Red haired women in their rooms.

Is it just me or do you also fell that paintings of a person in a room 

has a story of  itself  and you are not invited?

Specially if there is no eye to eye contact ,that will say none of the painted persons stare out of the frame ! 

Then it's almost like you intrude with your staring.

I tell myself a painting welcomes a stare and it is meant to be looked at no matter the motif .

Perhaps it's because I am from the generation where we were grown to believe that it is impolite to stare?

If I go to neighbors to ask for something I never step in, but wait in the door opening.

Curiosity to see how other people live, my parents always said was rude.

But I wonder if it is? We all live in rooms that we decorated with our taste.

We chose things we like to stare at. It becomes an exhibition of our taste.

Perhaps it's the measuring that is impolite, the risk of getting jealous?

Does someone else have it nicer than I do?

So here comes some persons in their rooms, 

where there was something that made the artist think: This I have to catch and make forever!

So this private rooms are meant to be stared at, like actually all pictures are!

So enjoy the peep at redheads in their rooms, there wont be anyone to judge your curiosity.

This is the only way you will see this persons in their rooms ever ,

because neither the person nor their taste

is to be found anywhere any longer .

Adolf Heinrich Hansen

A fine little picture, funny with all the antique furniture and then this red haired woman

 in her simple 1920 style tent dress.

In my older days I got interested in the color pink.

A color that hardly exists in your surroundings except on certain

pieces of cloth or on  the back of a book or on flowers. 

Lately I found it extremely interesting using pink .

 The light effect that color gets when you make it cold or warm, 

adding it up against a warm yellow or a cold purple is quit remarkable.

Like the artist did in this picture making her dress cold pink against the warm pink walls.

The woman seem  natural in this surroundings. It's inherited furniture and  the fact that she is not dressed to fit the furniture's age gives it a very natural feeling.

I like her knee socks and funny 1920-shoes with the Micky Mouse shine.

It's a funny picture !

The  viewer is  not relevant here and we don't get the feeling that we are sitting  in the place of the painter .

The woman will continue in eternity to fix her flowers not noticing  us.

Harry Herman Roseland

Here is a story : This shoes the red haired woman wore as a child!

As a viewer we are not important and have no part of the picture or of the story in it, except
for the eventual memory we get of having been in a similar situation?
Or we are provoked to think .....Where are my own old baby shoes? I wonder if I had any?
Where are the ones that my children wore? What happens to all the generations of saved baby shoes?
Where are all my great grandparents baby shoes?
The painter did not draw any unusual perspective lines which would pull us in to the composition.
And we are also not present since there is no staring at us.

Don't you just love being in a place that holds old memories in boxes on dark dusty attics?
I get this itch to stare into that old box and  trunk in the painting!
Now I have no attic, but I grew up with several.
We did not have generations of hidden memories in saved things.
There were only our own old stuff, to nice to trow away, but saved for the next generation
with no respect for their taste. My sisters brown baby jumpsuits and old teddies.
I wish we had boxes with grandmothers letters or weeding dress.
My grandfathers cylinder and walking stick. The letters from his brother in America or from his mother.
They all fade away without something to touch.
Enjoy the picture and save your things for your grandchildren.
 Let them touch once what you touched!

Toulouse de Lautrec
Madame Juliette Pascal

Now this is something else!  Here we are also  important.

Always the staring out  involve the viewer and bring her or him into the composition of feelings.

The mood in the face in a way portraits you. You are the subject of her staring 

and somehow You give her the feelings that she expresses.

Seriously judging, not friendly, not flirting or even specially interested in you "The painter"

As if she doubts you can do your work and therefor she helps you by sitting as stiff as possible.

How old is this woman? 20-30 and already gives an impression of being an old strict madame

with a stick in the back. It is not a widow !

 Every  woman wore black or dark colors  in the 1870-80.

Her red hair doesn't seem natural ! 

The picture is a nice contrast to all the happy dancing women Toulouse de Lautrec  always painted.

Or is this perhaps  one of the women who modeled for him, 

 this picture could be his exchange payment  for all her free posing?

And that is why it is different  and  looks the way she wants to be presented  on her own walls .

With a piano to tell that she was a talented and serious person.

No matter how small her rooms were, there is a  piano .

It seems she needed you to see her so serious!

Cassie Taggart

I just love this picture,  the way it is painted with all the details,

  the  fantasy and the storytelling in it . 

All the small details,look at the playing cats !

Even the strange red shadow that looks more like blood than a shadow is interesting.

The calmness and warmth in this picture stand in contrast to an extremely disturbing picture I found on e-bay.

 The next picture gave such an awful impression, but I show it anyway.

It is a picture that was posted on E-bay.

It came with a long essay that seems very strange! 

The owner writes it's a typical menstrual picture,and try to make a long Art Historical 

theory, which can't change the fact,

that it shows a child bleeding and not a teenager.

