E

Eakins Thomas (1844–1916). U.S. painter and photographer. Trained as a painter in Paris and influenced by Manet, E. became one of the major American Realists, e.g. his studies of surgeons operating. His paintings include brilliantly composed sculling pictures, e.g. The Biglen Brothers Turning the Stake. E. revolutionized U.S. art teaching, insisting on drawing from the nude and sound anatomical knowledge. As a photographer he continued Muybridge’s experiments in the photography of motion, improving on them by using 1 camera to produce a series of images on a single plate rather than a number of cameras producing single images. E.’s composite plates inspired Duchamp’s famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase.

Eakins Masked Woman Seated c. 1886

Earle Ralph (1751–1801). Self-taught, itinerant U.S. portraitist and, for his battle scenes of Lexington and Concord (1775), believed to be the earliest historical painter in America. He worked for a time in London, replacing the attractive untutored stiffness of his early pictures with the smoother style of fashionable English portraiture.

Earth art. Trend which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Works were the result of the preoccupation with natural processes: often monumental and realized with the aid of earth-moving equipment, they were created in remote locations, e.g. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty of boulders, 1500 ft (457 m.) long, in Great Salt Lake, Utah (1970). Such works were concerned with the notion of ‘sites and non-sites’ and geology. Works were often presented in photographs (often taken from the air because of the scale of the work), sometimes juxtaposed with piles of material selected from the site of the work. Long.

earth colours. Pigments such as yellow and red ochres, raw sienna, raw umber and terre verte which are found in their natural state in the earth. Ochres in particular were used in prehistoric cave painting. They are among the most permanent and least expensive colours.

East Sir Alfred (1849–1913). British landscape painter and watercolourist. His idealized romantic scenes are painted in a style indebted to the Barbizon school.

Easter Island. Oceanic art

Eastlake Sir Charles Lock (1793–1865). British painter, writer on art and administrator. As keeper (1843–7) and 1st director (1855–65) of the N.G., London, he devoted energy, scholarship and taste to building up one of the greatest colls of Italian art, particularly the work of the so-called ‘primitives’. E.’s early landscapes deserve attention.

Eclecticism. Loosely definable as the drawing on many styles by an artist, more specifically the practice of selecting the best from various styles in an attempt to create a style of greater perfection. The term used to be applied to the work of the Carracci who were believed (wrongly) to have deliberately formulated such a programme.

École de Paris (Fr. School of Paris). Term used to describe the modernist artists, many of them from other countries, who were centred in Paris during approximately the first forty years of the 20th c. They included Bonnard, Chagall, Matisse, Miró, Modigliani and Mondrian.

Ecological art. Art which first appeared c. 1968 and which is concerned with natural processes, as in the work of artists Sonfist and Haacke.

écorché figure (Fr. flayed). Term used to describe human or animal figure drawing or engraving, practised widely since c. 16th c. displaying the muscles of the body.

Edmondson William (1882–1951). U.S. African-American sculptor, the 1st to have a one-man exhibition at M.O.M.A., N.Y. (1937). A religious convert to the United Primitive Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, he said he started making tombstones and sculptures at God’s command. E. depicted human and animal figures, and angels inspired by biblical texts. The Crucifixion of Christ is a frequent subject in his numerous limestone carvings, e.g. Crucifixion (c. 1932–7).

Edo. Period of Japanese history (1616–1868) ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate, secured in 1615 by T. Ieyasu (1542–1616), from its capital Edo (modern Tokyo). In the arts sculpture stagnated except in netsuke carving. The new graphic art of ukiyo-e (Japanese prints) produced popular masterpieces. Painting was represented by the courtly school of Kano Tanyu at Edo; the Tosa school; Ogata Korin (1658–1716), working in a revived yamato-e tradition of great decorative splendour; and the 18th-c. nanga school. Based on Chinese ideals (wen-jen) and on Zen Buddhist principles, this admired self-expression above academic expertise.

Edo Matsuura Byõbu (detail of screen) early 17th c.

