In the Locker Room (Oil Painting of Male Nude wrapped in White Towel)
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Mark BeardIn the Locker Room (Oil Painting of Male Nude wrapped in White Towel)
About the Item
- Creator:Mark Beard (1956, American)
- Dimensions:Height: 25 in (63.5 cm)Width: 18 in (45.72 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Hudson, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU2271890943
Mark Beard
Contemporary New York City-based artist Mark Beard has long demonstrated command in a variety of mediums — he works in oil paint, bronze, ceramics and more. Beard is known mainly for his portraits and figurative paintings, but he is prolific in figurative drawing and nude photography as well.
Beard was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1986, he began working as a set designer, and for the next decade, he created more than 20 sets in New York City, London, Frankfurt, Vienna and Cologne. As a painter and printmaker, Beard didn’t wish to confine himself to a rigid style and instead sought to explore Impressionism, Art Nouveau and other movements in a range of mediums. In order to freely move from one style to the next, Beard created several different personas, assigning a specific biography to each one.
Beard's most prominent artistic alter ego is Bruce Sargeant, whom the artist has positioned in exhibitions as an early 20th-century painter. Beard's work as Sargeant is a detailed study of the male physique. The paintings often feature sculpted athletic men engaged in physical activities like wrestling and rowing. The work is steeped in homoeroticism, and the artist’s name itself is a reference to painter John Singer Sargent — while he’s best known for his Edwardian-era portraits, John Singer Sargent also created murals and drawings of male nudes that were similarly reflective of a homoerotic sensibility.
Beard is also an accomplished landscape painter. His great-grandfather, George Beard, was a regional painter and photographer of the Rocky Mountains. Mark spent summers at his grandfather's 19th-century log cabin retreat as a child. These formative experiences are reflected in his own stunning landscape paintings.
Beard's artwork is held in many high-profile museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Today, Beard resides in the Manhattan loft that he purchased in 1994 with his partner, James Manfred. It serves as both his home and his studio. The space is filled with his oil paintings, drawings and sculptures.
On 1stDibs, find Mark Beard paintings, drawings, photography and more.
- Tennis Whites & Wrestling Singlet (Figurative Oil of Athletes by Mark Beard)By Mark BeardLocated in Hudson, NYAcademic style figurative oil painting of a young, female tennis player and young male athlete dressed in a wrestling singlet by Mark Beard (aka Bruc...Category
Early 2000s Academic Figurative Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- Untitled Portrait II (Modern, Academic Style Portrait Painting of a Young Man)By Mark BeardLocated in Hudson, NYModern, academic style portrait painting on canvas of a young athletic male oil on canvas, 26 x 17 inches in antique wood frame This vertical, contemporary portrait painting of sin...Category
2010s Academic Portrait Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- Untitled Portrait I (Academic Style Portrait Painting of a Young Muscular Man)By Mark BeardLocated in Hudson, NYModern, academic style portrait painting on canvas of a young athletic male oil on canvas, 28 x 22 inches unframed This vertical, contemporary portrait painting of a single young m...Category
2010s Academic Portrait Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- Le Martyr de Saint Sebastian (Academic Figurative Oil Painting in Gold Frame)By Mark BeardLocated in Hudson, NYAcademic style figurative oil painting on canvas 48 x 24 inches unframed 58 x 32 x 3 inches in gold leaf wood frame This vertical, contemporary figurative painting of Le Martyr de Saint Sebastian was made by Mark Beard under his fictitious artistic persona, Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon. Painted in a modern Academic style, Beard paints this Christian saint with dramatic detail and emotional gravity. The scene is a common artistic depiction of Sebastian who according to traditional belief, was killed during the Roman emperor Diocletian's persecution of the Christians. Here the artist depicts a nearly nude Saint Sebastian standing stoically while tied to a rustic brown post. A lush green forested terrain decorates the background while a white neo-classical building sits in the distance, which is perhaps the tomb where Saint Sebastian's remains were laid to rest. Saint Sebastian's pale blue-grey, stone-like stone tone is characteristic of Mark Beard's work who often portrays muscular young men similarly to Greek statues. The vertical Academic style figurative oil painting is complimented with a vintage style gold leaf wood frame. The painting is signed 'H. A. Michallon 1872' in red oil paint in the lower right corner. The gold frame is also signed and inscribed with black oil paint in several places (please see images). Mark Beard is a contemporary artist who made this work under the pseudonym Hippolyte A. Michallon who painted during the late 1800's so slight wear (see images) is intentionally staged to align with the factitious artist's purposed history. About the artist: Mark Beard is perhaps the most literal example of an artist pulled in so many different directions that he chose to “invent” six different personae in which to channel his overflowing energy and need for expression. Each