beside the easel

Carnival procession in the 17th century, 1887 Yesterday was the birthday of French painter, sculptor and illustrator Adrien Moreau . A contemporary of Émile Friant, Moreau's oeuvre is more dramatic and focuses more on grand scenes than portraiture. He is a storyteller in the purest sense of the word, in a similar vein to Friant but with more attention to atmosphere and surrounding details. Moreau is actually another master of color, but in a style totally different than Tiepolo that uses contrast to lead the eye around the painting. In The Carnival Procession above, Moreau uses very warm light against the almost theatrical architecture behind the main figures. Shiny golden costumes separate most of the figures from the observers, while the body language and bold color itself act as a design element to lead the eye to the main two characters: the devil and the mandolin player, effectively dividing the entourage in half so that we look both in front of and behind them. The larg...

Les Amoureux, 1888 Friant is an artist I know relatively little about, admittedly, but his work is definitely worth appreciating. Born on this day in 1863, in North East France, he avoided his father's wishes to become a chemist and found his path into painting. Initially, he studied the Academic Atelier method under Cabanel but he must have found it stifling and soon discovered his own realism, a natural style that avoided stiff posing and instead focused on people just being themselves, yet still managing to capture their dignity and character. In the above painting, The Lovers we see what appears like a scene from a movie...a man and woman talking on a bridge overlooking a scenic river view. Compositionally, we never see the main subjects of a painting with their backs to the viewer, and yet their body language and facial expressions are so real, so natural, it is as if we are spying on their conversation. It is also quite rare for an artist to incorporate nature and people...