Eeckhout Gerbrand van den (1621–74). Dutch painter of portraits, religious subjects and genre, a favourite pupil of Rembrandt and a close imitator of his style, e.g. Officers of the Amsterdam Coopers’ Guild. About 1665 he began to paint genre scenes in the style of Ter Borch.

Egg Augustus Leopold (1816–63). British painter of anecdotal subjects whose popularity revived in the mid-20th-c. vogue for Victoriana. He was a friend of Dickens and travelled with him to Italy.

Eggeling Viking (1880–1925). Swedish painter and pioneer of avant-garde films. In 1915 he met Arp in Paris, moved to Switzerland and joined the Dada movement. In Germany he and H. Richter experimented with abstract picture strips which formed the bases for Symphonie diagonale (1921), an early abstract film.

Ehrenstahl David Klo(c)ker von (1629–98). German portrait painter known as the ‘father of Swedish painting’. He was in Italy (1654–8) but worked mainly at the Swedish court, introducing a style of portrait with allegorical figures and putti.

Eight, The. Group of 8 U.S. painters – Henri, Luks, Sloan, Glackens, Shinn (previously the Philadelphia Realists), joined by Prendergast, Lawson, Davies – formed in 1907 as a gesture of protest against the National Academy. Stylistically the members differed considerably and they exhibited together only once (N.Y., 1908); they were, however, united in seeking independence of the Academy and supporting progressive trends in art; and they played a vital role in organizing the Armory Show and in founding the Society of Independent Artists (1917).

Elementarism. A successor to the Neo-plasticism promoted by the Dutch artists connected with De Stijl, this new movement was announced by Van Doesburg in a manifesto published in the magazine De Stijl in 1926. Forms were still to be right-angled, as in Neo-plasticism, but inclined planes could now be used.

Elsheimer Adam (1578–1610). German painter, trained chiefly in Italy. He specialized in small highly finished works, often painted on copper. The landscape is given great importance and E. experiments with effects of lighting. In one example of a scene he painted many times, Flight into Egypt, half the picture is lit by moonlight, half by the light from a bonfire.

emblems. Books of e.s were not uncommon in the 17th c. They consisted of short poems, etc., based on passages of Scripture and with quotations from the fathers of the Church and were decorated with engravings. A well-known example was publ. by Francis Quarles.

encaustic wax. A technique of painting in which the medium for the powdered colour is hot wax; the method was used in classical antiquity and revived in the 20th c., e.g. Johns.

engraving. The term covers many techniques for multiplying prints, either of a picture designed by the engraver himself for the medium, or of a reproduction of a work in another medium by another artist. Correctly e. refers only to intaglio techniques. All these involve a metal plate, usually copper, on which the ink is held in furrows and crevices cut or bitten by acid into its surface: a print is obtained by rolling the plate, covered by a sheet of dampened paper, through a press; so that the paper is forced into the engraved markings, thus picking up the ink.

LINE ENGRAVING. A copper plate is polished and often covered with chalk. The main contours of the picture are marked in the chalk and the lines cut in the copper with a shaver or burin; graduated tones can be obtained by hatching. Line e. achieved its greatest expressiveness in the N. schools, especially in the work of Dürer. Later it was used mainly for making reproductions.

DRY POINT. A steel stylus is used on a copper plate; but whereas in line e. the burr of copper is polished away, in dry point it is left. In printing, the ink caught in this burr gives a characteristic ‘bloom’ to the line. This technique is often used with etching, notably in Rembrandt’s work.

ETCHING. The plate is covered with a thin resinous film impervious to acid. The artist draws on this ground with a needle, exposing lines on the copper which are bitten away when the plate is dipped in acid. Since shallow lines will hold less ink than deep ones, graduations of tone can be obtained by briefly immersing the plate for the faintest lines, ‘stopping’ these out and immersing for longer and longer periods as the darker lines are drawn in, ‘stopping out’ each successive set of lines when they have been etched. Tonal gradations in etching are far more subtle than those possible in line engraving. Aerial perspective is one effect thus obtainable. Developed in the early 16th c., etching was first fully explored by Callot; its greatest exponent was Rembrandt. In soft ground etching the artist draws on to the ground (mixed with tallow) with a pencil through a sheet of paper; parts of the ground cling to the paper and the final picture from the plate has a grainy texture.

