Potential choices for "Articulating the Arts" - Classic Paintings
INTERESTING TIDBITS ABOUT THESE PAINTINGS
Thanks to our crack research team -Liz Richards, Lisa Barri and Karen Ann Ledger- here's some items of interest about the paintings.
#1. Johannes Vermeer van Delft, "The Art of Painting" or "The Painter in his Studio" (1968): Vermeer's largest painting, and one of the only ones he never gave a way or sold, even when he was in debt. The woman they are painting is Clio, the muse of history.
#2. Michelangelo Merisi - Caravaggio, "David with the head of Goliath" (1610): On May 1606 Caravaggio was accused of murder and fled from Rome to distant lands (Naples, Sicily, Malta) to escape the price that had been placed on his head. This painting was sent to the papal court in 1610 as a kind of painted petition for pardon. Caravaggio modeled Goliath on himself, and the model for David is thought to be his studio assistant and possible lover.
#3. Henri Julien Felix Rosseau, "Carnival Evening" (1886): the first major painting by Rousseau. The painting is unique because the people seem to be lit from within (no shadows) and the landscape is flattened (no perspective).
#4. Diego Velasquez, "Las Meninas" (The Maids of Honor) (1656): When Velasquez painted Las Meninas, he had been with the royal household of Philip IV of Spain for 33 years. The king and Queen are reflected in the mirror, but the subject is the royal children.
#5. M. Jeanne Lemaire - Chariot of Fairies (XXXX) “The Fairy Chariot”, a porcerlain panel by Madelaine Lemaire was painted c 1890. Lemaire was a member of the Societe Nationale de Beaux Arts and a Member of the Legion d”honneur. She kept a famous Belle Epoque salon and inspired the character of "Madame Verdurin" in Proust’s A La Recherche du Temp Perdu. A beautifully painted whimsical piece.” NOTE: interesting to explore character of Mme Verdurin, who in “Time Past” is considered to be a poseur…read on: from character breakdown of “…Time Past” by Proust: Mme Verdurin is a poseur and salonniere who rises to the top of society through inheritance, marriage, and sheer single-mindedness”. Certainly, from a modern point of view, M. Jeanne Lemaire’s inclusion into the Beaux Arts is a mixed blessing – much of the work has been, if not dismissed, by modern critiques, than certainly questioned as reflections of taste than examples of new thought and dynamic, movement in the world of art."
#6. Jan Van Eyck - "The Arnolfini Portrait" (1434): Subjects are the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and possibly his wife (though they were married 13 years after this painting was finished). They are clearly wealthy and want to appear so (they are wearing expensive winter coats and fancy summer hats). Some think the painting was painted because Giovanni wanted something to prove his good standing as a merchant.
#7. Vincent Van Gogh, "Potato Eaters" (1885): Van Gogh chose the subject because it would challenge him. He considered it his most successful work, though many of his contemporaries criticized it. It has been stolen twice.
#8. Henri Rousseau, "Sleeping Gypsy" (1897): Interesting in the combination of cultures: an African gypsy in a desert wearing an Oriental costume, lying beside an Italian stringed instrument and jar of water.
#9. Lyubov Popova - The Philosopher (1955) Portrait of artist’s brother Pavel Sergeyevich Popova. Like Alexandra Exter, Lyubov Popova was a leader in the cubist-to-architectonique style and was called one of the “Amazons of the Avant-Garde” (from book title of same name). Also like Exter, Popova designed for stage. Of her, her friend/fellow student Vera Mukhina recalled: “L. S. had an incredibly sharp eye for life and art. She had a marvellous feeling for colour and was all in all very talented. She was the first to begin to unveil the essence of art for me. Until then I had conveyed only what I saw. But if an artist conveys only what he sees then he’s a naturalist. You have to convey what you feel and know. She made me understand that. She taught me how to look at colour, at the handling of colours in the Russian icon, for example. She was excited by everything new.
She loved to express her opinions on works of art. I was beginning to see.” Although the following is about the painting “The Violin,” [these two paintings are] similar to it in style and scope: “Her painting The Violin of 1914 suggests the development from Cubism towards the "painterly architectonics" series of 1916–1918. This series defined her distinct artistic trajectory in abstract form. The canvas surface is an energy field of overlapping and intersecting angular planes in a constant state of potential release of energy. At the same time the elements are held in a balanced and proportioned whole as if linking the compositions of the classical past to the future. Color is used as the iconic focus; the strong primary color at the center drawing the outer shapes together.”
#10. Leonardo Da Vinci, "Vitruvian Man" (1492): this classic exemplifies the intertwinement of art and science in the renaissance. Vitruvius was a Roman architect, and Da Vinci believed all proportions in architecture could be traced to the human body. Recently, doctors have concluded the model has a hernia, leading them to believe either he was working from a cadaver that died from that ailment or that it afflicted Da Vinci himself.
