Landscapes after Old Masters
BlogAdmin on 27th May 2022
Landscape paintings and wall art can transform your dull walls into works of art. A landscape picture that coordinates with your room’s furniture, accessories, and wall paint color can provide a lovely visual interest to your space. It has the capability to make the area look lively and colorful, as well as give a refreshing and welcoming atmosphere.
Have you wondered how wonderful a style statement you can create with landscapes of the old masters?
In this article, I’ve discussed the pioneering old masters of all time and their masterpieces.
Make your interior lavish and choose your favorite landscape of old masters to flaunt your ‘panache’.
Landscapes after old masters
Carl Bloch
Carl Heinrich Bloch was a dutch painter who lived between 1834 and 1890. He was born in Copenhagen into a well-to-do family. Contrary to his parent’s wishes, he chose art as his career and joined the Royal Danish Academy of Art (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi). He married and had eight children. His pain at the loss of his wife to early death fuelled his passion. Many attribute his development as a painter to and during his stay in the rural communities of Italy. His death was termed as a “great blow to Nordic art”. He received many accolades both during and after this death. Many of his paintings still adorn the Frederiksborg Palace of Denmark.
Fra et romersk osteria (Roman Osteria) (1866)
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Fra et romersk osteria (Roman Osteria), 1866 by Carl Bloch – Statens Museum Kunst – Stretched Canvas
Set in a Roman osteria, the scene is thought to be a sharper interpretation of Wilhelm Marstrand’s Italian Osteria Scene. Baloch tutored under Wilhelm Marstrand.
Samson on a treadmill (Samson_hos_filistrene), 1863
In the painting, Samson from the biblical story is seen grinding grain by the Philistines are seen goading him on. In the story, he is blind with his eyes gouged out. This disfigurement is supposedly invisible to the viewer due to the position of Samson’s body.
Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro, a French landscape painter who influenced Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, was born on July 10, 1830. Camille Pissarro started experimenting with art as a young man, later helping to form the Impressionist movement alongside friends like Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. Pissarro was also prominent in Post-Impressionist societies, and he continued to paint till his death on November 13, 1903, in Paris.
Knocke Village (1894)
Gustave Courbet greatly influenced Pissarro’s painting, and it is apparent that Pissarro stole from his Realist colleague Gustave’s style. These two painters shared similar viewpoints, especially in glorifying villagers and their hard work in the countryside. This artwork has a soothing vibe that the real Knocke village might provide.
The Factory on the Oise at Pontoise (1873)
Several of Pissarro’s works demonstrated the factory across the river from his Pontoise home. The atmospheric setting is represented by the silver light on the artwork, which was created during the impressionist period. The free brushwork portrays the surface, which includes the river, sky, and field. This superb piece exemplifies the artist’s technique and his ability to combine colours to highlight the subject.
Deux femmes causant au bord de la mer, Saint Thomas (Two women chatting by the sea, St. Thomas)
Two women chatting by the sea, St Thomas was painted by Camille Pissarro in 1856. The original can be seen at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA. Many of the artist’s paintings have fetched millions in the secondary market. His style of using loose brushstrokes was later discarded by the painter in favor of pointillism. It is said that he approached Paul Seurat for guidance as the latter had already mastered this technique. Pissarro was born in St. Thomas in the Caribbean which is the setting for this artwork.
Another famous painting set in the beautiful backwaters of the Caribbean island was A creek in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. The painting has a beautiful tone so reminiscent of evening scenes by the artist.
Van Gogh
“An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.” That is exactly what Van Gogh’s artwork represented. Vincent Van Gogh is one of the greatest post-impressionists of his time. His work’s vibrant colors, dramatic brushwork, and contoured forms significantly influenced Expressionism in modern art. After his death, Van Gogh’s art became a sensation worldwide, selling for record-breaking sums at auctions and becoming the subject of blockbuster touring exhibitions.
The Factories
Indications of the industry began to dominate the late 19th-century French landscape. Van Gogh represents a glass factory in Asnières, a neighborhood of Paris where he often painted during the summer of 1887. The round items heaped along the pathway’s sides are glass balls ready to melt within the buildings. They would have been shaped into lantern globes for gas streetlights and interior lighting installations.
In the gritty, industrial district of Clichy, northwest of Paris, Vincent van Gogh showed a stretch of factories blowing smoke into the air. The picture is divided into three layers of fields, factories, and sky, with two little figures (possibly lovers) visible in the field.
The Langloise Bridge
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Vincent van Gogh’s The Langlois Bridge (1888) – Stretched Canvas
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Vincent van Gogh’s The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888) – Stretched Canvas
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Vincent van Gogh’s The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888) – Stretched Canvas
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Vincent van Gogh’s Langlois Bridge at Arles (1888) – Stretched Canvas
Langlois Bridge at Arles consisted of four oil paintings, four drawings, and one watercolor painting. Langlois bridge was named after the bridge’s keeper – Pont de Langlois. The original bridge was replaced by a 45-meter reinforced-concrete arc bridge in 1930. This was done to allow for the passage of heavy convoys. Langlois bridge was blown up by the retreating German forces in 1944.
Washing women at the canal going about their commonplace work near the Langlois Bridge is one of the most iconic paintings of Van Gogh. The canal had nine wooden drawbridges and five fixed bridges. In other references to the bridge, Van Gogh also mentions sketches he made with other subjects of interest to him.
Winslow Homer
The American artist Winslow Homer is one of the prominent old masters of the landscape. His maritime paintings are among the most powerful and expressive representations of late 19th-century American art. Homer began working in watercolors in 1873, which allowed him to make quick, new observations of nature. However, his greatest artistic growth began in 1881, when he left America for England and spent two years working and living in the nearby North Sea.
Maine Coast (1896)
This is one of Homer’s photo-perfect paintings. In the foreground, he applies the white colour thickly with brush and palette knife, creating long, serpentine sections of white hue that are almost enamel-smooth. Set against more furiously stroked areas, these white streaks’ brightness, silky texture, and artistic freedom immediately capture attention. The painting’s most violent and thrilling passage occurs when the sea and stone crash with a real-life effect.
Peach Blossoms (1878)
Winslow Homer’s Peach Blossoms portrays a girl looking longingly out of the picture area. His aesthetic choices connect this piece to both French and Japanese art. Homer’s use of a brighter palette was inspired by Impressionism, and the tree’s linearity is suggestive of Japanese calligraphy. As a result, the painting offers visual evidence of the late 19th-century global artistic exchange.
Charles Daubigny
Charles Daubigny is a French landscape painter whose landscapes introduced an overarching concern for the precise analysis and depiction of natural light with the use of colour into mid-nineteenth-century naturalism, profoundly influencing late-nineteenth-century Impressionist painters. He had illustrated books in his youth, but his true calling was landscape painting. Daubigny is best understood as a bridge between Corot’s more ordered naturalism and his younger friends Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley’s more spontaneous approach to painting.
Apple Blossoms (1873)
Around 1857, the artist began painting flowering orchards and continued to do so practically every spring. His canvases are marked by simple subject matter, which he represented with quick, brief brushstrokes. The brilliant greenery and bright blue sky are so life-like that French critique Théophile Gautier dubbed Daubigny’s landscape as “pieces of nature cut out and set into golden frames.”
Boats on the Seacoast at Etaples (1870)
Daubigny and his family fled the Franco-Prussian War in October 1870, and this scene of beached fishing boats is believed to be the first painting he signed and dated after his return to France in June 1871. He later donated the painting to a New York auction benefiting the Great Chicago Fire victims in 1872.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Renoir is originally linked with the Impressionist movement due to his association with other Impressionist painters. His early works were classic Impressionist pictures of everyday life, full of glistening color and light. By the mid-1880s, he abandoned the movement to use a more controlled, formal approach in portraits and figure paintings, notably women.
A Road in Louveciennes (1870)
This painting, which is practically a direct drawing with paint, was almost certainly created outside in 1870. The location is in the village of Louveciennes in west Paris, where Camille Pissarro lived and worked between 1869 and 1870. Renoir was inspired to paint the same motif from a different perspective.
The Bay of Naples (1881)
Naples, as seen in Renoir’s picture, is a hive of activity around the harbor. The scene is brimming with local flavor—typical Neapolitan boats, donkeys loaded with stuff, a woman carrying a load on her head, and smoke erupting Mount Vesuvius on the backdrop. The composition is structured by parallel paint strokes, with reds and oranges complementing the purple and blue shadows and yellow and white structures across the bay.
James Whistler
The American-born artist is known for his canvases of nocturnal London, stunning full-length portraits and artistically progressive, and beautiful etchings and lithographs. He was an articulate art theorist who was instrumental in bringing modern French painting to England. He was focused on the issues of portrait painting from the 1870s onward, producing several masterpieces marked by simple forms and muted tones. The famous portrait of his mother was also featured in the movie Bean.
