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Larger Picture: This simple fireplace with its plain surround is a blank canvas for a dramatic display. An old picture frame looks gorgeous standing on it -no need for a picture inside, the frame is beautiful enough on its own. An unusual carving, perhaps once part of a larger picture piece of furniture, is stunning and echoes the curves of the cupboard and frame. Logs piled high add a rustic note and some welcome woody colour.
Its very incompleteness gives the picture an intimate quality: only the head and the hands of the little boy have beer finished, the costume looks unreal, as though it had been made for a tailor's dummy, the chair and the background remain sketchy. At the same time, however, the intimacy of the picture is undermined by its format, thus making the boy look larger picture than life. So, even in this painting, we find that peculiar mixture of the intimate and the monumental which is so typical of this time.
What makes this picture rather complex is the fact that it contains not only elements of motherliness and artistic tradition, but also of the grotesque, motifs which contradict our normal visual experience: for example, the arm which appears to be most in the foreground is the smallest one, while the one at the back is distorted and larger picture than life; and the horizon is not absolutely straight, but goes up a little, although this is hardly noticeable. |
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