World Famous Paintings

Andy Warhol's Elvis Presley Prints

2009-10-12T05:11:00.001+03:00

American Pop Art Artist Andy Warhol's Elvis Presley Pop Art Paintings Posters Prints.

Double Elvis, c.1963Art Print
Warhol, Andy
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Triple Elvis, 1963 Art Print
Warhol, Andy
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Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Prints - Retro Advertisements

2009-10-12T03:30:00.000+03:00

Andy Warhol's Retro Advertisements Illustrations Prints - Campbell's Soup Condensed Tomato Soup - 1960s Retro Pop Art Advertising Poster Prints

Campbell's Soup I, 1968 Art Print
Warhol, Andy
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Campbell's Soup Can, 1965 (Green and Purple) Art Print
Warhol, Andy
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Campbell's Soup I, 1968 Art Print
Warhol, Andy
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Andy Warhol Self Portrait Posters

2009-10-12T03:19:00.000+03:00

Famous American Pop Art Artist Andy Warhol's Self Portrait Prints with Quotes.

I think everybody should like everybody Art Print

Warhol, Andy
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"I think everybody should like everybody" Andy Warhol quote print - Andy Warhol green tones self portrait poster print

The world fascunates me Art Print
Warhol, Andy
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Andy Warhol Red Self Portrait - "The world fascinates me"

Three's a Party Art Print
Warhol, Andy
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Andy Warhol Blue Self Portrait Poster Print - "But I always say, one's company, two's a crowd, three's a party"

Van Gogh's artistic expression

2009-03-01T23:15:00.000+02:00

Two Cut Sunflowers Art Print
van Gogh, Vincent
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Vincent Van Gogh found in Millet the basis of a primitive popular art, models for portraits of humanity. He made the gravity of Millet graver, I might almost say more Lutheran. The ancient Greek spirit which breathes from many of Millet's soft pencil drawings like a natural sound, gives place in him to a gigantic instinct, in relation to which the Millet form appears only as as oftening element. There is nothing classical about him; he reminds us rather of the early Gothic stone masons; the technique of his drawings is that of the old wood-carvers; some of his faces look as if they had been cut with a blunt knife in hard wood. The ugliness of his personages, the "mangeurs de pommesde terre," carries the primitive ruggedness of the older painters to the region of the colossal, where it occasionally resembles materialised phantoms of horror.

Heprojected such things as La Berceuse not for amateurs, but for common folks, and it was one of his--all too natural--disappointments, that no peasant would give himself up to sitting. In his painted portraits, the hard wood of the drawingsseems sometimes to be blent with gleaming metal. Schuffenecker owns the most masterly of his portraits of himself. No-one who has seen this tremendous headwith the square forehead, the staring eyes and despairing jaw can ever forget it. It is so full of a terrible grandeur of line, color, and psychology, that it takes away one's breath, and it is hard to know whether one is repelled by its monstrousexaggeration of beauty, or by the lurking madness in the head that conceived it.

Van Gogh's self-destruction in the cause of artistic expression is tragic, because it was a natural sacrifice, not a self-defilement, the act of a perfectly healthy consciousness, shattered by insufficient physical powers of resistance. "The more ill I am, the more of an artist do I become," he writes, with no thoughts of verse joys in his mind. He records the same simple fact with which Delacroix reckoned, and Rembrandt, "the old wounded lion with a cloth round his head,still grasping his palette." The tragic result was inevitable, because it fulfilled a natural doom. The only means by which he could escape despair, retain his self-respect, and repay the devotion of the brother who had spent so much on canvas and colors was, to make constant progress, to loosen more and more the slenderthreads that bound his individuality to a failing body, and penetrate ever more deeply into the mystery that dazzles the eyes, to give bodily substance to theartistic soul, even when it was parting soul and body. It was heroism, becausethe result was hardly doubtful to him, a peasant's heroism, because it went straighton its way without any dramatic gesture, simply and naturally. In one of hisletters Vincent speaks of a worthy fellow who died for lack of a proper doctor: "He bore it quietly and reasonably, only saying: 'It is a pity I can't have anyother doctor.' He died with a shrug of the shoulders that I shall never forget."

In some such fashion Vincent's death must be explained. Even in the early days at Arles, when Gauguin was with him, be once threatened to cast off the weary flesh. He came to himself again, and went voluntarily to the Arles asylum, where he painted some wonderful things, among others the Schuffenecker portrait of himself, the cloistered garden of the asylum with the splendid flower-beds (belong shying to Hessel), and some beautiful flower-pieces. In his letters to Theo he revealsa marvellous memory, clinging to childish recollections, as if to interpose his home between himself and the strange power that sought his life; he recovered so far, that he went to Saint Rémy, to find a new field of activity there. But his brother was in trouble, and when Vincent came to visit him in Paris he recognised his own danger, and looked about him for help. He found it in Dr. Gachet.

Gachet, who still pursues his avocation and his art robustly, had a comfortable, hospitable house at Auvers-sur-Oise, near Valmandois, where Daumier spent his lastyears of blindness. Daubigny painted there, Cézanne came thither in 1880 at Gachet's recommendation, and lived there for several years, painting many finethings; to many others the happy land and the old artist-doctor's table were a solace. Even Van Gogh seemed to have painted himself into health at Auvers. He came in the middle of 1889. His Auvers pictures have not, of course, the intoxicating richness of strong colour revealed to him by the south; but on the other hand, he achieved an unprecedented development in his play of line. His own portrait and his portrait of Gachet are purely rhythmic works, quite free from hardness, marked by a perfectly conscious application of his unrivalled talent for decorative tasks. In the roses, and in the arrangement of chestnut leaves and blossoms, a happy harmonious spirit seems to be weaving its beautiful dreams, remote from all dramatic violence.

Van Gogh - nature of all modern color theories

2009-03-01T23:03:00.000+02:00

Landscape with Olive Trees Art Print
van Gogh, Vincent
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We must grasp Van Gogh thoroughly, to recognise the relative nature of all modern color theories, and above all, to get some definite idea of the inscrutable laws that govern the quantitative distribution of color-masses. Roughly speaking, it might almost be supposed that the quantity of a colour juxtaposed to one or more other colors, is of greater importance than the quality, and behind this is concealed again, the old, inestimable importance of composition in a picture. Hence it may perhaps be said that Van Gogh finest work is Le Bon Samaritain, which is a free rendering of Delacroix' lithograph. In this work of from 60 to 70 cm. Van Gogh exhausted his whole palette. The dominant is blue, and to this all the colors of the picture are brought into relation. It begins in the background, which contains in nuce all those elements that are brought into vigourous contrast in the dramatic group. The light blue tones, which also distinguish the famous contemporary ravine-pictures painted at Arles, predominate in the background. They are enriched with white, occasionally with pink, light green, and to the left, with dark orange. The contours of the mountains rise in delicate gradations to pale pink, and at the highest point to pale green, and are given in waved brush-strokes, which accentuate the direction of the inner hatchings. The group is composed of the somewhat rusty but brilliant colour of the mule,(produced by a mixture of lac de garance, white and blue), the Prussian blue of the wounded man's drapery, and the orange of the Samaritan's. But such dry enumerations as these fail to suggest any idea of the richness of effect, even when reinforced by our excellent reproduction. The beast in particular, whose strangely deep colour is the focus of the whole picture, defies description. It forms a mysterious ground tone for the still more mysterious flesh-tones of the sufferer and the dark skin of the Samaritan. The blue swells arvellously from the back ground to the foreground, i.e., from above to below, reaching its utmost volume in the Samaritan's breeches, where it blends into a resonant chord with the orange of the tunic, and the greenish yellow tones of the legs. On the other side, the orange stands on a field made up of strong, bright green splashes of colour on the fading blue. Here the light pink of the road winds upwards into the mountains, is repeated in the soil of the foreground, and above near the pale green of the cleft etween the mountains; it strikes a stronger note in the border of the Samaritan's urban, where it leads up from the tawny flesh tones to the isolated deep-red of the fez, that glows ruby-like in the centre, the fiery eye of the picture.

Apart from Delacroix and Daumier, Van Gogh, when he sought inspiration from others in composition, relied on Millet with a sort of fervid veneration--on that Millet, be it understood, who comprised Daumier. Theodore van Gogh's widow at Bassum has a number of drawings, which Vincent borrowed more or less from Millet. He looked upon Millet, not as a rival to be surpassed, but as the embodiment of a doctrine, almost of a religion, in which he believed. " Rembrandt and Delacroix," be wrote, "painted the person of Jesus, Millet his teaching."

Of this teaching, we are here concerned only with those traditional elements to which Millet gave form. For Van Gogh it was a kind of haven, and I pass over the superfluous question how much he added to Millet, or Millet to him. It was not poverty of invention that drew him to Millet and Delacroix, but rather an excess of productive energy, which he was only able to curb by keeping it within the limits of a prescribed alien form. Let us hear what he says himself in one of his letters:

"Eussé-je eu les forces pour continuer, j'aurais fait des saints et des saintes femmes d'après nature, qui auraient paru d'un autre âge: ç'auraient été des bourgeois d' à présent, ayant pourtant des rapports avec des chrétiéns fort primitifs. --Les émotions que cela cause sont cependant trop fortes. J'y resterais.

"Mais plus tard, plus tard je ne dis pas que je ne viendrai pas à la charge. . . . Il ne faut pas songer à tout cela, il faut faire, fût-ce des études de choux et de salade pour se calmer, et après avoir été calmé, alors . . . ce dont on sera capable."

Well, he painted his saints, after all. Every picture he painted was holy ecstasy, even when the theme was a bunch of lettuces.