MEZZOTINT. Unlike line e. or etching, mezzotint (invented in the mid-17th c.) works with tones rather than lines; it was thus suitable, and in the 18th c. widely used, to reproduce paintings. A curved file or ‘rocker’ is rocked over the plate to give a uniformly burred surface like sandpaper. This, when inked, would print as a solid black. By scraping off the burr to a greater or lesser extent or by burnishing it away entirely, the amount of ink carried by different areas can be controlled and gradations of tone or highlight (the burnished areas will carry no ink) obtained.

AQUATINT. A tone process (invented by Leprince) which uses acid as in etching. The plate is covered with a porous ground which allows the acid to bite away a fine mesh of tiny dots. The artist first stops out the white areas of the picture, immerses the plate briefly for the next lightest tone, stops out these areas in turn and repeats the process for the successively darker tones. Unlike the mezzotint, the aquatint is incapable of fine modulations of tone, each tone being uniform and bounded by an abrupt contour.

SUGAR AQUATINT is a linear technique combined with aquatint tone. The design is brushed on to the copper with a black ink or gouache dissolved in sugar-water, and the plate is covered with a ground and dipped in warm water. The sugar mixture dissolves, leaving the plate exposed where the drawing was. A second ground is laid and the plate bitten as for an ordinary aquatint.

Ensor James (1860–1949). Belgian painter and engraver, born in Ostend of an British father and a Flemish mother. E. studied at the Brussels Academy, but otherwise seldom left Ostend. Neglected by all but a few writers such as Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, E. was awarded later recognition in the 1920s and created a baron in 1930. Today he is considered a major pioneer of both Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism. E. began by painting sombre interiors, portraits, landscapes and seascapes (The Rower) as well as a few superb still-life studies. About 1883 his palette changed to lighter, brilliantly contrasted colours. This very Flemish choice of colour can first be seen in a variation in a self-portrait by Rubens, Portrait of the Artist in a Flowered Hat. Of E.’s engravings of this period, one of the greatest is The Cathedral (1886). The macabre carnival paintings of fighting skeletons and masked revellers, with the echoes of the Dance of Death, Bosch, Bruegel the Elder, Callot, Goya and Magnasco, now made their appearance. The most celebrated of these, Christ’s Entry into Brussels, was rejected in 1889 after a scandal by Les XX, an avant-garde group which E. had helped to found. E. continued to paint until 1939; his later work is less fierce in character, e.g. Coup de lumière (1935).

Environmental art. Term used from the late 1950s for works of art which are three-dimensional environments, i.e. which the spectator can enter, e.g. Kienholz.

Epstein Sir Jacob (1880–1959). U.S.-born portrait and monumental sculptor who settled in London in 1905. His fame and notoriety were established with the 18 figures in semi-relief carved for the British Medical Association Building in the Strand. Many sculptures of his early and middle period were rejected by the general public as ugly and attacked by the critics either for the deliberate distortion of the human figure or on formal grounds: the Risen Christ (1919) showed Christ as a Jew, and the influence of primitive art is apparent in the Ecce Homo (1934–5) and the alabaster Adam (1938–9), a barbaric and energy-charged figure. The 3 major religious commissions of E.’s last years, the Madonna and Child (1951–2), the Christ in Majesty (1953–7) and the St Michael and the Devil (1955–7) were more traditional compositions. His bronze portrait heads of children and of great contemporaries are notable.

Erbslöh Adolf (1881–1947). German Expressionist painter, a member of the New Artists’ Federation (1909) led by Kandinsky. He disapproved of the increasing tendency towards abstraction in Kandinsky’s work and was partly responsible for bringing about his resignation from the Federation in 1911.

Erhart Gregor (d. 1540). German sculptor in wood and stone, trained in late Gothic style but subsequently influenced by the Renaissance. Most famous are his painful figures on the high altar of the Klosterkirche, Blaubeuren; other works include the Frauenstein Madonna and La Belle Allemande, a figure of Mary Magdalene.

Ernst Jimmy Ulrich (1920–84). German-born Abstract Expressionist painter who settled in the U.S.A. in 1938; son of Max E.

