Paintings Worth Looking At

Today, I was preparing a “portrait of the day” post, and hoped to include a batch of five paintings, rediscovered together, that served as a fantastic comparison point. They were found on the Frick Digital Collections , a consistently phenomenal resource. However - despite Frick offering a “large” download size - I found that that the result had crushed these nice crisp images into a tiny low-quality photo! Here’s how to fix that.  Firstly, please do note, for 99% of images on Frick, the “large” size (2048px) will be more than sufficient to approximate the quality of the original scan. You don’t need to go to all this trouble. However, when it is necessary, this process will permit you to extract Frick images in maximum quality, just the same as the high-resolution online viewer. 

The members of the so-called “Prior-Hamblin school” weren’t a school at all. Colleagues? Competitors? We still barely know. The five usual suspects - W.M. Prior, S.J. Hamblin, G.G. Hartwell, W W. Kennedy, and E.W. Blake - are constantly compared, mixed up, and conflated. However, despite their profound similarities, they all had their own quirks - especially when it comes to a pair of eyes. Part 1 of this post will address, illustrate, and explain the PHS's five unique methods for the so-called windows to the soul. The PHS problem has been tackled by exceptional folk art scholars for generations before me, so I don't expect this post to solve it. However, I hope that it will offer some useful clues.  Read on for the Eyes of the Prior-Hamblins.  - - -