Eight Notable One Pear Art Essay

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Eight Notable One Pear Paintings 1820 to 1999...

...by two women and six men, all artists born in Britain (2), China (1), Columbia (1), Finland, (1), France (1), and the United States (2), with one painting buzzing with two.

​1

Poire d'Erik Satie / Pear by Erik Satie

Man Ray (1890-1976) American
Lithograph in colors on Arches paper, 105 of 120
20" x 26" (w x h), 1969

Source: Wiki and Artsy edited

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890-1976), the artist adopted his pseudonym Man Ray in 1909. He was an American artist, working with painting, sculpture, video, and printmaking. He became renowned for his striking, sensual black-and-white photographs. He spent most of his professional life in Paris. He was one of the few Americans associated with Dada and Surrealism. A number of his photographic portraits, such as Larmes (Tears), circa 1932, features a woman crying glass bead tears, and his pictures of Kiki de Montparnasse, are icons of 20th-century art. At auction, his work has repeatedly sold for seven figures, his 1916 canvas Promenade selling at Sotheby's for $5,877,000 in 2013. His work is represented in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many others.

​​2

Single Pear

Robert Kulicke (1924-2007), American
Oil on board, 7" x 9" (w x h), 1980
Sannon's Fine Art Auctions, Milford, CT, 2021
estimate: $2,500-$3,500 USD, sold $11,430 USD
Private Collection

Source: Wiki edited

Robert Moore Kulicke (1924-2007) was an American artist, frame maker, and teacher. Though most influential for modernizing the design of picture frames, he was also a noted painter of many small and delicate still lifes, as well as a jewelry maker credited with reviving the ancient goldsmithing technique of granulation. His paintings, which he described as more 1600's than 2000's, were exhibited in museums and several New York galleries. His work is represented in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.

​3
Common Pear, European Pear
Lise Cloquet (1788-1860), French
Watercolor on paper, 1820

Source: Google arts and culture, Wiki, edited

Lise Cloquet, also known as Anne-Louise Cloquet, was a French botanical painter who picked up drawing from her father, illustrator and engraver Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Cloquet. Lise's flower paintings are evidence of a wealthy family background. Painting flowers was thought to be a suitable pastime for wealthy women because of its more effeminate qualities. Cloquet's works thus exhibit an interest, primarily, in artistic details rather than scientific ones.
        Compositionally, Cloquet's Common Pear is quite similar to the rest of her work. It has been taken out of its context; it is not lying on a table or on its side, but is curiously upright. Just as it is compositionally consistent with her work, in style, too, it is alike: colors are vivid, shadows realistic, and texture glossy. Yet this painting is one of three works which mark her deviation from merely flowery subjects towards a greater genre of plants, fruit. Unlike many of her specimens, the European pear is a native of Europe and grows best in a few European areas, including France.
        Pears vary considerably in color and in shape, yet Cloquet depicts the pear as meticulously as her blooming flowers. The transition from red to yellow in the bottom right corner of the pear is seamless, the ridges at the top are enlivened by sloping highlights and shadows. The texture of the pear, in particular, is remarkable: the glossy sheen on the left side of the pear exhibits Cloquet's close attention to detail.

​4
Dragon's Den restaurant menu cover
Tyrus Wong (1910-2016), Chinese born American
circa 1935
The Huntington Library, Art Museum,
and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA

Source: Wiki edited

Before pioneering Chinese American artist Tyrus Wong made history as leading the art direction on Walt Disney Co.'s classic animated film Bambi, he drew nightly menus for his buddy Eddy See's legendary Chinatown restaurant Dragon's Den during the Great Depression, where Hollywood celebrities such as Anna May Wong and Casablanca stars Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet would dine on chow mein and char siu. Some of those menus, including the one above, and other never-before-seen original documents chronicling Chinese American history are in the collection of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. "Every menu had its own original Tyrus Wong painting or drawing."
        Tyrus Wong was a painter, animator, calligrapher, muralist, ceramicist, lithographer and kite maker, as well as a set designer and storyboard artist. One of the most-influential and celebrated Asian-American artists of the 20th century, Wong was also a film production illustrator, who worked for both Disney and Warner Bros. He was a muralist for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), as well as a greeting card artist for Hallmark Cards.

