Raindrops

Gustave Caillebotte, Yerres Effect of Rain (1875)
Photo: Larry Wolf, Art Institute of Chicago (2025)

Walking swiftly through the Art Institute, scanning for landscapes, this one jumped out at me. the mix of created environment (the pavement just barely at our feet, diagonally) and river with woods and rain drops, the boat on the far shore in the shadows at the edge of the river almost hidden in the trees behind it, backlit. And then a chuckle, reading the wall text, that this is another Caillebotte, though one which wasn't in the blockbuster show a month or two ago. Another Caillebotte rainy day painting, larger, urban, is around the corner. A further chuckle looking at this photo, with the painting balancing, a bit askew, on my blurry finger.

Photo Dup

The photo at my doctor's office

Larry Wolf, Photo of Photo, no credit on the framed photo (2025)

My Rephotographed Photo

Larry Wolf, Sunny Chicago Fall (2025)

Application to Allerton/Hood Residency

Proposal

Imagine May of 1898. It was a formative time for Robert Allerton and for what would become The Farms. What is remembered in the land?

This is a photographic project: walking the land, dreaming it is a century ago, what might be developed. This is a modernist look showing the land as it is today, informed by the past.

During the residency I will produce a set of Cabinet Cards, a format popular in the late 1800s, small objects (41⁄2” by 61⁄2”) to hold and display. Similar to cartes de visite, but slightly larger, they were used for landscapes. It is a form to slow us down and appreciate the immediate, to underwhelm our overwhelmed senses, to pay attention to the print we’re holding and what it evokes.

The residency is a retreat. Dawn and dusk are transition times when the sun is slant and the mind is open to feeling what is seemingly hidden; an extended walking meditation, letting mind and body, feet and camera, move through the landscape.

The land was there before Robert. It will be here after we are gone. It has been shaped by ice ages and river floods. It has been inhabited by indigenous people (Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations). The Potawatomi were marched through Monticello in 1838, with treaties broken, they were forcibly relocated to Kansas, on the Trail of Death. The land was collectively managed by the indigenous nations; it was privately owned; it is now held in public trust.

That spring, Robert was 25. He and his childhood friend Frederic Bartlett had spent five years in Europe studying to be artists. Before leaving Paris, Robert had burned his paintings, declaring he would never be more than an amateur artist. [Note: the root of amateur is love, to do something for the love of it.] Robert brought an artist’s eye to Piatt County, treating the land as his canvas.

Robert immediately started shaping things, moving the old Stallcup house to be near a spring. He wallpapered his privy with Toulouse-Lautrec posters, bringing his past into his present. Living on the land, he was imagining what he might build. My mid-20’s were also a time of setting the course of my life.

This project will photograph the land and invite us to envision what might be.

Larry Wolf, Creek Bed, formatted as a Cabinet Card (2025)

[submitted to the Joan and Peter Hood Residency at the Allerton Park and Retreat Center]

Homage to David and Arthur

Larry Wolf, Arthur Rimbaud Enshrined,
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (2025)

Some Earlier Posts

Me and Rimbaud (July 2025)

Arthur Rimbaud at 17 and 170 (October 2024)

Two Bad Boy Artists - Enfants Terribles (July 2024)

Looking Up

Larry Wolf, Looking Up (2025)

Young Sophocles

John Talbott Donoghue, Young Sophocles Leading the Chorus of
Victory after the Battle of Salamis (1885/cast 1911)
Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Robert Allerton

1853 - sculptor John Talbott Donoghue born in Chicago

Chicago Inter-Ocean, Monday Morning
February13, 1882 
(from the Internet Archive)

1882 - Oscar Wilde, on tour in Chicago, praised Donoghue: “more beautiful than the work of any sculptor I have seen yet, and of whom you should all be proud”

"Here is a plaque he designed for one of my poems - a figure of a girl - so simple, so powerful, so pretty. It is perfect"

John Donoghue, Plaque of Isola Wilde

1885 - Donoghue created Young Sophocles Leading the Chorus of Victory after the Battle of Salamis

1890 - Isabella Gardner acquired a bronze of Young Sophocles in Venice

John Talbott Donoghue, Young Sophocles Leading the Chorus of
Victory after the Battle of Salamis (1890)
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

1893 - Young Sophocles was exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Multiple biographical posts about Donoghue claim that it won a first prize however it is not listed in the awards records of the Exposition at the Chicago History Museum. There were many fans of the work (Oscar Wilde, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Robert Allerton), but not everyone liked it (see review, below).

"The Young Sophocles Leading the Chorus of Victory After the Battle of Salamis," by John Donoghue, is of the French school, adapting modern treatment to studies of the antique. It is not an attractive composition, and is in more than questionable taste. True, that after the battle of Salamis he was chosen to head the chorus of boys at the celebration of that victory; but one cannot imagine the great dramatist posing as a lad nude and with a lyre in hand. Though lads went naked on such occasions, it is not the guise or attitude that one is apt to associate with this the great master of tragedy. The figure is well enough in its way, with erect and supple carriage, head thrown back, and earnest thoughtful features; but it is not suggestive of anyone in particular, and certainly not of Sophocles, either as a youth or at any other period of his life.

The Book of the Fair by Hubert Howe Bancroft (1893)

Also intended for the Exposition was The Genius of America. The 30-foot sculpture was shipped from Rome to Brooklyn, where, according to the Boston Herald, it sat on the docks, “a huge bill for trans-shipment confronting the artist.” Left unclaimed, it was broken to pieces by dockworkers to make room for incoming shipments. 

1888 - Donoghue moved to Boston, where he exhibited his work at Horticultural Hall to great acclaim.

1903 - John Donoghue died in New York by suicide (NYTimes and Irish Boston website)

1911 - Robert Allerton gifted a casting of Young Sophocles to the Art Institute of Chicago. Allerton had spent time at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 and may have seen the sculpture there.

1917 - the Metropolitan Museum (NY) purchased a plaster cast from the Art Institute of Chicago, and ten years later, their bronze was replicated from it. 

[Wikipedia states that there’s a copy of Young Sophocles at the Honolulu Museum of Art. A search of their database finds an entry for John Talbott Donoghue, though there’s no image and no metadata. It’s possible that Robert Allerton had a copy of the sculpture in his personal collection which was donated to the HMOA.]

Canalscape

John Jacobsen, Evening Canalscape (2000-2025)