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

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was Italian, and the second child of a master baker from Ferrara. (Hey, quit giggling. I said "baker.")
• Best known for a vast output of religious paintings, the artist executed three versions of the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross). The Vatican Museums own one of them.
• The artist died on the Italian Riviera southeast of Genoa, about 100 miles (as the crow flies) NNW from the island of Giglio -- scene of the recent Costa Concordia shipwreck.
  
  And
  
  
• In addition to being at the forefront of two Modernist movements in Italy, the artist also illustrated two books: The Betrothed (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni, and a private, Italian edition of Edgar Allen Poe's Tales. Poe had a major influence on this artist, who read Tales over and over again in its original English.

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:

I asked more than one question, and Super Reader Val answered them all. First, the artist was Cincinnati native Elizabeth Nourse (American, 1859-1938) whose 1888 canvas La Mère (Mother and Child) was last week's "Guess the Artist" image. Second, her English immigrant, widower, designer in-law was Benn Pitman (1822-1910), who took Elizabeth's twin sister Adelaide (1859-1893) as his second wife in 1881. Benn was a minor celebrity in his own right for acting in the capacity of stenographer throughout the 1865 trials of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. And, finally, Benn knew how to be a stenographer due to having helped his brother, Isaac, refine Pitman shorthand. (If you ever took shorthand, whether Pitman or Gregg, now you know who to either praise or blame.) Val, you put Nancy Drew to shame!