beside the easel

The Resurrection of Christ by Paolo Veronese, ca.1570 Beside the Easel is now over a year old, and having written about and analysed well over 80 Old Masters from the Renaissance to Academic, I will continue to focus on techniques and methods of great artists but with more comparison and observation. Up until now I have focused on celebrating artist birthdays and their work, but moving forward I will be also writing about art books, color palettes and color, and interesting blogs to showcase some current ideas and methods.

Self portrait Born March 8, 1869 in London, George Spencer Watson was an English Realist portrait and figure artist. Watson was a member of the prestigious Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters , whose famous alumni include artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Henri Fantin-Latour, John Singer Sargent, James Whistler and Auguste Rodin. By the time his career was in full-swing the 20th century changed art in a way that punished Realist painters and Watson's talents were not appreciated as much as they could have been had he been born a mere fifty years earlier. Although obscure considering the company he was in, Watson had a uniquely modern eye for the portrait and especially the female nude that is definitely worth looking at. In his Self-Portrait above, Watson portrays himself as an artist with uncanny self-awareness, studying himself with cautious scrutiny by the way he leans forward. Note how tightly rendered his head is, and how the...

St Sebastian, ca.1660 Born on 24 February, 1613 in Taverna , a small town in Catanzaro of southern Italy, Mattia Preti was a Baroque painter who worked in both fresco and large-scale paintings. Preti is the only major artist of success to come out of the region south of Naples, the only city besides Rome that was a hotbed of Baroque talent at the time. Having been influenced by Caravaggio and taught by Battistello Caracciolo , Preti would become a major force in Italian Baroque art, although today his name is not entirely recognized except in Italy. Preti's style is characterized by chiaroscuro with dynamic anatomy and dramatic angles, and a gift for facial expressions. I had the pleasure of observing St. Sebastian at the Capodimonte Museo in Naples back in 2010, and I have to say it is not only one of Preti's masterpieces, it is a triumph of Baroque art. Choosing a low view-point, Preti's brilliant composition is created by a sagging figure with each limb bendin...

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...

Self-Portrait of the Artist holding a Palette, ca.1635 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri , known as Guercino was born on February 8, 1591 in Cento, a small city near Ferrara. He is one of the great masters of the Italian Baroque and poet of painters. Noted for his speed and efficiency, Guercino also worked in a number of mediums with equal passion whether ink, chalk, charcoal, or oils. His nickname, which means 'little cross-eyes' in Italian, derives in part from an apocryphal childhood accident where he supposedly awoke from a deep sleep as a child from a loud scream that caused his eyes to cross. Another story says something was thrown into his eyes. At any rate, he was self-taught as an artist from as early as nine years old and by his early teens was discovered by the eldest of the Carracci where he would spend some time at the Accademia Degli Incamminati before venturing out on his own. Despite his apparent 'handicap', his vision and talent would make him a giant t...

Here's an informative video by Carmen Bambach , curator for the Met in New York on the thought process behind Michelangelo's most famous drawing: http://82nd-and-fifth.metmuseum.org/thinking-aloud

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...