#11. Margaret Murray Cookesley - Quiet Corner in Tangiers (XXXX) "The number of professional women artists who painted Orientalist subjects grew as the century wore on (due in part to the increased ease and safety of travel). As might be expected, the majority stuck to safely feminine areas of representation such as topography, portraiture, children, and ethnographic types... Others, however, ventured into what we might consider to be more dangerously immoral area of Orientalist pseudo-classical nude. Whilst there were some artists whose work clearly fell into one camp rather than another, many women painted both 'feminie' cameos of Oriental daily life and nudes and odalisques. The range of subjects and styles adopted by women artists in relation to the Orient suggests that the boundaries of the field were more fluid than had been previously supposed and also indicated the changing nature of women's relationship to art. Certainly, by the 1880s, when the M.M. Cookesely was exhibiting, her pseudo-classical Oriental nudes appear to have been quietly received; her Nubian Girl leans against an urn, proudly bare-chested, clad only in an 'Oriental" drape and was shown to no great notoriety.
#12. Peter Paul Reubens, "Massacre of the Innocents" (1611) Reubens’ work depicts the episode of the biblical massacre of the innocents of Bethlehem, as related in the gospel of Matthew. It is the moment when Herod sends his soldiers to kill infants in case one of them should be the Messiah. Antwerp, where Rubens lived, was a city haunted by the horrors of war. This painting uses the biblical scene to depict Reubens’ world. The violence is shoved in our face by a theatrical presentation, at the very front of which, pressed horribly towards us, is a fleshy tangle of clawing fingers, plunging swords and murdered babies.
#13. Edouard Manet, Le Bon Bock (A Good Glass of Beer) [Study of Emile Bellot] (1873) This painting was widely identified as a French Alsatian patriot drinking his regional beer. It came to sere as a symbol of the recent loss of the Alsace-Lorraine region by France to the Germans and a liberal political symbol of national introspection. This inspired Emile Bellot to organize the Bon Bock Society in 1875.
#14. Berthe Morisot - Children With a Bowl (1886) Morisot painted what she experienced on a daily basis. Her paintings reflect the 19th-century cultural restrictions of her class and gender. She avoided urban and street scenes as well as the nude figure and, like her fellow female Impressionist Mary Cassatt, focused on domestic life and portraits in which she could use family and personal friends as models. Paintings like The Cradle, in which she depicted current trends for nursery furniture, reflect her sensitivity to fashion and advertising, both of which would have been apparent to her female audience. Her works also include landscapes, portraits, garden settings and boating scenes. Born into a family of wealth and culture, Morisot received the conventional lessons in drawing and painting. She went firmly against convention, however, in choosing to take these pursuits seriously and make them her life's work. Having studied for a time under Camille Corot, she later began her long friendship with Edouard Manet, who became her brother-in-law in 1874 and was the most important single influence on the development of her style. Unlike most of the other impressionists, who were then intensely engaged in optical experiments with color, Morisot and Manet agreed on a more conservative approach, confining their use of color to a naturalistic framework. Morisot, however, did encourage Manet to adopt the impressionists' high-keyed palette and to abandon the use of black. Her own carefully composed, brightly hued canvases are often studies of women, either out-of-doors or in domestic settings. Morisot and American artist Mary Cassatt are generally considered the most important women painters of the later 19th century.
#15. Georges Seurat, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (1886) Seurat spent over two years painting this work which represents the right bank of the bourgeoisie on La Grande Jatte. This work is the companion of his other work, Bathers At Asnieres, which depicts the left bank of the working class. The artist worked on the painting in several campaigns with a layer of small horizontal brush strokes of complementary colors. He later added small dots, also in complementary colors, that appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance. As Seurat explained, “ I want to make modern people, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color.”
#16. Max Liebermann - Old Woman with a Cat (XXXX) from the Blue Lantern blogspot:
“Max Liebermann (1847-1935) was a young man when he painted this wonderful image. Like the old woman, the wall behind her has roughened with age. Under the bright Mediterranean sun, her striped skirt looks festive and though she may be poor as evidenced by the roughness of her hands, the artist does not ask us to pity her. Though the picture is carefully posed, it is not stiff. The woman’s head is turned toward the viewer, yet it is part of the frame of the embrace holding her cat, her friend. Before he turned to painting, Liebermann, the child of a prosperous Jewish family from Berlin, has studied philosophy. No wonder, then, that he was attracted to 17th century Dutch paintings that portrayed solitary individuals, lost in contemplation. In the event, Max Liebermann and his wife Martha were deprived of the luxury of such an old age. He resigned from the Presidency of the Prussian Academy when it decided in 1933 not to exhibit the work of Jewish artists anymore, under no illusions about the intentions of the National Socialists regime. Martha, who outlived him, committed suicide in their beloved home just hours before the police were due to deport her to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.”
#17. Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night (1889) In May 1889, Vincent Van Gogh decided to enter the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where he stayed for the next year. Inspired by the landscape surrounding the asylum, he painted Starry Night in June 1889. There are several main aspects that intrigue those who view this image. 1) There is the night sky filled with swirling clouds, stars ablaze with their own luminescence, and a bright crescent moon. 2) Below the rolling hills of the horizon lies a small town. 3) There is a peaceful essence flowing from the structures. 4) This steeple casts down a sense of stability onto the town, and also creates a sense of size and seclusion. During Van Gogh's younger years he wanted to dedicate his life to evangelization of those in poverty. Many believe that this religious endeavor may be reflected in the eleven stars of the painting. In Genesis 37:9 the following statement is made: "And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made
obeisance to me." Although Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life, the aftermath of his work is enormous.
