The Most Famous Paintings

Jeroen Van Der Steen Paintings

2008-12-29T04:06:00.000-08:00

Jeroen van der Steen is a young dutch painter.

Born in 1990 in Rotterdam.

''I usually paint things out of my dreams, things that I see or just things I love to paint.''

Links for more work of Jeroen van der Steen

http://www.jeroenvdsteen.exto.nl/

http://gmac06.deviantart.com/

Top 10 Most Expensive Paintings Of All Time

2008-02-15T10:44:00.000-08:00

1. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt ($135,000,000)

2. Garçon à la Pipe by Pablo Picasso ($104,100,000)
3. Dora Maar with Cat by Pablo Picasso ($95,200,000)
4. Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh ($82,500,000)
5. Bal Au Moulin de la Galette by Pierre-Auguste Renoir ($78,000,000)
Rumors - 1948 by Jackson Pollock ($140,000,000)
6. Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens ($76,700,000)

7. Portrait de l'Artiste sans Barbe by Vincent van Gogh ($71,500,000)
8. Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier by Paul Cézanne ($60,500,000)
9. Femme aux Bras Croisés by Pablo Picasso ($55,000,000)
10. Irises by Vincent Van Gogh ($53,900,000)

Raphael Biography and Paintings/1483-1520

2008-02-13T14:02:00.000-08:00

The vision of Ezekiel(1518)

The Woman with the Unicorn(approx 1505)
The Sistine Madonna(detail,1513-14,oil on canvas)
The Transfiguration(detail2)
The Transfiguration(detail)
The Transfiguration(unfinished)
The virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist(1507,wood)
The Madonna of Foligno(1511-12)

The mute woman
The prophet Isaiah(1511-12)
The school of Athens(1510-11,fresco)
The Sistin Madonna(1513-14,oil on canvas)
The fornarina(approx 1516,possibly painted by one of his pupils)

The Holy Family with a lamb(1507,oil on panel)
The Holy Family with St.Joseph(1506,oil and tempera on canvas)
The Holy Family(1518,canvas)
The Knights Dream
The Alba Madonna(1509)

The Blessing Christ
The canigiani Holy Family(1507,oil on panel)
The Entobment
The fire in the Bongo(fresco)
St. George and the Dragon(1504-06, oil on wood)

St. Sebastian (probably with Perugino, approx 1500-01)
St.Catherine of Alexandria(1508)
Study for The Knight's Dream(approx 1504)
Tempi Madonna(1507-08,oil on panel)
Portrait of Julius II

Quidobaldo da Montefeltro(1506,oil on wood)
Raphael_head
Saint Michael trampling the dragon(1518)
Self-portrait(1506,oil on wood)
Portrait of a cardinal(1510,oil on panel)

Portrait of a Man with an Apple (1503-04, oil on wood)
Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione(1414-15,canvas)
Portrait of Cardinal Bibbiena
Portrait of Fedra Inghirami
Madonna del Baldacchino(1507,oil on wood)

Madonna della Sedia(approx 1518)
Madonna della Tenda(1514,oil on panel)
Madonna of the goldfinch(1505-06,oil on wood)
Phyche offering Venus the water of Styx(red chalk)
Detail from the Saint Nicholas Altarpiece(1500-01, oil on wood)

Elisabetta Gonzaga(1504-06, oil on wood)
La Donna Velata(1516)
Madonna & Child (Madonna del Granduca,1505)
Madonna & Child (The Small Cowper Madonna,1505)
Altarpiece of St. Nicholas of Tolentino(1501)

Bindo altoviti(1515)
Christ with the Virgin,Saint Jerome,Magdalene,Baptist(1502)
Conestabile Madonna(1502, tempera on canvas)
Coronation of the Virgin (Oddi Altarpiece, 1502-03)

Raphael(1483-1520)

Raphael was an Italian Renaissance painter who is considered one of the greatest and most popular artists of all time.
He was born Raffaello Santi or Raffaello Sanzio in Urbino on April 6, 1483, and received his early training in art from his father, the painter Giovanni Santi. According to many art historians, he also studied with Timoteo Viti at Urbino, executing under his influence a number of works of miniaturelike delicacy and poetic atmosphere, including Apollo and Marsyas (Louvre, Paris) and The Knight's Dream (1501?, National Gallery, London). In 1499 he went to Perugia, in Umbria, and became a student and assistant of the painter Perugino. Raphael imitated his master closely; their paintings of this period are executed in styles so similar that art historians have found it difficult to determine which were painted by Raphael. Among Raphael's independent works executed at Perugia are two large-scale paintings, the celebrated Sposalizio, or Marriage of the Virgin (1504, Brera Gallery, Milan), and The Crucified Christ with the Virgin Mary, Saints and Angels (1503?, National Gallery, London).
Florentine Period
In 1504 Raphael moved to Florence, where he studied the work of such established painters of the time as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Fra Bartolommeo, learning their methods of representing the play of light and shade, anatomy, and dramatic action. At this time he made a transition from the typical style of the Umbrian school, with its emphasis on perspective and rigidly geometrical composition, to a more animated, informal manner of painting. His development during his Florentine period can best be traced in his numerous Madonnas. The earliest example, still Umbrian in inspiration, is the Madonna del Granduca (1504-1505, Pitti Palace, Florence). Later examples, showing the influence of Leonardo in serenity of expression and composition, include the well-known La Belle Jardinière (1507-1508, Musée du Louvre) and the Madonna of the Goldfinch (1505, Galleria degli Uffizi Gallery, Florence). The last of his Madonnas executed at Florence, the Madonna del Baldacchino (1508, Pitti Palace), a monumental altarpiece, is similar in style to the work of Fra Bartolommeo. Raphael's most important commissions during his stay in Florence came from Umbria. His most original composition of this period is the Entombment of Christ (1507, Borghese Gallery, Rome), an altarpiece that nevertheless shows the strong influence of Michelangelo in the postures and anatomical development of the figures.
Roman Period
In 1508 Raphael was called to Rome by Pope Julius II and commissioned to execute frescoes in four small stanze, or rooms, of the Vatican Palace. The walls of the first room, the Stanza della Segnatura (1509-1511), are decorated with scenes elaborating ideas suggested by personifications of Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Justice, which appear on the ceiling. On the wall under Theology is the Disputà, representing a group discussing the mystery of the Trinity. The famous School of Athens, on the wall beneath Philosophy, portrays an open architectural space in which Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers are engaged in discourse. On the wall under Poetry is the celebrated Parnassus, in which the Greek god Apollo appears surrounded by the Muses and the great poets. The second Vatican chamber, the Stanza d'Eliodoro (1512-1514), painted with the aid of Raphael's assistants, contains scenes representing the triumph of the Roman Catholic church over its enemies.
After the death of Pope Julius II in 1513, and the accession of Leo X, Raphael's influence and responsibilities increased. He was made chief architect of Saint Peter's Basilica in 1514, and a year later was appointed director of all the excavations of antiquities in and near Rome. Because of his many activities, only part of the third room of the Vatican Palace, the Stanza del Incendio (1514-1517), was painted by him, and he merely provided the designs for the fourth chamber, the Sala Constantina. During this period he also designed ten tapestries illustrating the acts of Christ's apostles for the Sistine Chapel; the cartoons, or drawings, for these are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Raphael also devised the architecture and decorations of the Chigi Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo and the decorations of the Villa Farnesina, which include the Triumph of Galatea (1513?).
In addition to these major undertakings, he executed a number of easel paintings, including a Portrait of Julius II (1511-1512), a series of Madonnas, and the world-famous Sistine Madonna (1514?, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden). Other religious paintings during this period include The Transfiguration (1517-1520, Vatican), completed posthumously by the most notable of Raphael's many followers, Giulio Romano. Raphael died in Rome on his 37th birthday, April 6, 1520.

Salvador Dali Biography and Paintings/1904-1989

2008-02-12T15:48:00.000-08:00

The Pyramids and the Sphinx of Gizeh (Oil on canvas, 1954)

The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition (1934)
White Calm (Oil on canvas, 1936)
Young Virgin Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity (1954)
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, Premonition of Civil War (1936)
The Colossus of Rhodes (Oil on canvas, 1954)
The Duke of Urbino - Portrait of Count Theo Rossi Di Montelera (Oil on canvas, 1957)
The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1969-70)
The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Portrait of Mrs. Isabel Styler-Tas (Oil on canvas, 1945)

Portrait of Mrs. Jack Warner (Oil on canvas, 1951)
Portrait of Mrs. Ruth Daponte (Oil on canvas, 1965)
Portrait of Paul Eluard (1929)
Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)
Morphological Echo (Oil on canvas, 1936)

Nature Morte Vivante - Living Still Life (Oil on canvas, 1956)
Paysage aux Papillons (1959)
Portrait of Chester Dale and His Dog Coco (Oil on canvas, 1958)
Portrait of John Theodoracopoulos (Oil on canvas, 1970)
Illumined Pleasures (1929)

Leda Atomica (Oil on canvas, 1949)
Lincoln in Dalivision (1977)
Meditation on the Harp (1932-1934)
Meditation on the Harp (1932-1934)
Equestrian Fantasy - Portrait of Lady Dunn (Oil on canvas, 1954)

Eucharistic Still Life (Oil on canvas, 1952)
Feather Equilibrium - Interatomic Balance of a Swan's Feather (Oil on canvas, 1947)
Figure at Window (1925)
Girl from the Back (Oil on canvas, 1925)
Character Masquerading in Pinning Up a Butterfly (Oil on canvas, 1965)

Cruxifixion (Hypercubic Body) (Oil on canvas)
Dali at the Age of Six (Oil on canvas, 1950)
Dali Nude, in Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies (Oil on canvas)
dali_head
Apparition of the Town of Delft (Oil on canvas, 1936)

Apparition of the Visage of Aphrodite (1959)
Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus (1935)
Asummpta Corpuscularia Lapislazulina (Oil on canvas, 1952)
Cannibalism in Autumn (1936-37)

Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

"Spanish painter. Born into a middle-class family, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he mastered academic techniques. Dalí also pursued his personal interest in Cubism and Futurism and was expelled from the academy for indiscipline in 1923. He formed friendships with Lorca and Buñuel, read Freud with enthusiasm and held his first one-man show in Barcelona (1925), where he exhibited a number of seascapes. He wrote the screenplay for Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (produced in 1928), largely thanks to which he was adopted by the Surrealists. In Paris he met Picasso and Breton, and his involvement from 1929 onwards, his effervescent activity, his flair for getting publicity through scandal and his vivacity which counterbalanced the political difficulties encountered by the group, made him a particularly welcome addition.

"Over the next few years Dalí devoted himself with passionate intensity to developing his method, which he described as 'paranoiac-critical', a 'spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivation of delirious associations and interpretations'. It enabled him to demonstrate his personal obsessions and fantasies by uncovering and meticulously fashioning hidden forms within pre-existing ones, either randomly selected (postcards, beach scenes, photographic enlargements) or of an accepted artistic canon (canvases by Millet, for example). It was at this period that he was producing works like The Lugubrious Game (1929), The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Surrealist Objects, Gauges of Instantaneous Memory (1932). Flaccid shapes, anamorphoses and double-sided figures producing a trompe-l'œil effect combine in these works to create an extraordinary universe where the erotic and the scatological jostle with a fascination for decay - a universe that is reflected in his other works of this period, including his symbolic objects and poems (La Femme visible, 1930; L'Amour et la mémoire, 1931) as well as the screenplay for L'Age d'Or (1930).

"It soon became apparent, however, that there was an inherent contradiction in Dalí's approach between what he himself described as 'critical paranoia' - which lent itself to systematic interpretation - and the element of automatism upon which his method depended. Breton soon had misgivings about Dalí's monsters which only lend themselves to a limited, univocal reading. Dalí's extreme statements on political matters, in particular his fascination for Hitler, struck a false note in the context of the Surrealist ethic and his relations with the rest of the group became increasingly strained after 1934. The break finally came when the painter declared his support for Franco in 1939. And yet he could boast that he had the backing of Freud himself, who declared in 1938 that Dalí was the only interesting case in a movement whose aims he confessed not to understand. Moreover, in the eyes of the public he was, increasingly as time went by, the Surrealist par excellence, and he did his utmost to maintain, by way of excessive exhibitionism in every area, this enviable reputation.

"In 1936, Dalí returned to a classical manner of painting, switching haphazardly between Italian, Spanish and pompier styles. From 1939 to 1948, he lived in the United States, cultivating his persona as a genial eccentric, and earning from Breton the nickname Avida Dollars (an anagram of his name) in 1940. In Spain once more (at Port Lligat), he provided a constant source of interest for the gossip columns, which described the parties he threw, his carefully orchestrated 'eccentricity' and all the pomp and ceremony of his church wedding in 1958 to Gala (Éluard's first wife), whom he had first met in 1929 and who was to remain the only woman in his life, his muse, his model and his most effective agent. If he declared that Meissonier was a better painter than Picasso, that Perpignan railway station was the centre of the world, or that Francoism had saved Spain, these were precisely the sort of statements that people expected of him. His painting, in the meantime, while technically brilliant, was based on ideas that were not perhaps as bold and new as they seemed (Christ of Saint John of the Cross, 1951, for example, or the Crucifixion of 1954) - more a series of confidence tricks designed to convince the public that Dalí was borrowing from nuclear physics or 'inventing' the anaglyph relief. In 1965, he turned his hand to sculpture, contenting himself with repeating themes from his paintings: a Venus equipped with cupboard drawers, elephants with spiders' legs, soft watches, etc., worked in bronze or crystal. The purpose of the post-war lithographs was principally financial: their uncontrolled print runs and more or less authentic signatures brought discredit on the artistic mass market of the 1960s. Such 'scandals', however, like the denunciation of fake Dalís in the 1970s, served to keep a myth alive - a myth that has proved remarkably durable if the success of both the Dalí museum at Figueras, which the painter himself set up in 1974, and the major exhibitions periodically held in celebration of his 'genius' is anything to go by."