The Yellow Room, ca. 1883-84
The Yellow Room, a harmonic “arrangement” of violet and yellow, is one of Whistler’s most outstanding watercolors, dating from his most adventurous era working with the progressive medium. The painting depicts Whistler’s main model and lover, Maud Franklin, who posed for over 60 of his paintings, providing a rare, intimate look into the artist’s personal and professional life. The interior illustrates the couple’s sitting area at their London home, full of Japanese artifacts and Aesthetic Movement design collected by Whistler.
Manet
Édouard Manet, regarded as one of the most divisive artists of his time, has defied his critics to show his actual talent. His paintings that had inspired young painters in that age demonstrated while society may not always embrace new ideas, they might open the door to the future for those who embrace them. Despite the influence of the Impressionists on Manet’s work, he was reluctant to participate in Impressionists exhibitions. For all his preference for lighter colors, Manet’s paintings often included a tinge of black, which was unusual for the paintings at the time.
Madame Manet (Suzanne Leenhoff, 1829-1906), at Bellevue
Manet’s health began to deteriorate in the 1870s, so he and his wife chose to spend the summer of 1880 at a rented home in Bellevue, a Paris suburb, where Manet had been recommended to seek treatment. This is his final painting of his wife, and it portrays her sitting in the villa’s garden. The painting’s lack of fine detail and sense of rush are related to an instinctive need to create fast, motivated by a deeper awareness that his time has come.
The Brioche (1870)
From 1862 until 1870, Manet created many large-scale tabletop scenes of fish and fruit, the final and most elaborate is this one. It was inspired by a brioche painting donated to the Louvre by Jean Siméon Chardin, an eighteenth-century French still-life painter. Manet, like Chardin, surrounded the buttery bread with sensory stimuli—a beautiful white napkin, soft peaches, gleaming plums, a shiny knife, a bright red box—and topped the brioche with a scented flower.
Goya
Francisco Goya is considered the most famous Spanish artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In his paintings, sketches, etchings, and frescoes, Goya transitioned from merry and joyous to intensely pessimistic and yearning during his long career. His work influenced key 19th- and 20th-century painters and mirrored contemporary historical upheavals.
Bullfight in a Divided Ring (1825)
Goya’s final series, based on the theme of bullfighting, was his shortest, yet its place among the masterworks of printmaking is universally acknowledged. In his late 70s and with eyesight deteriorating (and having been deaf for several decades), Goya set up the hefty stones on an easel and sketched with the greasy lithographic crayon as if he were working on paintings in the still relatively new technique of lithography. The picture he created conveys the passion and raw brutality of the bullring amazingly well.
Majas on a Balcony, ca. 1800-1810
The idea of women on a balcony being watched over by observant, slightly frightening male companions emerged in one of Goya’s most powerful paintings. The powerful contrasts of light and shadow, the limited use of color, the arrangement of forms, and personalities of the people, create a dramatic mood. It’s a solid mode of presentation that results in a work of social criticism.
El Greco
Few old masters are widely celebrated today, and El Greco is one of them. For Picasso and many other lovers of El Greco, he was a painter of the spirit. For Franz Marc, pioneer of the Blue Rider school, El Greco was a painter who “felt the mystical inner construction of life,” someone whose art stood in opposition to the materialist culture of modern life.
View of Toledo, ca. 1599-1600
It’s common for landscape paintings to capture a specific moment in time in a specific location and preserve it for the rest of the time. That is not the case with El Greco’s famous View of Toledo. In this canvas, El Greco switched the locations of several buildings, except the Church, which proves that documenting was not El Greco’s major focus. Instead of describing Toledo’s appearance, El Greco focuses on conveying the city’s atmosphere. The artist used Toledo as a vehicle to portray an internal state of mind and possibly a view of the relationship between man and the divine.
Christ Healing the Blind ca. 1570
El Greco created this masterpiece of dramatic narrative in either Venice or Rome after leaving Crete in 1567 and before migrating to Spain in 1576. It depicts the Gospel tale of Christ anointing a blind man’s eyes to heal him. The two people in the front could be the blind man’s parents. The composition is incomplete in the upper left corner. El Greco created two more versions of the subject, one of which he seems to have carried to Spain.
