beside the easel

A Rainy Day in New York City, 1905 Born in St. Louis, Missouri on August 15, 1864, Paul Cornoyer was an American Impressionist painter. He studied under a scholarship at the Académie Julian in Paris under Jules Lefebvre and Benjamin Constant before eventually settling in New York years later, where his strong French influences would surface to bring about his own vivid style. Cornoyer had the uncanny ability to meld mood and color together in a way that made his architectural settings seem to speak aloud. In this post I'd like to talk about a few of his works. In A Rainy Day in New York City above, Cornoyer uses reflections and strong darks to balance warm and cool colors under an overcast sky that, despite being grey, actually has many subtle colors. The use of one-point perspective also leads our eye toward very cool distant buildings and an empty sky that brings our eye back to the architecture and pedestrians. Note the use of variance in edges, how the foreground tree i...

Boston Common at Twilight, 1886 Born on October 17, 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, Frederick Childe Hassam was an American Impressionist painter and member of the Ten American Painters . At a period in time when America was redefining itself decades after the civil war and travelling to Europe, artists and collectors became inspired by the loose brushwork and mood of this new contemporary style. Many French Impressionists were social critics making sharp statements of the change in society from agriculture to industrialization, seeking a more pure environment of an unpolluted countryside. Hassam found his niche in depicting the modern urban streets of Paris, Boston and New York, paying particular attention not only to light and color but season and mood. Hassam loved nature also, and his works reflect a fascination with texture and color, emphasizing the tangible qualities of water, grass and worn architecture. However, he also painted people, and with a keen eye that is reminiscen...

Breton Women at a Pardon, 1887 An Acedemic genre painter from France, Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret was born in Paris on January 7, 1852. Pascal had a style reminiscent of Adrien Moreau and Émile Friant in that he captured the natural everyday, especially fascinated with the customs and rituals of people from different walks of life. Looking at Pascal's body of work we see a very eclectic and often inconsistent rhythm, at times amazing and yet occasionally odd, especially in his religious-mystical work. Pascal is also noted for his pioneering work in the use of photography as reference material, a practice that many artists of the day were discovering to be a highly useful and time-saving tool. Read more about this on a post by James Gurney . Bretons are a subculture of historically Celtic-based French who live in Northwestern France. In the Breton Women at a Pardon , Pascal uses grays and muted tones to convey a peaceful, Amish-like quality, with the women in full co...

A Young Man with a Basket of Fruit (Personification of 'Summer'), ca.1650 Happy New Year! Welcome to the first post of 2013 ! January is a busy month for artists, with only November and July coming close for the sheer amount of artist birthdays. Born on December 31 and baptized on January 1, 1618 in Seville, Spain, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was a giant of the Spanish Baroque era known for his flawless figures, graceful poses, and deep colors. Murillo is unique in his range of subject matter for his time, ranging from the genre of poor young boys to religious figures, lovely women and children to aristocratic portraits. Murillo may have been among the first to portray poverty after Velázquez, who was a profound influence on his work as a young artist in his twenties. However, Murillo has an optimism, a gentle quality to his work that is tender and soothing, a sort of antithesis to Caravaggio's tenebrism which was far more distopian and dark. At times this makes hi...

A Couple Walking in the Citizens' Hall of Amsterdam Town Hall , ca. 1665 A contemporary of Vermeer yet not nearly as famous, Pieter de Hooch (pronounced Peter de HOHhuh) also known as Pieter de Hooghe was baptized on December 20, 1629— for some reason birthdates were not always recorded accurately or at all, as was the case with Vermeer also. Similar in style, it is not known whether they ever met or who influenced whom, although present day scholars believe it was Vermeer that influenced de Hooch. This genre of Dutch painting that explores everyday life, completely secular, is the one similarity they both have but if we look more carefully there are very distinct differences between these two Masters. And de Hooch, far from being the lesser of the two, is quite the contrary as we will see in these examples. De Hooch seems to have favored warm light and a warmer palette than Vermeer. In the above example, A Couple Walking in the Citizens' Hall of Amsterdam Town Hall ...

Nymphs and Satyr, 1873 If there is one artist today that hardly needs an introduction, it would be William-Adolphe Bouguereau , supreme giant of 19th century Academic art. Born on November 30, 1825 in La Rochelle on the southwest of France, his talent would define the era he lived in only to fall into obscurity for decades after his death in 1905 until as recent as the early 1980's, shockingly. Today he has the distinction of being lionized by the Art Renewal Center as one of the greatest artists of all time while at the other end of the spectrum vilified by modernists as artificially perfect and sentimental. In fact it is quite rare to see such polarization over an artist of a calibre like Bouguereau, whose bravura is difficult to equal yet at the same time thematically his work admittedly tends toward women and children, a subject matter that sold well and he had endless patience for. Over the vast array of his oeuvre, some 820 paintings, I have tried to fi...