Leonardo Da Vinci Biography and Paintings/1452-1519

2008-02-12T14:37:00.001-08:00

Virgin and child with St.Anne

Virgin of the rocks
The adoration of the Magi
The Annunciation
The battle of Anghiari(copy,the original does not survive)
The Last Supper(1495-98)
Virgin & child with St.Anne & John the Baptist
Self-portrait(at age 65)

St.John the Baptist
Study for the Virgin of the rocks
Study of an old man's profile
Study of the Heads of an old man and a Youth
Leda(copy,the original does not survive)

Portrait of Cecilia Gallarani
Portrait of Isabelle d' Este
Proportions of Man
Self-portrait
A woman's head

Assault Chariot with scythes
Benois Madonna
De Vinci_head
La Gioconda(The mona Lisa,1503-06,oil on canvas)

Leonardo da Vinci(1452-1519)

Leonardo da Vinci was a Florentine artist, one of the great masters of the High Renaissance, who was also celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His profound love of knowledge and research was the keynote of both his artistic and scientific endeavors. His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies—particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics—anticipated many of the developments of modern science.
Early Life in Florence
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the small Tuscan town of Vinci, near Florence. He was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid-1460s the family settled in Florence, where Leonardo was given the best education that Florence, the intellectual and artistic center of Italy, could offer. He rapidly advanced socially and intellectually. He was handsome, persuasive in conversation, and a fine musician and improviser. About 1466 he was apprenticed as a garzone (studio boy) to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. In Verrocchio's workshop Leonardo was introduced to many activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble and bronze. In 1472 he was entered in the painter's guild of Florence, and in 1476 he is still mentioned as Verrocchio's assistant. In Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (circa 1470, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), the kneeling angel at the left of the painting is by Leonardo.
In 1478 Leonardo became an independent master. His first commission, to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine town hall, was never executed. His first large painting, The Adoration of the Magi (begun 1481, Galleria degli Uffizi), left unfinished, was ordered in 1481 for the Monastery of San Donato a Scopeto, Florence. Other works ascribed to his youth are the so-called Benois Madonna (c. 1478, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg), the portrait Ginerva de' Benci (c. 1474, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), and the unfinished Saint Jerome (c. 1481, Pinacoteca, Vatican).
Years in Milan
About 1482 Leonardo entered the service of the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, having written the duke an astonishing letter in which he stated that he could build portable bridges; that he knew the techniques of constructing bombardments and of making cannons; that he could build ships as well as armored vehicles, catapults, and other war machines; and that he could execute sculpture in marble, bronze, and clay. He served as principal engineer in the duke's numerous military enterprises and was active also as an architect. In addition, he assisted the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli in the celebrated work Divina Proportione (1509).
Evidence indicates that Leonardo had apprentices and pupils in Milan, for whom he probably wrote the various texts later compiled as Treatise on Painting (1651; trans. 1956). The most important of his own paintings during the early Milan period was The Virgin of the Rocks, two versions of which exist (1483-85, Musée du Louvre, Paris; 1490s to 1506-08, National Gallery, London); he worked on the compositions for a long time, as was his custom, seemingly unwilling to finish what he had begun. From 1495 to 1497 Leonardo labored on his masterpiece, The Last Supper, a mural in the refectory of the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Unfortunately, his experimental use of oil on dry plaster (on what was the thin outer wall of a space designed for serving food) was technically unsound, and by 1500 its deterioration had begun. Since 1726 attempts have been made, unsuccessfully, to restore it; a concerted restoration and conservation program, making use of the latest technology, was begun in 1977 and is reversing some of the damage. Although much of the original surface is gone, the majesty of the composition and the penetrating characterization of the figures give a fleeting vision of its vanished splendor. During his long stay in Milan, Leonardo also produced other paintings and drawings (most of which have been lost), theater designs, architectural drawings, and models for the dome of Milan Cathedral. His largest commission was for a colossal bronze monument to Francesco Sforza, father of Ludovico, in the courtyard of Castello Sforzesco. In December 1499, however, the Sforza family was driven from Milan by French forces; Leonardo left the statue unfinished (it was destroyed by French archers, who used it as a target) and he returned to Florence in 1500.
Return to Florence
In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, duke of Romagna and son and chief general of Pope Alexander VI; in his capacity as the duke's chief architect and engineer, Leonardo supervised work on the fortresses of the papal territories in central Italy. In 1503 he was a member of a commission of artists who were to decide on the proper location for the David (1501-04, Accademia, Florence), the famous colossal marble statue by the Italian sculptor Michelangelo, and he also served as an engineer in the war against Pisa. Toward the end of the year Leonardo began to design a decoration for the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. The subject was the Battle of Anghiari, a Florentine victory in its war with Pisa. He made many drawings for it and completed a full-size cartoon, or sketch, in 1505, but he never finished the wall painting. The cartoon itself was destroyed in the 17th century, and the composition survives only in copies, of which the most famous is the one by the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1615, Musée du Louvre). During this second Florentine period, Leonardo painted several portraits, but the only one that survives is the famous Mona Lisa (1503-06, Musée du Louvre). One of the most celebrated portraits ever painted, it is also known as La Gioconda, after the presumed name of the woman's husband. Leonardo seems to have had a special affection for the picture, for he took it with him on all of his subsequent travels.
Later Travels and Death
In 1506 Leonardo went again to Milan, at the summons of its French governor, Charles d'Amboise. The following year he was named court painter to King Louis XII of France, who was then residing in Milan. For the next six years Leonardo divided his time between Milan and Florence, where he often visited his half brothers and half sisters and looked after his inheritance. In Milan he continued his engineering projects and worked on an equestrian figure for a monument to Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, commander of the French forces in the city; although the project was not completed, drawings and studies have been preserved. From 1514 to 1516 Leonardo lived in Rome under the patronage of Pope Leo X: he was housed in the Palazzo Belvedere in the Vatican and seems to have been occupied principally with scientific experimentation. In 1516 he traveled to France to enter the service of King Francis I. He spent his last years at the Château de Cloux, near Amboise, where he died on May 2, 1519.
Paintings
Although Leonardo produced a relatively small number of paintings, many of which remained unfinished, he was nevertheless an extraordinarily innovative and influential artist. During his early years, his style closely paralleled that of Verrocchio, but he gradually moved away from his teacher's stiff, tight, and somewhat rigid treatment of figures to develop a more evocative and atmospheric handling of composition. The early The Adoration of the Magi introduced a new approach to composition, in which the main figures are grouped in the foreground, while the background consists of distant views of imaginary ruins and battle scenes.
Leonardo's stylistic innovations are even more apparent in The Last Supper, in which he re-created a traditional theme in an entirely new way. Instead of showing the 12 apostles as individual figures, he grouped them in dynamic compositional units of three, framing the figure of Christ, who is isolated in the center of the picture. Seated before a pale distant landscape seen through a rectangular opening in the wall, Christ—who is about to announce that one of those present will betray him—represents a calm nucleus while the others respond with animated gestures. In the monumentality of the scene and the weightiness of the figures, Leonardo reintroduced a style pioneered more than a generation earlier by Masaccio, the father of Florentine painting.
The Mona Lisa, Leonardo's most famous work, is as well known for its mastery of technical innovations as for the mysteriousness of its legendary smiling subject. This work is a consummate example of two techniques—sfumato and chiaroscuro—of which Leonardo was one of the first great masters. Sfumato is characterized by subtle, almost infinitesimal transitions between color areas, creating a delicately atmospheric haze or smoky effect; it is especially evident in the delicate gauzy robes worn by the sitter and in her enigmatic smile. Chiaroscuro is the technique of modeling and defining forms through contrasts of light and shadow; the sensitive hands of the sitter are portrayed with a luminous modulation of light and shade, while color contrast is used only sparingly.
An especially notable characteristic of Leonardo's paintings is his landscape backgrounds, into which he was among the first to introduce atmospheric perspective. The chief masters of the High Renaissance in Florence, including Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, and Fra Bartolommeo, all learned from Leonardo; he completely transformed the school of Milan; and at Parma, Correggio's artistic development was given direction by Leonardo's work.
Leonardo's many extant drawings, which reveal his brilliant draftsmanship and his mastery of the anatomy of humans, animals, and plant life, may be found in the principal European collections; the largest group is at Windsor Castle in England. Probably his most famous drawing is the magnificent Self-Portrait (c. 1510-13, Biblioteca Reale, Turin).
Sculptural and Architectural Drawings
Because none of Leonardo's sculptural projects was brought to completion, his approach to three-dimensional art can only be judged from his drawings. The same strictures apply to his architecture; none of his building projects was actually carried out as he devised them. In his architectural drawings, however, he demonstrates mastery in the use of massive forms, a clarity of expression, and especially a deep understanding of ancient Roman sources.
Scientific and Theoretical Projects
As a scientist Leonardo towered above all his contemporaries. His scientific theories, like his artistic innovations, were based on careful observation and precise documentation. He understood, better than anyone of his century or the next, the importance of precise scientific observation. Unfortunately, just as he frequently failed to bring to conclusion artistic projects, he never completed his planned treatises on a variety of scientific subjects. His theories are contained in numerous notebooks, most of which were written in mirror script. Because they were not easily decipherable, Leonardo's findings were not disseminated in his own lifetime; had they been published, they would have revolutionized the science of the 16th century. Leonardo actually anticipated many discoveries of modern times. In anatomy he studied the circulation of the blood and the action of the eye. He made discoveries in meteorology and geology, learned the effect of the moon on the tides, foreshadowed modern conceptions of continent formation, and surmised the nature of fossil shells. He was among the originators of the science of hydraulics and probably devised the hydrometer; his scheme for the canalization of rivers still has practical value. He invented a large number of ingenious machines, many potentially useful, among them an underwater diving suit. His flying devices, although not practicable, embodied sound principles of aerodynamics.
A creator in all branches of art, a discoverer in most branches of science, and an inventor in branches of technology, Leonardo deserves, perhaps more than anyone, the title of Homo Universalis, Universal Man.

Wassily Kandinsky Biography and Paintings/1866-1944

2008-02-12T14:09:00.000-08:00

On White II

Ravine Improvisation
Small Pleasures
Yellow, Red, Blue
Contrasting Sounds
Fragment 2 for Composition VII
Improvisation 7
Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle)
kandisky_head
Composition V

Composition VI
Composition VII
Composition VIII
Composition X
Autumn in Bavaria

Black and Violet
Black Spot I
Composition IV
Composition IX

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky spent his early childhood in Odessa. His parents played the piano and the zither and Kandinsky himself learned the piano and cello at an early age. The influence of music in his paintings cannot be overstated, down to the names of his paintings "Improvisations", "Impressions", and "Compositions."
In 1886, he enrolled at the University of Moscow, chose to study law and economics, and after passing his examinations, lectured at the Moscow Faculty of Law. He enjoyed success not only as a teacher but also wrote extensively on spirituality, a subject that remained of great interest and ultimately exerted substantial influence in his work. In 1895 Kandinsky attended a French Impressionist exhibition where he saw Monet's "Haystacks at Giverny." He stated, " ...it was from the catalog I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture... "
Soon thereafter, at the age of thirty, Kandinsky left Moscow and went to Munich to study life-drawing, sketching and anatomy, regarded then as basic for an artistic education.
Ironically, Kandinsky's work moved in a direction that was of much greater abstraction than that which was pioneered by the Impressionists. It was not long before his talent surpassed the constraints of art school and he began exploring his own ideas of painting - " ...I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could... " Now considered to be the founder of abstract art, his work was exhibited throughout Europe from 1903 onwards, and often caused controversy among the public, the art critics, and his contemporaries.
An active participant in several of the most influential and controversial art movements of the 20th century, among them the Blue Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc and the Bauhaus which also attracted Klee, Geiniger, and Schonberg, Kandinsky continued to further express and define his form of art, both on canvas and in his theoretical writings. His reputation became firmly established in the United States through numerous exhbitions and his work was introduced to Solomon Guggenheim, who became one of his most enthusiastic supporters.
In 1933, Kandinsky left Germany and settled near Paris, in Neuilly. The paintings from these later years were again the subject of controversy. Though out of favor with many of the patriarchs of Paris's artistic community, younger artists admired Kandinsky. His studio was visited regularly by Miro, Arp, Magnelli and Sophie Tauber.
Kandinsky continued painting almost until his death in June, 1944. His unrelenting quest for new forms which carried him to the very extremes of geometric abstraction have provided us with an unparalleled collection of abstract art.