​5
Special Pear
Euan Ernest Richard Uglow (1932-2000), British
Oil on canvas laid on panel, 7" x 5" (w x h), 1999
Private Collection

Source: Wiki edited

Euan Uglow (1932-2000) was a British painter, best known for his nude and still life paintings. He studied at the Camberwell School of Art, his instructors included William Coldstream. Coldstream's meticulous method of painting from life involved repeated, careful measurements. Uglow continued his studies under Coldstream at the Slade School of Art until 1954, and later taught there. Uglow's adaptation of Coldstream's method of painting included the use of a metal instrument of his own design with which he could take the measure of an object or interval to compare against other objects or intervals in his field of vision. By the use of such empirical measurements, he painted what the eye sees without the use of conventional perspective. Uglow's finished paintings display the many small horizontal and vertical markings where he recorded these coordinates so that they could be verified against reality.
        Public collections holding Uglow's works include the Tate Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Wales.

​6
Pear
Fernando Botero (1932-2023), Columbian
Oil, 1997
Assouline and Museo Botero, Bogota, Columbia

Source: Wiki, edited

Botero's paintings and sculptures are united by their proportionally exaggerated, or "fat" figures, as he once referred to them. Botero explained his use of these "large people", as they are often called by critics, in the following way:
        "An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it."
        Botero's work, Still Life with Mandolin, marked the beginning of his stylistic development in painting enlarged figures. It became his trademark. During a November 2000 interview, he said:
        "I was drawing a mandolin, and I made the sound hole very small, which made the mandolin look gigantic. I saw that making the details small made the form monumental. So, in my figures, the eyes, the mouth are all small and the exterior form is huge.

​7
Pear
Helene Sofia Schjerfbeck (1862-1946), Finnish
Oil on canvas laid on cardboard, 11" x 11" (w x h), 1925-1926
Private Collection

Source: Wiki, edited

Helene Schjerfbeck was a Finnish modernist painter known for her realist works and self-portraits, and also for her landscapes and still lifes. Throughout 84 years her work changed dramatically, beginning with French-influenced realism and plein air painting. It gradually evolved towards portraits and still life paintings.
        Dancing Shoes is one of Schjerfbeck's most popular paintings. She returned to the theme three times, and executed a lithograph of it that catapulted the painting to international fame. It depicts her cousin Esther Lupander, who had extremely long legs, which led to the painting being nicknamed The Grasshopper. Executed in Realist style, the painting shows the clear influence of Schjerfbeck's stay in Paris, where she had expressed admiration for Manet, Degas, Morisot, and Cassatt. It fetched £3,044,500 ($3,830,650 USD) at a 2008 Sotheby's London sale. See that painting on Sotheby's HERE.
        Three Pears on a Plate, 1945, was the final painting she made.

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8
The Quiet Theft
David Pugh Evans (1942-2020), British
Oil on canvas, 50" x 58" (w x h), 1965
Alcuin College,
The University of York, York, England

Source: Artists in Britain Since 1945 by David Buckman, edited
David Pugh Evans (1942-2020) was a painter and teacher who lived in Edinburgh, Scotland. Evans was noted for his hyper-realist interiors, which often have a tinge of suspense or mystery about them. Born in Abercarn, Monmouthshire, England, he studied at the Newport College of Art, 1959-1962, then at Royal College of Art, 1962-1965. In 1965 he won the College's Silver Medal for Painting.
        He traveled in Spain and Morocco before becoming a lecturer at the Edinburgh College of Art. Evans was Granada Arts Fellow at University of York, 1968-1969, and traveled in America from 1975 to 1976.
        He had a one-man show at New 57 Gallery in Edinburgh in 1966, others following in London. He was a member of the RSW, Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, and was elected to the RSA, Royal Scottish Academy, in 1989. He was an Associate of the Royal College of Art.