#18. Salvadore Dali, "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee" (1944) NOTE: Awaiting permissions to use this image. By rendering scenes of dreamlike irrationality with seemingly incongruous precise and naturalistic form, Dalí gives substance to subconscious visions, making his often strange content more palatable to viewers, while at the same time challenging them to consider the relationship between internal and external realities. Dream purportedly depicts Gala, Dalí’s wife, in the midst of a dream. The bee and pomegranate of the title hover below Gala’s body. The fish, tigers, and rifle all seem poised to attack her, but they clearly stand as symbols of unconscious desires. Dalí’s explicit focus on a dream as the stated content of the painting grounds his chaotic vision firmly in the Surrealist tradition. In 1962, Dalí said his painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud’s discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the
instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up.”
#19. Salvadore Dali, "The Face of War" (1940) NOTE: Awaiting permissions to use this image. This work was painted between the end of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Second World War. The painting depicts a disembodied face hovering against a barren desert landscape. The face is withered like that of a corpse and wears an expression of misery. In their mouths and eyes are more identical faces in a process implied to be infinite. Swarming around the large face are biting serpents. In the lower right corner is a handprint that Dalí insisted was left by his own hand. On war he spoke often, “Bury and unbury! Disinter and inter in order to unbury again! Such was the charnel desire of the Civil War in that impatient Spain. One would see how she was capable of suffering, of making others suffer, of burying and unburying, of killing and resurrecting. It was necessary to scratch the earth to exhume tradition and to profane everything in order to be dazzled anew by all the treasures that the land was hiding in its entrails."
#20. John William Waterhouse, "The Lady of Shalott" (1888) The work is a representation of a scene from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1832 poem of the same name. According to Tennyson's version of the legend, the Lady of Shalott was forbidden to look directly at reality or the outside world; instead she was doomed to view the world through a mirror, and weave what she saw into tapestry. One day the Lady saw Sir Lancelot passing on his way in the reflection of the mirror, and dared to look out at Camelot, bringing about a curse. The lady escaped by boat during an autumn storm, inscribing 'The Lady of Shalott' on the prow. As she sailed towards Camelot and certain death, she sang a lament. Her frozen body was found shortly afterwards by the knights and ladies of Camelot, one of whom is Lancelot, who prayed to God to have mercy on her soul. The tapestry she wove during her imprisonment was found draped over the side of the boat.
#21. Paul Gauguin - Royal End (1892) "I have just finished a severed kanak [Pacific Islander] head, nicely arranged on a white cushion, in a palace of my invention and guarded by women also of my invention." --Paul Gauguin . Writing to his friend Daniel de Monfreid, Paul Gauguin referenced in an almost offhand way this startling painting of a decapitated human head, which he made during his first stay in Polynesia in the early 1890s. Real events, from Tahitian King Pomare V's death soon after Gauguin's arrival, to the artist having witnessed a public execution by guillotine several years earlier, likely influenced its dark subject matter. Gauguin added the Tahitian words "Arii" and "Matamoe" in the canvas' upper left. The first means "noble;" the second, "sleeping eyes," a phrase that implies "death." The notion of a human head ritually displayed in an ornate interior suggests the formality of a ruler lying in state, supported by the presence of sorrowful figures in the background. However, this scene doesn't correspond to actual accounts of Pomare V's funeral because the body wasn't decapitated. Gauguin was just as apt to fantasize about life in Polynesia as he was to document it. Bright reds, yellows, and pinks are juxtaposed with muted browns and purples to evoke a tropical sensibility. The rough, burlap-like canvas also hints at an exotic "primitivism." In his collage-illustrated book Noa Noa--which he began after his first trip to Tahiti--he included a copy of this painting and a comment that he thought of Pomare's death as a metaphor for the loss of native culture due to European colonization. Symbolist artists, including Gauguin, had a predilection for images of decapitated heads and any associated figures, such as Orpheus and John the Baptist. But in a more general sense, Gauguin also freely mixed Eastern and Western imagery. His obsession with the theme of death, which appears throughout his Tahitian paintings, is less a reference to spiritual beliefs or to what he saw around him than perhaps more significantly, how he viewed himself. Gauguin thought of himself as a martyr victimized by modern society, which compelled him to escape to a "primitive" culture.
