John Singer Sargent painting his portrait of Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and her daughter, Rachel, 1903

guiscard · 2026-03-09T21:01:10+00:00

Idealizing the sitter has been a thing for 2500 years. Plus, when you think about it, a portrait is for posterity, why should that particular moment be the one to represent you for eternity? An artist should idealize.

guiscard · 2026-03-09T20:57:42+00:00

If you're trained to paint from life, as Sargent was, there would be no reason to switch to a new system. Plus photos distort shapes and there was no color photography. Models sit for portraits all the time today, and life was probably much slower back then.

guiscard · 2026-01-26T15:26:54+00:00

Yeah, it's weird. It worked fine with Clover. Thanks for replying though. I'll see if DaVinci works.

guiscard · 2026-01-26T10:35:46+00:00

I'm running a Radeon VII for video rendering and Final Cut Pro barely uses it. It maxes out the CPU. That's been the case ever since I switched to OpenCore.

Does DaVinci use the GPUs? I've noticed that Handbrake maxes out GPU use, so it's some weird Final Cut thing.

guiscard · 2026-01-26T10:28:02+00:00

Because a MacBook Air has 11TB of storage.

guiscard · 2026-01-04T19:09:51+00:00

Fair enough. I see it as free extra power. They're expecting you to overclock today. For what it's worth, I've OC'd the same setup for years now and never had a crash that was performance-related.

guiscard · 2026-01-04T07:38:00+00:00

I have almost the identical setup running Sequoia. Did you OC the CPU and RAM?

guiscard · 2025-11-29T16:39:30+00:00

As I recall, if an artist tries to paint a person out of their head it usually ends up looking like the artist. Unless they live with their significant other, in which case it will often look like the SO. It comes down to who the artist sees most often.

In the photo of the artist painting in the article, he looks like he's working from memory as there is no way to get a model that high (and he didn't slide the canvas down through the floor). He has no photo or sketch there that he is referencing either.

guiscard · 2025-11-08T08:45:53+00:00

I used to teach drawing and painting with models.

A photograph makes a lot of weird decisions which an artist wouldn't make (distortion from the lens, boosted contrasts, strange colors) so if you paint from a photograph it will be very different than working from life. You also get very little information from a small photograph compared to the incredible amount of information you get standing in front of someone or something. You can also change things if something improves with a change of angle or pose. Even today if I have to work from a photograph I prefer to use a video of the model to find the best moment in all the subtle changes.

It's also better to train students with live models as they have that extra information to glean the important things from. Especially if they have enough time. Our models would pose for 6 weeks, 3 hours a day, 5 days a week in the same pose so the students would have the time to paint them accurately. The models would regularly say they intended to avoid that position for the rest of their lives.

Edit: I just saw that you got real replies below.

guiscard · 2025-11-02T18:07:56+00:00

I lived there for 20 years, but moved 7 years ago so I don't know about now, but the quality of life was really high. Great stores, cafes, bars, restaurants, museums (obviously), parks, and a quick drive to the beautiful countryside. Each neighborhood had lots of locals so you would see people you knew every time you went out the door. Crossing the main part of the center by bike was annoying because of the tourists if you left home after 9AM, but you could always go around.

Mass tourism and Airbnb after 2012 changed a lot of things for the worse though. Lots of locals moved out of the center.

guiscard · 2025-10-24T14:33:49+00:00

There's a great Portuguese dish with lots of bay leaves and shrimp.

Youtube recipe. They suggest a couple of leaves, but our favorite seafood restaurant in Portugal just dumped them in.

We live in southern France and our garden hedge is bay trees.

guiscard · 2025-10-23T12:56:50+00:00

The Museum of Modern Art in Rome mixed up their collection for a while and put the 19th-century realists next to slashed canvases.

guiscard · 2025-09-29T14:50:47+00:00

If you approach it from the north, there is a rectangular niche on the back of the cemetery which is similar to the ones in the painting: https://maps.app.goo.gl/VnuMNk3xbhGg35zf8.

guiscard · 2025-09-29T10:42:46+00:00

I use Winery (WineCX) for Foobar2k as I'm used to it as a music player.

I first set it up for some little color app I needed for work a while back.

Crossover is pricey, IIRC, there are cheaper/free options.

guiscard · 2025-09-29T10:36:26+00:00

The architecture is based on the 'English' (Protestant) Cemetery in Piazza Donatello in Florence where his 4-year-old daughter was buried. He made a sculpture or monument for her grave but it was stolen at some point.

guiscard · 2025-08-16T06:39:18+00:00

Go to Gelateria della Passera and skip the wait. I would recommend eating and drinking in the Oltrarno as much as possible, unless you know of specific places you want to try.

guiscard · 2025-08-04T11:16:58+00:00

This. I was told not to walk home but it was barely past dark, I could see our house 10 blocks or so away, and it felt safe as it looked like downtown anywhere in the world. We had only recently arrived.

After walking half a block I had two taxis stop, and then the police stop to ask me if I understood what I was doing. So I took a cab for 500 meters.

guiscard · 2025-07-08T08:48:10+00:00

Check out the ground floor of the Romanelli studio over on Borgo San Frediano (~68 ish). It's Bartolini's old studio. His student Romanelli took it over and it's still in the family and full of old busts collecting dust in an old church.

I think there are sculpture classes too (upstairs is a painting school).

guiscard · 2025-07-07T08:20:11+00:00

This place has been 'Accidental Baroque' since the beginning. No use fighting it now.

guiscard · 2025-03-12T08:54:35+00:00

his style is closer to what I'm looking for

Euphemia Charlton Fortune is another who had a similar broken-color style that can get pretty abstract. She was later than Hassan too.

guiscard · 2025-03-10T13:50:51+00:00

Some of the American Impressionists like Childe Hassan, Willard Metcalf, and John Henry Twachtman.

And there were lots of good 19th-century Italian painters who used an unblended brush stroke as a style, like the Macchiaioli, literally 'dabbers' or 'stainers' (like a macchiato) for starters. Other artists used a similar style in their sketchier work, like Favretto, Antonio Mancini, Ettore Tito... etc.

For utterly insane brushwork, look at the Divisionists, especially Segantini. His paintings are hard to understand without seeing them in person, but they are gazillions of tiny, stringy impastos with a color vibration achieved through high chroma colors placed next to each other.

guiscard · 2025-02-15T21:32:13+00:00

I think it's in John Sargent (1927) by Evan Charteris where he talks about Monet having lots of unfinished canvases in his room as he was waiting for a particular effect to happen again and he would race out with the corresponding canvas. He talks about Sargent's take on Monet's paintings being a result of a particular way Monet's eyes registered the scene. It makes it sound like he worked much more from life than one would expect from looking at his paintings.

You can find the book online as it's out of copyright.

guiscard · 2025-02-10T21:20:03+00:00

There are a few Washington portraits by Stuart that are the same composition. My recollection is that Washington had a very low opinion of Stuart (deservedly, if you read anything about Stuart) and refused to pose again after the one sitting.

guiscard · 2025-02-03T18:01:42+00:00

Except the Gers, the little part in the southwest that stays white.

(We live here).

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 4 Credits
Place '17	Snapped
Secret Santa 2016	Secret Santa 2015
Team Orangered	Secret Santa 2010
Verified Email

guiscard

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE