Across Photoarchive files, researchers can make their own connections among themes of portraiture and emptiness, and artists like Water Gay, Joseph Ducreux, and Goya and his followers. In Interior of the Artist’s Apartment, Ducreux stands in as the identifiable face to Walter Gay’s living room, and the directness of Ducreux’s portrait remains central to both pictures. Working in his own home, Gay sometimes included images of himself and Matilda, adding a more literal expression of portraiture to his work. Half-closed doors, wrinkled sheets, and cluttered arrangements of bibelots speak as much to the unseen occupants as they do to those qualities innate to a space itself. The portrait also complemented Walter Gay’s interior scenes, in which he imbues rooms with moods and personalities. It is also possible that the Goya-esque quality observed in 1949 references Matilda Gay’s appreciation of the Spanish temperament: in a diary entry, she describes an acquaintance who “looks just like a Goya, and has the fougueux quality of a man of that epoch.” The picture presumably appealed to the Gays’ love of eighteenth-century French art. It is not known when the Gays might have acquired this version of Ducreux’s painting, of which several replicas and copies are known to exist. Its twenty-first-century fame is due largely to a 2009 internet meme called “Archaic Rap,” in which images of Ducreux’s paintings captioned with slangy one-liners and Britishisms were widely tweeted and shared on Facebook.
When Interior of the Artist’s Apartment was exhibited at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, in 1949, five years before it was accessioned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the portrait was listed as “probably by Goya or one of his followers.” Today, it is recognized as a self-portrait by the French painter Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802). The portrait hangs above a bright blue settee and is surrounded by a cluster of five small landscapes. Prominently featured in this corner of the room is a large portrait of a man, grinning and pointing at the viewer. Like, I’m talking every two hours.Interior of the Artist’s Apartment, made sometime after 1910 by the American painter and watercolorist Walter Gay, shows a narrow view of a sitting area in Walter and his wife Matilda’s Paris apartment at 11 Rue de l'Université, where the couple had moved in May 1909. She’s like the lesbian next door-if there was ever a town that actually had enough lesbians that two of them could live next to each other. Not to brag, but she *is* followed by Ruby Rose, who also gave hotmessbian a shout out on her social media. 24 Hilarious Gay Memes From Best Of Grindr That Are Guaranteed To Make You Gay Cackle 'Gay people walk quickly because we constantly have 'Toxic' by Britney Spears (143 bpm) playing in our heads. Hotmessbian is the first name that comes to many minds when it comes to lesbian memes. So, in my accumulated hours on the internet, I have been able to find meme accounts that may not be huge but that have had a huge impact on my development into the strong, self-actualized sapphic that I am today. No matter the topic, memers have the unique ability to tap into our most specific experiences and bring them to light for everyone to relate to.
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