Giorgio de Chirico Biography and Paintings/1888-1978

2008-02-12T12:12:00.000-08:00

The Nostalgia of the Infinite

The Prophet
The Vexations of the Thinker
Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits

Montparnasse Station
The Archaeologists
The Conquest of the Philosopher
The Disturbing Muses
Andromache
Ariadne
chirico_head
Le Cerveau de l'Enfant (The Child's Brain)
Love Song

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)

Giorgio De Chirico was born on 10th July 1888 in Volos, the capital of Thessaly (Greece). His father Evaristo was an engineer and his mother, Gemma Cervetto, a noblewoman of Genoese origin. Two years later in Athens, his brother Andrea was born. Andrea adopted the pseudonym of Alberto Savinio in his work as a writer and musician.
During this time Giorgio, whose father always supported his passion for art, took his first drawing lessons with the Greek painter Mavrudis. And it was in Athens that De Chirico realized his first painting, entitled "Still Life with Lemons (Natura morta con limoni)". In 1906, following the death of his father, the De Chirico family moved to Germany where Giorgio attended the Academy of Fine Arts and came into contact with German artistic, literary and philosophical culture. He read Schopenauer, Nietzsche and Weininger, continued studying the Ancients and studied the art of Arnold Böcklin. In 1908 he returned to Italy and was reunited with his family; in 1910 he moved to Florence and was influenced by Giotto and primitive Tuscan painting, concentrating on a style rich in perspective layouts and constructions with arches. It was in this way that one of his first metaphysical paintings was born: "Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (Enigma di un pomeriggio d’Autunno)". In the summer of 1911, with his mother and his brother Alberto, he travelled to Paris where his real artistic career began, in contact with the French artistic-cultural avant-garde circles and later with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In the same year, thanks to help from his brother, he met Pierre Laprade, member of the jury at the Salon d’Automne, for which he exhibited three works: "Enigma of the Oracle (Enigma dell’Oracolo)", "Enigma of an Afternoon (Enigma di un pomeriggio)" and "Self-Portrait (Autoritratto)". When another three of this works were exhibited in 1913 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris he was noticed by Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, thanks to whom De Chirico became friends with Brancusi, Braque, Jacob, Soffici, Léger and Derain. In the autumn of the same year Apollinaire organised an exhibition of thirty works by the artist in his studio and wrote a review of De Chirico in "L'intransigeant" using the term "metaphysic". Magazines and newspapers published his works and praised his creative qualities. The First World War broke out and the two brothers returned to Italy. Giorgio was assigned to the hospital in Ferrara where he had a sedentary job since he was considered unfit to work. He continued to maintain close ties with the Parisian milieu and came into contact with the Dada movement. In 1916 he painted his famous "Hector and Andromache (Ettore e Andromaca)" and "The Disturbing Muses (Le Muse inquietanti)" and frequented Ferrara's artistic milieu: he met Filippo De Pisis and began corresponding with Carrà, whom he was to meet during a stay in military hospital. Carrà was fascinated by De Chirico's poetic world and artistic themes and painted a series of works with clear metaphysical foundations. "Metaphysical painting" was born, theorized a little later in the magazine "Valori Plastici". In 1918 De Chirico obtained a transfer to Rome. There, he worked with the above-mentioned magazine and exhibited in the rooms of the newspaper "Epoca" together with Prampolini, Carrà and Soffici. In 1919 he presented his first personal exhibition at Anton Giulio Bragaglia's Art Gallery and published the text "We metaphysicists". That moment marked the beginning for De Chirico of an intense period of exhibitions throughout Europe, particularly in France, while considerable interest in his works also emerged in the United States. De Chirico's painting was appreciated by all the major Dadaist and Surrealist artists and also by the German artists of "Magic Realism", those of the "Bauhaus" and of the "New Objectivity". In 1925 he married the Russian dancer Raissa Gurievich Kroll. In 1928 he held his first one man exhibition in New York at the Valentine Gallery and shortly afterwards exhibited in London. He published the novel "Hebdòmeros" in 1929. Indeed, in those years, as well as painting, he dedicated himself to writing and also to stage designing for theatrical shows and ballets. He continued to exhibit in the most important art galleries both in Europe and America and met Isabella Far, who was to become his second wife in 1952. A few months after his ninetieth birthday, on 20th November 1978, Giorgio De Chirico died in Rome. His remains are conserved in the Monumental Church of St. Francis at Ripa, in Rome.

Sandro Botticelli Biography and Paintings/1445-1510

2008-02-11T14:56:00.000-08:00

The discovery of the Body of Holofernes(1480,tempera on wood)

The return of Judith(1470,tempera on wood)
Venus and Mars (1482-83)
Tempation of Christ (1480,fresco))

The Adoration of the Magi (1475,tempera on wood))
The Annunciation(1489-90,tempera on wood)
The birth of Venus(1480,tempera on canvas)
The coronation of the virgin(1489,tempera on wood)
Portrait of a Man with a medal(1480,tempera on wood)

Portrait of a young man
Primavera(1477-80,tempera on wood)
San Barnaba Altarpiece(1483,tempera on panel)
Scenes of the life of Moses(1480,fresco)
No III-The story of Natagio degli Onesti (1483,tempera on panel)

No II-The story of Natagio degli Onesti (1483,tempera on panel)
No I-The story of Natagio degli Onesti (1483,tempera on panel)
Pallas an the Cantaur(undated,tempera on canvas)
Pieta(1495-1500,tempera on panel)
Botticelli_head

Calumny,detail of Truth and Remorse(1490-95)
Fortitude(1470)
Madonna and the Child with a Angel(1469)
Mystical Nativity(1500,tempera on canvas)

Sandro Botticelli(1445-1510)

Sandro Botticelli, born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, is considered one of the leading painters of the Florentine Renaissance. He developed a highly personal style characterized by elegant execution, a sense of melancholy, and a strong emphasis on line; details appear as sumptuous still lifes.
Botticelli was born in Florence, the son of a tanner. His nickname was derived from Botticello (“little barrel”), either the nickname of his elder brother or the name of the goldsmith to whom Sandro was first apprenticed. Later he served an apprenticeship with the painter Fra Filippo Lippi. He worked with the painter and engraver Antonio del Pollaiuolo, from whom he gained his sense of line; he was also influenced by Andrea del Verrocchio.
Botticelli had his own workshop by 1470. He spent almost all of his life working for the great families of Florence, especially the Medici family, for whom he painted portraits, most notably the Giuliano de' Medici (1475-1476, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Adoration of the Magi (1476-1477, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) was painted on commission (though not for the Medicis), and contains likenesses of the Medici family as well as a likeness of himself. As part of the brilliant intellectual and artistic circle at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici, Botticelli was influenced by its Christian Neoplatonism, which tried to reconcile classical and Christian views. This synthesis may be the theme of two larger panels commissioned for Medici villas and now in the Uffizi, Primavera (1478?) and Birth of Venus (after 1482). While scholars have not yet conclusively deciphered these paintings, their slender elegant figures, which form abstract linear patterns bathed in soft golden light, may depict Venus as a symbol of both pagan and Christian love.
Botticelli also painted religious subjects, especially panels of the Madonna, such as the Madonna of the Magnificat (1480s), Madonna of the Pomegranate (1480s), and Coronation of the Virgin (1490), all in the Uffizi, and Madonna and Child with Two Saints (1485, Staatliche Museen, Berlin). Other religious works include Saint Sebastian (1473-1474, Staatliche Museen) and a fresco, Saint Augustine (1480, Church of the Ognissanti, Florence). In 1481 Botticelli was one of several artists chosen to go to Rome to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. There he executed The Youth of Moses, the Punishment of the Sons of Corah, and the Temptation of Christ.
In the 1490s, when the Medici were expelled from Florence and the fanatic Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola preached austerity and reform, Botticelli experienced a religious crisis. His subsequent works, such as the Pietà (early 1490s, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan) and especially the Mystic Nativity (1490s, National Gallery, London) and Mystic Crucifixion (1496?, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts), reflect an intense religious devotion.

Rene Magritte Biography and Paintings/1898-1967

2008-02-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

The Secret Player (Oil on canvas, 1927)

The Voice of the Winds (Oil on canvas, 1928)
Threatening Weather
The Great War (Oil on canvas)
The Human Condition (Oil on canvas)
The Lovers (Oil on canvas, 1928)
The Menaced Assassin (Oil on canvas)
The Pleasure Principle - Portrait of Edward James (Oil on canvas, 1937)
The Discovery of Fire

The Domain of Arnheim (Oil on canvas, 1938)
The Empire of Light (Oil on canvas, 1954)
The Empire of Lights
The Glass Key (Oil on canvas, 1959)
Perspective, Madame Recamier by David

Souvenir of a Journey III (Oil on canvas, 1955)
The Big Family (Oil on canvas)
The Blank Check (Oil on canvas)
The Companions of Fear (Oil on canvas, 1942)
L'aimable verite

L'art de vivre
Le sihcle des lumihres
magritte_head
magritte_head
Homesickness (Oil on canvas)

La Beau Monde (Oil on canvas)
La condition humaine
La Duree poignardee (Oil on canvas, 1938)
La Therapeute (Gouache, 1941)
Attempting the Impossible (Oil on canvas)

Black Magic (Oil on canvas, 1933-1934)
Clairvoyance, Self-Portrait (Oil on canvas)
Dangerous Liaisons (Oil on canvas, 1926)
Gonconda (Oil on canvas, 1953)

Rene Magritte (1898 - 1967)

René François-Ghislain Magritte was born on November 21st, 1898, in Lessines, Belgium, the eldest of three boys. Even at an early age, he liked to draw, and was encouraged to do so by his father Léopold. He later started painting at the age of 12. Régine Bertinchamp, Magritte's mother, suffered from depression; one night, while the rest of the family was asleep she fled to go to throw herself over a bridge, into the river Sambre. A few days later, her body is found floating, her face covered by her nightgown; René, who was then only 14, was deeply scarred by the image, which was later going to reappear in some of his works (The Heart of the Matter).

At the age of 16, Magritte met Georgette Berger, the girl who would be his future wife and creative muse. A year later, in 1914, he left Georgette behind, and he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels to learn how to paint with all the "proper" techniques usually attributed to artists who worked in the figurative style, his plan was to master these techniques before breaking free of them. He would not see his beloved Georgette again until 1920, when by chance he would meet her at an art supply store.

While studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, Magritte met many artists who would influence his style, amongst them were E.L.T Mesens, Pierre Flouquet, and Piérre Bourgeois. He also showed some interest in the Futurist movement, and Cubism, but it was when he discovered Giorgio De Chirico's surrealist works that he found true inspiration. It was from this inspiration that Magritte decided to make each of his painting a visual poem; a quality he found present in De Chirico's works.

In the fall of 1923, René Magritte married Georgette Berger, wallpaper artist. At that time, he develops a profound dislike for the decorative arts. He later would state: "I detest my past, and anyone else's. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people."

In 1927, Magritte joined André Breton, Paul Eluard, Salvador Dali, and other artists and writers who were part of the surrealist movement in Paris. Magritte held his first one-man exhibit was in Brussels in 1927, and as it was with his contemporaries, his art drew the ire of the critics and the conservative art crowd. But what made Magritte's work so special was his incredible skill at painting realistic objects and figures. The critics could not deny his talent, nor could they dismiss his work as an exercise in "laisser-faire". Like De Chirico, and Dali, he was a true technician, and a technician with soul. What set him apart from the other surrealists was his technique of juxtaposing ordinary objects in an extraordinary way; while Dali would "melt" a watch, playing with the consistency of an object (amongst other things), Magritte would leave objects intact, but play with their placement in reality, playing with logic. This technique is sometimes called Magic Realism. Of course, what really upset the critics was that Magritte's art did not provide answers, but only confusion, and questions as to why...

In 1929, Magritte and poet Paul Eluard spent some time in Cadaquès, at Salvador Dali's residence. Dali is perhaps the only other surrealist who's work could be compared to Magritte's. Both shared impeccable technique, and a great sense of humor. Another thing which may have angered critics was Magritte's "parodies" of famous paintings; like other surrealists, his irreverence and contempt for the norm was quite apparent in his work. It is evident that the humor magazines such as Harvey Kurtzman's Mad, and comedy troupes such as Monty Python owe much to the surrealists.

While René Magritte's art may have been frowned upon by some, his skill as a painter found him many admirers. In the late 1940s, Magritte experimented with a different technique, which he premiered at an exhibition at the Galerie du Faubourg, in Paris. Of course, by then, his fans had grown accustomed to his previous style, and did not appreciate the new direction he was taking. Discouraged by horrible reviews, he returned to his trademark technique, a sad bit of irony, especially in light of Magritte's contempt for the nostalgic.

In later years, he was commissioned to create large canvasses for Edward James in London, and later on, he is hired to paint murals for the casino at Knokke-le-Zoute. In 1965, New York's Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art hold retrospectives of his work; alas, Magritte is in poor health, and exhausted from his travels. A year later, he spends Christmas and New Year's Eve in Cannes, with his beloved Georgette, and in 1967, he has a retrospective in Rotterdam, Holland, and an exhibit at the Iolas Gallery in Paris.

