beside the easel

Man with the Cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker), 1898 Born on May 1, 1855, Cecilia Beaux was an American portrait artist from Philadelphia. Often compared to John Singer Sargent for her loose brushwork, Beaux studied in Paris under Tony Robert-Fleury and William-Adolphe Bouguereau to craft a style that was distinctly her own. Beaux developed a less formal sensibility than Sargent, except in her commissioned portraits, yet she maintains a human warmth in her subjects that is more spontaneous at times, whereas Sargent composed his paintings with an austere elegance. Where Sargent experimented with light and costume Beaux held an empathy with her sitters that reveals a more relaxed style of portraiture. Beaux was known to be a very independent and headstrong woman who lived a full life with many lovers yet never lost her sensitivity for her subjects. In Man with the Cat above, Beaux takes a rather ordinary pose and through her incredible brushwork transforms this painting into magic. He...

Leonardo's most cryptic and virtually unknown work, Salvator Mundi sold for a mind-boggling $450 million dollars at Christie's New York to break a world record, more than paying for the painstaking restoration by the incredibly skilled hands of Dianne Dwyer Modestini . Read more about her process in this CNN article . This article by Gary Meisner talks about Da Vinci's use of Golden Ration proportions within the painting. Although this kind of selling price has outraged many art critics and skeptics alike all over the world—how dare an Old Master work outsell a Van Gogh or other modern work? I'll leave the art market talk to the experts. In this post I hope to examine the painting more fully and explore how much of it is the hand of Leonardo and the rest possibly the hand of others including Melzi, among others. Am I disputing its authorship? Not necessarily. I have profound respect for Professor Martin Kemp and I'm sure he's right when he says that stand...

A Stream and a Deer, 1905 Born December 10, 1859, Peder Mørk Mønsted was a Danish landscape painter from western Denmark. Popular throughout Europe and Africa throughout his career, Mønsted clearly established himself as Denmark's greatest landscape artist for his supreme technical abilities, strong compositions and meditative peacefulness. His brushwork varied from very loose and Impressionist to a neatly detailed attention that served to heighten the sensation of presence, in contrast to much Photorealism that would come decades later to merely mimic the camera with no personality whatsoever. Mønsted's love for the countryside and nature is so seductive it lures us into his world in a direct way that I haven't quite seen before in landscape art. There is an immediacy and simplicity to his work, a sense of standing in the grass and snow that is inviting. Most landscape work from the vedute painters of Italy right up to the English of the 19th century held a deep formal...

A recent article explains how viewing art in a museum has a more powerful effect on the viewer.