beside the easel

La Place du Châtelet, ca. 1941 Born in Paris on December 11, 1854, Eugène Galien-Laloue was a French landscape and urban street painter. He worked under many aliases but is known mainly as Eugène Galien-Laloue. He painted mainly in gouache, taking advantage of the medium's quick drying time to produce more work while maintaining the painterly qualities that his astute Impressionism required. Although often imitated over the years by lesser artists, Galien-Laloue's work is strikingly clean and crisp...with careful lines in perspective, beautiful skies, and fashionable figures depicted in all seasons and all times of day. In La Place du Châtelet above, Galien-Laloue's immediacy and freshness of the moment is so crisp and real you can almost smell the air. That contrast of hazy cool sky with the warm glow of the Théâtre du Châtelet's lights is captivating. Galien-Laloue paints the winter trees with very liquid brushstrokes while the figures have the exact sens...

Madonna della Misericordia by Fra Bartolomeo, 1515 In this article, Bob Duggan discusses how Renaissance Art redefined culture by overturning dogma and challenging religious notions, sometimes vain but always intriguing. Based on the book The Controversy of Renaissance Art by Art History professor Alexander Nagel he explains how Humanism deeply influenced artists of the day yet were criticized for being superficial and distracting people from the intended message. The Art triumphs ultimately after the fall of Savonarola's radical puritanism and paves the way for artists to explore ideas and concepts within the scope of religion and Neo-Platonism that changed the world.