Express Van Gogh in terms of art

2009-03-01T22:47:00.000+02:00

It is difficult to express Van Gogh in terms of art. It is always absolutely vital, because it is power; and power is always beauty. His harmonies are of a physical order, and therefore outside the melancholy or the delight to which the mind is stirred by other sorrowful or cheerful pictures. The reaction induced by his works is at first a purely physical one. The planes of his canvases, which seem to have been produced, not by brushes, but by the stonemason's implements, scream, and we are sometimes tempted to scream in unison, just as we feel inclined during a storm to shout aloud with the thunder. It is the cry of the human animal, whose blood is quickened by the enigmatic relation of the individual to the cosmos, who yearns to penetrate into his environment, into Nature, and destroys either this or himself if he does not succeed. Van Gogh did not produce his art; it was as much a part of himself as is some material function a part of the body; it was not something external to him, but his closest idiosyncrasy, joy or suffering. To this man, who first turned to art in his later years, and then perhaps only as to a pisaller, it was apparently a thing inherent, with which perforce he had to live and die.

That this pathological phenomenon should have resulted in aesthetic achievement is no more remarkable than that Nature, of whatever kind it may be, produces beauty. Van Gogh regarded a striving after perfection as a natural morality. He was a cleanly animal. He owed more to Daumier and to Delacroix than to all the Impressionists. Here the peasant, who regretted that Paris did not possess more "tableaux en sabots," found a kindred spirit. When he took the group of the three topers with the child at the table, from Daumier Buveurs,† he did Daumier the highest honour in his power and--like Delacroix, when he used Raphael's composition in the Vatican for his Heliodorus in St. Sulpice--added to his own laurels by producing one of his most individual pictures. He found in Daumier the justification of his own linear exaggerations, the flaming play of his aspiring lines, that seem to crouch in order to strike more surely. He had also a great admiration for Cézanne, and an unbounded veneration for Monticelli, to whom he was drawn more closely by that magic South where Cézanne painted his fruits and the old gipsy his marvellous colour fantasies. In a letter to Aurier, containing perhaps the most complete revelation of an artist's psychology ever penned--it appears in Aurier Œuvres Posthumes--he almost indignantly assigns the praise awarded to himself to Monticelli, even ranking Jeannin's and the aged Guost's flower-pieces above his own works. He esteemed Meissonier, because Mauve thought highly of him, and venerated Ziem, because Ziem venerated Delacroix. This naivete does not, however, preclude very delicate appreciations. He speaks of a Monticelli at Lille, "autrement riche et certes non moins français que le Départ pour Cythère de Watteau," and opines that no other artist has approved himself so directly the heir of Delacroix, though Monticelli received Delacroix' teaching at secondhand, through Diaz and Ziem. . . .

These few lines also contain all the physiology of Monticelli that was valuable to Van Gogh. He made his start under the spell of the Impressionists. Pissarro had the same influence upon him as upon Gauguin and later upon Bernard. His Quatorze Juillet à Asnières, one of the very best of his pre-Arlesian pictures, is painted very thinly, the colour divided into minute green and yellow particles on a gray ground. At Arles he came to think this technique insufficient. He was temperamentally incapable of consistent work on this system, by which Signac fixed the vapourous quality of Southern landscape; and further, he had not time for it. The exact opposite attracted him in Monticelli: the heavy fabric of loaded colour, with which the old magician produced his thousand accidents. Van Gogh exaggerated this, but at the same time, he simplified it, he rejected what was petty and incidental, reduced the palette to single pure colours, laid on in large, coarse fragments, and added his own temperament as the amalgam.

There are many pictures in a single picture by Van Gogh. His brush strokes not only give things that force themselves upon the eye from a distance with elemental power, but they combine to produce an extraordinary play on the surface, forming a free and varied ornament and giving a mysterious animation to the background, as well as a rare splendour of texture to things that stand out against it in sharply defined contours. Fundamentally it is, of course, nothing but a development of the granulations which give the quality to every surface in painting; a special structure of the brush-strokes, in short, that development of the manual element in brushing which the Venetians began; that which distinguishes the later painting from that of the Primitives; that which, apart from colour and composition in the vulgar sense, delights us in Titian and Tintoretto, Rubens and Watteau, Delacroix and Monet, that on which the majority of contemporary painters base the whole of their art. But Van Gogh uses it as a means which determines the character of his pictures more clearly than any other element in them, a means whereby he concentrates his material in a colour-extract of all possible materials. Nothing was farther from his purpose than optical illusion; no modelling tempts us to believe in a corporeal presence, his picture is always as flat as a Gobelin tapestry; but it has a richness no textile could approach, even if woven of gold and precious stones, and this richness is so organic, that it affects us like Nature itself. His palette may be told off on the fingers of one hand. Prussian blue, pure yellow to orange, emerald and Veronese green, and red were to him what white, gray, rose-colour and black were to Velazquez, lemon yellow, pale blue, and pearl gray to Vermeer.

The problem of complementary colours was in his hand, so to speak, rather than in his head; it did not dominate him. He ventured on the most daring combinations, juxtaposed a resonant Prussian blue and a tender red, but chose his quantities so unerringly that his most audacious effects seem the most natural. He never used blue without an accompanying yellow, or his luminous red without orange. M. Aghion's extra-ordinary picture, the avenue with the Roman tombs at Arles, is a marvellous example of this system. Into the two mighty rows of trees, that stand in front against the blue, and behind run into the pure yellow of the sky, brought to a narrow strip by the perspective, shoot streams of orange tinged with red, forming deep blood-red pools upon the ground. It is a colossal combat of colours, that take on an almost objective significance, so convincing is the manner in which they are used.

Van Gogh - Influence of Paris and Pissarro

2009-03-01T22:35:00.000+02:00

The influence of Paris upon Van Gogh was not altogether happy; it sought to divide a being who was an absolute unity. He made the acquaintance of the Impressionists, whose analytic art was the antithesis of his own, which aimed, above all things, at concentration, but whose logical deductions forced themselves upon his intelligence. The pictures he painted at this time betray the influence of Pissarro; when he came to know and reverence Seurat, he even attempted division. The best picture he painted in Paris was the Quatorze Juillet, to which I shall return presently; in others--the medallion, for instance, now belonging to Vollard--his individuality seems entirely obscured. In all we are conscious of an arrest of his powers, the uncertainty the vast city induced in him (he speaks of it in later letters referring to this time). But we must not think of Van Gogh as the peasant, falling under the wheels in the city. Rather did his danger lie in his remarkable instinct for culture, eager to embrace everything, and insistent upon order, where disorder is habitual in all relations of life. Julien Leclerc, who made his acquaintance in 1888, describes him as a nervous, chilly individual, suggestive of Spinoza, and concealing a violent intellectual activity under an exterior reserve.

Vincent breathed freely again, when he found himself once more among peasants at Arles. His letters to Emile Bernard and to his brother, published by the "Mercure de France," reveal his conception of art, a conception which would only have excited the laughter of the boulevardier. "Christ," he says, "was the greatest of all artists, because He made immortal men, and not works of art, because His words, which He, as a grand seigneur, disdained to set down in writing, were mightier in their power over others than marbles and pictures, because He knew that they would endure, when the forms of the world in which He lived had long passed away." Here we have the whole of Van Gogh, the man who believed, even more fervently than in art, in a tremendous pure creative power given to men to make others happy; which urges the individual not to gratify his own vanity by his art, but to find satisfaction in the hard fate of a great artist such as he himself was. He repeatedly lamented to his brother, that pictures and statues were not living things. It depressed him to think "that life is created with less effort than art."

It was natural that Millet should influence him: Millet, whose attitude to Christianity was akin to his own, and who invented the divine gesture of his Sower to express it. But Millet was made of other stuff. He enjoyed the Nature he painted. The gravity that breathes from his pictures is that of the country man, familiar with hard work, but confident of its results. Van Gogh is all harsh tragedy; he did not go to Nature; she dragged him to her. To be nearer to her, he, the Dutchman, nourished in the northern calm of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Vermeer, went to the wonderland of France, to Provence, where the sun bathes the earth in pure colour, and men and things are still as simple and as great as when the Romans built their arenas there.

Frans Hals was the Dutch element in Van Gogh, who always retained his peculiar vehement handling. With all the impetuosity Frans Hals employed to give life and colour to his portraits, with all the turbulent vigour Daumier used to kindle his darkest sauce to flames, and with an irresistible impulse towards symbolism, Van Gogh rushed upon the new country, in which all the conditions were sharply opposed to those of his own nation: flame met flame. All his pictures are battle; battle in the literal sense; he painted, buffeted by the mistral; the effects he sought lasted sometimes but a few moments, and had to be got in one sitting. And even more urgently was he driven forward by the frantic fire within, that blazed high under the burning skies above him: creating, creating--"Vite, vite, vite et pressé comme le moissonneur qui se tait sous le soleil ardent, se concentre pour en abattre."

Van Gogh seemed hardly to paint his pictures, but rather to breathe them on to the canvas, panting and gasping. We may take it that he painted about three-fifths of his pictures at Arles. His stay here lasted from 1887 to the middle of 1889. In this space of a little over two years, he painted several hundred pictures. These were slight superficial manifestations, implying long and ex hausting preparation. Van Gogh may aptly be called a Vulcan; the phrase a Romantic writer applied to Delacroix was no less descriptive of him: he carried about a sun in his head and a hurricane in his heart. But in his case, a certain pathological significance must be read into the poetic words. All that this man undertook was carried to a terrific pitch. It is gruesome to see him paint--a kind of orgy, in which the colours were splashed about like blood. He did not paint with hands, but with naked senses; special organs were given him.

He became one with the Nature he created, and painted himself in the flaming clouds, wherein a thousand suns threaten the earth with destruction, in the startled trees that seem to cry aloud to Heaven, in the awful immensity of his plains. He seems sometimes to have made himself a hole in the earth and to have painted from it. This was how he executed the picture belonging to the younger Bernheim, which so delighted Monet, Les Coquelicots, a landscape without a sky, a kind of microscopic slide, showing a bit of fruitful earth. He ventured upon still-life, the genre in which Cézanne did his best work. Van Gogh's idea was to calm himself with these essays. He was fond of setting a fruit-basket diagonally across the canvas and filling it with apples. With the great Cézanne these subjects were actually "still-life," a splendid and grandiose version of the Dutch "nature morte," the most remarkable creation of a brilliantly selected palette.

