Potter/Potter's wheel at work
Credit: Tina Tari
The potter's wheel has been spinning for donkeys ears and will still spin for long… As shown on the pictures above, the position of the hands shows the technic and the precision of the potter to give in fine the shape to the pottery. In life, hands are an important element of the in body language. It is the same in painting where hands play a major role in the overall expression of a composition; this is why they are often subject to dedicated studies preluding more achieved works...
1-For instance, Holbein made few sketches of hands before portraying Desiderius Erasmus at his writing table...
Left: Hans Holbein the Younger's Hand studies, Museum Boymans van Beuningen
Right: Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98-1543), Erasmus writing (detail), 1523, Le Louvre
2-The Nicolas de Largilliere's Hand study/Etude de main, ca 1715 that is exhibited in Le Louvre shows that hand sketches may even become a fully accomplished painting.
Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746), Etude de main, Le Louvre
3-Jean Antoine Watteau invented at the turn of the XVIIIth century the genre of the fêtes galantes. In the detail of "Le faux pas", 1716/1718, shown below, a young girl is repelling the lover with her hand on his chest while he tries to embrace her. The expression in this scene results less from the face or the sight of the subjects than from the position of the bodies and the play with their hands: repelling or attraction?
For those familiar with the German silent Movie Menschen am Sonntag, mentioned in a previous post, this detail of Watteau' work may show a striking similarity with a crucial scene of the film...
Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), Le faux pas, 1716/17, Le Louvre
Coming back to pottery, an original pottery craft "spinned" in the worksop of the potter's workshop showed above:
4-In Manet's In the Conservatory/Dans la serre, the hands of the two subjects are curiously placed right in the center of the painting. There is in this case no physical contact. The visible wedding rings on their hands shows a couple. They are in fact Mr and Mrs Guillemet visiting the winter garden of Count Otto Rosen in the VIIIth arrondissement of Paris. The two subjects are placed on each side of a bank backrest which creates de facto a separation in the various composition planes. In absence of eye contact between them (or with the observer), this couple looks rater distant, not to say feelingless rendering the overall atmosphere even heavy. Two elements come to balance this impression: the elegance of Mrs Guillemet in the foreground (ornamented hat, glove, tied ribbon, wristband, umbrella), and the decor of the winter garden in flower in the background. Is Manet just picturing a conventional bourgeois couple of the "glossy" Paris in 1879?
Edouard Manet (1832-1883), In the Conservatory, 1879 Old National Gallery, Berlin
Would the close up on the hands study below help to read this master piece in a conservative or provocative way?
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