#22. Cecilia Beaux - Twilight Confidences (1888) Cecilia Beaux’s sophisticated conception of the enterprise of a portrait painter acknowledged the multiple interactions between creator, subject, and medium. She wrote, "In this collaboration between personality, artist and material, there must be exercised infinite reconciliations, shiftings, compromises -- exchanges between the absolute -- (that is, the weight and momentum of the personality) and the flexible power of line, modelling and color. But to go into the intricacies and interdependencies of the interchange between spirit and matter . . . all of this would be an endless story."[1] Beaux's most important production during this sojourn was Twilight Confidences. Aware of the contemporary preoccupation with the quaint aspects of Breton costumes and customs, Beaux was reluctant to embrace such subjects with too much vigor. However, she remembered that she could not "eschew all dealings with 'col and coiffe.' I attempted two life-size heads, at dusk, on the beach; two girls of the merely robust type in conference or gossip -- the tones of coiffe and col mingling with the pale blue, rose and celadon of the evening sky."
#23. Emma Ciardi - Nightime Performance (XXX) Following in the footsteps of her father Guglielmo and brother Beppe, Emma Ciardi began painting as an adolescent and exhibited for the first time in 1900 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and at the Promotrice in Turin; in 1903 she participated in the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte di Venezia and took part in it almost every year after that until 1932. In addition to her landscapes and views of Venice, she also soon made a name for herself with neo-18th-century subjects which were particularly well received by the English and American public. In 1910 she organised her first solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London, followed by a second in 1913; she also had other exhibitions mounted in London by the Fine Art Society in 1928 and 1933. In the USA market she received acclaim from 1923 onwards, when she exhibited at the Howard Young Gallery in New York, which obtained exclusive rights to selling her work. Two years after her death, Emma Ciardi’s painting was celebrated in a retrospective on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Venice Biennale.
#24. Elizabeth Nourse - Tennessee Woman (1885)
Born to the Catholic household of Caleb Elijah Nourse and Elizabeth LeBreton Rogers Nourse on October 26, 1859, Elizabeth and her twin sister were the youngest of ten children. She attended the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati (now the Art Academy of the Cincinnati Art Museum) at age fifteen, and was one of the first women admitted to the women's life class offered there taught by Thomas Satterwhite Noble. In 1882, with the assistance of an art patron, she went to New York to continue her studies, briefly in the Art Students League. From 1884 – 1886, she spent most of her summers in Tennessee in the Appalachian Mountains doing watercolor landscapes. In 1887, she moved to Paris, France along with her older sister, Louise. There, she attended Académie Julian, studying under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. In 1888, her work was featured in her first major exhibition at the Societé Nationale des Artistes Français. Her subjects were often women, mostly peasants, and depictions of France's rural countryside. Though continuing to live and work mainly in Paris, Nourse travelled extensively around Europe, Russia, and North Africa painting the people she met. During the first world war, Nourse defied the tendency of most American emigres to return home and remained in Paris, where she worked to assist the war's refugees and solicited donations from her friends in the United States and Canada for the benefit of people whose lives were disrupted by the war. In 1921, she was awarded the Laetare Medal for "distinguished service to humanity" by a Catholic layperson, an annual award from Notre Dame University.
#25. Henry Fuseli - Titania and Bottom (1788) Fuseli was introduced to Shakespeare's plays during his student days in Zürich with the Swiss scholar Jacob Bodmer. A Midsummer Night's Dream held a special appeal for him, in that it explores the realms of the supernatural. In the picture Fuseli illustrates a moment from Act IV scene 1, in which Oberon, in order to punish her for her pride, casts a spell on Queen Titania, as a result of which she falls in love with Bottom, whose head has been transformed into that of an ass. Titania calls on her fairies, who are wearing contemporary dress, to attend to Bottom: Pease-blossom scratches his ass's head; Mustard-seed perches on his hand in order to assist; and Cobweb kills a bee and brings him the honey-bag. A leering young woman offers him a basket of dried peas. The young woman leading a dwarf-like creature by a string symbolises the triumph of youth over old age, of the senses over the mind and of woman over man. The hooded old woman on the right is holding a changeling newly formed out of wax. Similarly, on the left of the picture, the group of children are artificial beings created by witches. The picture draws on several artistic sources. Fuseli has adapted Titania's seductive pose from Leonardo da Vinci's Leda (c.1506, Galleria Borghese, Rome). The elves plunging into the calyx on the right are inspired by Botticelli's illustration of Canto XXX of Dante's Paradiso (c.1469). And the small girl with a butterfly head on the left derives from a type of child portrait developed by Reynolds, whereby the child's features closely resemble a cat, mouse or other small creature posed with her.
#26. E. Fortesque Brickdale - The Ugly Princess (1902) Inspired by a poem by Charles Kingsley, which concludes: “I was not good enough for man and so am given to God.” The heroine is a princess forced to become a nun after being rejected by her intended husband. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Fortescue-Brickdale was an illustrator as well as an artist, illustrating contemporary poets including Browning and Tennyson. But she also described herself as an ‘artist-craftswoman’, and produced designs for Liberty pewter-ware, stained glass and memorial statuary. As a person, she apparently appeared to be a gentle, typical spinster, though with a wicked sense of humour and a tendency towards smoking cigars and going to the races! Her work also moved with the times: at some point during the Great War, perhaps, she seems to have moved on from Pre-Raphaelitism to something much more contemporary, but there is no doubting her Pre-Raph credentials, as her paintings testify. As an illustrator and painter, Brickdale’s works are always styled in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, using vibrant jewel like colors and representative 19th century subject matter.
