A Touch of Class, Part III – Parrot Pandering

Even great artists are not above occasionally pandering to fashionable public tastes. In the 18th and 19th century the exotic flora and fauna of the new world, especially the brightly colored parrots, appealed to both artists and their patrons.

If pandering is good enough for the likes of Courbet, Tiepolo, and Delacroix, I guess its okay for us to pander to the parrot lovers among our readership.

Venetian master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is best known for his massive paintings in churches and palaces, but he was also one of the first artists to discover the parrot. “Woman with a Parrot”, 1760, may be seen at the Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford.

Gustave Courbet was a free-spirited artist who gained acceptance by the Paris Salon and later became popular with the impressionists when he turned down an award from Napoleon III. His parrot painting is “Woman with a Parrot” painted in 1866 and now residing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Eugene Delacroix is the best known of the Romanticists, specializing in action and battle scenes. Delacroix was also aware of the appeal of the parrot, as displayed in his version of “Woman with a Parrot” from the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, France.

(Click here for the previous installment of A Touch of Class.)