With Van Gogh, the term "still-life," applied to these amazingly vital masses of fruit seems almost an irony. Vallotton owns one of the "sedatives," as Vincent called them. The apples glow, they seem to be on the point of bursting; the whole essence of their species seems to be concentrated in them; a piece of furious vitality has fallen by chance into this basket. We marvel at the extraordinary and unerring taste that has placed the basket thus and not otherwise, and piled the fruits just in this fashion. We are often surprised at Cézanne's arbitrariness, his indifference to questions of arrangement in spite of his careful calculation of effects. In the wildest of Van Gogh's fantasies one can always trace a strong, methodical hand, co-ordinating images and welding them into pictures, occasionally by an almost superhuman effort, and often achieving extraordinary delicacy the while. M. Maurice Fabre Gipsies with their van, M. Schuffenecker Route de Provence with the mail-coach, and M. Hessel Drawbridge are lyric harmonies full of the most dainty passages, in which the painter's temperament only serves to make the grace he saw as vital as possible. Of course we must not look for sentimen tal charm in this grace, and we must accept the means of which it makes use.

Van Gogh: up to his thirtieth year had not found his vocation

2009-03-01T22:22:00.000+02:00

Van Gogh was born at Groot Zundert on March 30, 1853, and up to his thirtieth year had not found his vocation. Everything and nothing revealed the artist in him; everything, because he had within him a consciousness of the divine fire, a veritably elemental craving to express himself; and nothing, because painting by no means presented itself to him as the natural manifestation of this craving. He was of the stuff of which, in earlier days, the great benefactors of the human race were made; he was essentially an idealist, consumed with a yearning affection for humanity, a man who, under all circumstances, would always have been eager to do good. A natural inclination, the sole commercial element in which was a desire to occupy himself usefully with beautiful things, led him as a young man to seek employment with art-dealers. For several years he was with the well-known firm of Goupil in London, Paris, and the Hague. In 1876 he renounced business; and, obeying his dearest instincts, became a teacher in a school in England, working till the end of the year at Ramsgate and at Isleworth. Difficulties of all kinds only served to strengthen his convictions, and finally to make him resolve to extend his sphere of usefulness by becoming a clergyman. He was a Protestant; his father, the pastor of a small congregation, encouraged him in his determination, and in 1877 Vincent went to Amsterdam to begin his theological studies. But the struggle with all the forms and superficialities that overlie the essentials of faith, became too irksome to him. These were dark days; he felt impelled to change his calling once more; his family looked upon him as a castaway. The following year he left his native land again, this time for Brussels, and accepted a mission from the Protestant congregation to the workmen in the Borinage, reading the Scriptures to them, and expounding the primitive Gospel as he himself understood it.

This period, about the year 1880, was a decisive one in his life. His experiences among his miners were those of every warm-hearted person who is brought into contact with miners for the first time. Intelligent enough not to blind himself to the fact that his unpractised speech could offer little indeed to these mute victims of a sombre lot, everything that he saw increased his longing for a medium of expression; for him there was but one idea in these surroundings, where everything tended naturally to become a symbol to him; this was, to show his sympathy by some means or the other. He did so by recording what he saw on paper. Thus, that which had thrust him from one calling into another, from one country into another, became a means of salvation to him.

This time his choice was final. In 1881 we find him again in Holland with his parents in the little village of Etten in North Brabant, drawing everything that came to his hand. One of his cousins was married to the painter, Anton Mauve. Mauve's advice was sought, and he took Vincent into his studio at the Hague. Here Van Gogh learned to paint. But the pupil and the teacher did not get on well together--which is hardly surprising! Anything Van Gogh could have learnt from Mauve must have been acquired in a few weeks! His brother Theodore gave him the means to set up a tiny studio of his own at the Hague. Here his teachers were those great Dutchmen of the seventeenth century, who silently proclaim their immortal tenets in the Mauritshuis, rather than his contemporaries. In 1883 he returned to the country, painting those powerful studies of Brabant peasants, in whose faces he discovered his own original physiognomy. The Mangeurs de Pommes de Terre dates from this period--he painted it at Nuenen in 1885--the grandest portrait ever painted of this être sacré de pure vérité, as Van de Velde calls the peasant in his beautiful study, Du Paysan en Peinture. Earlier painters of rural subjects had exercised their wit, their sense of the grotesque, their cynicism upon him; the modern who misread Millet sought in him a legitimate outlet for sentimental emotion; to the aestheticism of a Huysmans he was simply repulsive. Van Gogh saw in him a Titanic healthfulness, rising like some rugged monument out of the prevailing corruption of the times.

Even then the real Van Gogh was complete. But he would not trust himself. In 1885 he was a pupil of the Academy at Antwerp for a few months. It was perhaps here that he conceived his gloomy prison-yard scenes. In 1886 he at last went to France, where the quality of his art that still lay dormant, colour, likewise developed with amazing rapidity. Here be found the few friends of his life, or rather they found him in the little shop in the Rue Clauzel belonging to Père Tanguy, the only dealer who took up his pictures. Van Gogh commemorated him afterwards in the fine portrait belonging to Rodin, of the man against a wall hung with Japanese coloured prints. The chief of these friends were Gauguin and Emile Bernard. Vincent worked for a time with the latter in Cormon's studio, which Lautrec had quitted the year before.

Lippi Poster Print Adoring Angel

2009-01-31T21:35:00.000+02:00

Adoring Angel Print

Filippino Lippi

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Raphael Madonna Print Cowper Madonna Poster Print

2009-01-31T21:25:00.000+02:00

Cowper Madonna Print

Raphael

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Raphael Madonna of the Chair Print Poster

2009-01-31T21:12:00.000+02:00

Madonna of the Chair Print

Raphael

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Annunciation Print Poster Leonardo da Vinci

2009-01-31T21:00:00.000+02:00

Annunciation Print

Leonardo da Vinci

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Bianchi Madonna Print Poster Mother and Child Print

2009-01-31T20:44:00.000+02:00

Mother and Child Print

Riccardo Bianchi

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Filippo Lippi Madonna Print Poster Madonna delle Roccie

2009-01-31T20:36:00.000+02:00

Madonna delle Roccie, Particolare Print

Filippo Lippi

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Raphael Sistine Madonna Print Poster

2009-01-31T20:15:00.000+02:00

Sistine Madonna Print

Raphael

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Sano di Pietro Madonna and Child Print

2009-01-31T19:58:00.000+02:00

Madonna and Child Print

Sano di Pietro

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Jan Vermeer Print Poster with a Pearl Earring

2009-01-31T19:03:00.001+02:00

Girl with a Pearl Earring Print

Jan Vermeer

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Bruegel The Tower of Babel Print Poster

2009-01-31T18:54:00.000+02:00

The Tower of Babel Print

Bruegel the Elder

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Leonardo da Vinci La Scapigliata Print Poster

2009-01-31T18:46:00.000+02:00

Female Head (La Scapigliata), c.1508 Art Print
Leonardo da Vinci Posters & Prints
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Famous Paintings of Chardin

2007-11-17T01:45:00.000+02:00

Baltimore, MUSEUM OF ART: "Les Osselets."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Still Life" (several).
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "Still Life."
Cincinnati, EWARDS COLLECTION: "Still Life."
Dublin, NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND: "Les Tours des Cartes," "The Governess."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "La Serinette."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Supplies for Lunch," "Woman Knitting."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: A number of examples.
Ottawa, NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA: "Still Life."
Paris, LOUVRE: "Le Bénédicité," "La Pourvoyeuse," "L'Enfant au Toton," "La Mère Laborieuse."
Philadelphia, JOHNSON COLLECTION: Probably the largest group of Chardin's works in the United States.
Philadelphia, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Princeton, UNIVERSITY MUSEUM: "Attributs de Peintre,""Attributs d'Architecte."
St. Louis, CITY ART MUSEUM: "Le Gobelet d'Argent."
Stockholm, NATIONAL MUSEUM: "La Toilette de Matin," "Le Bénédicité."
Vienna, LIECHTENSTEIN GALLERY: "La Gouvernante,""La Garde Attentive."
Washington, CORCORAN ART GALLERY: "Woman with a Saucepan."
Washington, PHILLIPS MEMORIAL GALLERY: "A Bowl of Plums."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Little School Mistress," "The House of Cards."

Le Bénédicité by Chardin

2007-11-17T01:42:00.000+02:00

WHAT the painters, Watteau, Nattier, Boucher, Fragonard, did in commemoration of the court life of their century, Chardin did for the life of that lower class which was its undercurrent. Virtually in that station into which he had been born, he lived and worked and died. In his still-lifes he has imbued the simplest and most homely objects with arresting dignity, endowing them with a warmth that was of his own kindly, generous, and simple nature. Portraits, his still-lifes might be called, of people.

And in his genre pictures he has granted to the humble people of his own class a greater dignity than to the great of France their own appointed painters would concede. And on what Chardin saw and felt--on what Chardin himself through the simple integrity of his own nature was--the final happiness of social man depends.

Chardin - French School

2007-11-17T01:37:00.000+02:00

CHARDIN was born in a poor quarter of the neighborhood of the Rue de Seine, Paris, the second son of a master joiner and maker of billiard tables. His father, who had hoped that all his sons would follow in his profession, reluctantly permitted Siméon to take up art in the studio of the academician, Casus, a teacher of repute. But it was his second master, Coypel, who permitted him that freedom to pursue his own work in his own way through which he came to behold as though for the first time the immediate realities of the life around him. His paintings had an immediate popular appeal, and upon their first exhibition at the Academy elicited the praise from critics that "a new master has arisen who rivals the Dutch painters." Chardin was unanimously elected to the Academy, with the special consideration, in recognition of his poverty, of having his entrance fees reduced.