#1. Johannes Vermeer van Delft, "The Art of Painting" or "The Painter in his Studio" (1968): Vermeer's largest painting, and one of the only ones he never gave a way or sold, even when he was in debt. The woman they are painting is Clio, the muse of history.
#2. Michelangelo Merisi - Caravaggio, "David with the head of Goliath" (1610): On May 1606 Caravaggio was accused of murder and fled from Rome to distant lands (Naples, Sicily, Malta) to escape the price that had been placed on his head. This painting was sent to the papal court in 1610 as a kind of painted petition for pardon. Caravaggio modeled Goliath on himself, and the model for David is thought to be his studio assistant and possible lover.
#3. Henri Julien Felix Rosseau, "Carnival Evening" (1886): the first major painting by Rousseau. The painting is unique because the people seem to be lit from within (no shadows) and the landscape is flattened (no perspective).
#4. Diego Velasquez, "Las Meninas" (The Maids of Honor) (1656): When Velasquez painted Las Meninas, he had been with the royal household of Philip IV of Spain for 33 years. The king and Queen are reflected in the mirror, but the subject is the royal children.
#5. M. Jeanne Lemaire - Chariot of Fairies (XXXX) “The Fairy Chariot”, a porcerlain panel by Madelaine Lemaire was painted c 1890. Lemaire was a member of the Societe Nationale de Beaux Arts and a Member of the Legion d”honneur. She kept a famous Belle Epoque salon and inspired the character of "Madame Verdurin" in Proust’s A La Recherche du Temp Perdu. A beautifully painted whimsical piece.” NOTE: interesting to explore character of Mme Verdurin, who in “Time Past” is considered to be a poseur…read on: from character breakdown of “…Time Past” by Proust: Mme Verdurin is a poseur and salonniere who rises to the top of society through inheritance, marriage, and sheer single-mindedness”. Certainly, from a modern point of view, M. Jeanne Lemaire’s inclusion into the Beaux Arts is a mixed blessing – much of the work has been, if not dismissed, by modern critiques, than certainly questioned as reflections of taste than examples of new thought and dynamic, movement in the world of art."
#6. Jan Van Eyck - "The Arnolfini Portrait" (1434): Subjects are the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and possibly his wife (though they were married 13 years after this painting was finished). They are clearly wealthy and want to appear so (they are wearing expensive winter coats and fancy summer hats). Some think the painting was painted because Giovanni wanted something to prove his good standing as a merchant.
#7. Vincent Van Gogh, "Potato Eaters" (1885): Van Gogh chose the subject because it would challenge him. He considered it his most successful work, though many of his contemporaries criticized it. It has been stolen twice.
#8. Henri Rousseau, "Sleeping Gypsy" (1897): Interesting in the combination of cultures: an African gypsy in a desert wearing an Oriental costume, lying beside an Italian stringed instrument and jar of water.
#9. Lyubov Popova - The Philosopher (1955) Portrait of artist’s brother Pavel Sergeyevich Popova. Like Alexandra Exter, Lyubov Popova was a leader in the cubist-to-architectonique style and was called one of the “Amazons of the Avant-Garde” (from book title of same name). Also like Exter, Popova designed for stage. Of her, her friend/fellow student Vera Mukhina recalled: “L. S. had an incredibly sharp eye for life and art. She had a marvellous feeling for colour and was all in all very talented. She was the first to begin to unveil the essence of art for me. Until then I had conveyed only what I saw. But if an artist conveys only what he sees then he’s a naturalist. You have to convey what you feel and know. She made me understand that. She taught me how to look at colour, at the handling of colours in the Russian icon, for example. She was excited by everything new.
She loved to express her opinions on works of art. I was beginning to see.” Although the following is about the painting “The Violin,” [these two paintings are] similar to it in style and scope: “Her painting The Violin of 1914 suggests the development from Cubism towards the "painterly architectonics" series of 1916–1918. This series defined her distinct artistic trajectory in abstract form. The canvas surface is an energy field of overlapping and intersecting angular planes in a constant state of potential release of energy. At the same time the elements are held in a balanced and proportioned whole as if linking the compositions of the classical past to the future. Color is used as the iconic focus; the strong primary color at the center drawing the outer shapes together.”
#10. Leonardo Da Vinci, "Vitruvian Man" (1492): this classic exemplifies the intertwinement of art and science in the renaissance. Vitruvius was a Roman architect, and Da Vinci believed all proportions in architecture could be traced to the human body. Recently, doctors have concluded the model has a hernia, leading them to believe either he was working from a cadaver that died from that ailment or that it afflicted Da Vinci himself.
