beside the easel

In Time of Peril, 1897 Born on the 21st of September, 1852 Edmund Blair Leighton was an English medieval painter from London. He was known for a highly accurate and detailed realism with a vivid palette and figures with decorative costumes. Leighton's work has a strong narrative, and when he wasn't painting Medieval themes he often explored romantic concepts and, like his Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries, may have been influenced by Lord Tennyson. If we look at In Time of Peril above, Leighton creates a drama right out of a scene from a novel or drama. I love how the figures looking back at the old man direct our eye to him, while the child looks in the opposite direction toward where they are headed. By making the composition in two-point perspective, Leighton heightens the drama that they are in danger and eager to escape wherever they came from to arrive at a monastery. He creates vivid contrasts in texture between the water, the costumes of the figures, and...

Born on the 26th of October, 1859 in southern Ohio, Elizabeth Nourse was an American portrait and landscape painter. Nourse was highly regarded in her day for her social realism and as a role model for female artists, and her extensive art education encompasses schools such as Art Students League of New York and Académie Julian . This is reflected in her work which has strong Classical sensibilities while exploring the feminine 19th century New Woman with incisive genre and portraiture that rivaled many of her contemporaries. In La mere above, Nourse uses complementary colors to reinforce the bond between mother and child while balancing this with a blue that echoes the influence of Renaissance religious themes. The way the mother is posed here is so brilliant in that she is both strong and tender at the same time, and the way the drapery hangs in her lap brings to mind Leonardo. The way Nourse foreshortens the baby is unusual and interesting in its realism, s...

Pentecost, 1732 Jean Restout II was born on March 26, 1692 in Rouen, France. He comes from a long line of painters and is distinguised from his father, Jean I Restout or Jean Restout the elder (1666-1702) . Misattribution is common between them, even within wikipedia where both artists are sometimes shown as having painted the same work. Restout II studied with his uncle, the great Jean Jouvenet . In Pentecost above, Restout II depicts the 50th day after Easter, (sometimes called "White Sunday") where the Holy Spirit appears before the Apostles and Christians during the Jewish holiday known as the Feast of Weeks or Shavuot . Out of the various renditions of this holy event by other artists, Restout II's is the most impressive visually, both compositionally and in scale: the painting measures 4,65 m in height by 7,78 m in length! In the top center the Virgin Mary stands tall while balls of fire shoot out and touch the Apostles symbolizing the gift of tongues to h...

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, ca.1726 Born June 6, 1687 in Venice, Giovanni Battista Pittoni was a late Baroque/early Rococo painter. Pittoni enjoyed a popular career throughout Europe both as an artist and restorer, and at the age of 71 he became the second president of the famous Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia whose alumni include not only Tiepolo but Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Francesco Hayez, and Antonio Rotta among others. Pittoni's work is characterized by grand gesture, strong, dramatic figures and of course, being Venetian, a bold palette of beautiful colors. Look at The Rest on the Flight into Egypt above and we immediately see two interesting things: a low viewpoint, where our eye level is right about at baby Christ's yet intersects the waistline of Joseph and just below the neckline of Mary, and second, dynamic figure placement that focuses on Mary and Joseph more than baby Jesus. I love how Joseph is portrayed in true Humanist style, sculptural a...

The Birth of the Virgin, ca.1660 Born on November 19, 1607 in Antwerp, Erasmus Quellinus II was a Flemish painter and engraver who worked under Peter Paul Rubens . Erasmus came from a family of artists that profoundly influenced Flemish Baroque in the 1600's. Unlike Rubens, Erasmus had never been to Italy and so his style evolved from the influence of Rubens and others around him, including his brother, sculptor Artus Quellinus II. Although the influence of Rubens is very strong—sometimes easy to mistake—Erasmus developed into a deeper Baroque sensibility with less emphasis on color and sensuality and more on chiaroscuro and architecture. Today little is mentioned about Erasmus, especially in that he worked with Rubens for less than ten years yet became a major painter in the years after Rubens' death in 1640. In The Birth of the Virgin above, we can see here that the cluttered confusion of this composition doesn't quite have the flow and grace of his Master, Rubens....

Christian Dirce, 1897 Henryk Siemiradzki was a Polish Academic painter born on October 24, 1843. After studying painting in Russia and Munich he moved to Rome in his late twenties, where he would be known for his very large-scale paintings that rival Rubens in terms of sheer size. Siemiradzki (pronounced ShimiRADski) like many of his Russian-educated contemporaries, had a genius for multiple figure arrangement and use of natural light. Siemiradzki's attention to architectural and natural detail appears astounding from a distance, yet the way he paints detail is actually suggestive and emphasizes the appearance of texture over intricate detail. In Christian Dirce above, Siemiradzki depicts a scene from Greek mythology portrayed in the Roman arena about Dirce, wife of the ancient ruler of Thebes, martyred by being tied to the horns of a bull. In this instance, by the title of the painting, it is a Christian woman being martyred in the same fashion as Dirce. Note the elaborate ...

The Garden of the Hesperides‎, 1892 Sir Frederic Leighton was born in Scarborough, England on December 3, 1830. He is one of Britain's most well-known artists from the Victorian Age , typifying a style of Romantic sensual Academic Classicism that foreshadows Art Nouveau . Leighton gives all his figures an elegance and grace—sometimes forced— yet somehow musical to watch, a visual poetry. He has a similar sensibility to the Dutch artist of the same era: Lawrence Alma-Tadema . Leighton also has a strong sense for colour that is more organic than his contemporaries. His use of reds, oranges, yellows, greens and blues are never garish or unnatural. Portraiture was also something he was easily well-versed in, capturing his sitters with a dignity and poise that was distinctive. He often used a lovely female actress of the day as his model whose beauty still inspires today. In The Garden of the Hesperides‎ above, Leighton's feminine side dominates the composition and tone...

A Calm at a Mediterranean Port, 1770 Born on August 14, 1714, Claude-Joseph Vernet was a French Romantic painter from Avignon. Vernet's vedute are strongly influenced by painters such as Giovanni Paolo Panini and Claude Lorrain, whom both worked in Rome. Vernet distinguished himself from his contemporaries by seeking more dramatic light effects, particularly moonlight, and early dawn as well as experimenting with weather itself including fog and rain as subjects to reinforce his Romantic themes, something foreign in most landscape painting at that time. Vernet also worked mainly from imagination, using sketches as reference and incorporating some known landmarks from Rome but combining them into his own capricci but with fishermen and marine subject matter as his main themes. In A Calm at a Mediterranean Port above, Vernet's use of light and clouds is mesmerizing. Look up close and that beautiful golden yellow glaze on the sky against the blue is superb, which he co...