Chardin's first marriage, postponed because of his poverty, was of short duration. His wife's death left him with two children to care for. In 1744, after nine years of widowerhood, he married a widow of some substance. She cared for him tenderly until, yielding to increasing infirmities, he passed quietly away at the age of eighty years.

Famous Paintings of Nattier

2007-11-17T01:33:00.000+02:00

Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Portrait of Mlle. de BourbonConti."
Buffalo, CLIFTON COLLECTION: "Portrait of Mlle. de la Borde."
Cincinnati, MUSEUM ASSOCIATION: "Portrait of Mme. Thérèse de la Martinière."
Cleveland, SEVERANCE COLLECTION: "Mme. Henriette de France as Diana."
Haverford, MUCKLÉ COLLECTION: "Portrait of Henriette de Bourbon."
London, WALLACE COLLECTION: "Portrait of the Countess of Tillières."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Lady."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of the Vicomtesse de Polignac," "The Princess of Condé as Diana."
Stockholm, GALLERY: "The Duchess of Orleans as Hebe."
Versailles, PALACE: "Portrait of Marie Leczinska," "Portrait of Madame Sophie."

Portrait of Madame by Sophie Nattier

2007-11-17T01:29:00.000+02:00

ENTIRELY in keeping with Nattier's purposeful flattery, with the general vainglory of his patrons and the particular wishfulness of the young everywhere and always, Nattier, commissioned by Louis XV to paint the portraits of the five princesses, his daughters, showed the youngest of them, Sophie,--then a schoolgirl at the Abbey Fontevrault--as the mature woman that we see.

"Madame Sophie" is Sophie-Elizabeth-Justine, fifth daughter of Louis XV and Marie Leczinska. During the period of the three youngest princesses' education at the Abbey Fontevrault, the king sent Nattier to paint their portraits as a surprise gift to their mother. The daughters of Louis XV and Marie Leczinska his queen were named Mesdames Sophie, Victoire, Louise, Adelaide, and Elizabeth. Their portraits hang at Versailles.

Nattier - French School

2007-11-17T01:26:00.000+02:00

JEAN-MARC NATTIER received his first instructions in drawing and painting from his father. Although his skill in portraiture was early in evidence, his first important commission was the engraving of the Rubens' paintings in the Luxembourg Palace for Louis XIV. In 1716 he traveled to Amsterdam to paint the portrait of Peter the Great, and to the Hague where he painted the Czarina. Reduced to financial straits by a prolonged study of the Dutch masters, the repercussions of the bursting of the John Law bubble left him with no resources but his talent. He promptly turned it to account in portraiture; and winning favor from the court of Louis XV, succeeded the painter Raoux, on his death, as the favored painter of the fashionable world.

Nattier served his patrons well. To flatter his subjects had become his aim; and by the delicacy of his drawing and color he achieved it. Employing a time-honored expedient of portrait flatterers he bestowed classical divinity on his sitters, and thereby on the court itself the glory of Olympus.

Nattier outlived his vogue. He died in obscurity in 1766.

Famous Paintings of Watteau

2007-11-17T01:17:00.000+02:00

Berlin, PALACE: "Fête Champêtre," "Departure for the Island of Cythera."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "La Perspective."
Chicago, EPSTEIN COLLECTION: "Portrait of Jean Francois Pater."
Cleveland, PRENTISS COLLECTION: "The Village Bride."
Edinburgh, NATIONAL GALLERY OF SCOTLAND: "Fête Champêtre."
London, WALLACE COLLECTION: "Return from Hunting."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Le Mezzetin."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Paris, LOUVRE: "Gilles," "Jupiter and Antiope."
Philadelphia, WIDENER COLLECTION: "Woman Asleep."
Potsdam, MUSEUM: "L'Amour Paisible," "L'Enseigne de Gersaint."

Fête Champêtre by Watteau

2007-11-17T01:13:00.000+02:00

FROM Murillo to Watteau; from the fervent unrealities which were the solace of the rulers of decaying empire, to the triumphant, light-hearted pageantry of make-believe of a court too blinded by wealth to care where wealth derived from or to think where play might lead. From Spain to France. How devastatingly does art betray its time and place, and the minds and moods and circumstances of its sponsors:

The world's a theater, the earth a stage,
Which God and nature do with actors fill.

The wise have known this. The French court, lacking wisdom, built for itself a theater within that larger theater, the world. And little guessing to what role in the larger drama their own acts predestined them, played on. Watteau was perhaps no wiser than the court he served, but he had eyes. And with the compelling realism of great art, he gave us in "Fête Champêtre" just what the French court was: life once too much removed.

Watteau - French School

2007-11-17T01:10:00.000+02:00

JEAN-ANTOINE WATTEAU was born at Valenciennes in Flanders, the son of a carpenter. Yielding to the boy's precocious talent for drawing, his father most unwillingly sent him, when fourteen, to study with an obscure local painter. To escape the importunities of his father, the boy fled to Paris where his eventual sufferings from hunger and cold laid the foundation of consumption from which, at the age of thirty-seven, he died. His drawings attracted the attention of Claude Gillot, a painter and engraver, who introduced to the young Watteau those subjects to which the pupil's own charm of imagination were to lend such lasting distinction.

Through his friendship with the great financier, Crozat, he was to enjoy for the remainder of his life that luxury to which his eyes were attuned. Wearied at last by the restraints and excitements of fashionable life, he left Crozat's friendly roof. His illness had by now so far advanced that he was beset by a depression of spirit which never left him. To seek the counsel of a noted London physician, he crossed the channel to England. He returned to France and died there.

Watteau was by nature both sensitive and wild, a product of the France of his day. He was the prototype of the school of distinguished court painters who came to record to the very moment of its tragic close an era of such reckless pleasure as no ruling class, pray God, will ever know again.

Famous Paintings of Murillo

2007-11-17T01:02:00.000+02:00

Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "The Assumption."
Cincinnati, MUSEUM ASSOCIATION: "St. Thomas of Villanueva Dividing His Clothing Among the Beggar Boys."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "The Immaculate Conception."
Glasgow, GALLERY: "The Infant St. John Playing with a Lamb."
Guadalajara, Mexico, CATHEDRAL: "Assumption of the Blessed Virgin."
Jenkintown, Pa., FISHER COLLECTION: "The Holy Family."
Kansas City, NELSON GALLERY: "The Little Conception."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "St. John and the Lamb," "The Holy Family."
Los Angeles, FISHER COLLECTION: "Our Lady Kneeling."
Madrid, PRADO: "The Adoration of the Shepherds," "St. John the Baptist."
Minneapolis, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "The Pilferer Alarmed."
Montreal, VAN HORNE COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Cavalier."
New York, HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA: "St. Francis of Assisi."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of Don Andres de Andrade y Col."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Pride's Crossing, Mass., FRICK COLLECTION: "Self-Portrait."
Paris, LOUVRE: "The Immaculate Conception," "The Young Beggar."
Philadelphia, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Some examples.
Riverside, Calif., HUTCHINGS COLLECTION: "Immaculate Conception with a Mirror."
St. Louis, CITY ART MUSEUM: "Portrait of a Man."
San Diego, MUSEUM: "Penitent Magdalen."
San Francisco, STERN COLLECTION: "A Girl with a Basket of Chickens."
Seville, CATHEDRAL: "St. Anthony of Padua Visited by the Infant Savior."
Youngstown, WARNER COLLECTION: "Madonna and Child."

The Immaculate Conception by Murillo

2007-11-17T00:59:00.000+02:00

PIOUS and cautious by nature, and living in a period when the activities of the Inquisition were to be feared, Murillo, in the painting of religious subjects, sought and followed minutely the instructions of the authorities. His religious symbolism is the approved orthodox symbolism of his day. The details of this version of "The Immaculate Conception" are based on the verses in the Book of Revelation: "And there appeared a great sign in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." The crown of stars, it will be noted, is omitted.

Of Murillo's versions of this subject, "The Immaculate Conception" in the Louvre is the most popular. His Madonnas were new to Spanish art; they were Andalusians "idealized" (that's the accepted term) or sentimentalized to a degree that was new in the sacred art of his country. Yet, though his world-wide reputation rests mainly upon these devotional pictures, he is perhaps to be more fairly judged by his paintings of beggars and peasants. Many of these are in the United States.

Esteban Murillo - Spanish School

2007-11-17T00:56:00.000+02:00

BARTOLOMÉ, ESTÉBAN MURILLO was born at Seville of poor parents. Left an orphan at the age of ten, he was adopted by an uncle who, happily encouraging his interest in drawing pictures, eventually placed him in the studio of a local artist. Just as potential American Murillos or "inglorious Miltons" of the brush are today earning a precarious livelihood at our World's Fairs by sketching for the public, so the young Murillo occupied himself at the weekly fairs in Seville. With the little money that he could at last accumulate, he set off on foot for Madrid. He brought himself to the attention of Velasquez who, consistent with his generous nature, helped him.

After two years in the capital, Murillo, now an accomplished painter, returned to his home town. He was awarded commissions for church decorations which he executed so brilliantly as to establish himself as the foremost painter of Seville. A wealthy marriage and a circle of learned friends enhanced his prestige. He lived happily; and in the fullness of his powers at the age of 64, suffered from an accident while at work, and died.