#11. Margaret Murray Cookesley - Quiet Corner in Tangiers (XXXX) "The number of professional women artists who painted Orientalist subjects grew as the century wore on (due in part to the increased ease and safety of travel). As might be expected, the majority stuck to safely feminine areas of representation such as topography, portraiture, children, and ethnographic types... Others, however, ventured into what we might consider to be more dangerously immoral area of Orientalist pseudo-classical nude. Whilst there were some artists whose work clearly fell into one camp rather than another, many women painted both 'feminie' cameos of Oriental daily life and nudes and odalisques. The range of subjects and styles adopted by women artists in relation to the Orient suggests that the boundaries of the field were more fluid than had been previously supposed and also indicated the changing nature of women's relationship to art. Certainly, by the 1880s, when the M.M. Cookesely was exhibiting, her pseudo-classical Oriental nudes appear to have been quietly received; her Nubian Girl leans against an urn, proudly bare-chested, clad only in an 'Oriental" drape and was shown to no great notoriety.
#12. Peter Paul Reubens, "Massacre of the Innocents" (1611) Reubens’ work depicts the episode of the biblical massacre of the innocents of Bethlehem, as related in the gospel of Matthew. It is the moment when Herod sends his soldiers to kill infants in case one of them should be the Messiah. Antwerp, where Rubens lived, was a city haunted by the horrors of war. This painting uses the biblical scene to depict Reubens’ world. The violence is shoved in our face by a theatrical presentation, at the very front of which, pressed horribly towards us, is a fleshy tangle of clawing fingers, plunging swords and murdered babies.
#13. Edouard Manet, Le Bon Bock (A Good Glass of Beer) [Study of Emile Bellot] (1873) This painting was widely identified as a French Alsatian patriot drinking his regional beer. It came to sere as a symbol of the recent loss of the Alsace-Lorraine region by France to the Germans and a liberal political symbol of national introspection. This inspired Emile Bellot to organize the Bon Bock Society in 1875.
#14. Berthe Morisot - Children With a Bowl (1886) Morisot painted what she experienced on a daily basis. Her paintings reflect the 19th-century cultural restrictions of her class and gender. She avoided urban and street scenes as well as the nude figure and, like her fellow female Impressionist Mary Cassatt, focused on domestic life and portraits in which she could use family and personal friends as models. Paintings like The Cradle, in which she depicted current trends for nursery furniture, reflect her sensitivity to fashion and advertising, both of which would have been apparent to her female audience. Her works also include landscapes, portraits, garden settings and boating scenes. Born into a family of wealth and culture, Morisot received the conventional lessons in drawing and painting. She went firmly against convention, however, in choosing to take these pursuits seriously and make them her life's work. Having studied for a time under Camille Corot, she later began her long friendship with Edouard Manet, who became her brother-in-law in 1874 and was the most important single influence on the development of her style. Unlike most of the other impressionists, who were then intensely engaged in optical experiments with color, Morisot and Manet agreed on a more conservative approach, confining their use of color to a naturalistic framework. Morisot, however, did encourage Manet to adopt the impressionists' high-keyed palette and to abandon the use of black. Her own carefully composed, brightly hued canvases are often studies of women, either out-of-doors or in domestic settings. Morisot and American artist Mary Cassatt are generally considered the most important women painters of the later 19th century.
#15. Georges Seurat, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (1886) Seurat spent over two years painting this work which represents the right bank of the bourgeoisie on La Grande Jatte. This work is the companion of his other work, Bathers At Asnieres, which depicts the left bank of the working class. The artist worked on the painting in several campaigns with a layer of small horizontal brush strokes of complementary colors. He later added small dots, also in complementary colors, that appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance. As Seurat explained, “ I want to make modern people, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color.”
#16. Max Liebermann - Old Woman with a Cat (XXXX) from the Blue Lantern blogspot:
“Max Liebermann (1847-1935) was a young man when he painted this wonderful image. Like the old woman, the wall behind her has roughened with age. Under the bright Mediterranean sun, her striped skirt looks festive and though she may be poor as evidenced by the roughness of her hands, the artist does not ask us to pity her. Though the picture is carefully posed, it is not stiff. The woman’s head is turned toward the viewer, yet it is part of the frame of the embrace holding her cat, her friend. Before he turned to painting, Liebermann, the child of a prosperous Jewish family from Berlin, has studied philosophy. No wonder, then, that he was attracted to 17th century Dutch paintings that portrayed solitary individuals, lost in contemplation. In the event, Max Liebermann and his wife Martha were deprived of the luxury of such an old age. He resigned from the Presidency of the Prussian Academy when it decided in 1933 not to exhibit the work of Jewish artists anymore, under no illusions about the intentions of the National Socialists regime. Martha, who outlived him, committed suicide in their beloved home just hours before the police were due to deport her to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.”
#17. Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night (1889) In May 1889, Vincent Van Gogh decided to enter the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where he stayed for the next year. Inspired by the landscape surrounding the asylum, he painted Starry Night in June 1889. There are several main aspects that intrigue those who view this image. 1) There is the night sky filled with swirling clouds, stars ablaze with their own luminescence, and a bright crescent moon. 2) Below the rolling hills of the horizon lies a small town. 3) There is a peaceful essence flowing from the structures. 4) This steeple casts down a sense of stability onto the town, and also creates a sense of size and seclusion. During Van Gogh's younger years he wanted to dedicate his life to evangelization of those in poverty. Many believe that this religious endeavor may be reflected in the eleven stars of the painting. In Genesis 37:9 the following statement is made: "And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made
obeisance to me." Although Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life, the aftermath of his work is enormous.
