Gotta love those studio portraits!

In response to a couple of other postings I've seen both in praise and criticism of the portrait of Fanny, I just have to say, I gotta love those old studio portraits! There's something about the way studio artists painted props for these old films that is strange and very appealing to me. They are both hyper-realistic, and oddly flat and vaguely disproportionate, and evoke a sense of era, but are also somewhat hokey and dated in a charming way. Overall, they have a strange and interesting quality that you don't see in real-life portraits from the past. It sort of reminds me of some of the portraits Disney artists created for the older rides (haunted mansion, etc). You can tell they're phony, but they're charmingly theatrical and very appealing. Maybe that hard-to-describe artificiality has to do with the way they appear on film, sort of like how makeup and costumes take on a different tone.

Other's that I love are the "Rebecca" portrait, the portrait of Azilde in "Dragonwyck", that great one of Scarlett in the blue dress from "Gone With the Wind", The "Vertigo" portrait (and the joke version of Barbara Bel Geddes!), that other one of Bette Davis as the Empress Carlota in "Juarez", the striking mock primitive of Joan Bennett from "Scarlet Street", the one of Ingrid Bergman's aunt as Theodora from "Gaslight", The Dorian Gray portraits, the title "Portrait of Jenny" and numerous others. (Can you tell I pay undue attention to this topic?)

One of my dream jobs is to have been a studio painter during the golden age. My mother and I have also always said that we'd love to see all these paintings dug up from warehouses and private collections for a "Studio Portraits from the Golden Age" art exhibit. Sadly, many have probably been lost or scrapped.