On August 15th, 1967, at the age of 69, Magritte dies in Brussels. Throughout his entire career, René Magritte had created over a thousand paintings, not to mention the numerous photographs, and essays which he published in art magazines. Like Salvador Dali, Magritte's work will forever come to mind when we hear the word "surreal".

"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."
Rene Magritte

Rembrandt Van Rijn Biography and Paintings/1606-1669

2007-12-14T09:58:00.000-08:00

The rich old man from the Parable(1627,oil on wood)

The Risen Christ appearing to Mary Magdalen(1638,oil on wood)
The Sacrifice of Isaak(1635,oil)
Woman wearing a gold chain(1634,oil on panel)
The descent of the Cross (1633,oil on wood)
The mill(1650,canvas)
The music party(1626,oil on wood)
The Night Watch(1642,oil on canvas)
The return of the Prodigal Son(1668-69,oil on canvas)
Self-portrait(1660,oil on canvas)
Sussana and the Elders(1647,oil on canvas)
The blinding of Samson(1636)
The company of Frans Banning(detail I,1642,oil on canvas)
The company of Frans Banning(detail II,1642,oil on canvas)
Self-portrait(1627,oil on canvas)

Self-portrait(1629,oil on canvas)
Self-portrait(1629,oil on panel)
Self-portrait(1630,pen & brown in,brown & gray wash)
Self-portrait(1659,oil on canvas)
Rembrandt_head

Rembrandt's mother(1639,oil on panel)
Sascia with a child(1636,paper and wash)
Seated man wearing a flat cap(pen & brown ink,brown wash)
Self-portrait as a young man(1634)
Nicolaes Ruts(1631,oil on mahogany panel)

Portrait of a lade with an ostrich feather fan(1660)
Portrait of an old Jewish man(1654,oil on canvas)
Portrait of Herdrickje Stoffel(1659)
Portrait of Titus(1656,oil on canvas)
Lady with a Pink(oil on canvas)

Landscape with a Stone Bridge(1638,oil on panel)
Ledikant(1646,etching)
Lucretia(1665,oil on canvas)
Man with a magnifying glass(oil on canvas)
Hendrickje at an open door(1656)

Jacob's blessing(1656,oil on canvas)
Joseph accused by Potiphar's wife(1655,canvas)
Juno(1661,oil on canvas)
Balshaazzar's Feast(1630-35)

Bust of a old man in a fur cap91630,oil on wood)
Danae(1636)
David's farewell to Jonathan(1642,oil on wood)
Frederick Rihel on horseback(1633,oil on canvas)
A cottage among trees(1650-51,pen & brown ink,on tap paper)

Adoration to the Shapherds(1646,canvas)
Aristotle with a bust of Homer(1653,oil on canvas)
Artist in his studio(1629,oil on panel)
Ballam's Ass(1626)

Rembrandt(1606-1669)

Rembrandt was a Dutch baroque artist who ranks as one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art. His full name was Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, and he possessed a profound understanding of human nature that was matched by a brilliant technique- not only in painting but in drawing and etching- and his work made an enormous impact on his contemporaries and influenced the style of many later artists. Perhaps no painter has ever equaled Rembrandt's chiaroscuro effects or his bold impasto.
Life Born in Leiden on July 15, 1606, Rembrandt was the son of a miller. Despite the fact that he came from a family of relatively modest means, his parents took great care with his education. Rembrandt began his studies at the Latin School, and at the age of 14 he was enrolled at the University of Leiden. The program did not interest him, and he soon left to study art-first with a local master, Jacob van Swanenburch, and then, in Amsterdam, with Pieter Lastman, known for his historical paintings. After six months, having mastered everything he had been taught, Rembrandt returned to Leiden, where he was soon so highly regarded that although barely 22 years old, he took his first pupils, among them Gerrit Dou.
Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in 1631; his marriage in 1634 to Saskia van Uylenburgh, the cousin of a successful art dealer, enhanced his career, bringing him in contact with wealthy patrons who eagerly commissioned portraits. An exceptionally fine example from this period is the Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts (1631, Frick Collection, New York City). In addition, Rembrandt's mythological and religious works were much in demand, and he painted numerous dramatic masterpieces such as The Blinding of Samson (1636, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt). Because of his renown as a teacher, his studio was filled with pupils, some of whom (such as Carel Fabritius) were already trained artists. In the 20th century, scholars have reattributed a number of his paintings to his associates; attributing and identifying Rembrandt's works is an active area of art scholarship.
In contrast to his successful public career, however, Rembrandt's family life was marked by misfortune. Between 1635 and 1641 Saskia gave birth to four children, but only the last, Titus, survived; her own death came in 1642. Hendrickje Stoffels, engaged as his housekeeper about 1649, eventually became his common-law wife and was the model for many of his pictures.
Despite Rembrandt's financial success as an artist, teacher, and art dealer, his penchant for ostentatious living forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1656. An inventory of his collection of art and antiquities, taken before an auction to pay his debts, showed the breadth of Rembrandt's interests: ancient sculpture, Flemish and Italian Renaissance paintings, Far Eastern art, contemporary Dutch works, weapons, and armor. Unfortunately, the results of the auction-including the sale of his house-were disappointing.
These problems in no way affected Rembrandt's work; if anything, his artistry increased. Some of the great paintings from this period are The Jewish Bride (1632), The Syndics of the Cloth Guild (1661, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Bathsheba (1654, Musée du Louvre, Paris), Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (1656, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Kassel, Germany), and a self-portrait (1658, Frick Collection). His personal life, however, continued to be marred by sorrow, for his beloved Hendrickje died in 1663, and his son, Titus, in 1668. Eleven months later, on October 4, 1669, Rembrandt died in Amsterdam.
Early Painting Rembrandt may have created more than 600 paintings as well as an enormous number of drawings and etchings. The style of his earliest paintings, executed in the 1620s, shows the influence of his teacher, Pieter Lastman, in the choice of dramatic subjects, crowded compositional arrangements, and emphatic contrasts of light and shadow. The Noble Slav (1632, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) shows Rembrandt's love of exotic costumes, a feature characteristic of many of his early works.
A magnificent canvas, Portrait of a Man and His Wife (1633, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), shows his early portrait style-his preoccupation with the sitters' features and with details of clothing and room furnishings; this careful rendering of interiors was to be eliminated in his later works. Members of Rembrandt's family who served as his models are sometimes portrayed in other guises, as in Rembrandt's Mother as the Prophetess Anna (1631, Rijksmuseum), or the wistful Saskia as Flora, (1634, the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg).
Perhaps no artist ever painted as many self-portraits (about 60), or subjected himself to such penetrating self-analysis. Not every early portrayal, however, can be interpreted as objective representation, for these pictures frequently served as studies of various emotions, later to be incorporated into his biblical and historical paintings. The self-portraits also may have served to demonstrate his command of chiaroscuro; thus, it is difficult to tell what Rembrandt looked like from such a self-portrait as the one painted about 1628 (Rijksmuseum, on loan from the Daan Cevat Collection, England), in which deep shadows cover most of his face, barely revealing his features. On the other hand, in none of these youthful self-portraits did he attempt to disguise his homely features.
Biblical subjects account for about one-third of Rembrandt's entire production. This was somewhat unusual in Protestant Holland of the 17th century, for church patronage was nonexistent and religious art was not regarded as important. In Rembrandt's early biblical works, drama was emphasized, in keeping with baroque taste.
Among Rembrandt's first major public commissions in Amsterdam was the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632, Mauritshuis, The Hague). This work depicts the regents of the Guild of Surgeons gathered for a dissection and lecture. Such group portraits were a genre unique to Holland and meant substantial income for an artist in a country where neither church nor royalty acted as patrons of art. Rembrandt's painting surpasses commemorative portraits made by other Dutch artists with its interesting pyramidal arrangement of the figures, lending naturalism to the scene.
Middle Period
Many of Rembrandt's paintings of the 1640s show the influence of classicism in style and spirit. A 1640 self-portrait (National Gallery, London), based on works by the Italian Renaissance artists Raphael and Titian, reflects his assimilation of classicism both in formal organization and in his expression of inner calm. In the Portrait of the Mennonite Preacher Anslo and His Wife (1641, Staatliche Museen, Berlin-Dahlem), quieter in feeling than his earlier work, the interplay between the figures is masterfully rendered; the preacher speaks, perhaps explaining a biblical passage to his wife, who quietly listens. A number of Rembrandt's other works depict dialogues and, like this one, represent one specific moment. In the moving Supper at Emmaus (1648, Musée du Louvre), Rembrandt's use of light immediately conveys the meaning of the scene.
His group portraiture continued to develop in richness and complexity. The so-called Night Watch-more accurately titled The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq (1642, Rijksmuseum)-portrays the bustling activity of a military company, gathered behind its leaders, preparing for a parade or shooting contest. In departing from the customary static mode of painting rows of figures for the corporate portrait, Rembrandt achieved a powerful dramatic effect. Despite the popular myth that the painting was rejected by those who commissioned it, and led to a decline in Rembrandt's reputation and fortune, it was actually well received. Many of Rembrandt's landscapes in this middle period are romantic and based on his imagination rather than recording specific places. The inclusion of ancient ruins and rolling hills, not a part of the flat Dutch countryside, as in River Valley with Ruins (Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Kassel), suggests a classical influence derived from Italy.
Late Period Rembrandt's greatest paintings were created during the last two decades of his life. Baroque drama, outward splendor, and superficial details no longer mattered to him. His self-portraits, portrayals of single figures and groups, and historical and religious works reveal a concern with mood and with spiritual qualities. His palette grew richly coloristic and his brushwork became increasingly bold; he built thick impastos that seem miraculously to float over the canvas. In Portrait of the Painter in Old Age (1669?, National Gallery, London), Rembrandt's features betray a slightly sarcastic mood. One of his finest single portraits (1654, Stichting Jan Six, Amsterdam) is that of Jan Six. Six, wearing a deeply colored red, gold, and gray costume, is shown putting on a glove. The portrait is painted in a semiabstract style that demonstrates Rembrandt's daring technical bravura. Six's quiet, meditative mood is expressed by the subtle play of light on his face. In such late biblical works as Potiphar's Wife Accusing Joseph (1655, Staatliche Museen, Berlin-Dahlem), and the very moving Return of the Prodigal Son (1669?, the Hermitage) Rembrandt concentrated on the inherent psychological drama rather than on the excitement of the narrative as he had in works of his early period. In general, after his early period, Rembrandt was not particularly interested in allegorical and mythological subjects.
Graphic Work For Rembrandt, drawing and etching were as much major vehicles of expression as painting. Some 1400 drawings, recording a wide range of outward and inner visions, are attributed to him, works mostly done for their own sake rather than as preparatory studies for paintings or prints. The majority of them are not signed, because they were made for his private use. Rembrandt's early drawings (of the 1630s) were frequently executed in black or red chalk; later his favorite medium became pen and ink on white paper, often in combination with brushwork, lending a tonal accent. In some drawings, such as The Finding of Moses (1635?, Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam), a few charged lines indicating three figures carry maximum expression. Other drawings were, in contrast, highly finished, such as The Eastern Gate at Rhenen (Oostpoort) (1648?, Musée, Bayonne, France), which displays details of architecture and perspective. He made masterful drawings throughout the early as well as mature phases of his career. An example of an early work is Portrait of a Man in an Armchair, Seen Through a Frame (1634, private collection, New York City), done in chalk, considered Rembrandt's most finished portrait drawing. Superb later works are Nathan Admonishing David (1655-1656?, Metropolitan Museum), done with a reed pen, and a genre piece, A Woman Sleeping (Hendrickje?) (1655?, British Museum, London), a powerful brush drawing universally praised as one of his finest.
Rembrandt's etchings were internationally renowned even during his lifetime. He exploited the etching process for its unique potential, using scribbling strokes to produce extraordinarily expressive lines. In combination with etching he employed the drypoint needle, achieving special effects with the burr in his mature graphic work. Indeed, Rembrandt's most impressive etchings date from his mature period. They include the magnificent full-length portrait of Jan Six (1647, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), the famous Christ Healing the Sick, also known as the 100 Guilder Print (1642-1645?), the poetic landscape Three Trees (1643), and Christ Preaching, or La Petite Tombe (1652?), all in the British Museum.