#18. Salvadore Dali, "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee" (1944) NOTE: Awaiting permissions to use this image. By rendering scenes of dreamlike irrationality with seemingly incongruous precise and naturalistic form, Dalí gives substance to subconscious visions, making his often strange content more palatable to viewers, while at the same time challenging them to consider the relationship between internal and external realities. Dream purportedly depicts Gala, Dalí’s wife, in the midst of a dream. The bee and pomegranate of the title hover below Gala’s body. The fish, tigers, and rifle all seem poised to attack her, but they clearly stand as symbols of unconscious desires. Dalí’s explicit focus on a dream as the stated content of the painting grounds his chaotic vision firmly in the Surrealist tradition. In 1962, Dalí said his painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud’s discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the
instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up.”
#19. Salvadore Dali, "The Face of War" (1940) NOTE: Awaiting permissions to use this image. This work was painted between the end of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Second World War. The painting depicts a disembodied face hovering against a barren desert landscape. The face is withered like that of a corpse and wears an expression of misery. In their mouths and eyes are more identical faces in a process implied to be infinite. Swarming around the large face are biting serpents. In the lower right corner is a handprint that Dalí insisted was left by his own hand. On war he spoke often, “Bury and unbury! Disinter and inter in order to unbury again! Such was the charnel desire of the Civil War in that impatient Spain. One would see how she was capable of suffering, of making others suffer, of burying and unburying, of killing and resurrecting. It was necessary to scratch the earth to exhume tradition and to profane everything in order to be dazzled anew by all the treasures that the land was hiding in its entrails."
#20. John William Waterhouse, "The Lady of Shalott" (1888) The work is a representation of a scene from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1832 poem of the same name. According to Tennyson's version of the legend, the Lady of Shalott was forbidden to look directly at reality or the outside world; instead she was doomed to view the world through a mirror, and weave what she saw into tapestry. One day the Lady saw Sir Lancelot passing on his way in the reflection of the mirror, and dared to look out at Camelot, bringing about a curse. The lady escaped by boat during an autumn storm, inscribing 'The Lady of Shalott' on the prow. As she sailed towards Camelot and certain death, she sang a lament. Her frozen body was found shortly afterwards by the knights and ladies of Camelot, one of whom is Lancelot, who prayed to God to have mercy on her soul. The tapestry she wove during her imprisonment was found draped over the side of the boat.
#21. Paul Gauguin - Royal End (1892) "I have just finished a severed kanak [Pacific Islander] head, nicely arranged on a white cushion, in a palace of my invention and guarded by women also of my invention." --Paul Gauguin . Writing to his friend Daniel de Monfreid, Paul Gauguin referenced in an almost offhand way this startling painting of a decapitated human head, which he made during his first stay in Polynesia in the early 1890s. Real events, from Tahitian King Pomare V's death soon after Gauguin's arrival, to the artist having witnessed a public execution by guillotine several years earlier, likely influenced its dark subject matter. Gauguin added the Tahitian words "Arii" and "Matamoe" in the canvas' upper left. The first means "noble;" the second, "sleeping eyes," a phrase that implies "death." The notion of a human head ritually displayed in an ornate interior suggests the formality of a ruler lying in state, supported by the presence of sorrowful figures in the background. However, this scene doesn't correspond to actual accounts of Pomare V's funeral because the body wasn't decapitated. Gauguin was just as apt to fantasize about life in Polynesia as he was to document it. Bright reds, yellows, and pinks are juxtaposed with muted browns and purples to evoke a tropical sensibility. The rough, burlap-like canvas also hints at an exotic "primitivism." In his collage-illustrated book Noa Noa--which he began after his first trip to Tahiti--he included a copy of this painting and a comment that he thought of Pomare's death as a metaphor for the loss of native culture due to European colonization. Symbolist artists, including Gauguin, had a predilection for images of decapitated heads and any associated figures, such as Orpheus and John the Baptist. But in a more general sense, Gauguin also freely mixed Eastern and Western imagery. His obsession with the theme of death, which appears throughout his Tahitian paintings, is less a reference to spiritual beliefs or to what he saw around him than perhaps more significantly, how he viewed himself. Gauguin thought of himself as a martyr victimized by modern society, which compelled him to escape to a "primitive" culture.
#22. Cecilia Beaux - Twilight Confidences (1888) Cecilia Beaux’s sophisticated conception of the enterprise of a portrait painter acknowledged the multiple interactions between creator, subject, and medium. She wrote, "In this collaboration between personality, artist and material, there must be exercised infinite reconciliations, shiftings, compromises -- exchanges between the absolute -- (that is, the weight and momentum of the personality) and the flexible power of line, modelling and color. But to go into the intricacies and interdependencies of the interchange between spirit and matter . . . all of this would be an endless story."[1] Beaux's most important production during this sojourn was Twilight Confidences. Aware of the contemporary preoccupation with the quaint aspects of Breton costumes and customs, Beaux was reluctant to embrace such subjects with too much vigor. However, she remembered that she could not "eschew all dealings with 'col and coiffe.' I attempted two life-size heads, at dusk, on the beach; two girls of the merely robust type in conference or gossip -- the tones of coiffe and col mingling with the pale blue, rose and celadon of the evening sky."
