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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Most of the public who went to look at paintings in the Salon were ignorant of the penury which existed in the countryside, and one of Millet’s conscious aims was “to disturb them in their contentment and leisure.”
On a few notable occasions during his life Turner was able to express his visions through actual incidents which he witnessed. In October, 1834, the Houses of Parliament caught fire. Turner rushed to the scene, made furious sketches and produced the finished painting for the Royal Academy the following year. Several years later, when he was sixty-six years old, he was on a steamboat in a snow storm and afterwards painted the experience. Whenever a painting was based on a real event he emphasized, in the title or in his catalogue notes, that the work was the result of first hand experience.
In 1917, the art dealer Vollard bought up Rouault’s entire output, which then consisted of nearly 800 paintings, many of them belonging to the period of 1905-1912. Rouault claimed that most of these paintings were unfinished, and he made Vollard agree that he would sell no work until the painter declared it finished. During the following thirty years of his working life, Rouault saw himself as the prisoner of his contract, bound to the impossible of finishing to his own satisfaction what was already completed. “Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders,” he wrote, “is a child compared to me . .
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Vollard was killed in an accident in 1939. The news of his death in no way came as a release to Rouault. Once again he was stricken. But after the war he brought a legal case against Vollard’s heirs and demanded the return of his unfinished works. He won the case. His old paintings passed into his hands. On November 5, 1948, he publicly burned 315 of them because he believed that he could never finish mem,
