At the turn of century that Mark Twain called “The Gilded Age,” fashion and propriety  ruled wealthy families.

“… Edith Wharton could have quite naturally placed the behaviors of the Minturn girls into one of {her} novels.”

Both Edith and Newton enjoyed the perks of the rich – European travel, posh surroundings, servants, tailor-made clothes.  Newton chose architecture over the family banking business, and  Edith rebelliously fought for women’s rights – she turned down his first proposal of marriage.  The famous portrait came to represent a new freedom for women, with Edith’s pose “with attitude,” the position of the well-placed hat and Newton’s fading into the background.

Using a conversational style, Zimmerman looks back at Manhattan’s history and the famous families who created the foundation for what it is today. Part of the Stokes family mansion still stands as the Morgan Library on 34th street (where I visited the Jane Austen collection not long ago) and their famous portrait hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The couple who look out from the painting changed  Manhattan with a legacy that endures today – through buildings he designed,  reformation of low-income housing, Edith’s introduction of the new concept of kindergarten, and Newton’s Iconography of Manhattan Island – a six-volume visual history of New York that exhausted “its creator’s fortune, health, and grip on sanity.”

Whenever I can wander the halls of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. or the Metropolitan Museum in New York City,  the portraits always tease me with lingering questions – I wonder who were these patricians and did they do anything besides “sit” for the artist. Jean Zimmerman delivers a well-researched answer on one that reveals the personalities behind the paint. Edith Minturn Stokes and Newton Phelps Stokes are worth knowing.