Paul Cézanne
The Post-Impressionist French painter, Paul Cezanne, laid the foundation for a new and profoundly different art world that emerged in the 20th century. Cezanne can be seen as a bridge between Impressionism in the late 19th century and Cubism of the early 20th century. Matisse and Picasso’s claim that Cezanne “is the father of us all” can’t be denied.
Apples on a Sideboard (1900–1906)
When it comes to Impressionism, watercolor was the main aspect for all the painters, but Paul Cézanne’s work relied heavily on it. The picture has a spontaneous, airy character due to the light, fragmented brushstrokes. The white pitcher’s floral pattern, the fluted mouth edge, the curved handle, and the rich, rounded shapes of the ginger pot and fruit provide life to the watercolor. These fruits stand out against the light-filled, almost insignificant pale yellow sideboard and background wall.
Gardanne, 1885-86
Between the summer of 1885 and the spring of 1886, Cézanne and his family lived in the village of Gardanne in Provence. Staggered geometric shapes of the orange-roofed homes dominate this painting. Cezanne also emphasized historical features such as the bell tower in the center by placing the vantage point in the east.
Paul Signac
When he was 18, Signac abandoned his studies in architecture in favor of painting, and through Armand Guillaumin, he became a convert to Impressionism’s coloristic ideals. Signac was a founding member of the Salon des Indépendants in 1884. There he met Seurat, and they both created the pointillism approach, which became the foundation of Neo-Impressionism. The Neo-Impressionists impacted the next generation, and Signac, in particular, influenced Henri Matisse and André Derain and so influenced the development of Fauvism.
Still Life with Jug (1919)
When Signac was a young man living in Montmartre, Paris, he was deeply influenced by modern theories on optics and color and the work of the Impressionists. Signac’s style changed dramatically when he embraced the techniques of Neo-Impressionism and “Pointillism” pioneered by Georges Seurat. His neo-impressionist brushstrokes are marked by small, nearly square points, which he used to portray the effects of light on the subject matter. The painting also marks the beginning of abstraction.
Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch painter who created some of the most renowned and revered works of art in the world’s history. Roughly 36 of his paintings have survived, yet they are among the greatest treasures in the world’s most prestigious museums. When he started painting in the early 1650s, Vermeer painted large-scale biblical and mythological scenes. However, most of his later paintings (famous worldwide) reflect everyday life in interior settings, marking a timeless dignity.
The Geographer (1669)
Vermeer signed and dated only three of his works, and this is one of them (the other two are The Astronomer and The Procuress). Cartography is a Dutch specialty, and this globe and wall map shows the country’s leadership in that field. When the geographer is done calculating distances with his compass, he pauses to reflect on his thoughts. Vermeer used painting techniques to depict the geographer’s mental journey around the world.
The Little Street (ca. 1658)
The artwork represents a typical picture of life in a Dutch Golden Age town, depicting a calm street. It is one of only three Delft views painted by Vermeer; the other two are View of Delft and the now-lost House Standing in Delft. This artwork by the Dutch master is regarded as his masterpiece. The painting has dynamism, and there is a thick layer of paint on the walls, stones, and brickwork, making them almost real.
Charles Cromwell Ingham
Charles Ingham was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1796 and studied under William Cumming, a portrait painter who specialized in female subjects. Ingham chose his master’s specialty after four years of study with Cumming. As a result, when he traveled from Ireland to New York in 1816, he quickly established himself as the city’s top “ladies’ painter.” He also painted miniatures and landscapes, and historical paintings on occasion.
The Flower Girl (1846)
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Large Vase with Flowers (1912) by Odilon Redon – Stretched Canvas
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Flower Clouds (1903) by Odilon Redon – Stretched Canvas
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In the Meadow, 1888-92, Auguste Renoir, French – Stretched Canvas
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The Flower Girl, 1846, Charles Cromwell Ingham, American, born Ireland- Stretched Canvas
Ingham might have recalled a popular painting of the same title by the Spanish painter Esteban Murillo. As in Ingham’s picture, Murillo’s Spanish flower girl directly appeals to her viewers, as does Ingham’s American girl. Under her left arm, Ingham’s girl carries a stunning flower bouquet that is so lively and unparalleled not only in contemporary still-life painting but even on the streets of New York. In her right hand, she holds a potted fuchsia, a gesture associated with the goddess Flora. The plant itself represents frustrated love.