Famous Paintings by Velasquez

2007-11-17T00:47:00.000+02:00

Boston, DANIELSON COLLECTION: "St. John in the Wilderness."
Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Portrait of Philip IV,""Portrait of Pope Innocent IX" (attributed).
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Portrait of Don Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf,"Portrait of a Man,""Portrait of Philip IV," "Portrait of the Infanta Maria Teresa" (attributed).
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "Job," "The Kitchen Maid."
Chicago, EPSTEIN COLLECTION: "Portrait of Isabel of Bourbon."
Cincinnati, MUSEUM ASSOCIATION: "Portrait of Philip IV."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Portrait of a Man."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Portrait of Philip IV," "Venus and Cupid," "Christ at the Column."
London, WALLACE COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Young Girl," "Portrait of Prince Baltasar Carlos,""A Boar Hunt."
Madrid, PRADO: "The Spinners," "Las Meniñas," "The Dwarf," "The Surrender of Breda," "The Topers."
Montreal, VAN HORNE COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Young Man."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Portrait of Philip IV."
New York, HISPANIC SOCIETY: "Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivàrez,""Portrait of a Young Girl,""Portrait of Cardinal Pamphili,""Portrait of Juan de Pareja."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Christ and the Pilgrims of Emmaus," "Portrait of Philip IV," "Portrait of Count Olivàrez," "Portrait of a Man."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTION: Several examples.
Paris, LOUVRE: "Portrait of a Young Woman," "Portrait of Princess Margarita Maria."
Rome, DORIA GALLERY: "Portrait of Pope Innocent X."
Rutherford, N. J., WARRINGTON COLLECTION: "Angelica and Medoro."
San Francisco, CALIFORNIA PALACE OF THE LEGION OF HONOR: "Self-Portrait."
Toledo, WILLYS COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Girl."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Portrait of Pope Innocent X."

Portrait of Philip IV by Velasquez

2007-11-17T00:42:00.000+02:00

OF THE "shattered visage" of one Ozymandias who had held himself to be the "king of kings" Shelley wrote

. . . whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed . . .
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Read into these lines imperial Spain, the Spain of Charles V, of Philip II and his Armada, the Spain of the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons; all, by the grace of time, growth, progress, by the grace of God are gone. And Philip IV, well-meaning, pleasure-loving, weak, by virtue of the arts which flourished on the decaying refuse heap of a great empire, by the penetration of a master painter's mind who served and knew him well, Philip lives on.

Venus and Cupid by Velasquez

2007-11-17T00:36:00.000+02:00

IT WAS no doubt a problem to one whose rank was that of Grand Marshal of the Palace in a Court noted for its sober dignity to paint the goddess Venus, full length, full faced, and unadorned, and yet in painting her preserve to some extent her modesty, and spare a prudish Court its blushes. That problem Velasquez, with a mirror, solved. And the picture, owned at one time by the Merritt family of Rokeby, is now known as the "Rokeby Venus."

Although the art of painting is ostensibly limited to the appearance of life, the painter-seer (and all great masters of the art are that) views surfaces as but the covering of underlying structural truth or principle. Under the forest-clad slopes that meet our eyes the seer perceives the naked contours of the earth; behind the mask of the human countenance he discerns essential character; and beneath the voluminous brocades and satins, the hoops and panniers of whalebone and steel, the bales of petticoats that made, to courtiers' eyes, a Spanish lady there lived, though who would guess it, the primordial woman, call her Eve or Venus.

Velasquez - Spanish School

2007-11-17T00:28:00.000+02:00

AT THIRTEEN THE young Velasquez was a pupil of the Spanish painter and fanatical tyrant, Francisco Herrera the elder. Surviving this, he went a year later to study under the polished and scholarly Francisco Pacheco. Here, privileged no doubt to mingle with the nobles and intellectuals who frequented Pacheco's house, he remained for five years, winning from his master the first recognition of an original and personal talent. Probably less through instruction than by natural tendency Velasquez was a realist, his conviction that art must follow nature deepening as his life advanced. The apparent similarity of Velasquez's manner of painting to that of his slightly older contemporary, Ribera, has led some authorities to term imitation what was in fact a spiritual likeness between the two. Velasquez, a great master of realism, came to have a profound influence on European art of the succeeding centuries.

In 1618 Velasquez married his master's daughter, Juana; and four years later, being already the father of two daughters, the family accompanied by Pacheco himself journeyed to Madrid. Here but for two journeys to Italy he was to spend his life. Under the royal patronage and favor he rose to that high rank of Grand Marshal of the Palace which, through the obligations and restraints that it imposed, was to curtail the painter's output at the very height of his powers. It was in the fatiguing performance of his distinguished official duties that he died.

Famous Paintings of Hobbema

2007-11-17T00:21:00.000+02:00

Amsterdam, MUSEUM: "A Water Mill."
Antwerp, GALLERY: "A Water Mill."
Brooklyn, MUSEUM: "Ruins of Kostverloren Castle on the Amstel."
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "The Water Mill with a Great Red Roof."
Cincinnati, TAFT COLLECTION INSTITUTE OF FINE ARTS: "Landscape with Cattle and Figures."
Cleveland, PRENTISS COLLECTION: "A Wooded Lake with a Large Pool."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "A River Scene."
Glasgow, GALLERY: "A Group of Trees," "Wooded Landscape," "Landscape in a Storm."
Indianapolis, JOHN HERRON ART INSTITUTE: "Landscape with Cottages."
Kansas City, NELSON GALLERY: "Road in the Woods."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Woody Landscape,""Village with Water Mills,""Ruins of Brederode Castle,""Forest Scene,""Castle in a Rocky Landscape,""The Avenue, Middelharnis."
Madison, N. J., TILGHMAN COLLECTION: "Old Mill."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "View of a Woody Country," "Landscape with Buildings and Figures."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Entrance to a Village."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Many examples.
Paris, LOUVRE: "Landscape."
Philadelphia, MUSEUM OF ART: "Wooded Road."
Philadelphia, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Pittsburgh, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Saugatuck, Conn., ENO COLLECTION: "The Water Mill."
Washington, CORCORAN GALLERY: "Landscape with Figures and Ruins."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "The Farm in the Sun," "The Holford Landscape," "The Farmyard."

The Avenue by Hobbema

2007-11-17T00:18:00.000+02:00

HOBBEMA, despite the short period of his activity as a painter, is next to Ruysdael the most distinguished of the Dutch landscape painters. While neither were effective in establishing a school of landscape painting in Holland, their influence upon Constable, the founder of the English landscape school, is definite.

Hobbema's interest in painting the countryside of Holland as every day it met his eyes was kindred to the interest and avowed purpose of Constable in portraying his own England. What to Hobbema and Constable was significant in that it was commonplace, became to their followers the "picturesque," and, as such, a ready-made-to-order subject matter for the art of the degenerated heirs of a worthy tradition.

Whether or not the works of Hobbema were studied by the impressionists of the nineteenth century, he reveals a spiritual kinship to them in the outdoor light and atmosphere for which his paintings are noteworthy.

Meindert Hobbema - Dutch School

2007-11-17T00:10:00.000+02:00

HOBBEMA WAS PROBABLY born in Amsterdam. In 1668 he married Geltie Vinck, a servant maid four years his senior; by her he had a son and two daughters. Through her influence he obtained a post in the wine office of the Excise. The little stipend derived from his employment scarcely relieved the poverty which beset him all his life. His period of activity as an artist was brief, eleven years. He was a painter of the pleasant countryside of Holland, of red roofed houses, canals, streams, watermills. Always a landscape painter, it was recorded that the human figures incidental to his compositions were painted by his friends, Ruysdael and Van de Velde. Hobbema died in poverty at the age of 70.

Famous Paintings by Maes

2007-11-14T16:34:00.000+02:00

Amsterdam, RIJKSMUSEUM: "Girl at a Window," "Old Woman Spinning."
Baltimore, BURNS COLLECTION: "Portrait of Henrietta Maria."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "The Jealous Husband,""Portrait of a Lady."
Brussels, ROYAL MUSEUM: "Old Woman Reading."
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "Portrait of an Old Lady."
Cincinnati, HANNA COLLECTION: "Titus, Rembrandt's Son, as a Child."
Hartford, WADSWORTH ATHENEUM: "Portrait of Prince Charles, Earl of Plymouth."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "The Dutch Housewife," "Portrait of a Girl," "The Cradle," "The Idle Servant."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "A Woman Making Lace," "Young Girl Peeling an Apple," "Portrait of a Woman," "Portrait of a Young Man."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Several examples.
Philadelphia, JOHNSON COLLECTION: "The Lovers,""Kitchen, with a Maid Peeling Apples, and a Pig's Carcass,""Old Woman."
Toledo, MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of a Gentleman," "A Lady by a Fountain."
Washington, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION NATIONAL COLLECTION OF FINE ARTS: "A Burgomaster."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Old Woman Dozing over Her Bible."
Worcester, ART MUSEUM: "Interior with an Old Lady."

The Idle Servant by Maes

2007-11-14T16:29:00.000+02:00

DRUDGERY is a burden and housework day in and day out a bore. The hours are long. Rooms are cleaned, only to be cleaned again. Dishes are washed, only to be dirtied at the next meal. And so, in all ages, servants have sometimes slept at their work.

The ladies of Holland had their domestic problems too. You had to be snapping at servants constantly, watching them every minute, to get things done. It was easy for a Dutch housewife of the seventeenth century to see the humor of this unpretentious little drama. She would not be bitter about things like this. As a matter of fact, she seems quietly amused. Chatting in her parlor with her neighbor's wife, she might point to this painting, shrug her shoulders and say, "It is so hard these days, my dear friend, to keep a house running smoothly. I don't think our husbands appreciate what we must put up with to make them comfortable. But what is to be done to these lazy girls?"

Pictures like this were not made to be placed in museums or described at great length in encyclopedias. Men painted them to sell them. And if they amused people, people bought them and kept them in their homes. And saw them and were amused because-look! that very thing happened to me yesterday!