Paul Klee Biography and Paintings/1879-1940

2007-12-10T12:45:00.000-08:00

Rising Sun

Southern (Tunisian) Gardens
Southern Gardens
The Golden Fish
Legend of the Nile
Park of Idols
Red and White Domes
Refuge
Remembrance of a Garden
Dream City

Embrace
Highway and Byways
Insula Dulcamara
klee_head
1914

Ad Parnassum
Ancient Sound, Abstract on Black
Captive
Death and Fire

Paul Klee (1879-1940)

Paul Klee was born on 18 December 1879 in Münchenbuchsee near Bern. In 1898 he decided to move to Munich, where he studied etching and drawing under Heinrich Knirr. Two years later Klee began to study painting at the Munich Art Academy under Franz von Stuck. His first travels took the painter to Rome in 1901/02 and, in 1905, to Paris. Participating in 1908 in the exhibitions mounted by the Munich and Berlin Secessions, Klee met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Hans Arp, who would exert the formative influences on his work. Taking part in the second 'Blauer Reiter' exhibition in 1912, Klee met more distinguished contemporaries, such as the artist Alexej von Jawlensky, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the writer and composer Herwart Walden. The following year Klee showed work at the First German Herbstsalon. At that time he also did his first watercolours. From 1914 he increasingly devoted himself to working in this medium, most notably during the trip he took to Tunisia with August Macke and Louis René Moilliet. After a two years' stay there, Klee returned to Germany, where he was invited in 1920 by Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. There he worked at first as a Formmeister (Master of Design) and later taught in the free-form painting class. In the years that followed the artist exhibited increasingly both in Germany and abroad: in 1924 he showed work in New York; in 1925 he took part in the first group show of 'painture surréaliste' in Paris, where he shared the honours with Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso et al. The following year he founded the 'blaue Vier' group together with Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger and Jawlensky. By then Klee was painting chiefly constructive and absolute pictures. Friendship with Kandinsky and his wife as well as trips to Paris, England and Egypt were a welcome change from teaching at the Bauhaus, an activity which came to restrict the artist's creative powers. An appointment as professor at the Düsseldorfer Academy in 1930 released Klee from his contract with the Bauhaus. Three years later, however, pressure from the National Socialists brought about Klee's dismissal from the Düsseldorf Academy and he moved to Bern. In 1937 the National Socialists removed 102 works by Klee from German museums and that same year 17 of his works were shown at the notorious exhibition of 'Degenerate Art'. This was the period of the Beam-Stroke pictures and the tragic, demonic figurations which indicate Klee's premonitions of death. Not long after the Zurich Kunsthaus devoted a one-man retrospective to him, Paul Klee died at Muralto (Ticino) on 29 June at the age of sixty.

Whistler Biography and Paintings/1834-1903

2007-12-10T11:48:00.000-08:00

Symphony in White Number 2 (The Little White Girl, 1864)

Symphony in White Number 3(1865-67)
The Princess from the Land of Porcelain(1863-64)
Wapping(1861-64)
Whistler_head
Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell(1882-84)
Portrait of the Artist's Mother(1871)
Portrait of Thomas Carlyle (1872-73)
Symphony in Grey and Green(The Ocean, 1866-72)
Symphony in White Number 1(The White Girl, 1862)
Annabel Lee (Also known as Niobe,1890, pastel on brown paper)

Harmony in Green and Rose(The Music Roomm,1860-61)
Harmony in Grey and Green(Miss Cicely Alexander, 1872-73)
Miss Rosa Corder (1876-78)
Nocturne in Black and Gold(The Falling Rocket, 1875)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler(1834-1903)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American painter and etcher, who assimilated Japanese art styles, made technical innovations, and championed modern art. Many regard him as preeminent among etchers.
Whistler was born on July 10, 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts. He entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1851, did not do well in his studies, and left in 1854 to take a job as a draftsman with the U.S. Coast Survey. One year later he left the United States and went to Paris, where he became a pupil of the Swiss classicist painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre. Formal instruction influenced him less, however, than his acquaintance with the French realist painter Gustave Courbet, other leading contemporary artists, and his own study of the great masters and of Japanese styles.
In Paris, Whistler won recognition as an etcher when his first series of etchings, Twelve Etchings from Nature (commonly called The French Set), appeared in 1858. Soon after he moved to London, where his paintings, hitherto rejected repeatedly by the galleries of Paris, found acceptance. At the Piano was shown by the Royal Academy of London in 1860. In 1863Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) won great acclaim in Paris. Thereafter exhibitions of his work aroused increasing international interest, as did his flamboyantly eccentric personality.
Three of Whistler's best-known portraits, Arrangement in Black and Grey No. 1: The Artist's Mother (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Thomas Carlyle (1872-1874, City Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow), and Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (Tate Gallery, London) were painted around 1872. In 1877 he exhibited a number of landscapes done in the Japanese manner; these paintings, which he called nocturnes, outraged conservative art opinion, which did not understand his avoidance of narrative detail, his layers of atmospheric color, and his belief in art for art's sake. The English art critic John Ruskin wrote a caustically critical article, and Whistler, charging slander, sued Ruskin for damages. He won the case, one of the most celebrated of its kind, but the expense of the trial forced him into bankruptcy. Selling the contents of his studio, Whistler left England, worked intensively from 1879 to 1880 in Venice, then returned to England and resumed his attack on the academic art tradition.
In later years Whistler devoted himself increasingly to etching, drypoint, lithography, and interior decoration. The Thames series (1860), the First Venice series (1880), and the Second Venice series (1881) heightened his standing as an etcher and won him success when they were exhibited in London in 1881 and 1883. The Peacock Room, which he painted for a private London residence (begun 1876 and moved in 1919 to the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), is the most noteworthy example of his interior decoration. Toward the end of his life, when he lived in Paris, Whistler came to be regarded as a major artist. He died in London on July 17, 1903.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir Biography and Paintings/1841-1919

2007-12-09T09:18:00.000-08:00

Pierre-Auguste Renoir(1841-1919)

Pierre Auguste Renoir was a French impressionist painter noted for his radiant, intimate paintings, particularly of the female nude. Recognized by critics as one of the greatest and most independent painters of his period, Renoir is noted for the harmony of his lines, the brilliance of his color, and the intimate charm of his wide variety of subjects. Unlike other impressionists he was as much interested in painting the single human figure or family group portraits as he was in landscapes; unlike them, too, he did not subordinate composition and plasticity of form to attempts at rendering the effect of light.
Renoir was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841. As a child he worked in a porcelain factory in Paris, painting designs on china; at 17 he copied paintings on fans, lamp shades, and blinds. He studied painting formally in 1862-63 at the academy of the Swiss painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre in Paris. Renoir's early work was influenced by two French artists, Claude Monet in his treatment of light and the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix in his treatment of color.
Renoir first exhibited his paintings in Paris in 1864, but he did not gain recognition until 1874, at the first exhibition of painters of the new impressionist school. One of the most famous of all impressionist works is Renoir's Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette (1876, Musée du Louvre, Paris), an open-air scene of a café, in which his mastery in figure painting and in representing light is evident. Outstanding examples of his talents as a portraitist are Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) and Jeanne Samary.
Renoir fully established his reputation with a solo exhibition held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1883. In 1887 he completed a series of studies of a group of nude female figures known as The Bathers (Philadelphia Museum of Art). These reveal his extraordinary ability to depict the lustrous, pearly color and texture of skin and to impart lyrical feeling and plasticity to a subject; they are unsurpassed in the history of modern painting in their representation of feminine grace. Many of his later paintings also treat the same theme in an increasingly bold rhythmic style. During the last 20 years of his life Renoir was crippled by arthritis; unable to move his hands freely, he continued to paint, however, by using a brush strapped to his arm. Renoir died at Cagnes, a village in the south of France, on December 3, 1919.
Other notable paintings by Renoir include La Loge (1874, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London); Woman with Fan (1875) and The Swing (1875), both in the Louvre, Paris; The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.); and Vase of Chrysanthemums (1895, Musée de Beaux-Arts, Rouen)—one of the many still lifes of flowers and fruit he painted throughout his life.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Biography and Paintings/1864-1901

2007-12-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

Moulin Rouge

Old Man at Celeyran
Portrait of a Woman
Queen of Joy
toulouse_head
Jeanne Wenz
Lili Grenier in a Kimono
Louis Pascal
Madame Lili Grenier
Margot
Gustave Lucien Dennery
Hangover
Henri-Gabriel Ibels
Hunting
Jane Avril
Cadieux

Dance at the Moulin Rouge
Dancer Adjusting Her Tights
Divan Japonais
Girl in a Fur, Mademoiselle Jeanne Fontaine
A Laborer at Celeyran

Aristede Bruand at His Cabaret
At the Cafe- The Customer and the Anemic Cashier
At the Moulin Rouge - the Two Waltzers
Bust of a Nude Man

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 -1901)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on November 24, 1864, in southern France. Son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse, he was the last in the line of an aristocratic family that dated back a thousand years. Today, the family estate houses the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec. As a child, Henri was weak and often sick. But by the time he was ten years old he had begun to draw and paint.

At age twelve Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at fourteen his right leg. The bones did not heal properly, and his legs ceased to grow. He reached maturity with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 4 1/2 feet (1.5 meters) tall.

Deprived of the physical life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived completely for his art. He dwelt in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to depict in his work. Dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks, prostitutes - all these were memorialized on canvas or made into lithographs.

Toulouse-Lautrec was very much an active part of this community. He would sit at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking, meanwhile making swift sketches. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into brightly colored paintings.

In order to join in the Montmartre life - as well as to fortify himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance - Toulouse-Lautrec began to drink heavily. By the 1890s the drinking was affecting his health. He was confined first to a sanatorium and then to his mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol. Toulouse-Lautrec died on September 9, 1901, at the family chateau of Malrome.

Paul Cezanne Biography and Paintings/1839-1906

2007-12-05T10:46:00.000-08:00

The Great Pine

The Hanged Man's House
The Murder
The Negro Scipion
Young Girl at the Piano - Overture to Tannhäuser
Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup
The Abduction
The Bather
The Feast
The Garden at Les Lauves
Still Life with Green Pot and Pewter Jug
Still Life with Onions and Bottle
Still Life with Peppermint Bottle
Still Life with Water Jug
Still Life, Apples, Bottle and Chairback
Road at Chantilly

Skull and Candlestick
Still Life with Apples
Still Life with Compotier
Still Life with Flower Holder (Nature morte au vase pique-fleurs)
Portrait of Achille Emperaire

Portrait of Antony Valabrègue
Portrait of the Artist's Father
Pyramid of Skulls
Riverbanks (Bords d'une riveire)
Large Bathers

Le vase bleu (The Blue Vase
Mont Sainte-Victoire
Nudes in Landscape (Les grandes baigneuses)
Pastoral (Idyll)
Etude Paysage a Auvers

Foliage
Gardanne
Jas de Buffan, The Pool
Bathers in London

Bend in Road
Bread and Eggs
cezanne_head
Corner of Quarry
A Modern Olympia

Apples, Peaches, Pears, and Grapes
Bather and Rocks
Bathers
Bathers at Rest (Les baigneurs au repos)

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

Paul Cézanne was a French painter, often called the father of modern art, who strove to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract pictorial order.

Cézanne was born in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839, the son of a wealthy banker. His boyhood companion was émile Zola, who later gained fame as a novelist and man of letters. As did Zola, Cézanne developed artistic interests at an early age, much to the dismay of his father. In 1862, after a number of bitter family disputes, the aspiring artist was given a small allowance and sent to study art in Paris, where Zola had already gone. From the start he was drawn to the more radical elements of the Parisian art world. He especially admired the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and, among the younger masters, Gustave Courbet and the notorious Edouard Manet, who exhibited realist paintings that were shocking in both style and subject matter to most of their contemporaries.

Many of Cézanne's early works were painted in dark tones applied with heavy, fluid pigment, suggesting the moody, romantic expressionism of previous generations. Just as Zola pursued his interest in the realist novel, however, Cézanne also gradually developed a commitment to the representation of contemporary life, painting the world he observed without concern for thematic idealization or stylistic affectation.

The most significant influence on the work of his early maturity proved to be Camille Pissarro, an older but as yet unrecognized painter who lived with his large family in a rural area outside Paris. Pissarro not only provided the moral encouragement that the insecure Cézanne required, but he also introduced him to the new impressionist technique for rendering outdoor light.

Along with the painters Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and a few others, Pissarro had developed a painting style that involved working outdoors (en plein air) rapidly and on a reduced scale, employing small touches of pure color, generally without the use of preparatory sketches or linear outlines. In such a manner Pissarro and the others hoped to capture the most transient natural effects as well as their own passing emotional states as the artists stood before nature. Under Pissarro's tutelage, and within a very short time during 1872-73, Cézanne shifted from dark tones to bright hues and began to concentrate on scenes of farmland and rural villages.

Although he seemed less technically accomplished than the other impressionists, Cézanne was accepted by the group and exhibited with them in 1874 and 1877. In general the impressionists did not have much commercial success, and Cézanne's works received the harshest critical commentary. He drifted away from many of his Parisian contacts during the late 1870s and '80s and spent much of his time in his native Aix. After 1882, he did not work closely again with Pissarro. In 1886, Cézanne became embittered over what he took to be thinly disguised references to his own failures in one of Zola's novels. As a result he broke off relations with his oldest supporter. In the same year, he inherited his father's wealth and finally, at the age of 47, became financially independent, but socially he remained quite isolated.

Cézanne's goal was, in his own mind, never fully attained. He left most of his works unfinished and destroyed many others. He complained of his failure at rendering the human figure, and indeed the great figural works of his last years—such as the Large Bathers(circa 1899-1906, Museum of Art, Philadelphia)—reveal curious distortions that seem to have been dictated by the rigor of the system of color modulation he imposed on his own representations. The succeeding generation of painters, however, eventually came to be receptive to nearly all of Cézanne's idiosyncrasies. Cézanne's heirs felt that the naturalistic painting of impressionism had become formularized, and a new and original style, however difficult it might be, was needed to return a sense of sincerity and commitment to modern art.

