 Hi everybody, and welcome to today's edition of Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. I'm Bill Perthes, the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education, and my colleagues and I are taking some time selecting works from the collection of the Barnes Foundation, some of our favorite works, and sharing our thoughts about them with you. It's our way of staying connected both to the collection that we love, as well as to folks like you who appreciate art or are longing as we are to once again see our collection. So this is a way of sort of holding us over until we're all able to do that again. Today I've chosen a picture by William Glackens. It's called Woman with Umbrella, Washington Square, and it was created around 1910. In an earlier Barnes Takeout, I talked about William Glackens painting the racetrack from 1908-1909. If you didn't have a chance to see that, you can go back and watch it. And I mentioned that that picture was a real pivotal turning point for Glackens. So this picture was done a little bit later, a year or so later, and it really captures another really important aspect of the work of William Glackens. So this is a work on paper. It's both graphite as well as oil pastel, and it's a kind of middle ground for Glackens. What I mean by that is it's between a sketch or a drawing, of which he was very well known for doing, and a painting, which was another medium that he was very popular with. And Glackens actually got his start as an illustrator. So William Glackens was born in Philadelphia. He went to Central High School with Albert Barnes, and in high school, Glackens had the reputation for drawing witty caricatures of their instructors. Barnes and Glackens shared a love of baseball that allowed them to bond. After Barnes went out into the business world and began to make some money he reconnected with Glackens, in those intervening years, Glackens established himself as an illustrator reporter for newspapers in Philadelphia. So this is before photographs were able to be printed in newspapers. And instead newspapers hired artists, sketch artists, to go out to news events and capture images, and then those images would be brought back and they would be transferred into the newspaper. And amongst his colleagues, Glackens gained a reputation for being one of the most adept at being able to draw figures. He really focused on the movement and characteristics. He was able, very economically, to capture the essence of a figure in simple drawing. He then went on to establish himself, as I said earlier, as a painter. And I think very much what Barnes appreciated in Glackens' work is that he understood the difference and the different responsibilities of an artist working as an illustrator in line and value or as a painter working in color. But in this work, again, so this is both illustration as well as oil pastel, we see Glackens sort of navigating nicely between those two. I mentioned that the title of this is Woman with Umbrella, Washington Square, because in 1896, Glackens resettled in New York, eventually finding a studio on Washington Square. And I suspect one of the reasons that he chose that location is that it gave him ready access to Washington Square and all of the people that would congregate and gather or move through that square so that he could literally just look out his studio window and be able to see that. And this illustration has a bit of an elevated vantage point. And it may have been the case that at least some of it or perhaps the idea of it came to him as he was looking out of his studio window. His son, Ira, regularly wrote that when Glackens would never leave the house without carrying a sketchbook and a pencil with him, in fact, he had a very particular kind of pencil that he preferred to use that had that gripped the paper in a way that he that he really wanted what it had, what he called tooth. And he would capture, so let me show you in the collection. So here we are in gallery 17, and we're facing east. This is a gallery 17 is one of the rooms in the Barnes Foundation that is almost exclusively or largely filled with works on paper. There are some paintings, so you see this work by Henri Matisse. But our drawing, you'll see it's very modest in scale, is here. It's surrounded by works by other American artists, including Charles Demith below, Francis McCarthy, a local artist, another Demith above, and a Pennsylvania German fracter above. The work over the over the doors by Jules Pascal. But so here's our here's the picture that we're talking about and we put it back into and we go back to it. We see it full. And I wanted to show you not just that, but this little drawing. So this is actually in gallery 20, let me show you that while this is even of a more modest scale. This is another one of the galleries really dominated by works on paper. So you'll see several drawings by by Glackens here here, here are two of them side by side. And here's the little one that I just showed you. And in this little sketch, I think you can see how just through a series of simplified lines and not simplified, but simple lines, Glackens is able to really capture the essence of this figures movement. The particular sway of the of the cloth, the transfer of weight from one foot to to another, the sense of gate of the of the figure. And if we go back to our work, it's not too dissimilar to this figure here walking in a different direction. But again, capturing that sense of of animation of physical move movement through space. So and if we look at other figures in this in this picture, you can see how each one has a kind of individual quality to them. So it's not it's not as if they are individuals themselves. So he's not really focusing on facial features, for instance, they're kind of types. But each of them have a particular way of standing or moving or interacting with with another figure. And I would say that's even true of the horse in carriage in the in the middle distance, even the sense of the gate of the horses through just an economy of lines. Glackens is able to to capture that. But this is so this one of the primary things about this picture that Glackens is is trying to capture is the sense of movement through space of figures. And this vantage point gives us a really nice sort of pathway, literally a pathway that carries our eye into the distance. You'll notice that the pathways sort of snakes through the picture. But as it does so, interestingly, you'll notice that we're almost always moving behind the tree with the tree here in the foreground with this figure in blue. So the figure with the umbrella that gives the picture its title that we navigate across this tree. What that allows the viewers eye to do is to both move deep into space as if we ourselves are walking through Washington Square amongst these figures. But that that tree and that boldly colored figure in the foreground gives our eye a pathway to move back to the to the foreground. So he's really mapped out means of our eye both traveling through space, but also navigating back to the foreground. And he does that not only by way of this this tree, but also in the the bold color choice that he gives the figures in the foreground. So you'll notice that he uses the complementary colors of red and blue and yellow. So these become really attraction points for our eye. But that each figure as we move back becomes a little less distinct. These figures in the in again in the middle distance are just a few sketched lines and that the the scene in the very far distance is is just a bit of color, which gives us a hint of the cityscape, perhaps, perhaps beyond there. There's a vibrancy and an animation to this picture that that really characterizes the best aspect of William Glacken's work. Few few artists of his day were able to so immediately capture the quality of figures in motion. Then more than was William Glacken's, whether it's in line drawing or in pictures. And I will return to Glacken's and paintings by Glacken's in the in the collection in the future. But that's all for me today. I appreciate you watching. And if you haven't already signed up for for our notices of the Barnes Takeout, I strongly encourage you to do so. Also, please leave comments below. We really appreciate hearing from you. We really want to hear that your response to it. And until tomorrow, take care.