Nicholas Maes - Dutch School

2007-11-14T16:21:00.000+02:00

NICHOLAS MAES was born in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. At the age of eighteen he went to Amsterdam where he became one of the many pupils and assistants in the atelier of Rembrandt. It was here that he acquired the warmth of color which characterizes his early genre pictures. The years between 1655 and 1665 were the most productive of his life. The paintings dating from this period are small, simple scenes portraying people engaged in domestic pursuits. When he settled in Antwerp about 1670, his style was radically altered. Possibly under the influence of Van Dyck, Maes abandoned scenes of home life and devoted himself exclusively to portraiture. So completely altered was the matter and the manner of his work that for many years it was believed that two painters named Maes were living at the same time, one in Dordrecht, the other in Brussels. Commissions came readily from the prosperous citizens of Antwerp who were more interested in life-like portraits than in qualities of color and design. At the age of sixty-one Maes died in the city of Antwerp.

Famous Paintings by Vermeer

2007-11-14T16:02:00.000+02:00

Wien, KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM: "The Artist in His Studio."
Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "The Concert."
Cincinnati, EDWARDS COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Woman."
Dresden, STATE PICTURE GALLERY: "The Young Courtesan."
The Hague, MAURITSHUIS: "View of Delft," "Head of a Young Girl."
The Hague, RIJYKSMUSEUM: "The Love Letter," "A Girl Reading a Letter," "A Maidservant Pouring Milk."
London, BEIT COLLECTION: "A Love Letter."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "A Family Group," "A Lady at a Spinet."
London, WALLACE COLLECTION: "A Boy with Pomegranates."
London, WINSDSOR CASTLE: "Lady and Gentleman at a Spinet."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "The Soldiers and the Laughing Girl,""A Lady and a Maidservant,""The Music Lesson."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Allegory of the New Testament," "A Lady with a Lute," "A Young Lady Opening a Casement," "A Young Woman with a Water Jug," "A Girl Asleep."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Several examples.
Philadelphia, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "The Smiling Girl," "The Lace Maker," "The Girl in the Red Hat."

Lady at a Spinet by Vermeer

2007-11-14T15:56:00.000+02:00

THIS is a late work, "tight" in handling, more meticulous in detail. The room is bathed in atmosphere; color is subdued and harmonious. It is genre painting at the level of highest perfection.

Vermeer is par excellence a painter's painter. As a craftsman he has never been surpassed. And no other painter has so beautifully and correctly organized color in terms of light. Vermeer, unlike Ter Borch and De Hooch, was not interested in the superficial, flashy sheen of textures. He studied the effects of light, captured the play of it upon colored surfaces existing in space and atmosphere, and by painting deliberately and scientifically in the mode of the total visual effect, achieved tonal harmony and richness and delicacy that have never been equaled. His paintings are small and unpretentious; their limitations are acknowledged. They possess the quiet beauty, dignity, and lucidity of well-fashioned gems, and are among the most precious things we have in oils.

View of Delft by Vermeer

2007-11-14T15:42:00.000+02:00

THIS landscape is believed to be an early work, for the brushwork is comparatively broad and free. It is probable that the picture was painted direct from observation, contrary to the custom of that period. Most Dutch landscape painters first made drawings and sketches of their scene, and painted from them in their studios.

The cities of Holland have changed very little during the past few hundred years. If you study this reproduction well and then go to visit Delft, no doubt you will feel at home. Perhaps you will even recognize Rotterdam Gate and the Niewkerk.

Vermeer - Dutch School

2007-11-14T15:35:00.000+02:00

VERMEER'S LIFE fared as poorly as his reputation. He was born in Delft, marriedin Delft, raised a large family in Delft, painted in Delft. But the people of Delft hadlittle use for his pictures; the pictures didn't sell. And so Vermeer died in Delft, a poor, well-intentioned artist who had the hard luck of being a failure.

One hundred years ago the name Vermeer meant nothing in the history of painting. His works were not known and were attributed to inferior painters with more impressive names. After hundreds of yearsof neglect, a new personality was admitted to art's arbitrary Hall of Fame.

So it was and is with Vermeer. His name today is among the foremost in the historyof Dutch painting. His works, small in number, are as precious as jewels. That he couldn't find a market for his work in Delft is a fact we regret and can do nothing about.But it is a good and encouraging thing to know that effective research and sound appreciation can regenerate a deserving artistic ghost.

Famous Paintings by Metsu

2007-11-14T15:22:00.000+02:00

Baltimore, WALTERS COLLECTION: "The Message."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "The Usurer."
Brooklyn, MUSEUM: "A Dutch Interior."
Cincinnati, HANNA COLLECTION: "Lady Seated With A Dog."
The Hague, GALLERY: "The Huntsman," "Justice Protecting the Widow and Orphan," "The Amateur Musicians."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "The Music Lesson," "The Duet," "The Drowsy Landlady."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Lady in Blue."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "The Music Lesson," "The Visit to the Baby," "The Artist and His Wife," "The Music Party."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Several examples.
Paris, LOUVRE: "An Officer Entertaining a Young Lady," "The Chemist at the Window."
Philadelphia, JOHNSON COLLECTION: "The Hay Barn,""A Young Lady Sewing,""Twelfth Night."
Philadelphia, WANAMAKER COLLECTION: "Twelfth Night."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "The Intruder."

The Music Lesson by Metsu

2007-11-14T15:10:00.000+02:00

METSU painted high life and low life without moralizing about either. Here is one of the most genteel of his canvases, as fragile and delicate in tone as it is in anecdote.

It is not very often that we find three paintings within the compass of a single frame. Hanging on the wall in the background is a Ruysdael landscape. Beside it is a much larger canvas, "The Twelfth Night Feast" by Metsu himself; two versions of this picture are now in Philadelphia. The Dutch painters frequently used pictures as backgrounds, not in the nature of a joke or trick, but as elements of design and composition.

Gabriel Metsu - Dutch School

2007-11-14T14:22:00.000+02:00

GABRIEL METSU was born at Leyden in 1630. He was one of the first to register in the newly formed Guild of St. Luke in his native city, being only twenty at the time. Houbraken, the prolific and frequently unreliable chronicler of the Dutch painters, says that Metsu studied with Gerard Dow in his early years. But after moving to Amsterdam in 1650 he came directly under the influence of Rembrandt. He made an awkward attempt to paint religious pictures, but soon realized that sacred subjects were not his forte. And so he turned to the scenes of Dutch life for which he is famous. Metsu, more than any other painter of his times, cut across class lines in his choice of subjects. They range from the most decorous of family group portraits to the Rabelaisian rowdiness of the peasantry. Metsu married in 1659 and became a permanent citizen of Amsterdam. It was there that he died at the early age of thirty-seven.

Famous Paintings by De Hooch

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Amsterdam, MUSEUM: "Self-Portrait," "The Buttery Hatch."
Berlin, GALLERY: "A Dutch Interior."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Dutch Interior."
Brooklyn, MUSEUM: "The Flower Garden."
Cincinnati, HANNA COLLECTION: "The Game of Skittles."
Copenhagen, GALLERY: "A Family Party," "An Interior."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Mother Nursing Her Child."
Glen Ridge, N. J., BLANK COLLECTION: "Interior with Soldiers in a Tavern."
The Hague, STEENGRACHT: "A Musical Party."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Interior of a Dutch House," "Courtyard of a Dutch House," "Brick-paved Courtyard of a Dutch House," "Dutch Interior."
Minneapolis, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Dutch Interior."
Munich, GALLERY: "Dutch Interior."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Girl and Two Officers."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "The Visit," "Scene in a Courtyard," "The Maid Servant."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Several examples.
Paris, LOUVRE: "Dutch Interior Showing Two Women and Child," "Dutch Interior Showing Card Players."
Philadelphia, JOHNSON COLLECTION: "View of Delft after the Explosion of 1654," "Cavalier with a Pipe," "A Group in a Barn," "A Dinner Party on a Terrace," "A Lady Feeding a Child, with a Serving Maid."
Philadelphia, WIDENER COLLECTION: "The Bedroom," "Woman and Child in a Courtyard."
Pittsfield, Mass., MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY AND ART: "The Music Party."
St. Louis, CITY ART MUSEUM: "The Skittles Players."
Toledo, MUSEUM OF ART: "Interior."
Toledo, WILLYS COLLECTION: "A Musical Party."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Interior," "Courtyard Scene."
Worcester, ART MUSEUM: "The Young Mother."

Courtyard of a Dutch House by Pieter De Hooch

2007-11-14T14:10:00.000+02:00

OF A CERTAIN class of paintings Ruskin had this to say, "They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame." One should not conclude from this remark that Ruskin was a tolerant critic; he certainly was not. What he meant was this. Some paintings, being neither pretentious nor bold, acknowledge their own limitations. They obviously are not inspiring; they tell us nothing about history or mythology; they have no connection with the painter's religion or beliefs. They are only what they seem to be: the products of good craftsmanship, nicely colored, well fitted to be placed on simple walls, to be decorative, and not too prominent.

And so it is with this picture. It is not necessary to be technical about it. Its subject has no mystery; its design has no intricacy. When one of De Hooch's townsmen bought a picture like this, he probably derived as much pleasure looking at it as we do when, going leisurely through an album, we run across a photograph of ourselves and a friend standing in the garden outside our home. It is a faithful scene of familiar people doing familiar things. For legend has it that the woman and child were the painter's wife and daughter.

Interior of a Dutch House by Pieter De Hooch

2007-11-14T14:04:00.000+02:00

DUTCH homes in the seventeenth century were a tribute to the quiet restraint and dignity that have always characterized the lives and manners of the people of Holland.

Holland then was a rich land, thriving in commerce, abundant in comforts and the things that make everyday living a tolerable, pleasant routine. Another nation, in such favorable circumstances, might have succumbed to the extravagant, superficial pleasures of elegance. The Dutch valued simplicity and comfort. Their homes were uncomplicated, sparsely furnished, full of light playing upon broad, unrelieved surfaces. The pictures of De Hooch reflect this simplicity of living and are a faithful record of the exemplary manners of his contemporaries.