For many years Cézanne was known only to his old impressionist colleagues and to a few younger radical postimpressionist artists, including the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the French painter Paul Gauguin. In 1895, however, Ambroise Vollard, an ambitious Paris art dealer, arranged a show of Cézanne's works and over the next few years promoted them successfully. By 1904, Cézanne was featured in a major official exhibition, and by the time of his death (in Aix on October 22, 1906) he had attained the status of a legendary figure. During his last years many younger artists traveled to Aix to observe him at work and to receive any words of wisdom he might offer. Both his style and his theory remained mysterious and cryptic; he seemed to some a naive primitive, while to others he was a sophisticated master of technical procedure. The intensity of his color, coupled with the apparent rigor of his compositional organization, signaled to most that, despite the artist's own frequent despair, he had synthesized the basic expressive and representational elements of painting in a highly original manner.

Johannes Vermeer Biography and Paintings/1632-1675

2007-12-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

Woman Holding a Balance (Oil on canvas, 1662-1663)

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (Oil on canvas, 1663-1664)
Young Woman Standing at a Virginal (Oil on canvas, c.1670-1672)
Young Woman with a Water Jug (Oil on canvas, 1660-1662)
vermeer_head
View of Delft (detail 1, Oil on canvas, 1659-1660 )
View of Delft (detail 2, Oil on canvas, 1659-1660)
View of Delft (Oil on canvas, 1659-1660)
View of Houses in Delft, known as 'The Little Street' (Oil on canvas, c.1658)
The Glass Of Wine (Oil on canvas, 1658)

The Guitar Player (Oil on canvas, c.1672)
The Lacemaker (Oil on canvas mounted on panel, c.1669-1670)
The Love Letter (Oil on canvas, c.1669-1670)
The Procuress (detail, Oil on canvas, 1656)
The Allegory of the Faith (Oil on canvas, c.1671-1674)

The Art of Painting (Oil on canvas, 1665-1667)
The Astronomer (Oil on canvas, c.1668)
The Concert (Oil on canvas, 1665-1666)
The Geographer (Oil on canvas, c.1668)
Lady with Her Maidservant Holding a Letter (Oil on canvas, c.1667)

Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid (Oil on canvas, c.1670)
Officer with a Laughing Girl (Oil on canvas, c.1657)
Diana and her Companions (Oil on canvas, c.1653-1654)

Girl Interrupted at Her Music (Oil on canvas, 1660-1661)
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (Oil on canvas, 1657)
Girl with a pearl earring (Oil on canvas, c.1665-1667)
Lady Seated at a Virginal (Oil on canvas, c.1673)
A Lady and Two Gentlemen (detail,Oil on canvas, c.1659)

A Lady and Two Gentlemen (Oil on canvas, c.1659)
A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (Oil on canvas, 1662-1665)
Allegory of the Faith (Oil on canvas, c.1670-1672)
Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Oil on canvas, c.1655)

Johannes Vermeer (1632 - 1675)

Dutch painter. He specialized in domestic interiors, portraits and city views. His entire life was spent in Delft, where, it has been suggested, he may have been trained by Leonaert Bramer or Carel Fabritius. His work does indeed show an affinity with that of Fabritius, but their relationship remains uncertain. Vermeer was a Master in the Delft painters' guild from 1653, was elected Dean (hoofdman) in 1662-3 and 1670-71, and was highly regarded in his lifetime, although he seems to have never been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and 11 children in debt at his death. His name and reputation were almost forgotten until 1866 when the art critic Thoré Burger published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him (only 34 paintings are firmly attributed to him today). The few contemporary references to his paintings all relate to surviving works, so it is unlikely that there were ever many more - he may have been a slow worker and probably (like many Dutch painters of this period) had another source of income - a trip to The Hague in 1672 to authenticate some paintings suggests that he may have been a picture dealer.
A chronology of Vermeer's work is complicated by the fact that only three paintings are dated: The Procuress (1656, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), The Astronomer (1668, private collection), and The Geographer (1669, Frankfurt, Städelsches). Two pictures are generally accepted as earlier than The Procuress; both are history paintings, painted in a warm palette and in a relatively large format for Vermeer - Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Edinburgh, National Gallery) and Diana and her Companions (The Hague, Mauritshuis). After The Procuress almost all of Vermeer's paintings are of contemporary subjects in a smaller format, with a cooler palette dominated by blues, yellows and greys. It is to this period that practically all of his surviving works belong. They are usually domestic interiors with one or two figures lit by a window on the left. They are characterized by a serene sense of compositional balance and spatial order, unified by an almost pearly light. Mundane domestic or recreational activities become thereby imbued with a poetic timelessness (e.g. Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie). To this period also have been allocated Vermeer's two townscapes, View of Delft (The Hague, Mauritshuis) and A Street in Delft (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). A few of his paintings show a certain hardening of manner and these are generally thought to represent his late works. From this period come The Allegory of Faith (c 1670, New York, Metropolitan Museum) and The Letter (c 1670, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).
The often discussed sparkling pearly highlights in Vermeer's paintings have been linked to his probable use of a camera obscura, the primitive lens of which would produce halation and, even more noticeably, exaggerated perspective. Such effects can be seen in Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (London, Royal Collection). Vermeer's interest in optics is also attested in this work by the accurately observed mirror reflection above the lady at the virginals.

Hieronymus Bosch Biography and Paintings/1450-1516

2007-12-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

The Ship of Fools (study)

The Cure of Folly

The Man-Tree
The Path of Life, outer wings of a triptych
The Seven Deadly Sins
The Ship of Fools
Temptation of St. Anthony, detail of the central panel

Temptation of St. Anthony, left wing of the triptych
Temptation of St. Anthony, outer wings of the triptych
Temptation of St. Anthony, right wing of the triptych
Paradise and Hell, left and right panels of a triptych

St Jerome in Prayer
St Jerome in Prayer (detail)
St. John on Patmos
Temptation of St. Anthony, central panel of the triptych
Last Judgement, left wing of the triptych

Last Judgement, right wing of the triptych
Last Judgement, central panel of the triptych
Last Judgement, left wing of the triptych
Last Judgement, right wing of the triptych
Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of right wing

Garden of Earthly Delights, outer wings of the triptych
Garden of Earthly Delights, right wing
Haywain
Haywain, central panel of the triptych
Crucifixion with a Donor

Death and the Miser
Garden of Earthly Delights (detail2)
Garden of Earthly Delights (detail)
Garden of Earthly Delights, central panel of the triptych
Adoration of the Magi

Adoration of the Magi (closed)
Adoration of the Magi (detail)
bosch_head
Christ Carrying the Cross

Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516)

Hieronymus Bosch (c1450-1516) was one of the late great medieval Dutch painters. Very little is known of his life, religious beliefs, or philosophy, but he is most well known for his painting of fantastic images and for his concentration of medieval symbols. Many scholars have tried to interpret the images and symbols in his paintings, but these interpretations often disagree with one another, resulting in speculations that are often contradictory. Thus, these images and symbols continue to fascinate and puzzle us today as the search for their meaning continues.

Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken (Bosch's orginal name) was born in 's Hertogenbosch in present-day Holland, near the Belgium border around 1450. It is assumed that his name "jheronymus" was chosen due to the family fondness for the patron Saint Hieronymous (St Jerome). Apparently, he used his town's name Bosch to identify and distinguish himself from the rest of his family. Joen or Jeroen (his more familiar names) was born as the fourth child of five into a family of painters in the Dutch tradition, and thus probably learned his technique from his father, Antonius van Aken, who was a professional painter. The Aken family came from Aachen in Germany; from which came their surname. 's Hertogenbosch is a small provincial town far from the centers of culture; so, it seems unusual that such a great artist lived and worked there. As an adult he became a church cleric and a lay member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady (a Virgin-Mary cult). The fraternity had a white swan as its emblem, which is curious considering its sacriligious use in his paintings. Bosch married Aleid van de Meerenne, who came from a prosperous middle-class family, around July 15, 1481.They had no children, but it is likely that he lived a comfortable life and may have enjoyed considerable artistic freedom. He created art that was replete with moral images and messages, containing symbols of warning and retribution for leading an immoral life. He died in his home town in 1516. Such important aspects as the dating and order of his works are unknown. Even the authenticity of many works is disputed. He had many imitators and his influence was recognized.

Environment. Bosch lived during a time of turbulence in western Europe. Just before the Protestant Reformation, there was widespread discontent with Roman Catholic clergy, who were believed to have become corrupt and immoral. The populace was increasingly losing respect for the moral tenets of these leaders, which, without strong moral leadership, led them to hedonistic and greedy behavior. Heretical sects were common. In reaction, in an effort to control the populace, Catholic Inquisitions condemned citizens as witches, wizards, and heretics. Hangings, beheadings, and burnings-at-the-stake became everyday public sights. Epidemics plagued the populace and killed thousands. Bosch himself may have succumbed to one of these epidemics. More than the printed word, art communicated moral messages, because most people were illiterate. Images of the devil and monsters were used as warnings and premonitions of the coming Last Judgment, which was predicted for the year 1500. It is quite possible that Bosch's paintings were commissioned by discontented new leaders who had lost respect for established authorities of the Church, which would explain his acrid anti-clerical images.

Francisco de Goya Biography and Paintings/1746-1828

2007-12-03T15:33:00.000-08:00

Young Majas(The love letter,1811)

The woman with a fan(canvas)
Village bullfight(1793,oil on canvas)
Virgin Mary as queen of Martyrs(1780-81,sketch for a fresco)
Winter(The Snowstorm,1786,oil on canvas)
Witches Sabbath(1798,oil on canvas)
The Maja and the masked men(1777,oil on canvas)

The parasol(1777,oil on canvas)
The pilgrimage to San Isadore(detail,1820-23)
The pottery vndor(1779,oil on canvas)
The second of May(1808-14,oil on canvas)
The Countess of El Carpio(1792,oil on canvas)

The Duke and Duchess of Osuma(1789,oil on canvas)
The Fire(1793,oil on canvas)
The Holy Family(1774,oil on canvas)
The ill-matched couple(tin)
The birth of the virgin(1771-73,fresco)

the bullfight(oil on canvas)
The burial of the Sardine(1793,oil on wood)
The count of Floridablanca(1783,oil on canvas)
The Countess of Chinchon(1801,oil on canvas)
Procession of flagellants on Good Friday(1793,oil on wood)

Self-portrait(1795,point of brush & gray wash)
Self-portrait(1815,oil on wood)
Still-life with sheep's head(wood)
The adoration of the name of the Lord(1772,fresco)
Nude Maja(before Nov. 1800,oil on canvas)

Picnic on the banks of the Manzanares(1776,oil on canvas)
Portrait of Don Jose Queralto(approx.1802,canvas)
Portrait of Mariana Waldstein(canvas)
Portrait of Maria-Teresa de Borbon(1783,oil on canvas)
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos(1797,oil on canvas)

Goya_head
Majas on a balcony(oil on canvas)
Maria-Teresa of Villabriga on horseback(1783,oil on cavnas)
Marquesa de Pontejos(approx.1786)
Dr.Pearl

Ferdinand Guillemadet(1798,oil on canvas)
Ferdinand VIII in his robes of State(1814,oil on canvas)
Festival at the meadow of San Isadore(1788,oil on canvas)
Disparates(plate 2-The madness of fear)

Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga(oil on canvas)
Don Tiburcio Perez y Cuervo(1820,oil on canvas)
Dona Isabel Cobos de Porcel(1806)
Dona Teresa Sureda(1805,canvas)
Antonia Zarate(1811,oil on canvas)

Blind man playing the guitar(1778,oil on canvas)
Charles III(1786-88,oil on canvas)
Clothed Maja(1800-03,oil on canvas)
Colossus

