PLEIN AIR HERITAGE
Artists often borrow ideas, compositions, or techniques from past masters by making studies of their major works. They might be inspired by the artwork, or they may see an opportunity to explore their own response to the masterpiece. In the mid-1950s, Irish-born artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992) made at least eight studies of a painting by Vincent van Gogh that is presumed to have been destroyed during World War II, when a museum in Magdeburg, Germany, was bombed. That painting was a self-portrait of Van Gogh carrying his painting supplies into the French countryside, where he would paint in Tarascon, a village between Arles and Avignon. According to writer Dale Cotton, Van Gogh once claimed, “The real painters do not paint things as they are.... They paint them as they themselves feel…