A tiny piglet, soft pink with dark-brown stripes, sits on a vitrine shelf next to an aged urn, a candle and three frosted-glass vases. He's a model in search of a canvas, on which he will appear when inspiration strikes the artist, photographer Harald Altmaier. 'I saw him in Paris and had to have him. He's been here since May and will go in a woodland shot, I think, with ferns, mushrooms-and there will be a little mole coming out of the soil.'
Mr Altmaier's pictures are closer to paintings than classic photographs, portraying monumental floral arrangements against gilded mirrors, sleeping cherubs and swathes of damasks, silks and rich velvets that cascade in sinuous drapes, as butterflies, caterpillars or stag beetles frolic among the petals.
Reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch still lifes, the images often have a deeper meaning and hidden messages, with memento mori sprinkled across the foliage-a skull here, a spent candle there and some canvases calling for a game of 'spot the crow'. (A clue for the wintry Composition V: peer closely between the Savoy cabbage and the old man's beard).
Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin November 27, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin November 27, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Save our family farms
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A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
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It takes the biscuit
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After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