Camille Corot
Camille Corot, the French artist, is mostly known for his landscapes, which influenced and foreshadowed the landscape art of the Impressionists. His oil sketches, notable for their technical freedom and vivid color, have come to be appreciated as highly as the full paintings on which they were based. In the history of 19th-century painting, Corot’s place is unquestionably assured.
River with a Distant Tower (1865)
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Beach at Low Tide (Mouth of the River) (1869) by Edgar Degas – Stretched Canvas
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Landscape with a Sunlit Stream, ca. 1877, Charles-Francois Daubigny, French – Stretched Canvas
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View from the Quai d’Orsay, 1854, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Dutch- Stretched Canvas
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River with a Distant Tower, 1865, Camille Corot, French- Stretched Canvas
While talking about Corot’s painting, Critique Théophile Thoré always mentions that he practically never made anything other than the same one landscape. Corot relies on pre-existing stock features like trees, water, and a distant tower. He created this environment in his studio using just what he was familiar with. Like his hero Claude Lorrain, Corot was able to evoke a scene and an atmosphere with his imagination alone.
Boatman among the Reeds, ca. 1865
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Boatman among the Reeds, ca. 1865, Camille Corot, French- Stretched Canvas
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The Flight into Egypt ca. 1767-70 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo- Stretched Canvas
Corot’s works are difficult to date because he frequently used the same compositions and motifs. Corot’s River with a Distant Tower, another painting in the Met Museum’s collection, bears a striking resemblance to the current work. This piece was likely painted later in the decade based on its fine brushstrokes and softer color palette.
Odilon Redon
Bertrand Redon, better known as Odilon Redon, was a French Symbolist painter and printmaker. He obtained the name Odilon from his mother’s name, Odile.
Redon began drawing at an early age and was given a school drawing prize at the age of ten. At the age of 15, his father compelled him to pursue a career in architecture. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was unsuccessful in becoming an architect, though he would later study painting under Jean-Leon Gerome.
Nasturtiums (1905)
Portraits of mythical and literary topics, as well as floral still lifes and decorative works, were Redon’s concentration after 1900. Andre Masson, a twentieth-century Surrealist artist, used the term “lyrical chromatics” to describe the bright colours he used in his work.
Nasturtiums is one of his floral still lifes of that time, which is tinted mainly by symbolism. Nasturtium plants are adored for their vibrant, jewel-toned hues, and in this painting, Redon adorned them with an even more jewel-like appearance. As a result, this masterpiece is unique in character yet has a sharp mark unique only to Redon’s art.
Flowers in a Vase (1910)
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Poppies and Daisies (1867) by Odilon Redon – Stretched Canvas
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Flowers in a Vase (1910) by Odilon Redon – Stretched Canvas
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Bouquet in a Chinese Vase ,ca. 1912-14, Odilon Redon, French – Stretched Canvas
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Vase of Flowers (Pink Background) ca. 1906 Odilon Redon French- Stretched Canvas
Redon, a French symbolist artist, and lithographer of tremendous poetic insight and imagination is best known for his dramatic paintings and lithographs. His prints, which anticipated the Surrealist and Dadaist movements, explore haunted, weird, and frequently macabre subjects. During 1900, color simply became another tool for him to explore worlds beyond the visible, allowing him to use it for expression rather than imitation. Other critiques have linked Redon’s acceptance of color to his own contentment.
His oils and pastels, primarily still lifes with flowers, earned him the respect of Henri Matisse and other painters as prominent colorists. This beautiful vase appeared in his canvas repeatedly and is one of the most notable contributions to his flower still lifes.
Jules Breton
Jules Breton (1827 – 1906) was a 19th-century French Naturalist painter. His painting career started when he met another famed painter of that era in 1842 who, impressed by his youthful talent, persuaded his family to allow him to study art and painting. His pursuit for excellence in art and unwavering desire to perfect his artistic training in painting took him to several famous painters and numerous academies of fine arts all over Europe. His paintings are heavily influenced by the French countryside and his keenness to excel in the traditional methods of painting helped make Jules Breton one of the versatile narrators of the rustic beauty and idyllic vision of rural life and its breathtaking ambiance.
The Song of the Lark
The Song of the Lark is considered one of Jules’s highly regarded works of painting. The title of the painting refers to the melodious voice of a kind of bird called Lark that could be heard at the break of dawn in rural France. The bird’s delicate and melodious voice heard slightly before the dawn is described as resembling the varying notes and pitches of music.