There is, in this painting, a very amusing oversight. Evidently the servant entering at the right, a hurried afterthought, was quickly and carelessly painted. Close examination will show the tiled floor coming through her voluminous skirts.

Pieter De Hooch - Dutch School

2007-11-13T13:47:00.000+02:00

FOR MANY YEARS, before scholars really got to work on the facts of his life, it was impossible to arrive at any biographical conclusion about the one Pieter De Hooch who painted the pictures reproduced here. Holland, early in the seventeenth century, had Pieter De Hooch's in most of her larger towns. An unsuspecting historian, using contemporary records as his guide, would have found his subject an amazing personality, coexisting in five places at times, member of almost all the guilds. Sound research at last has gathered together a few important facts about this Pieter De Hooch.

He was born in Rotterdam in 1629 and studied first with the painter, Berchem, at Haarlem. At the age of 24 he entered the service, as painter and valet (!), of one Justice de la Grange, accompanying his master to Delft, The Hague, and Leyden. From 1654 to 1657 he was a member of the painters' guild at Delft where, together with Vermeer and others, he became identified with a group of artists who painted domestic scenes from Dutch life. After his wife's death, he left Delft in 1667 and moved to Amsterdam. Contemporary records show that he was still living there, in poor circumstances, in 1683.

That is about all we know of the life of Pieter De Hooch.

Famous Paintings of Ter Borch

2007-11-13T13:24:00.000+02:00

Amsterdam, MUSEUM: "Paternal Counsel," "Portrait of Geertjen Matthijssen."
Antwerp, MUSEUM: "The Mandolin Player."
Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "The Music Lesson."
Brooklyn, MUSEUM: "Lady Pouring Wine."
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "The Music Lesson."
Cincinnati, HANNA COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Cavalier."
Cincinnati, MUSEUM ASSOCIATION: "A Music Party."
Cleveland, PRENTISS COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Lady Standing."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ART: "A Man Reading a Letter."
Dresden, GALLERY: "The Officer and the Trumpeter," "Young Lady Playing the Lute," "Young Lady in White Satin."
Haarlem, MUSEUM: "Portraits of Heer and Vrouw Colenbergh."
The Hague, MAURITSHUIS: "The Letter," "Self-Portrait."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "The Music Lesson," "The Peace of Münster," "Portrait of a Man."
Montreal, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Some examples.
Munich, GALLERY: "The Trumpeter and the Letter."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Lady."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Lady Playing the Theorbo," "Young Girl at Her Toilet."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Several examples.
Paris, LOUVRE: "The Music Lesson," "Soldier Offering Money to a Young Woman," "The Concert."
Philadelphia, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Washington, CORCORAN GALLERY: "Portrait of a Young Man."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Interior Scene."

The Letter by Ter Borch

2007-11-13T13:19:00.000+02:00

THE DUTCH school of painters of the seventeenth century is noted for the records it has given us of the lives of the people of the upper-middle class of its day. As the Venetian painter, Moroni, supplemented with portraits of the middle class that record of Venetian nobility which other painters of his time so generously supplied, so has Ter Borch completed for posterity the record of the Holland of his day and of his class.

He was, of all Dutch painters of his century, the most cultivated and refined. His horizon was limited by a life spent in the company of the aristocrats and the wealthy. If he knew anything about the existence of his less fortunate contemporaries, the peasants and tradesmen who worked hard and relaxed violently and obscenely, certainly he was careful in his painting to turn his eye the other way. His subjects are all well-mannered, charming people. Their gestures have a narrow scope. Their dignity is always carefully guarded. Never do they "let down their hair."
Ter Borch was the scion of a distinguished family and devoted his art to copying that fraction of the life of his times to which he was born and below which he never stooped.

Gerard Ter Borch Dutch School

2007-11-13T13:13:00.000+02:00

BORN AT ZWOLLE in 1617 Gerard Ter Borch was reared in the congenial environment of a cultured family circle. His father was quick in the encouragement of his son's liking to paint and sent him to be a pupil of Pieter Molyn at Haarlem. Years of travel followed for this most favored of the little masters. He visited England, Germany, and Italy in turn. While at Münster in Westphalia he was invited to return to Spain with the Spanish ambassador who introduced him to the life of the court. The portraits that he painted there won him the admiration of an exclusive circle and shortly before his return to his native town in 1652 he was honored with knighthood. While on a visit to England he was introduced into the society of the court and met the great court painter of that time, Van Dyck. Influenced to some degree by the great painters he had met on his travels, he became, nevertheless, the master of a personal style. It is information of a personal and intimate nature that he has given us of the time in which he lived and of that class, the aristocracy, in which he moved. After his death in 1681, his remains were carried to Zwolle where they were interred with great honor amid a gathering of the full citizenship of the town.

Famous Paintings of Rembrandt

2007-11-13T13:02:00.000+02:00

Amsterdam, RIJKSMUSEUM: "The Night Watch," "The Syndics," "The Jewish Bride."
Baltimore, EPSTEIN COLLECTION: "Portrait of an Old Man."
Baltimore, WALTERS COLLECTION: "Portrait of Hendrickje Stoeffels."
Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Self-Portrait,""Landscape with Obelisk,""Christ and His Disciples in the Storm,""A Young Couple."
Brooklyn, MUSEUM: "The Rabbi," "Portrait of Rembrandt's Father."
Cambridge, FOGG ART MUSEUM: "Portrait of an Old Man."
Chestnut Hill, Mass., PAINE COLLECTION: "Portrait of Rembrandt's Sister."
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet," "Portrait of a Young Girl," "Portrait of Rembrandt's Father."
Cincinnati, INSTITUTE OF FINE ARTS: "Young Man Rising from His Chair."
Cincinnati, MUSEUM ASSOCIATION: "Portrait of a Young Girl."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Head of Christ," "The Salutation," "Portrait of an Old Lady."
Dresden, GALLERY: "Portrait of Saskia."
Glasgow, KELVINGROVE ART GALLERY: "Man in Armor."
The Hague, MAURITSHUIS: "The Anatomy Lesson," "David Playing before Saul."
Indianapolis, CLOWES COLLECTION: "An Old Man in a Tall FurEdged Cap."
Kansas City, NELSON GALLERY: "Portrait of a Boy."
Leningrad, HERMITAGE: "Abraham with the Three Angels," "Danaë."
London, BRITISH MUSEUM: "Christ Healing the Sick," "The Three Trees."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Portrait of an Old Woman," "Portrait of a Man," "SelfPortrait," "The Adoration of the Shepherds," "A Woman Bathing."
Montreal, VAN HORNE COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Young Rabbi."
Munich, GALLERY: "The Descent from the Cross."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Self-Portrait,""Polish Rider," "A Young Painter,""Old Woman with a Bible."
New York, HISTORICAL SOCIETY: "Portrait of a Man."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of a Man," "Portrait of Titus," "Self-Portrait," "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails," and many others.
Paris, LOUVRE: "The Disciples at Emmaus," "Woman Bathing."
Rochester, UNIVERSITY: "Portrait of a Young Man."
Sarasota, RINGLING MUSEUM: "Lamentation over Christ,""An Evangelist,""Portrait of a Lady.
Toledo, MUSEUM OF ART: "SelfPortrait."
Washington, CORCORAN ART GALLERY: "Portrait of a Gentleman."
Washington, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION NATIONAL COLLECTION OF FINE ARTS: "Portrait of a Man Wearing a Large Hat."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "A Young Man with a Pink," "Joseph Before Potiphar," "Old Lady with a Bible," "Lucretia Stabbing Herself," and several other examples.

Man in Armor by Rembrandt

2007-11-13T12:54:00.000+02:00

THAT the painting, "The Man in Armor," is variously known as "Mars" and "Alexander the Great" suggests one of the difficulties which historians of art encounter. Possibly the latter is most accurate; for it is known that an Italian nobleman commissioned Rembrandt to paint an "Alexander," only to complain upon receiving it that it was painted on patched canvas. Rembrandt offered to paint another to replace it; and he doubtless did. At any rate, there are two Rembrandt paintings of this subject in existence: the one here reproduced, and one in the Hermitage in Leningrad.

This is not the type of painting that brought Rembrandt great wealth. It was more the painting that he loved, full of dramatic effect, broad and free in the handling of his brush, sometimes somber and brooding.

The Syndics by Rembrandt

2007-11-13T12:43:00.000+02:00

THE SOLID, serious business men of Rembrandt's Holland, enjoying the fruits of a vast commercial expansion, lived in a world of things that could be touched, and bought and sold. When they had acquired a position in life which commanded the respect of the community, they wished, as all men do, to have a permanent record of their success. If they had no special prominence they thought in terms of their participation in some social or business group. On the whole their mentality was not unlike that of a Chamber of Commerce today in a small American city. Dutch society in the seventeenth century was well integrated; men's common interests brought them together in trade associations and fraternal orders. And frequently, after a new election of officers, they commissioned a group portrait, to be placed on the walls of a clubhouse or in the offices of a trade association.

Thus it was that the five syndics of the Amsterdam drapers' guild came to Rembrandt to be painted. Rembrandt was flourishing then; he was fashionable; to be painted by him was an expression of personal substance and social importance.

These patrons were satisfied with the painting; they were pleased to see themselves pictured with so much dignity and seriousness in their daily job of work. This is no doubt what they wanted in the picture and what they sought when they posed themselves the way they did and assumed an expression of dead seriousness and intense preoccupation with their small world of commerce.

Rembrandt Dutch School

2007-11-13T12:33:00.000+02:00

REMBRANDT was born at Leyden in 1606, and his family enjoyed enough prosperity to permit him to choose a career. Academic life at the University of Leyden was not congenial. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a Leyden painter named Swanenburg and later to Pieter Lastman, from whom Rembrandt learned the craft without absorbing very much of his master's artistic formulas.

