Here we are, on a Friday morning, and we’d like to discuss the role of pandas in art history. I don’t know if anyone noticed in the most recent Wu on Wednesday cartoon, that Bai Yun’s pose in the first panel, was taken directly from a Caravaggio painting at The National Gallery in London, Supper at Emmaus. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I had wasted seven years in art school.

Speaking of pandas in art, a painting that was recently discovered in the basement of a London Gallery, which wished to be unnamed, proves beyond the shadow of a doubt, that James Abbott McNeil Whistler had a thing for pandas, in this first version of a painting of his mother. Rumor has it that he had asked his mother for funds to travel to Italy, as he had recently been bankrupted after the Ruskin trial.  She refused, and he painted this portrait of her, as a panda.  later he relented and painting a portrait that was more of a likeness, but many thought that the original painting was more flattering.

“Arrangement in Black, White, and Gray” by James A. McNeil Whistler

Till next week,

Be the Bear!

Bob T. Panda