beside the easel

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

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 2013 Two years ago I had an idea for a blog about art history and my favourite artists of all time, celebrating their birthdays and their great art by in-depth analysis of some of their best works. Over the course of that time I have discovered numerous artists that I never would have known even existed without this blog. I have learned so much. It is truly humbling not only to have discovered artists, but to have learned and keep learning the most important skill any artist needs in this world: observation. The ability to see. And to compose those elements into a meaningful work that truly tells a story or moves you in a unique way. The goal of this blog has been to go beyond the countless blogs out there that show all kinds of art but without context or explanation. A fresh point of view can really change your opinion about an artist, or at least see some of their work with a different perspective. In these past two years I have written about ov...

The Portrait of a Sergeant, 1874 Born on February 21, 1815 Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier was born in Lyon, France. A Classical painter known primarily for his military themes, Meissonier is someone who, within his narrow subject matter, shined as a storyteller through his incredible understanding of people and body language. His portraiture and studies of people have an insight that is absolutely captivating.Where Renaissance and Baroque artists were constrained to focus on the drama and exaltation of religion, by this era the Naturalism of everyday life is what distinguished France as the last great country of art. Meissonier was one of those great Masters. Note the use of perspective in The Portrait of a Sergeant above. Meissonier uses a warm, brick covered wall with a yellowish-grey cobble-stone pavement to frame these soldiers in their greenish-yellow uniforms, who are fascinated by the artist sketching the sergeant. Meissonier also creates depth by varying the distance and...

View of the Grand Canal and the Dogana, ca.1743 Born in Venice on January 30, 1721 Bernardo Bellotto was the nephew and student of his famous uncle Giovanni Antonio Canal , or Canaletto. Bellotto's style has a stronger use of chiaroscuro and tighter integration of the landscape whereas his uncle focused more on Venetian architecture as a distinctive splendor within the landscape. Bellotto was equally fascinated with old alleyways and crumbling Roman ruins as his Venetian roots. The other important distinction is that Canaletto remained in Venice for most of his career, venturing out only to London while Bellotto travelled to other parts of Italy and also to Germany, Austria, and Poland. Bellotto also returned on occasion to the vedute tradition of capriccio from Pannini , or painting from imagination rather than life, something Canaletto only depicted in his etchings. Above in View of the Grand Canal and the Dogana we can see Bellotto's informal and approachable eye...

A portrait is a picture in which there is something not quite right about the mouth. —John Singer Sargent Portrait of Sarah Choate Sears, 1899 Probably one of the most renown portrait artists of the last century, John Singer Sargent was born on January 12, 1856 in Florence, where his American family lived at the time. Sargent's family travelled extensively throughout his childhood, and it was his Italian influences, namely Tintoretto for his vivid brushwork that would have a lasting impact on the young artist. When Sargent trained under Carolus-Duran, a up-and-coming French painter from Lille, he taught Sargent about alla prima and the lively brushwork of Velázquez and drawing with the brush. This would lead Sargent to travel himself to Spain and study Velázquez up close, subsuming him into what would become Sargent's trademark sort of 'tight' impressionism that is often imitated today by portraitists. Despite this loose and vivacious brushwork Sargent...

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 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 ...

Portrait of Claude-Henri Watalet, 1763 Tomorrow is the birthday of French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze, born in 1725, in the east central region of France. His style of portraiture has at times a strong British influence, yet other times he is distinctly French, and other times the influence of Venetian color is highly evident. Greuze would later become eclipsed by other French giants such as David and Ingres, but what he may have lacked in consistency of style he made up for in emotion and mood, when he did get it right. His greatest strength was his draftsmanship, as his drawings that survived prove he could draw, and draw incredibly well. He had a unique cross-hatching style that is deceptively complex to imitate, and he often imbued those portraits with more character and personality than many of his very best paintings. The above portrait of Claude-Henri Watalet, respected engraver, painter, writer, art lover and expert on gardens, reveals a man highly esteemed by Greuze. The...