#23. Emma Ciardi - Nightime Performance (XXX) Following in the footsteps of her father Guglielmo and brother Beppe, Emma Ciardi began painting as an adolescent and exhibited for the first time in 1900 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and at the Promotrice in Turin; in 1903 she participated in the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte di Venezia and took part in it almost every year after that until 1932. In addition to her landscapes and views of Venice, she also soon made a name for herself with neo-18th-century subjects which were particularly well received by the English and American public. In 1910 she organised her first solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London, followed by a second in 1913; she also had other exhibitions mounted in London by the Fine Art Society in 1928 and 1933. In the USA market she received acclaim from 1923 onwards, when she exhibited at the Howard Young Gallery in New York, which obtained exclusive rights to selling her work. Two years after her death, Emma Ciardi’s painting was celebrated in a retrospective on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Venice Biennale.
#24. Elizabeth Nourse - Tennessee Woman (1885)
Born to the Catholic household of Caleb Elijah Nourse and Elizabeth LeBreton Rogers Nourse on October 26, 1859, Elizabeth and her twin sister were the youngest of ten children. She attended the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati (now the Art Academy of the Cincinnati Art Museum) at age fifteen, and was one of the first women admitted to the women's life class offered there taught by Thomas Satterwhite Noble. In 1882, with the assistance of an art patron, she went to New York to continue her studies, briefly in the Art Students League. From 1884 – 1886, she spent most of her summers in Tennessee in the Appalachian Mountains doing watercolor landscapes. In 1887, she moved to Paris, France along with her older sister, Louise. There, she attended Académie Julian, studying under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. In 1888, her work was featured in her first major exhibition at the Societé Nationale des Artistes Français. Her subjects were often women, mostly peasants, and depictions of France's rural countryside. Though continuing to live and work mainly in Paris, Nourse travelled extensively around Europe, Russia, and North Africa painting the people she met. During the first world war, Nourse defied the tendency of most American emigres to return home and remained in Paris, where she worked to assist the war's refugees and solicited donations from her friends in the United States and Canada for the benefit of people whose lives were disrupted by the war. In 1921, she was awarded the Laetare Medal for "distinguished service to humanity" by a Catholic layperson, an annual award from Notre Dame University.
#25. Henry Fuseli - Titania and Bottom (1788) Fuseli was introduced to Shakespeare's plays during his student days in Zürich with the Swiss scholar Jacob Bodmer. A Midsummer Night's Dream held a special appeal for him, in that it explores the realms of the supernatural. In the picture Fuseli illustrates a moment from Act IV scene 1, in which Oberon, in order to punish her for her pride, casts a spell on Queen Titania, as a result of which she falls in love with Bottom, whose head has been transformed into that of an ass. Titania calls on her fairies, who are wearing contemporary dress, to attend to Bottom: Pease-blossom scratches his ass's head; Mustard-seed perches on his hand in order to assist; and Cobweb kills a bee and brings him the honey-bag. A leering young woman offers him a basket of dried peas. The young woman leading a dwarf-like creature by a string symbolises the triumph of youth over old age, of the senses over the mind and of woman over man. The hooded old woman on the right is holding a changeling newly formed out of wax. Similarly, on the left of the picture, the group of children are artificial beings created by witches. The picture draws on several artistic sources. Fuseli has adapted Titania's seductive pose from Leonardo da Vinci's Leda (c.1506, Galleria Borghese, Rome). The elves plunging into the calyx on the right are inspired by Botticelli's illustration of Canto XXX of Dante's Paradiso (c.1469). And the small girl with a butterfly head on the left derives from a type of child portrait developed by Reynolds, whereby the child's features closely resemble a cat, mouse or other small creature posed with her.
#26. E. Fortesque Brickdale - The Ugly Princess (1902) Inspired by a poem by Charles Kingsley, which concludes: “I was not good enough for man and so am given to God.” The heroine is a princess forced to become a nun after being rejected by her intended husband. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Fortescue-Brickdale was an illustrator as well as an artist, illustrating contemporary poets including Browning and Tennyson. But she also described herself as an ‘artist-craftswoman’, and produced designs for Liberty pewter-ware, stained glass and memorial statuary. As a person, she apparently appeared to be a gentle, typical spinster, though with a wicked sense of humour and a tendency towards smoking cigars and going to the races! Her work also moved with the times: at some point during the Great War, perhaps, she seems to have moved on from Pre-Raphaelitism to something much more contemporary, but there is no doubting her Pre-Raph credentials, as her paintings testify. As an illustrator and painter, Brickdale’s works are always styled in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, using vibrant jewel like colors and representative 19th century subject matter.