Your clues this week are:

• The artist was Russian, and studied painting under the great Ilya Repin (1844-1930) at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg -- while concurrently studying sculpture and etching with two other masters.
• Although obviously a skilled portraitist, the artist had more fun designing stage sets and made more money as a book illustrator.
• For a brief time, the artist was a contributor to a journal called "Hell's Mail." I visualized "Hell's Mail" as a gigantic stack of bills due, but was incorrect.
  
  And
  
  
• In honor of Valentine's Day, a clue about the model, the dapper gent in the fur coat. He was an operatic bass who performed around the world, and whose best friend was Sergei Rachmaninoff. One of the singer's sons became an actor who did a lot of work in Hollywood although he lived in Italy. You may remember him from the 1987 love story Moonstruck, in which he exhorted the pack of dogs he was walking to look at the sky: "La bella luna! The moon brings the woman to the man. Capice?" For bonus bragging rights, who were these two entertaining men?

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Our born-in-Canada artist was Henrietta Shore (1880-1963), and we were looking at her California Data (ca. 1925). Incidentally, she and Edward Weston were indeed good friends, and only that (Weston was notorious for his extramarital affairs). Kudos to Lin, who emailed the correct answer first!

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was not born in the US, but became a citizen in 1920.
• The Art Students League in New York, with instructors William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, and Heatherly's Art School in London were where the artist was trained.
• The photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) was a great friend of the artist's. They were both fascinated by capturing the art-nature connection, and wound up living near one another in the flora and fauna surrounding Carmel, California.
  
  And
  
  
• Some well-intentioned -- but criminally stupid -- friends had the artist committed to a mental institution after noticing the artist's studio was messy. (As if tidy artists' studios are the norm!) The friends then apparently forgot what they had done, because the artist languished there, forgotten, until death provided an escape. This incident may or may not have given rise to the expression, "With friends like that, who needs enemies?"

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Who knew how many of you are fans of Gaetano Previati (Italian, 1852 -1920)? I obviously did not, but quickly learned. Paola pounced on the correct answer in record time, well before Ms. Six-Time-Zones-Earlier-than-Rome could even drag herself out of bed. Very well done, Paola. After my brain finally woke up, it registered great admiration for your art-historic knowledge base!

Thanks to the recent exhibition René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, and the unforgivable fact that there was no Magritte biography written (!), I spent a few weeks getting cozy with the gentleman in the bowler hat. (Well, as cozy as one can get buried in a stack of books while keeping 20+ tabs of interviews and articles open in one's browser.) Do I understand René Magritte now? Probably as well as I ever will. He is a classic hard "read," and whenever he tried to explain ... pretty much anything ... it only served to muddy my water. He probably would have been one of those visual artists that write incomprehensible artists' statements. Well, you could read a few quotes by René Magritte and see what you think. Oh, by the way -- if anything about him makes perfect sense to you, please feel free to leave your thoughts in comment form. I'll be grateful for your input.

Image Credit:

René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967)
Man with a Newspaper, 1928
Oil on canvas
115.6 x 81.3 cm (45 1/2 x 32 in.)
Tate Collection
© Charly Herscovici, Brussels - 2011© VBK Vienna, 2011

Did you miss the Show of Shows at London's National Gallery? Oh, it's not over yet -- not until this Sunday -- but we hear that all hope of getting a ticket between now and then is a lost cause. (Unless you know a scalper and are prepared to part with mega-bucks, of course.) Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan has been such a roaring success that "they" are calling it the exhibition of the year, the decade, and even the century. The last declaration seems a bit premature to me, but one thing is certain: we are not likely to see this many Leonardo paintings under one roof ever again.

Now, assuming that you and I are two of the billions of people who couldn't attend in person, we do have quite a few of the works here in an image gallery ... including the "new" painting, Salvator Mundi, both versions of Virgin of the Rocks, and a boatload of studies for the paintings Leonardo made while in Milan. And even more good news: starting just over two weeks from now (on February 16), Leonardo Live -- a movie of the exhibition -- will be broadcast to theaters around the world. Keep your eyes peeled for your own virtual private tour, filmed the evening before the show opened.

Image Credit:

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519)
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist ('The Burlington House Cartoon'), ca. 1499-1500
Charcoal (and wash?) heightened with white chalk on paper, mounted on canvas
141.5 x 104.6 cm (55 11/16 x 41 3/16 in.)
Purchased with a special grant and contributions from The Art Fund, the Pilgrim Trust, and through a public appeal organized by The Art Fund, 1962
NG6337
© The National Gallery, London