Ernst Max (1891–1976). German painter who first studied philosophy at Bonn (1909–14). Untrained as an artist, he visited Paris in 1913 and met Macke, Delaunay and – more significantly – Apollinaire and Arp. After the war he founded the Cologne Dada group in 1919. By this time he had seen the work of De Chirico, Klee, Picasso and the Zürich Dadaists, and his paintings combined found objects (pieces of wood, wallpaper, etc.) with painted objects into a fantasy imagery whose disturbing ambiguity was emphasized by the titles – The Little Tear Gland that says Tic Tac (1920). His one-man exhibition in Paris in 1920 was acclaimed by the Surrealists. His invention of ‘frottage’ paralleled the automatic writing of Breton and Éluard in eliminating the conscious creative role of the artist, e.g. Histoire Naturelle (publ. Paris 1926).

The painting and sculpture which now make him regarded as one of the major influential figures of international Surrealism depend either on the irrational juxtaposition of unrelated elements, e.g. Of this Men shall know Nothing (1923) or on a more imaginative nightmare improvisation of organic forms (The Horde, 1927). E. spent the war years in the U.S.A., later settling in France. In 1961 he publ. An Informal Life of Max Ernst.

Erri Agnolo and Bartolommeo (fl. after 1540). Italian painters who worked in Modena.

Eskimo. Name commonly applied to a group of Arctic tribal peoples occupying the area from N.E. Siberia to Labrador and Newfoundland. They have a powerful oral tradition of myths and legends and a sculptural tradition stretching back more than 2000 years to the stone carvings of the Old Bering Sea culture. This was maintained up to the early decades of the 20th c. with outstanding miniature carvings in wood, bone, walrus ivory and antler, depicting animal figures with vigorous economy of line. In recent decades the bulk of E. art has degenerated into tourist ‘airport’ art.

Estense Baldassare (d. 1504). Ferrarese painter, the natural son of Niccolo d’Esté III, Duke of Ferrara. The only signed work by him disappeared in the 19th c., but a number of other pictures in a severe, intellectual style are believed to be his, e.g. Family Group.

etching, engraving

Etty William (1787–1849). British painter best remembered for his studies of the nude, e.g. The Bather.

Euphronios (6th–5th c. BC). Greek potter and vase painter in the red figure style whose drawing showed a new interest in anatomical structure.

Euston Road school. A group of British artists, led by Coldstream, Gowing, C. Rogers and Pasmore who conducted a school (1938–9) of painting and drawing in London in which artists worked alongside their students. Realistic townscapes, landscapes and interiors were painted in opposition to the abstract and Surrealist painting current in Britain.

Eutychides (4th–3rd c. BC). Greek sculptor, pupil of Lysippus and famous for his statue of Tyche (Fortune), tutelary goddess of Antioch in Syria, showing her seated on a cliff with the river god Orontes at her feet. There is a Roman copy in the Vatican.

Everdingen Allart van (1621–75). Dutch landscape painter who visited Scandinavia (1640–4). His pictures of rough, romantic mountain scenery were the first of their kind in Holland and affected the later work of Van Ruisdael.

Everdingen Cesar Boetius van (d. 1678). Dutch painter of portraits and mythological subjects in a highly finished Caravaggesque manner. He was the brother of Allart van E.

Eworth Hans, or Jan Euworts, Flemish painter who worked chiefly in Britain (c. 1545–74). He painted portraits or flattered his patrons by including them in elaborate allegories close in style to the school of Fontainebleau, e.g. Queen Elizabeth puts the Goddess to Flight. A mysterious and evocative work is Sir John Luttrell Saved from Drowning.

Eworth Sir John Luttrell Saved from Drowning 1550

Exekias (6th c. BC). Greek potter and famous vase painter in the black figure style whose masterpiece is an amphora now in the Vatican showing Achilles and Ajax.

