The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (455 page)

 
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Sotheby's
.

The oldest and largest firm of auctioneers in the world. It was founded by the London bookseller Samuel Baker , who held his first auction in 1744. On his death in 1778, his estate was divided between his partner George Leigh and his nephew John Sotheby . The last of the Sotheby family to be involved in the firm died in 1861. Although Sotheby's extended its range to take in prints, coins, medals, and antiquities of various kinds, books long remained the primary concern of the company, and it was not until after the First World War that paintings and other works of art became a major part of its business (before this time most important picture sales were held by
Christie's
). In 1964 Sotheby's bought Parke Bernet, America's largest fine art auctioneers, and it now has major sale rooms in London, New York, Geneva, and Monaco, with numerous branches throughout the world.

 
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(Italian: from below upwards). Term applied to an extreme form of
illusionistic
foreshortening in which figures or objects painted on a ceiling appear to be floating or suspended in space above the viewer.
Mantegna's
Camera degli Sposi in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua is the first major example, but the device is associated particularly with
Baroque
decoration.

 
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(1893–1943)
. Lithuanian-born painter who settled in France in 1913 and became one of the leading
Expressionists
of the School of
Paris
. His friends in Paris's circle of expatriate artists there included
Chagall
and
Modigliani
, who painted a memorable portrait of him (NG, Washington, 1917). Soutine suffered from depression and lack of confidence in his own work (he was reluctant to exhibit and sometimes destroyed his own pictures), and he endured years of desperate poverty until the American collector Dr Albert C.
Barnes
bought a number of his paintings in 1923. Thereafter he had a prosperous career. Soutine's work included landscapes, portraits, and figure studies of characters such as choirboys and page-boys. His style is characterized by thick, convulsive brush-work, through which he could express tenderness as well as turbulent psychological states. There is something of an affinity with van
Gogh
, although Soutine professed to dislike his work and felt more kinship with the Old Masters whose work he studied in the Louvre; his pictures of animal carcasses, for example, are inspired by
Rembrandt's
Flayed Ox
. However, the gruesome intensity of works such as
Side of Beef
(Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1925) was not gained simply through study of similar pictures, for Soutine visited abattoirs and even brought a carcass into the studio. His neighbours complained of the smell of the rotting meat and called the police, whom Soutine harangued on the subject of how much more important art was than sanitation. The filthy state in which he lived was notorious: the poet André Salmon recalled that Soutine once consulted a specialist about earache and that ‘In the canal of the painter's ear the doctor discovered, not an abscess, but a nest of bed bugs’

 
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(1899–1974)
and Raphael (1899–1987). Russian-born painters, twins. They emigrated to America in 1912 as exiles from tsarist Russia. They are best known for their
Social Realist
subjects, particularly those of the Depression years of the 1930s, in which they depicted the lives of working people with sympathy and at times a touching air of melancholy, as in Raphael's well-known
Office Girls
(Whitney Mus. New York, 1936). Both brothers also did many self-portraits and wrote on art. Moses wrote articles defending Social Realism and attacking
Regionalism
; Raphael published several autobiographical volumes and a book on Thomas
Eakins
(1966). Another brother,
Isaac
(1907–81), who came to America in 1914, was also a painter.

 
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