painting style is radically different from the next, so it remains entirely believable that the work could stem from six completely different people of different time periods and different schools of thought. With a background in set design, Beard has always been one who could conjure total magic with anything available. Mark Beard has exhibited with Carrie Haddad Gallery for nearly twenty years and there has never been a dull moment. Mark Beard, born in 1956 in Salt Lake city, now lives in New York City. His works are in museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton University Art Museums; among many others. We would not be the least bit surprised to see new ‘personas’ emerge in the coming years. About: Hippolyte - Alexandre Michallon, 1849 -1930 The long and peripatetic artistic career of Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon began in a conventional fashion. The only son of prosperous bourgeois parents in Tours, he first studied drawing with his mother, an accomplished amateur painter of insects. His father, an undertaker who appreciated his son's talent and supported his ambition to become a painter, sent him to Paris at age sixteen to enroll in the studio of Francois-Edouard Picot (1786-1868), an eminent history painter and professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with whom he studied for three years, until Picot's death. Under his aging teacher's guidance and tutelage, Michallon entered the preliminary stages of the Prix de Rome contest at the Ecole three times, winning an Honorable Mention in 1869 for his composition entitled The Solider of the Marathon. For the next twenty years Michallon regualarly exhibited paintings on historical and biblical themes at the Paris Salon, as well as commissioned portraits. By his own account, the most ambitious work of Michallon's career was a thirty-foot canvas depicting Noah's Ark, which he exhibited in the Salon in 1875. Michallon began painting atmospheric but zoologically correct images of exotic animals in the wild. These achieved a certain popularity among French and foreign collectors alike, providing Michallon with financial security for the first time in his career. Michallon moved to England in 1893. His outstanding technical skills easily earned him a position on the faculty of the Slade School of Art in 1900. The craze for animal paintings proved short-lived. He continued to teach at Slade for the next two decades, but his classes gradually dwindled in size as the academic approach and methods he espoused went from outmoded to downright unpopular. Finally in 1922, finding himself reduced to a single pupil, the talented young American Bruce Sargeant, he retired from Slade, persuading Sargeant to leave with him and undergo private instruction at home. Several years later he retired to a cottage at St. Ives, Cornwall, where he lived quietly until his death in 1930, forgotten by all but a few former students, among them Edith Thayer Cromwell...Category
Early 2000s Academic Figurative Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- At the Camp (Academic Figurative Painting of Young Male Hunter by Mark Beard)By Mark BeardLocated in Hudson, NYAcademic style figurative oil painting on canvas of a young man undressing in a rural camp setting with a mountain landscape in the distance "At the Camp", Painted by Mark Beard as ...Category
2010s Academic Figurative Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- Frieze with Two Athletes on Bikes (Oil Painting by Mark Beard's Bruce Sargeant)By Mark BeardLocated in Hudson, NYAcademic style figurative painting of four young athletes running and on bicycles "Frieze with Two Men on Bikes", painted by Mark Beard as Bruce Sargeant (pseudonym in homage to the fashion photographer, Bruce Weber, and figurative painter, John Singer Sargeant) Oil on canvas, signed upper right 35.5 x 60 inches, 40.5 x 65.5 inches in a black frame with wire backing Excellent condition, ready to hang as is This magnificent horizontal composition was painted by Mark Beard under his fictitious artistic persona, Bruce Sargeant. Painted in a modern Academic style, this dynamic portrayal of young, male athletes in motion is an exciting example of the artist's talent for painting human anatomy. Two men are mounted on bikes; one wears khaki shorts and a billowing, white oxford...Category
2010s Academic Figurative Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- Teaching him a New TrickLocated in Washington, DC19th Century DutchCategory
1890s Academic Figurative Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- SummerLocated in Washington, DCExhibited: Royal Academy, London, 1880, no. 355 (as Summer)Category
1880s Academic Figurative Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- Petite fille et sa poupéeLocated in Washington, DCCharming example of nineteenth-century genre painting depicting a young girl, her doll, and sewing.Category
Late 19th Century Academic Figurative Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
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1870s Academic Figurative Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- The Love LetterBy William OliverLocated in Washington, DCSigned and dated '1884' lower rightCategory
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MaterialsCanvas, Oil
- Olivia Unveiling to Viola (from Twelfth Night)Located in Washington, DCExhibited: Birmingham Royal Society of Artists, 1879 “Autumn Exhibition of the Birmingham Royal Society of Artists.” The London Times, 25 August 1879. T...Category
1870s Academic Figurative Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Oil