Exekias Achilles and Ajax c. 545–30 BC

Expressionism. Term used to describe works of art in which reality is distorted in order to express the artists’ emotions or inner vision, e.g. in painting, emotional impact is heightened by deliberate use of strong colours, distortion of form, etc. In this sense, the paintings of El Greco and Grünewald are sometimes called Expressionist, though the term is usually restricted to artists of the last 100 years. Thus Van Gogh in painting and Strindberg in drama are regarded as the forerunners of modern E.

An overtly Expressionist movement developed in the German theatre after World War I (Kaiser, Toller) and there are Expressionist elements in the work of, e.g., Brecht, O’Casey and O’Neill; in other branches of literature there has been no avowed Expressionist movement, though similar effects have frequently been sought (e.g. by Kafka).

The most conscious Expressionist movements, however, have been in the visual arts, notably Die Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups in Germany. Munch’s influence was strong in Germany; his work had been shown in exhibitions and admired since the 1890s. Other important Expressionist painters are O. Kokoschka, C. Soutine, G. Rouault and M. Beckmann (his later allegorical works). O. Zadkine and E. Barlach are important Expressionist sculptors. A group of Expressionist painters formed round C. Permeke at Laethem-Saint-Martin in the Netherlands, including G. de Smet, F. van der Berghe and F. Masereel. In France the work of Édouard Georg, F. Gruber, Gromaire and B. Buffet is also described as Expressionist.

The term E. is sometimes used of architecture, e.g. of the work of P. Behrens and Eric Mendelsohn (the Einstein Tower at Potsdam, 1920), and of the picturesque Goetheanum built by Rudolf Steiner. There was much contact between architects and other artists after World War I, especially in the Novembergruppe.

Exter Alexandra (1884–1949). Russian Futurist and abstract painter; she emigrated to Paris in 1924. She is important chiefly as a theatrical designer for Tairov, director of the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow; famous productions were for Salome (1917) and Romeo and Juliet (1921).

Eyck Jan van (c. 1390–1441) and Hubert or Hubrecht (d. 1426). Early Netherlands painters. The great altarpiece of the cathedral of St Bavon, Ghent (The Adoration of the Lamb), bears an inscription stating that the work was begun by Hubert van Eyck and completed by Jan. This inscription has been a stumbling-block to scholars ever since. A number of attempts have been made to separate the work of the 2 brothers, but none has been universally accepted. Hubert’s name appears only on the Ghent altarpiece, while signed and dated works by Jan are numerous.

Jan van Eyck Man in a Red Turban (detail) 1433

Despite these difficulties of attribution, Jan emerges as unquestionably the greatest artist of the early Netherlands school. He was probably born at Maaseyck near Maastricht. From 1422 to 1424 he was in the service of John of Bavaria, Count of Holland. On the count’s death he joined the court of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy at Lille, acting as his envoy on missions to Spain (1426) and to Portugal (1428). From 1430 he lived at Bruges. Thereafter there is evidence of his increasing wealth and importance as a court painter, diplomat and city official of Bruges.

The earliest works attributed to Jan are the miniatures identified in 1902 as the Turin-Milan Book of Hours.

The Eycks’ clarity and realism were revered and sometimes imitated, but they proved too difficult for most painters to follow and there was an inevitable reaction against such work. Although the tradition that one or other of the brothers was the inventor of oil paint has been disproved, their mastery of the technique and the improvements they introduced undoubtedly changed the whole nature of the medium. Jan’s pupil, Petrus Christus, may have been responsible for teaching the secrets of the technique to Antonello da Messina and the Italians.

Jan executed a number of large commissions for donors who presented them to churches. Among these are The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin, Virgin and Child and the Canon van der Paele, Virgin and Child with Saints and a Carthusian. Similar subjects are The Virgin and Child in a Church, The Annunciation and the Virgin and Child, a triptych. Among his portraits are the early Tymotheos, The Painter’s wife, Margaret, Man in a Red Turban and Cardinal Niccolo Albergati. Perhaps the best known of his paintings is the The Marriage of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami(?), which is, at the same time, a double-portrait of great psychological insight, a meticulously rendered interior and one of the 1st genre paintings. The greatest aspect of Jan’s genius was in depicting such a scene with the utmost clarity and naturalism and yet creating from apparently mundane subjects a mystery so rich that it has eluded all analysis.