Pierre Subleyras: Selbstportrait im Atelier (1747)

Pierre Subleyras: Selbstportrait im Atelier
(L'Atelier du peintre, The Artist Studio)
Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna
(source: wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

A strikingly modern composition for a painting created almost three centuries ago. It gives some impression of controlled chaos, the personages seem the leave their canvasses, and the selfportrait is in the background. Well, the main character in a selfportrait is supposed to be its author, only here the author shows us his back.

I have just received this image on the mail today: not email, just mail, regular mail. My son and my daughter-in-law spent some days in Vienna, and enjoyed it a lot. It brought into my memories my own trip there. I visited then the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I wanted to see there a painting by Giorgione, Die drei Philosophen: many years earlier I had read a whole book about it. Of course, it was not only that painting in the museum. I spent there a whole morning, and probably I should have come the following day again. But I was not having time. I noted the preference there for Catholic painters, which could not have been a surprise in a city that for centuries had been one of the glories of the catholic world.

I couldn't find time to go to any other art gallery in Vienna. There are a lot, large museums, and small galleries, old masters and modern art. My kids went also to the Akademie der bildenden Künste, as I could see on the image from the postcard. And to other Viennese places, museums and palaces, and gardens. It's a place to enjoy culture, to breath culture, classic and contemporary. You can be a nostalgic for the old times and the good old order, you can be a free spirit experimenting the radical new in any direction, Vienna means all of these, because it has a great sense of keeping the balance. And also a gracious city celebrating the joy of life. With its breweries and heurigeren and the Prater. It's a great place to be.

I looked then on the web to find the painting of Subleyras, his self portrait in his studio.



(Pierre Subleyras)