Francisco de Goya(1746-1828

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was an innovative Spanish painter and etcher; one of the triumvirate—including El Greco and Diego Velázquez—of great Spanish masters. Much in the art of Goya is derived from that of Velázquez, just as much in the art of the 19th-century French master Edouard Manet and the 20th-century genius Pablo Picasso is taken from Goya. Trained in a mediocre rococo artistic milieu, Goya transformed this often frivolous style and created works, such as the famous Third of May, 1808 (1814, Museo del Prado, Madrid), that have as great an impact today as when they were created.
Early Training and First Projects
Goya was born in the small Aragonese town of Fuendetodos (near Saragossa) on March 30, 1746. His father was a painter and a gilder of altarpieces, and his mother was descended from a family of minor Aragonese nobility. Facts of Goya's childhood are scarce. He attended school in Saragossa at the Escuelas Pias. Goya's formal artistic education commenced when, at the age of 14, he was apprenticed to a local master, José Luzan, a competent although little-known painter in whose studio Goya spent four years. In 1763 the young artist went to Madrid, where he hoped to win a prize at the Academy of San Fernando (founded 1752). Although he did not win the desired award, he did make the acquaintance of Francisco Bayeu, an artist also from Aragón, who was working at the court in the academic manner imported to Spain by the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs. Bayeu (the brother of Goya's wife) was influential in forming Goya's early style and was responsible for his participation in an important commission, the fresco decoration (1771, 1780-1782) of the Church of the Virgin in El Pilar in Saragossa.
In 1771 Goya went to Italy for approximately one year. His activity there is relatively obscure; he spent some months in Rome and also entered a composition at the Parma Academy competition, in which he was successful. Returning to Spain about 1773, Goya participated in several other fresco projects, including that for the Charterhouse of Aula Dei, near Saragossa, in 1774, where his paintings prefigure those of his greatest fresco project, executed in the Church of San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid, in 1798. It was at this time that Goya began to do prints after paintings by Velázquez, who would remain, along with Rembrandt, his greatest source of inspiration.
Years as Court Painter
By 1786 Goya was working in an official capacity for King Charles III, the most enlightened Spanish monarch of the 18th century. Goya was appointed first court painter in 1799. His tapestry cartoons executed in the late 1780s and early 1790s were highly praised for their candid views of everyday Spanish life. With these cartoons Goya revolutionized the tapestry industry, which, until that time, had slavishly reproduced the Flemish genre scenes of the 17th-century painter David Teniers. Some of Goya's most beautiful portraits of his friends, members of the court, and the nobility date from the 1780s. Works such as Marquesa de Pontejos (1786?, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.) show that Goya was then painting in an elegant manner somewhat reminiscent of the style of his English contemporary Thomas Gainsborough.
Etchings and Later Paintings
In the winter of 1792, while on a visit to southern Spain, Goya contracted a serious disease that left him totally deaf and marked a turning point in his career. A mood of pessimism entered Goya's work. Between 1797 and 1799 he drew and etched the first of his great print series Los caprichos (The Caprices), which, in their satirical humor, mock the social mores and superstitions of the time. Later series, such as Désastres de la guerra (Disasters of War, 1810) and Disparates (Absurdities, 1820-1823), present more caustic commentaries on the ills and follies of humanity. The horrors of warfare were of great concern to Goya, who observed firsthand the battles between French soldiers and Spanish citizens during the bloody years of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain. In 1814 he completed Second of May, 1808 and Third of May, 1808 (both Prado). These paintings depict horrifying and dramatically brutal massacres of groups of unarmed Spanish street fighters by French soldiers. Both are painted, like so many later pictures by Goya, in thick, bold strokes of dark color punctuated by brilliant yellow and red highlights.
Straightforward candor and honesty are also present in Goya's later portraits, such as Family of Charles IV (1800, Museo del Prado), in which the royal family is shown in a completely unidealized fashion, verging on caricature, as a group of strikingly homely individuals.
Final Works
The Black Paintings, scenes of witchcraft and other bizarre activities, are among the most outstanding works of the artist's late years. Executed about 1820, these paintings are now in the Prado, Madrid. Originally painted in fresco on the walls of Goya's country house and now transferred to canvas, they attest to his progressively darkening mood, possibly aggravated by an oppressive political situation in Spain that forced him to leave for France in 1824. In Bordeaux he took up the then new art of lithography, producing a series of bullfight scenes, considered among the finest lithographs ever made. Although he returned to Madrid for a brief visit in 1826, he died in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux two years later, on April 16, 1828. Goya left no immediate followers of consequence, but his influence was strongly felt in mid-19th-century painting and printmaking and in 20th-century art.

EugeneDelacroix Biography and Paintings/1798-1863

2007-12-03T11:33:00.000-08:00

The sultan of Marocco and his entourage(1845,oil on canvas)

Woman with a parrot(1827,oil on canvas)
Womenof Algiers in their apartment(1834,oil on canvas)
The bride of Abydos(1857,oil on canvas)
The crusaders into Constantinople(1840,oil on canvas)
The death of Sardanapalus(1827-28,oil on canvas)
The fanatics of Tangiers(1837-38,oil on canvas)
The massacre at Chios(1824,oil on canvas)
Portrait of George Sand(unfinished,1838,oil on canvas)

Self-portrait(1837,oil on canvas)
The abduction of Rebecca(1846,oil on canvas)
The abduction of Rebecca(1858,oil on canvas)
The barque of Dante(1822,oil on canvas)
Lion with a rabbit(canvas)

Louis d'Orleans showing his mistress(1825-26,oil on canvas)
Medea(1838,oil on canvas)
Mephistopheles over Wittenberg(1839,lithograph)
Portait of Frederic Chopin(unfinished,1838,oil on canvas)
Girl seated in a cemetery(1824,oil on canvas)

Greece on the ruins of Messolonghi(1826,oil on canvas)
Justice(1833-37,oil on mounted canvas)
Liberty leading the people(1830,oil on canvas)
Bouquet of flower on a console(1848-50,oil on canvas)

Christ on the lake Gennesaret(oil on canvas)
Cleopatra and the peasant(1838,oil on canvas)
Delacroix_head
Female nude reclining on a divan(1825-26,oil on canvas)
Adromeda(1852)

Apasia(1824,oil on canvas)
Arab horses fighting in a stable(1860,oil on canvas)
Arab saddling his horse(1857,oil on canvas)
Arabs skirmishing in the mountains(1863,oil on canvas)

Eugene Delacroix(1798-1863)

Eugène Delacroix was born in 1798, the son of Charles Delacroix who had served briefly as minister of foreign affairs under the Directory and who was on a mission to Holland, as the ambassador of the French Republic, at the time of his son's birth. His mother, Victoire Oeben, was descended from a family of artisans and craftsmen. Both parents died early, the father in 1805, the mother in 1814, leaving Eugène in the care of his older sister, Henriette de Verninac, wife of a former ambassador to Turkey and minister-plenipotentiary to Switzerland. The fall of Napoleon's empire spelled the temporary ruin of this family of high officials, and with it that of young Delacroix. But the influential relations among which his birth and childhood had placed him were to protect his subsequent career, particularly in those periods, after 1830 and again after 1850, when Bonapartist interests were on the rise. As a child he had played on the knees of Talleyrand, his father's successor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a family friend. It has been suggested, but not proven, that Talleyrand, to whom Delacroix in later life bore a marked facial resemblance, was in fact his actual father.

In 1815 Delacroix, aged seventeen, began to take painting lessons from Pierre Guérin (1774-1833) through whose studio Théodore Gericault had briefly and turbulently passed a little earlier. Guérin was a tolerant teacher who attracted the sons of the middle class. His classicist instruction had little effect on Delacroix; it was less important for his development than the literary education that he had received at the lycée. The example of Gericault with whom he was acquainted and for whose Raft of the Medusa (Louvre) he posed in 1818 left its mark on him, but in every essential respect he was, like many of his contemporaries, a self-taught artist, whose real school was the Louvre, where, even after the removal of the Napoleonic loot, the splendor of Titian, Veronese, and Rubens shone brightly enough to eclipse the school of David. Among his fellow copyists in its galleries he met the young Englishman Richard Parkes Bonington (1801-1828) who, together with his friend Raymond Soulier, was to introduce him to watercolor painting and a British tradition of colorism, and who helped to awaken his interest in Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott, the main literary sources of his romanticism.

Delacroix' student work did not show extraordinary promise, but in 1822 his Salon debut, the Bark of Dante (Louvre), attracted some attention. Though it has a deserved place in the history of art, as the start of a great career, it is still an immature effort, heavy-handed in its combination of reminiscences of Gericault, Rubens, and Michelangelo, and incoherent in its composition. Two years later, his Massacres of Chios (Louvre) burst upon the Salon of 1824 as "a terrifying hymn in honor of doom and irremediable suffering" (Charles Baudelaire, "L'Oeuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix," published as L'Art romantique, Paris, 1869). The picture's resonant harmonies gave an early indication of Delacroix' mastery of color, and its lustful stress on horror and death struck a note that was to sound throughout much of his subsequent work. The government's purchase of the work enabled Delacroix to visit England in the spring and summer of 1825. He had already seen landscapes by John Constable (1776-1837) in Paris while at work on Massacres of Chios. Further impressions of English art and literature gathered during his months in London were to influence him in the following years, as is evident in his Portrait of Baron Switer (1826, National Gallery, London), a bravura performance in the manner of Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), and in his use of subjects from Scott and Byron. His Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1826, Wallace Collection, London), based on a play by Byron and painted with something of Bonington's nervous brilliance, is the crowning achievement of his English phase.

After these paintings of exquisite finish and relatively small format, the colossal, orgiastic Death of Sardanapalus (Louvre), shown at the Salon of 1827, came as a shock to the public. Delacroix had taken the subject from a play by Byron but supplied the voluptuous cast of this scene of slaughter from his own imagination. He paid for his audacity with a temporary loss of official favor. The following years were a difficult but productive period during which he experimented with a variety of subjects: studies of lions and tigers, oriental scenes, sensuous nudes, and turbulent battles.

The Revolution of 1830 inspired his one truly popular work, Liberty Leading the People (Louvre). In the place of the febrile romanticism of his paintings of the 1820s, he now used a larger, more sober manner and colors of muted intensity. Dealing with this modern subject he achieved poetic effect without morbidity or false grandeur: even Liberty, abundantly physical, has the effect of adding a note of actuality rather than allegorical artifice to the tumult on the barricade. For once, public and critics united in praise of the artist, and the government of Louis-Philippe awarded him the Legion of Honor.

In early 1832 Delacroix visited North Africa in the suite of a French embassy to the sultan of Morocco. Islamic Africa surpassed all his expectations. The classical beauty for which he had vainly looked among the plaster casts in Guérin's studio he now encountered along roadsides under the African sky. He filled sketchbooks with observations of Arab life and gathered a store of ideas that served him for the rest of his life. On his return to Paris, he began a series of oriental subjects, not Byronic fantasies now but recollections of actual experience. Algerian Women in Their Apartment (1834, Louvre) records his recollection of a visit to a harem with the quiet authority of fact rather than the fictions of romantic exoticism. The sensuous intensity of the painting results from stylistic means that seem simpler but are in fact more complex than those that produced the sensational Sardanapalus. It signals the attainment of his mature style, quieter but grander than his earlier manner, more monumental yet no less expressive, more restrained but more powerful.

Early in his career, Delacroix had been hailed by the young French romantics as their leader. During the 1830s he outgrew this affiliation, not because he had changed his course, but because his fellow romantics were failing to keep up with him. The "romantic battle" had been won too easily. After 1830 French romanticism became popular and died. Its followers, agreeable but minor talents for the most part, rapidly declined into picturesqueness and mannerism. Delacroix, by contrast, increasingly identified himself with the grand traditions of the Venetians and Flemings, withVeronese and Rubens above all. His later works expressed a growing concern with traditional subject matter and monumental form. In his Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (Louvre), shown at the Salon of 1840, he resumed compositional devices that he had used earlier in Massacres of Chios, but the former violence is stilled by the somber harmony of the colors and the weight of the great colonnade that dominates the scene. In his Justice of Trajan (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen) shown at the same Salon, an even more elaborate architectural setting contains, with its strong verticals and diagonals, the animation of the figures.

Behind Delacroix' new concern with compositional structure and balance lay the experience he had gained in carrying out the architectural decorations that occupied him during the latter part of his life. The governments of Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III favored him with important monumental commissions, beginning in 1833 with the allegorical decorations of the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon (Chamber of Deputies). This was closely followed by the even larger enterprise of the Palais Bourbon's library (1838-1847), where Delacroix covered a succession of domes and pendentives with scenes celebrating the heroic lineage of the arts and sciences, in a dramatic succession beginning with Orpheus' gift of civilization to mankind and ending with Attila's destruction of Italy. Before this was finished, he received the further commission of decorating the library of the Senate in the Luxembourg Palace (1840-1846), where, in the central dome, he painted the presentation of Dante to Homer and the other great men of Greek and Roman antiquity, to symbolize the meeting of the classical pagan with the modern Christian culture. There followed the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre (1850-1851), the decorations in the Salon de la Paix of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris (1852-1854, destroyed in 1871), and the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the church of Saint-Sulpice (1854-1861). No other painter of the time was so continuously employed in monumental work on the grandest scale, none was given such opportunities to triumph in public on ceilings, domes, and walls. His murals, exceptional achievements in a time when monumental painting languished, prove that this nervously frail artist had the energy to compose on immense surfaces and the mental vigor to invent images that dominate those walls. His superiority rested in part on his mastery of color that provided both the emotional force and the formal structure of his murals, in part on his command of expressive pantomime, of the movement, tension, and clash of bodies. He was the most versatile of the painters of his time, including in the range of his subjects battlefield and barricade, Faust and Hamlet, royal tiger and odalisque.

