 Hi and welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. I'm Aimee Gillette. I'm a collections researcher at the Barnes Foundation. Now today we're going to head into gallery number four, a little gallery on the first floor filled with all kinds of paintings, decorative objects from a bunch of different places and times. We're going to zoom in on this painting over here by the door right down here entitled The Offering, painted in right about the year 1915 by the American artist Charles Prendergast. And it's placed right underneath this exquisite image of the Virgin Mary with Christ child, as well as you can see a slice of this last supper painting, both of them painted in Germany toward the end of the 15th century. And I mentioned that because here, let's actually go look at The Offering a little more closely because medieval religious imagery, in this case, the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she was going to give birth to Christ was the starting point for this image of The Offering by Prendergast. Although the subject matter, he's generalized to be more kind of loosely spiritual. And so what we see is this angel appears to be a feminine angel offering this basket of flowers of perhaps fruit to this woman over here that we see in profile. And she has this bouquet that's like this spray of kind of daisy type flowers and is grasping a sort of tulip, I suppose over here. And then we've got this kind of Italian Renaissance style chair figure down here playing a pipe. And I think my favorite detail of the entire painting is this just lovely round, very toddler like cheek of his plus his tousled hair, little wings. And then over here, you see this fawn grazing on the grass and down toward the bottom we've got flowers, dots, ducks kind of stylized flora, the artist's signature CP for Charles Prendergast down there. And then the background's pretty abstracted except for this like one single cloud floating up here. So who was the artist and why was he painting this subject in this way? So the artist Charles was born on the 27th of May in 1863. So today is his birthday, as it is actually mine as well, a different year though. And he was the younger brother of Maurice Prendergast, whose speech scenes you heard about on another takeout. And they were born in Canada, but really got their careers going in the city of Boston, where Charles was involved with the arts and crafts movement. And this was an artistic movement that had begun in England spearheaded by figures such as John Ruskin, William Morris, who looked to the art of the mostly medieval past as a kind of antidote to the challenges of modernity such as mass production and the kind of what they thought of as like depersonalization or dehumanization of objects that could come objects and people that could go along with it. And then in 1914, the brothers actually moved to New York City right by William Glackens, who was a good friend of Barnes and a famous American painter. But Charles started painting in Boston around 1912 when he was already almost 15. And for paintings like this, he took inspiration from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the newly opened coasters in New York City, the Met Museum, where Pierpont Morgan's medieval collection was on display at the same time, and brought so many of them together in one painting. And so actually we can see perhaps medieval Persian painting in the super elegant profiles of the figures, medieval manuscripts, perhaps in the way he's boarded this down here. But Prendergast's number one artistic reference was the art of late medieval early Renaissance Italy. So we're talking Italy in the 1300s going into the 1400s. And much of the reason why was there was a book published in Florence right around the year 1400 by an artist called Cinnino Cinnini called The Book of Art, a Libro del Arte, sometimes called the Craftsman Handbook, the Craftsman's Handbook, translations of which were super popular amongst the arts and crafts movement. And Cinnino talked about all ways to make all kinds of different art. And Prendergast, as we know from his notes, took his recommendations for panel painting pretty thoroughly to heart. So I'm going to read to you what Prendergast wrote. He wrote, the surface of the panels are covered with a material called gesso. It was used by the early Italian primitives when they used a wood panel. I prepare my panels with the same medium. And while the gesso is still damp, the composition is cut into the surface with a tool. The goldwork is prepared separately and laid on gold sized with water, and finally burnished and toned. Now, somebody who saw Charles in action said when he was doing this he looked kind of like he was giving himself a haircut at the same time as he was slicing bread. But let's take a look at what this technique looks like. And so he says he lays on the plaster that you can see exposed here, incised the composition with some kind of tool. Let's take a closer look at the wing over here, painted it, and then he lays on the gold leaf with a sort of adhesive and then burnishes it so it's shinier. And one of the great things about its display at the barns is that it's on the same wall as another work of art that was painted in Florence right around the year 1400 by an artist called Gerardo Starnina, this little bust of a music making angel. So same time and place as Cennino was writing his craftsman handbook. You can see, let's zoom in and see, you can probably see that it is on panel with the composition incised, although Starnina has applied this reddish material called bowl, then he would lay on the gold leaf and then stamp it. You can see the different stamp patterns in the angel's halo over here, plus other incisions with this kind of vegetable pattern. So we've got for Charles a quasi-religious scene, medieval techniques, and Charles did actually write about the kind of effect that the techniques were supposed to have on the artist. I'm going to read to you now a quote about wood carving, his medium that he really worked in before painting and still kind of carried out in his images. And he said, wood carving is a beautiful art, its beauties are all of a quiet kind. The craftsman should not try to imitate nature but must adopt and modify the forms of nature. Just do the method of the work and carry out his fancy. So what we have for Charles is the material of the wood, of the paint, of the gold, the medieval technique to kind of spiritualize both the artist and the onlooker in in a rather broad way and as a kind of offering of materiality to spirituality or sublimation of the material. And I think to go back to thinking about this next to the star nina, let's go back to the display of the gallery. One of the super interesting things about the barns is that we can see this reciprocity between medieval and modern where we get to see not only how artists like Prendergast and many others made use of art from the medieval past or other periods and places but oddly how the modern in a way impacts the medieval in so far as Albert Barnes collected modern works of art well and I should specify it he collected the offering in the nineteen teens and the medieval paintings in here much later and so Prendergast work ends up governing the medieval objects he chose as well as how he displays them and so today I'll leave you with a thought of what are other ways in which today we might learn from the past in order to pivot toward a better future. So that's it for today's takeout. Thank you so much for watching. Get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.