5 ms·
Born into slavery, he rose to the top of France's art world
- rob74 2y agohttps://archive.is/eAgFS https://archive.is/eAgFS
- asveikau 2y agoI like the photorealism in some of these images. They look somewhat like contemporary people even though it's more than 200 years ago.
- argiopetech 2y agoPeople haven't changed much. We just wear cheaper clothes. No disagreement about the excellent art.
- asveikau 2y agoObviously clothing and hairstyles change. More recently, average BMI is higher, or people are more likely to be tattooed. I'm sure there's other differences that aren't coming to mind. But even setting aside any of that, it's pretty rare that I see a portrait that old and I think it could conceivably be recent.
- r14c 2y agoeven the amount of tattoos depends on culture and region. lots of cultures around the world practice some form of tattooing. even the BMI thing varies somewhat because different BMIs are healthy for different ethnic groups.
- Modified3019 2y agoThis is a tangent to the mention of cultural BMI, but I recently came across these: Ritual fattening of Massa men https://www.researchgate.net/publication/32978275_Guru_-fattening_sessions_among_the_Massa https://www.researchgate.net/publication/32978275_Guru_-fatt... Leblouh, the force feeding of girls to fatten them. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-tradition-leblouh-in-africa-force-feeding-girls-for-marriage.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-tradition-leblouh-in...
- saagarjha 2y agoWell the clothing and hairstyle in the top photo looks pretty modern to me
- tetris11 2y agoPeople haven't changed much over the last 2000 years I think, just different tools and terminologies
- DiscourseFan 2y agoIts funny that you say that since photography was invented in France in that period. Was it the paintings that were photorealistic, or the photos that were painterly?
- TacticalCoder 2y agoMirrors did exists since a long time though. You can substitute "photorealistic" with "looks like the square (or rectangle) picture in the mirror". Turns out photographic pictures did capture that "image in the mirror" picture. Funnily enough, using... Mirrors. > ... or the photos that were painterly? The answer is simply no. The real world doesn't work like that: photons/mirrors/prisms/our eyes "capturing" photons. Physics vs dialectic if you want.
- kingkawn 2y agoThe nature of the photographic mechanism becomes a new definition of “reality,” but it is still a cultural byproduct, leaving Realness to be still uncovered in all kinds of ways
- taejo 2y ago> You can substitute "photorealistic" with "looks like the square (or rectangle) picture in the mirror". Reflections in the mirror have depth and motion. Even without the viewer or the subject moving, the viewer can see depth in the mirror that isn't in a photo. In those respects, photos are more like paintings than mirrors. Of course, in other respects, they're more like mirrors.
- spython 2y agoIn early photography history there was a pictorialist movement where people used special sort focus lenses to introduce more of a painterly quality. These lenses, such as Rodenstock Imagon still exist and are sought after.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoSo what you’re saying is that the mirror is the measure, and that the projections based on photons, etc. are fundenmentally evidenced by the form of the mirror image?
- throwup238 2y agoIt's currently closed for renovation and set to reopen in November but if you have a chance to go see the Frick Collection in New York, I strongly recommend it for two of the most photorealistic paintings I've ever seen: the portraits of Sir Thomas More [1] and Thomas Cromwell [2] by Hans Holbein the Younger (sadly the digitized versions are low resolution and don't do them justice). The paintings are 500 years old but look like photographic portraits, down to the individual hairs in the stubble on More's chin. Realism was in vogue at the time but there weren't many other artists who were as good as Hans Holbein. [1] https://collections.frick.org/objects/100/sir-thomas-more https://collections.frick.org/objects/100/sir-thomas-more [2] https://collections.frick.org/objects/101/thomas-cromwell https://collections.frick.org/objects/101/thomas-cromwell
- jajko 2y agoThats an obsessive level of detail for that era. Later Rembrandt's school were focusing more on the play of shadows on given subject and its surroundings, but most of the details were not to this level, at least not those I've seen up close (but still some parts were pretty crazy, ie embroidered collar or vein structure of wrinkled skin of an old woman).
- asveikau 2y agoLast time I was in New York I had lunch not far from there. Noted for next time.
- vidarh 2y agoIt mentions Dumas held a eulogy for him. Dumas father came from a similar family background: He was the son of a French nobleman and a Caribbean slave, and Dumas' grandfather bought his father free and brought him to France, where he ended up a general under Napoleon.
- thelock85 2y agoCame here to say this... The Black Count was such an illuminating read. It's surreal to think that Dumas' own father was the inspiration for writing Count of Monte Cristo.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoAlong these lines - the life story of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Petrovich_Gannibal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Petrovich_Gannibal, who was Alexander Pushkin's great grandfather, is jaw-dropping incredible to me. I'm really surprised a Hollywood movie hasn't been made about him.
- tinyplanets 2y agoJust read this... yes, what an amazing HBO mini-series his life would make!
- msephton 2y agoAmazing
- sillyfluke 2y agoUnless there were gaping liberties taken with facts in that book, I can't for life of me fathom how that book still hasn't been made into a movie yet. It's amazing how one person was at the right place at the right time and at the wrong place at the wrong time in two very extreme ways in one lifetime.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThe Wikipedia page for him, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Guillon-Lethi%C3%A8re https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Guillon-Lethi%C3%A8r..., states that he was not born into slavery, but instead: > He was born out of wedlock, to Marie-Françoise Dupepaye, a free person of color, and Pierre Guillon, a colonial Royal Notary. The source for that sentence states his mother was "une esclave affranchie noire" - a freed black slave. May seem like a small detail, and I'm not sure the Wikipedia page is correct, but I think it's worth correcting the reporting if it is.
- techaudible83 2y agoThe article does discuss this, and the main point to understand is that his mother was a slave and was then emancipated, meaning any children she had prior to emancipation were born into slavery. The article says that his father emancipated both his mother and him. It does not state that there is 100% definitive evidence of his status at birth but given his mother's status and the lack of baptismal records for his birth, it is very likely he was born a slave.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ralferoo 2y ago> “Le Thière” is French for “the third” Is this true? I know modern French is troisième, but I'd never seen this before, so I googled. There seems to be nothing on the internet about it, and remarkably few matches for Thière beyond misspellings of théière (teapot), which makes me think the authors of this article just made this up.
- sattoshi 2y agoTroisieme is the third when counting. “Tiers” is the third when taking a fraction. I can only speak to modern french though.
- davidivadavid 2y agoThat got me curious, and according to the French Wikipedia, he was originally called "Letiers" (with the same etymological explanation) before he renamed himself "Lethiers" and finally "Lethière". Seems to hold up.
- srdgh 2y ago"Tiers" can mean "third" in a sense other than fractions. E.g. Le Tiers-Etat (the Third Estate in the Ancien Regime) and "un tiers" ("a third party").
- rurban 2y agoYou wouldn't be interested in him as neoclassicist, academist, even professor at Beaux Arts today, because that period is totally uninteresting at all. If not how they suppressed the independent artists, romantics those days. In England or Germany much more interesting painters were celebrated those days, who won over those salon academics.