To me it looks more like a pedophiles sick picture 

of his victim and that makes me puke.

The seller writes it is typical for pictures of menstruating women.

I have never seen  pictures of a menstruating woman in Art History! 

Don't think there are any typical such pictures at all.

Sorkin?

It is signed Sorkin ,but I found no artists that fit the same way of painting and think it is made by an amateur

 since the hands are so badly defined. But then again the treatment of the shadows in the dress and of the skin, and  the way the whole picture is kept in 3 colors point towards the fact that this is not amateur work.

There are things that are strange besides the idea to paint a picture with this motif!

The the Hat of Shame? A middle age symbol .

 The doll.....  girls over 12 don't play with dolls and this shows a girl aged 7-9 according to the proportions of her head to the body and the rather flat chest and facial feature. 

Only now the last 5 years does girls down to 9 get periods , when I was young which could fit that someone still kept a Flower stand like that ,girls would be between 14-18 when they got their period. So here something is strange! Please give me your opinion and if someone knows who this artist can be ?

Another thing is  no mother would let her teenager girl sit long enough to bleed trough like this. 

Are the walls green to make you feel sick?

I don't know what you say, but this is a troublesome picture! 

Guy Rose

Mirror mirror on the wall who's the most beautiful......... 

Would not mind having a mirror that size! Again we are not invited ,

 but  have to secretly stare.

Arthur Hughes

Sketch by Hughes or bad copy?

Harold Gilman

This gives me homesickness.the typical farmer furniture the table called a  Slagbord 

and handwoven carpets  "Trasmattor"

on the floor, made from old clothes that were cut into ribbon like pieces and woven together.

A typical Scandinavian breakfast.

Henri Matisse

Yes we are in!! 

Berthe Morisot

A natural way out of the picture, from the woman sitting in the back to the one in front of us an

then to us. Nice way of dragging the viewer into the picture.

William S Schwartz

Using the same colors for different objects gives a nice game to the picture.
Also here we are pulled in by the woman staring at us.

Ferdinand Horacek

Well some are so interested in art  that they don't care if the house is a mess.

Is that a copy of Rembrandt's night watchman on her wall?

There is also a jar with brushes on her cupboard.

Funny how the perspective makes the walls turn in over her. 

I once made a still life with this non vertical or horizontal lines and 

it could not be used! It looked totally unnatural when hanging on the wall

 because it didn't fit the natural 

Perspective.

Gino Parin

Again strange perspective but weighed up by her opposite position .

Look at this color harmony ,very very nice.

I would never dare to paint my walls that dirty green ocher would you?

Thanks for looking at me!

William Glackens

What is she holding in her arm......... a cat or a hat ?

She's daydreaming doesn't even see us.

Vittorio Reganini

Very thoughtful plant ,no need to show that tiny "finger",

and expose her naughty interest. 

Interesting furniture! Not many private houses has one of this sitting commodities.

Alfred Stevens

This is an amazing  master piece so elegantly painted and composed very majestic.

Further more it is painted on by using few colors: white, ocher brown and  a bluish black.

  By mixing them you get a broad spectra of color tones from blue, grey, yellow, green to almost pink.

Love this picture, look at the grey floor and light brown gloves. Amazing color tones!

Zelio Andrezzo

Not anyone's home but at a cafe. We are perhaps sitting at the same table? 

No ,too bad the painter didn't add another cup, to make that a possibility.

It would also be unnatural,women are seldom so impolite to sit 

and read newspapers next to another person.

Robert Panitzsch

This reminds me of all the hours staring trough my grandmother Ellen's windows down on Ryesgade

One gets the same feeling of fresh boredom that can go on hardly noticed for hours. Like time stand still.

The painter really had problems getting those table legs right!!!It looks like the table has 4 different legs.

Like the church tower in the simmering sun above the roofs.

Vuillard

Color harmony of another kind.

Again made from very few colors.

The patterns make the rooms with it's old closed in air shiver in trough the network of repeated patterns.

There is something choking in the heaviness of this colors.

Edward Munch

In the rooms of sorrow there are no need for decorations.

 The medicine ,the piss pot , 

the bed and portrait above, the sad and bend pale faces ....

we know death has paid his painful visit.

White, sienna, black and a few dots of red  .
And we are in the room standing up.

Rippl Ronai

Yellow create warmth. But it always ask for purple and green.

Leon de Smet

How many ways we decorate and chose our colors and patterns and shapes.
 Every home is a composition of somebodies taste.
We live in this colors and much time is used to keep the rooms tidy and clean,
very little time is used to change the things and colors. Instead we just add and add.
 all this things which we glue up around us like an outer skin.
I need to take a look at my own outer skin. Time for changes.
Did this last picture inspire You?
Do You have anything yellow in your rooms?
Or are your walls also white like almost everyone else prefer their walls?
Have a nice week!