#romantic portrait
A lovely double portrait, two exceedingly handsome young men looking serene and wistful, taken toward the end of the 19th century by Guglielmo Plüschow.
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One of the most elegant, captivating war portraits I’ve ever seen, such a graceful but intimate pose - whether they were a couple or just affectionate brothers, cousins or close friends, there’s a lot of protective, loving posessiveness in the way they’re holding eachother, and you can’t help but hope they both survived the troubled times to come.
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I’m filing this as Edwardian because of the hat style, but it could be older, hard to tell. Whatever the age, it’s a very sweet portrait.
And I would like that table.
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The Exalted Severina
Political leader and significant religious figure in Calancua. Now 40 years old, her military career began in 1808, training first in a Hesperan Academy in Ciudad del Oro, and from 1810 in various academies in Massalia, before returning home to add her tactical abilities - and her connections to Old World money - to the long and bloody struggle for independence.
The official portrait commissioned in 1836 depicts her before a Calancuan landscape, with the Banner of Sun as it was fifteen years earlier, when the treaty depicted on the open book beside her was first proposed, officially granting essential liberties to all peoples living in Calancua, though the high ideals of the first Independent Senate were never fully realized.
Severina is depicted in ornate military dress contemporary to the painting of the portrait rather than the early years of independance suggested by the rest of the piece, with the laurel crown of the Ancients further underscoring the power she commanded during her rule as a consequence of her military prowess - and her close ties to several prominent families of the Veinticuatro.
Every part of the image reinforces her desire to be seen as a leader by force of pen as well as blade, sanctioned by the divine, and suggests to the viewer a connection to the proposal and ratification of the idealistic treaty that is not supported by historical events in any way - several sources indicate she may not have even been in the country at the time, and her personal papers indicate significant ambivalence about the sweeping guarantees it extends even to the lowest of unfree laborers and immigrants.
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Painted in ProCreate, aiming for that odd formal romanticism typical of portraits of that era in our own world. The detail was probably crazy, but it wouldn’t really be a proper representation without her uniform, I don’t think. Her portrait is most interesting to me rendered as damaged - I am not yet sure if I will carry the conceit on to other significant leaders in the world of la mala suerte, but I might. After all, they could be from a personal collection of a wealthy patron who meets some misfortune in the future…
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