Lark, as a word, is used as a simile to describe the state of mind of a person who is carefree and unaware of the grimmer realities of life. Jules, a noted poet of his days, appears to have given an artistic shape to the feelings of his poetic heart.
The magnificent piece of art skilfully portrays the village lass with her wide open mouth and curious eyes make it appear as though she was in a trance. The sickle in her outstretched hand is indicative of its business at the ground level moments ago and was relieved from its engagement as though to let its owner behold the sight of the source of the enchanting voice.
The painting apparently represents ebullient state of the painter’s mind, his deep-rooted concern for the hardworking rural folk, and his urge to immortalize their rustic simplicity through painting.
This magnificent piece of painting has earned the famous painter lots of acclaim, accolades, and monetary rewards from places far from the shores of France, like America and England.
The Peasant Girl Knitting
Breton drew inspiration for his paintings by observing rural life around his native village of Courrières in France. His style was realism, many of his paintings, including this one, is a portrait with medium oil on canvas. This painting was created in 1870.
John Frederick Kensett
John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872) was an American landscape artist. He was one of the pioneers of ‘luminism’. He was also a leading member of the second generation of the Hudson River School of American art.
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A Foggy Sky, 1872, John Frederick Kensett, American – Stretched Canvas
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Salt Meadow in October, 1872, John Frederick Kensett, American- Stretched Canvas
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Hudson River Scene, 1857, John Frederick Kensett, American- Stretched Canvas
Kensett’s brilliance in landscape painting showed his association and experience with the English artists. He produced some of the marvelous views of shoreline locations, such as those around the Hudson River, Mississippi. The Foggy Sky is one such (1872) brilliant works of his art that earned him accolades all over the world of art.
Jules Tavernier
Jules Tavernier was a French-born American painter and illustrator who painted during the late 1800s. His paintings depict the life of white settlers and Native Americans in the backdrop of the beautiful North American natural landscape.
Dance in a subterranean roundhouse at Clear Lake, California
Oneofhis most famous and celebrated artworks is Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse at Clear Lake
, California (1878). The painting shows a ceremonial dance, the mfom Xe
of the Elem Pomo
. mfom Xe
or the people dance is performed in an underground roundhouse. The Elem Pomo
people are the ancestral custodians of the Clear Lake region of California. This painting gives us a rare glimpse into the cultures of these people as seen by white settlers in the region.
Theodore Rousseau
Pierre-Etienne-Theodore Rousseau, better known as Theodore Rousseau, is a famous French landscape painter. He was the source of many innovations in landscape art. He was a primary driving force behind the Barbizon School of Landscape Painting.
The Pond (La Mare)
Although there are many well-known artworks of Rousseau, this painting is among his most well-known and acclaimed paintings. The painting showcases the artist’s ability to show a variety of pictures in a small area and is painting in a realistic way rather than an idealistic way. The changes in light at various places in the painting speak to the artist’s mastery.
Jean Siméon Chardin
Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) who was a French painter.
Soap Bubbles (1733-34)
Soap bubbles is an oil on canvas painting by Jean Siméon Chardin.
Chardin, a naturalist painter, was well respected by his contemporaries in spite of the fact that his work belonged to a different genre. He was not a painter of the historical genre yet he held influential positions in the Louvre and the Academy.
The painting takes inspiration from the 17th-century Dutch genre. Some believe the bubble depicts the shortness of life and the painting tries to tell us the importance of reflection. The subject in the painting is a young man, who is of modest means. He is blowing soap bubbles as a young child watches. The characters are centered in the painting forming a triangle. The pipe that the blower uses to blow the soap bubble is slightly away from the center. This, some say, is to unbalance the composition slightly.
The painting came in multiple versions, some of which are in the LACM, LA, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Hubert Robert
Hubert Robert(1733-1808) was a French painter.
A hermit praying in the ruins of a Roman temple.
The painting shows a monk praying in what looks like the Roman ruins of a temple. The object of his devotion is Christ on a cross supported on the dilapidated wall behind it. He is reading from a large book. Next to the book, there is a skull, some prayer beads, and a sand clock. Skull and clock represent the fatality of the world, how death is imminent.
Langlois Bridge by Van Gogh
The famous painting is an image of washerwomen near the Langlois drawbridge. This bridge was replaced by a reinforced concrete bridge in 1930. The painting is bright with yellow and blue colors painted in an impasto style that was inspired by Japanese woodblock prints. This painting was to be given to Tersteeg.