El Greco Biography and Paintings/1840-1926

2007-11-29T05:35:00.000-08:00

The Holy Family(The Virgin of the Good Milk,approx.1594-1604)

The miracle of Christ healing the blind(1575,oil on canvas)
The Saviour(approx.1604-14)
The Trinity(1577-79,oil on canvas)
View of Toledo(1597,oil on canvas)
St.John the Evangelist(approx.1594-1604,oil on canvas)
St.Louis King of France(1586-94)
St.Martin and the beggar(approx.1597-99)
St.Varonica
The Disrobing of Christ(1583-84,canvas)
Resutrrection(approx.1584-94)

Saint Jerome as a Cardinal(oil no canvas)
Saints John the Evangelist and Francis(1600,oil on canvas)
Self-portrait(approx.1604)
St.Anthony of Padua
Fray Hortencio Felix Paravicino(1609,oil on canvas)

Laocoon(1610)
Madonna and the Child with St.Martina and St.Agnes(1597-99)
Portrait of a lady(aprox.1594-1601)
Potrait of a Cardinal(oil on canvas)
Agony in the garden(1595,oil on canvas)

Apostles peter and Paul(1587-92,oil on canvas)
Christ carrying the Cross(1600-05,oil on canvas)
Christ driving the tenders from the Temple
El Greco_head

El Greco(1541-1614)

El Greco was a "Spanish" Mannerist painter, whose work, with that of Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez, represents the acme of Spanish art.
El Greco (meaning “The Greek”) was born in Iráklion, Crete (then a possession of the Republic of Venice), in 1541 and was named Domenikos Theotokopoulos. Details of his early life and training are sketchy, but he probably first studied painting in his native city. Although no works from his first years survive, they were probably painted in the late Byzantine style popular in Crete at the time. Reminiscences of this style are seen in his later work. He was an erudite man, whose taste for classical and contemporaneous literature seems to have developed in his youth.
Early Work in Venice and Rome
About 1566, El Greco went to Venice, where he remained until 1570. He was employed in the workshop of Titian and was also strongly influenced by Tintoretto, both masters of the High Renaissance. Such early Venetian paintings as his Christ Healing the Blind Man (1566?-1567?, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden) demonstrate his assimilation of Titianesque color and of Tintoretto's figural compositions and use of deep spatial recesses. Further Italian inspiration came during the years El Greco spent in Rome, from 1570 to 1576. The sculptural qualities of the work of Italian artist Michelangelo inspired him, as is evident in his Pietà (1570?-1572?, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Purification of the Temple (1570?-1575?, Minneapolis Institute of Arts). A study of Roman architecture also reinforced the stability of his compositions, which often include views of Roman Renaissance buildings.
Move to Spain
In Rome he met several Spaniards associated with the church in Toledo, who may have persuaded him to come to Spain. In 1576 he left Italy and, after a brief sojourn in Malta, arrived in Toledo in the spring of 1577. He quickly began work on his first Spanish commission, producing for the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo the sumptuous Assumption of the Virgin (1577, Art Institute of Chicago), a painting that marks a turning point in his art. Although compositionally based on Titian's Assumption (1516-1518) in Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice, the colors and spatial relationships are less Italianate. A move toward nonnormative colors, groupings, and figural proportions became more marked in El Greco's art with each successive phase.
El Greco was anxious to be given the commission to fresco the walls of the newly built royal monastery-palace of El Escorial near Madrid, completed in 1582. He submitted several paintings to King Philip II for approval but was denied the commission. One of these, The Triumph of the Holy League (1578?-1579?, versions in El Escorial and in the National Gallery, London), proves his ability to combine complex political iconography with medieval motifs. El Greco also worked for Toledo Cathedral: The Disrobing of Christ (1577-1579) for the sacristy presents a splendid image of Christ in a rich red garment, closely surrounded by his captors. The work caused the first of several lawsuits brought by the artist against his patrons, who objected to its high price.
Emergence As a Spanish Master
In 1586 El Greco painted one of his greatest masterpieces, The Burial of Count Orgaz, for the Church of Santo Tomé in Toledo. This work, still in place, portrays a 14th-century Toledan nobleman laid in his grave (in actuality situated just below the painting) by Saints Stephen and Augustine. Above, the count's soul rises to a heaven densely populated with angels, saints, and contemporary political figures. The Burial also manifests El Greco's typical elongation of figures and a horror vacui (dread of unfilled spaces), features of his art that became more pronounced in later years. These characteristics may be associated with international mannerism, which is still evident in the art of El Greco sometime after it had ceased to be widely popular in European painting. El Greco's intensely personal vision was rooted in his highly cultivated spirituality. Indeed, there is present in his canvases a mystical atmosphere similar to that evoked in the writings of such contemporaneous Spanish mystics as Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint John of the Cross, although no evidence exists that El Greco had any personal contact with them.
El Greco was a prosperous man. He had a large house in Toledo, where he received members of the nobility and the intellectual elite, such as the poets Luis de Gongora and Fray Hortensio Felix de Paravicino, whose portrait, painted by El Greco from 1609 to 1610, is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. El Greco also painted views of the city of Toledo itself, such as View of Toledo (1600?–1610?, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), even though landscape was a genre traditionally neglected by Spanish artists.
Later Paintings
A feverish intensity can be sensed in many of El Greco's canvases dating from the 1590s until the time of his death. Baptism of Christ (signed in Greek, as was the artist's custom, 1596?-1600?) and Adoration of the Shepherds (1612-1614), both in the Prado, seem to pulsate with an eerie light generated by the holy figures themselves. In addition, the Adoration figures are enveloped by a steamy haze, observable in other late works, which intensifies the mystical nature of the event.
Subjects of classical mythology, such as the Laocoon (1610?–1614?, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), and Old Testament history, such as the unfinished apocalyptic scene Opening of the Fifth Seal (1608?–1614?, Metropolitan Museum), attest to El Greco's humanistic learning and his brilliantly personal and novel approach to traditional themes. El Greco died in Toledo on April 7, 1614, and he was buried there in Santo Domingo el Antiguo.

Claude Monet Biography and Paintings/1840-1926

2007-11-22T04:54:00.000-08:00

Water Lilies I (1905,oil on canvas)

Woman with a parasol(1875)
The Lucheon(1868,oil on canvas)
The studio-boat(1874)
The women in the garden(1866,oil on canvas)
The wterlily pond(1899)
Train in the country(1870,oil on canvas)
Terrace at St.Adresse(1866)

The artist's garden at Vetheuil(1880,oil on canvas)
The garden in flower(1900,oil on canvas)
The garden of the Princess(1867,oil on canvas)
The hotel des Roches Noires at Trouville(1870,oil on canvas)
Monet_head

Palazzo da Mula at Venice(1908,canvas)
Poplars on the Epte(1891,oil on canvas)
Regatta at Argenteuil(1874)
Rue Motargueil with flags(1878)
La Grenouillere(1869)

La Japonaise(Camile Monet ,1876,oil on canvas)
Le dejeuner sur l'Herbe(The Picnic,1865)
London-Houses of Parliament at sunset(1903,oil on canvas)
Madame Gaudibert(1868,oil on canvas)
A corner of the apartement(1875,oil on canvas)

A corner of the studio(1861,oil on canvas)
Boulevard des Capucines(1873,oil on canvas)
Gare St.Lazare(1877,oil on canvas)
Jeanne-Marguerite Lecandre in the garden(1866-67,oil on canvas)

Claude Monet(1840-1926)

Claude Oscar Monet was a French impressionist painter who brought the study of the transient effects of natural light to its most refined expression.
Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, but he spent most of his childhood in Le Havre. There, in his teens, he studied drawing; he also painted seascapes outside with the French painter Eugene Louis Boudin. By 1859 Monet had committed himself to a career as an artist and began to spend as much time in Paris as possible. During the 1860s he was associated with the preimpressionist painter Edouard Manet, and with other aspiring French painters destined to form the impressionist school—Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.
Working outside, Monet painted simple landscapes and scenes of contemporary middle-class society, and he began to have some success at official exhibitions. As his style developed, however, Monet violated one traditional artistic convention after another in the interest of direct artistic expression. His experiments in rendering outdoor sunlight with a direct, sketchlike application of bright color became more and more daring, and he seemed to cut himself off from the possibility of a successful career as a conventional painter supported by the art establishment.
In 1874 Monet and his colleagues decided to appeal directly to the public by organizing their own exhibition. They called themselves independents, but the press soon derisively labeled them impressionists because their work seemed sketchy and unfinished (like a first impression) and because one of Monet's paintings had borne the title Impression: Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan, Paris). Monet's compositions from this time are extremely loosely structured, and the color was applied in strong, distinct strokes as if no reworking of the pigment had been attempted. This technique was calculated to suggest that the artist had indeed captured a spontaneous impression of nature. During the 1870s and 1880s Monet gradually refined this technique, and he made many trips to scenic areas of France, especially the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, to study the most brilliant effects of light and color possible.
By the mid-1880s Monet, generally regarded as the leader of the impressionist school, had achieved significant recognition and financial security. Despite the boldness of his color and the extreme simplicity of his compositions, he was recognized as a master of meticulous observation, an artist who sacrificed neither the true complexities of nature nor the intensity of his own feelings. In 1890 he was able to purchase some property in the village of Giverny, not far from Paris, and there he began to construct a water garden (now open to the public)—a lily pond arched with a Japanese bridge and overhung with willows and clumps of bamboo.
Beginning in 1906, paintings of the pond and the water lilies occupied him for the remainder of his life; they hang in the Orangerie, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Throughout these years he also worked on his other celebrated “series” paintings, groups of works representing the same subject—haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the river Seine—seen in varying light, at different times of the day or seasons of the year. Despite failing eyesight, Monet continued to paint almost up to the time of his death, on December 5, 1926, at Giverny.

Caravaggio Biography and Paintings/1573-1610

2007-11-21T12:23:00.000-08:00

Youth bitten by a green lizard

Youth with a flower basket(before 1595)
The lute player
The Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence
The sacrifice of Isaac(1590-1610,oil on canvas)
The Seven Acts of mercy
The supper at Emmaus(1600-01)
The death of the Virgin

The Deposion(1604)
The doubting of St.Thomas
The Flagellation of Christ
The fortune teller(1594-95,canvas)
The beheading of the Baptist

The Calling of St.Matthew
The cardsharps(I Bari,approx 1595)
The conversion of St.Paul (copy,origimal painted 1600 is lost)
The conversion on the way to Damaskus
St.John the Baptist

St.John the Baptist as a child
Still-life with flowers & fruits
Supper to Emmaus
The Annuciation(approx.1609)
Medusa(after 1590,oil on canvas mounted on wood))

Narcissus
Rest during the flight into Egypt
Solame with the Head of the Baptist
St.Francis on ecstasy(approx.1595,oil on canvas)
Judith & Holofernes

Lute player(before 1595)
Madonna dei Pellegrini
Madonna del Rosario
Martha and Mary Magdalene(approx.1595)
Amor victorius

Caravaggio_head
Concert(before 1595)
David and Goliath(undated,oil on canvas)
David with the head of Goliath

Caravaggio(1573-1610)

Caravaggio was an Italian baroque painter who was the best exemplar of naturalistic painting in the early 17th century. His use of models from the lower classes of society in his early secular works and later religious compositions appealed to the Counter Reformation taste for realism, simplicity, and piety in art. Equally important is his introduction of dramatic light-and-dark effects—termed chiaroscuro—into his works.
Originally named Michelangelo Merisi, Caravaggio was born September 28, 1573, in the Lombardy hill town of Caravaggio, from which his professional name is derived. He may have spent four years as apprentice to Simone Peterzano in Milan before going to Rome in 1593, where he entered the employ of the Mannerist painter Giuseppe Cesari, also known as the Cavaliere d'Arpino, for whom he executed fruit and flower pieces (now lost). Among his best-known early works are genre paintings (scenes from everyday life) with young men—for example, The Musicians (1591?-1592, Metropolitan Museum, New York City)—which were done for his first important patron, Cardinal Francesco del Monte. Scenes such as the Fortune Teller (1594, versions in the Louvre, Paris, and the Museo Capitolino, Rome) were especially appealing to the artist's followers.
Caravaggio's mature manner commenced about 1600 with the commission to decorate the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome with three scenes of the life of Saint Matthew. The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599?-1600) is noted for its dramatic use of “cellar light,” streaming in from a source above the action, to illuminate the hand gesture of Christ (based on Michelangelo's Adam on the Sistine ceiling) and the other figures, most of whom are in contemporary dress. About 1601, Caravaggio received his second major commission, from Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome for a Conversion of Saint Paul and Crucifixion of Saint Peter. In the former, a bright shaft of light carries symbolic meaning, indicating the bestowal of Christian faith upon Saul.
Caravaggio's personal life was turbulent. He was often arrested and imprisoned. He fled Rome for Naples in 1606 when charged with murder. There he spent several months executing such works as the Flagellation of Christ (San Domenico Maggiore, Naples), which were crucial to the development of naturalism among the artists of that city. Later that year he traveled to Malta, was made a knight, or cavaliere, of the Maltese order, and executed one of his few portraits, that of his fellow cavaliere Alof de Wignacourt (1608, Musée du Louvre). In October of 1608, Caravaggio was again arrested and, escaping from a Maltese jail, went to Syracuse in Sicily. While in Sicily he painted several monumental canvases, including the Burial of Saint Lucy (1608, Santa Lucia, Syracuse) and the Raising of Lazarus (1609, Museo Nazionale, Messina). These were multi-figured compositions of great drama achieved through dark tonalities and selective use of lighting. These works were among Caravaggio's last, for the artist died on the beach at Port'Ercole in Tuscany on July 18, 1610, of a fever contracted after a mistaken arrest.
Although the use of both realistic types and strong chiaroscuro originated in northern Italian art of the previous century, Caravaggio brought new life and immediacy to these aspects of painting, with which he effected a transformation of anticlassical Mannerism in early baroque Rome. Despite his personal protestations that nature was his only teacher, Caravaggio obviously studied and assimilated the styles of the High Renaissance masters, especially that of Michelangelo. Caravaggio's impact on the art of his century was considerable. He discouraged potential students, but throughout the century a naturalist school flourished in Italy and abroad based on an enthusiastic emulation of his style.