Making a Compleat Gentleman

West Wycombe Manor was set in a beautiful Park and the perfect setting for a man of means who also enjoyed the good life. Its colonaded west front is highly unusual, for a climate like England recalling perhaps many happy times spent lazing in the loggia of an Italian Palazzo. While smaller than most of his friends country houses today it is a perfect film set for eighteenth century period films because it encapsulates and reflects in architecture the society of a time when young men of privilege went in passionate pursuit of civilised life. Is it the perfect Temple to Taste of a Compleat Gentleman?

Evolution of Art, Design and Style – Antiquity to Avatar

‘Just as a palate can be educated to appreciate fine wine so too can both the eye and the ear be educated to distinguish the rare from the ordinary, the exquisite from the mundane’. Pare Keiha, Associate Professor, Dean – Tumuaki AUT, Auckland NZ

THE EVOLUTION ART, DESIGN & STYLE
ARTISTIC TASTE – ANTIQUITY – AVATAR
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Portraiture – Egypt to Enlightenment

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever…Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
author Carolyn McDowall
What is a portrait? Is it an actual likeness of someone? If we know the person portrayed is a General, King or Queen will it change our viewpoint? What is a portrait’s function?  Is it meant to show the sitter at their most characteristic ?
The [...]

An affair of state…wise men needed now!

Perhaps the getting of wisdom is when we realize, despite eons of learning, that in the grand scheme of things we really know very little at all.  Carolyn McDowall

January 6 is the climax of the twelve days of Christmas known as The Epiphany.
For early ‘followers of the way’ gathering in the catacombs, the underground burial [...]

Women of Influence – Angelica Kauffmann

Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none…Benjamin Franklin 1706 – 1790

author Carolyn McDowall
As far as women are concerned the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century was inappropriately named. This was a period when the role of women, especially in a professional sphere, took a retrograde [...]

Creating the English style

interior that looked like it had evolved naturally over time…what constituted an ‘old money’ look.

Colour Considerations

People can have the Model T in any colour – so long as it’s black…Henry Ford (1863-1947)

Author Carolyn McDowall
All cultures on earth have particular perceptions of and about colour, which in its evolution has come to symbolize many things collectively and individually. It also has many variants so we could say it is neither [...]

Bunny in Sydney – Art or Artifice…

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) The Critic as Artist, 1891
This exhibition many would say is long overdue. In the landscape of Australian painting history Rupert Bunny is a significant figure who inserted himself effortlessly into French Parisian life during the so-called ‘Belle Epoque’ or beautiful era, demonstrating through [...]

Women of Influence – Marquise de Pompadour, pleasure is a serious business

The pleasure of love is in loving.  Francois de la Rochefoucauld (1613-80)
Author Carolyn McDowall
French painter François Boucher (1703-1770) produced many of the images that we have of the enigmatic Jeanne Antoinette, Marquise de Pompadour, Maîtresse-en-titre, or the official Mistress of Louis XV of France.
The daughter of a local beauty, Louise-Madeleine de la Motte and [...]

Bublé and Bunny…what more could Sydney want

Sydney has it all at the moment….both Bublé and Bunny!
This is a reminder the Rupert Bunny- Artist in Paris Exhibition opens at the Sydney Art Gallery tomorrow,  21st November and runs until 21st February. Rupert Bunny (1864-1947) created wonderful images during the so called Belle Époque, or ‘gilded’ age at Paris from the late 19th [...]