The Song Of The Day Is A Painting
Also Portland Oregon, the Cornish Coast, Bullseyes, Edwardian London, and Norman Rockwell. And a Shout-Out to Some Guy.
The small room (kitchen?) is scrupulously clean, and the abundant white linen immaculate in the morning light.
The eye is drawn to the middle ground window. Note the “bullsye” pattern in two of the panes.
Old House Online explains this quite well. Confidential to website copywriter: Respect, man. We see you. And you are CRUSHING IT.
A bullseye (manufacturers’ spelling) is the result of producing crown glass, a common process until the 19th century. The bullseye comes from a mouth-blown rondel that has been cut down to make square or rectangular panes. Before the advent of modern glass manufacture, gaffers or glassblowers made windowpanes for wealthier customers by using only the flat, thinner, transparent outer edges cut from large rondels. The center piece, thicker and more opaque, “flawed” by a break-off pontil mark (navel) and ripples, went to a less fussy buyer or was used in an outbuilding.
If you find this as interesting as I do, watch this brief video created by Bullseye Glass in Portland, Oregon.
Perhaps it was created for sale to Edwardian Londoners on holiday who want to hang a piece of Cornwall on their sooty walls?
The grandmother in the painting is a secular icon. I recall her face in the the legion of Polish grandmothers I met as a trial lawyer, answering a jury summons in Buffalo, where I tried cases for years.
The child’s face is realistic but also somehow a stylization, with distorted features.
The small room (kitchen?) is scrupulously clean, and the abundant white linen immaculate in the morning light.
Edwin Harris was a member of the Newlyn School of Painting, a Victorian artist colony in Cornwall. Norman Rockwell closely followed Harris and both time and style, refining Newlyn School realism into an archetypal alphabet of idealized American images.
I like this painting very much. I characterize it as a neo-pastoral, a portrayal of an idyllic, country scene. Perhaps it was created for sale to Edwardian Londoners on holiday who want to hang a piece of Cornwall on their sooty walls?
A glassblower is called a gaffer? Did not know that.