Joseph Ducreux is the painter of two of my favorite paintings. I found them while looking at someone's coffee table book of 500 Self Portraits. When ever I see them I cannot help but laugh. What an interesting guy he must have been! The one above captures a pose you seldom see in old paintings-a humorous one. It is a self-portrait of him laughing at the viewer, which was supposed to capture his personality. He believed in Physiognomy, an old science of deciding an individual's personality by the way their face looks. Isn't that what caricatures are besides exaggerating the features? Ducreux was definitely doing it in a fancy way! He almost looks like a modern day pimp...
If I were a millionaire this is the kind of painting I would want to comission. Imagine walking into my mansion and seeing over the mantle a giant oil painting of me sneezing. You'd be jealous.
4 apes with no tails:
It's purely coincidental, but the subject of these two paintings is a dead ringer for the current president of a certain animation company.
I want to know the certain animation company anonymous!
Those are priceless!
Are they actually genuine?
Thanks for the laugh.
Yes, these paintings are real- the yawning one is at teh Getty currently and the other one... France, I think. Yay!
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