By 1632 his reputation was so well established that he found it expedient to move to Amsterdam. Here commissions awaited him and great demands were made upon his activity. He founded a studio, accepted pupils and assistants, and soon became Amsterdam's most flourishing painter. It was then that he married Saskia Uylenburch, daughter of a wealthy and important family.

Saskia died in 1642. It had been around her that Rembrandt's life revolved, and it was then that he began to drift away from the life of his times.

The vagaries of his subsequent career--living in common law with the patient, understanding Hendrickje Stoeffels, his financial failure, and abject poverty--have been told and retold with perhaps too much melodrama and more with the adornment of legend than of fact.

As Rembrandt's prosperity and popularity diminished in the later years of his life, the quality of his art improved. The sweep of his brush became broader, his psychological insights became more penetrating, his sense of the dramatic more acute. His later painting was neither understood nor appreciated by his contemporaries; in the strictest sense it should be interpreted as a personal revolt against their canons of taste.

Famous Paintings of Frans Hals

2007-11-13T12:22:00.000+02:00

Baltimore, EPSTEIN COLLECTION: "Head of a Young Man,""Portrait of a Lady."
Berlin, KAISER FRIEDRICH MUSEUM: "Portrait of a Nurse and Child," "Hille Bobbe."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Portrait of a Lady,""Head of an Old Lady."
Brooklyn, MUSEUM: "Portrait of a Young Man in a Fur Hat," "Fisher Girl," "Portrait of a Young Lord."
Cambridge, FOGG, ART MUSEUM: "Portrait of a Man."
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "Portrait of Willem Van Heythuysen," "Portrait of Harmen Hals."
Chicago, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Cincinnati, MUSEUM ASSOCIATION: "Family Group."
Cincinnati, TAFT COLLECTION INSTITUTE OF FINE ARTS: "The Young Man of Haarlem," "Portrait of Michael de Waele," "A Young Woman of Haarlem," "Laughing Boy with a Lute."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Portrait of a Lady."
Detroit, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Many examples.
Haarlem, MUSEUM: "The Five Regentessen," "The Old Men's Hospital," "The Archers of the Guild of St. Adrian."
Indianapolis, CLOWES GALLERY: "Self-Portrait."
Kansas City, Mo., NELSON GALLERY: "Portrait of a Man."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Portrait of a Woman," "Portrait of a Man."
London, WALLACE COLLECTION: "The Laughing Cavalier."
Merion, Pa., BARNES FOUNDATION: "A Dutch Burgher."
Montreal, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "A Burgomaster,""Portrait of a Man."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "A Youth with a Lute," "The Fingernail Test," "The Merry Company," "The Smoker," "Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart," "Hille Bobbe," and many portraits.
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Paris, LOUVRE: "La Bohemienne," "Woman Standing."
Philadelphia, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
St. Charles, Ill., ANGELL-NORRIS COLLECTION: "Girl Singing from a Book," "Singing Boy with a Violin."
St. Louis, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
San Diego, FINE ARTS GALLERY: "Family Group."
Toledo, MUSEUM OF ARTS: "Flute Player."
Toronto, WOOD COLLECTION: "Portrait of Isaac Abrahamsz. Massa."
Washington, CORCORAN GALLERY: "Woman with Flagon."
Washington, DUMBARTON OAKS COLLECTION: "Portrait of Judith Leyster."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Portrait of Balthasar Coymans," "Portrait of an Admiral," "Portrait of Nicholas Bergham," "Portrait of an Old Lady," "Portrait of a Young Man."
Yonkers, BOYCE THOMPSON COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Nobleman."

The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals

2007-11-13T12:19:00.000+02:00

MANY have been the painters who worshiped at the altar of Frans Hals. And with what dismal results! Worship inspired imitation; imitation brought forth artistic atrocities.
Hals used a technique so intimately related to his personality that an attempt to copy his style is like trying to acquire angelic virtues by wearing wings. Virtuosity can be repeated. Hals had more than simple virtuosity. He had character and a unique personality, and expressed both forcefully.

The poor souls who sit and waste their days copying old masters in dimly lit museums, measuring distances and mixing pigments with infinite perfection--let them copy Hals! Square inch by square inch, compare closely the copied color and brush strokes. Miraculously accurate--the original seems reborn. But place the copy beside the true picture and stand back. Then look, and look hard. The gulf is as wide as the difference between life and death.

For Hals had the world's most fluent brush and a warm, probing, adventurous spirit. Art hasn't had such a mixture again since his time.

Frans Hals Dutch School

2007-11-13T11:52:00.000+02:00

MISFORTUNES CONSEQUENT upon the war for Dutch independence led to the flight from Haarlem to Antwerp of the patrician family of which, somewhere about 1580, Frans Hals was born. There is little record of the early life of Frans. He was a pupil for a time of Karel Van Mander, a painter of no distinction. Of Hals subsequent life there has risen such a tradition of riot and drunkenness as is at least inconsistent with the number of his works and the brilliant precision of his style. His first marriage was an unhappy one and after six years he is recorded as being summoned before the magistrates for ill-treating his wife. That her death occurred a few days later has occasioned gossip, but led in its time to no inquest. His second marriage was more fortunate. He lived with Lysbeth Reyniers nearly fifty years and became the father of a large family. That Hals was intemperate there can be no doubt. The charge that he was a sot is ridiculous. To his contemporaries his talents made up for his faults. His portraits radiate kindness and good humor. Hals was, he must have been, a good and understanding man. The poverty in which he died has been the lot of many painters. That it was at no time too great for his endurance is attested by the ripe old age of 86 at which he died.

Famous Paintings of Holbein

2007-11-13T11:44:00.000+02:00

Baltimore, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several portraits.
Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Portrait of Sir William Butts," "Portrait of Lady Margaret Butts."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Portrait of Sir William Butts."
Cleveland, PRENTISS COLLECTION: "Portrait of Sir Bryan Tuke."
Darmstadt, HESSISCHES LANDESMUSEUM: "Madonna of the Meyer Family."
Detroit: "Portrait of Sir Henry Guildford."
Indianapolis, CLOWES COLLECTION: "Self-Portrait."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "The Ambassadors."
London, WINDSOR CASTLE: "Derick Barn," drawings.
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Portrait of Sir Thomas More," "Portrait of Sir Thomas Cromwell."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of a Man," "Portrait of Lady Rich," "Portrait of Margaret Wyatt," "Portrait of Lady Guildford," "Portrait of Benedikt Von Hertenstein."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Many examples.
Philadelphia, JOHNSON COLLECTION: "Portrait of an Unknown Man," "Portrait of Sir John Godsalve."
Toledo, MUSEUM OF ART: "Catherine Howard."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Portrait of Sir Bryan Tuke," "Portrait of Edward VI as Prince of Wales."
Worcester, ART MUSEUM: "Portrait of a Man."

The Ambassadors by Holbein

2007-11-13T11:41:00.000+02:00

JEAN DE DINTEVILLE, ambassador of France to England, is now little but a name in dictionaries of art and biography; Georges de Selve, ambassador of France to the great Emperor Charles V, has the added notation that he was bishop of Lavour.

The Holbein portrait of "The Ambassadors" is obviously an uninspired work; its authenticity is questioned. It brings to mind how cautious we must be of accepting by their label of authorship all of the many poorer or quite worthless works that are attributed to the masters. Homer will nod. Under the pressure of necessity he will descend to work unworthy of himself. He will release from his workshop work that is not of his own hand. Or--and Leonardo "The Last Supper" is but one of many cases in point--the work of restorers may have obliterated the last trace of the master's handiwork. Let us be cautious, and, in regard to "The Ambassadors," admit it to be unworthy of a master painter's hand.

Hans Holbein German School

2007-11-13T11:36:00.000+02:00

HANS HOLBEIN is known as "the younger" to distinguish him from his distinguished but less celebrated father. He was employed for a time in his father's workshop, and then left Augsburg for Basle, then the center of the humanist revival in literature and the home of many eminent scholars of the day. One of them, Erasmus, is said to have been an early patron of the young painter. Holbein remained in Basle almost continuously for twelve years. Then, having won recognition as a master in Switzerland and Germany, and provided with a letter of introduction from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More, he went to England. The introduction served him well, and Holbein soon had access to the leading members of the court. He was appointed court painter to Henry VIII. Of one service to that king our histories tell us. Sent by the monarch to paint a portrait of Princess Anne of Cleves, Holbein, Walpole tells us, "drew so favorable a likeness of the princess that Henry was content to wed her; but when he found her so inferior to her portrait the storm, which really should have been directed at his painter, burst on his minister; and Cromwell lost his head because Anne was a 'Flanders mare,' not a Venus, as Holbein represented her."

Famous Works of Durer

2007-11-12T14:49:00.000+02:00

Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Portrait of Lazarus Ravensberger."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Portrait of an Unknown Man," and drawings.
Dresden, GALLERY: "Virgin and Child with St. Anthony and St. Sebastian," "Crucifixion."
Florence, PITTI PALACE: "Adam and Eve."
Florence, UFFIZI GALLERY: "Selfportrait as a Young Man."
London, BRITISH MUSEUM: Drawings, Engravings, Water-color Drawings.
Munich, GALLERY: "The Nativity," "Oswald Krell," "Four Apostles."
New York, BACHE COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Lady."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Christ as Salvator Mundi," "Madonna and Child with St. Anne," "Virgin and Child," and drawings.
New York, MORGAN COLLECTION: "Adam and Eve."
Prague, GALLERY: "The Feast."
Toledo, MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of the Wife of Jobst Plankfelt."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Portrait of a Man."

The Adoration of the Kings by Durer

2007-11-12T14:37:00.000+02:00

BELIEF in the legend of the visit of the Three Kings to the Infant Jesus was substantiated in the minds of the middle ages by the presence in Cologne of their alleged remains and by the plausible or, for all we know, accurate record of the wanderings of those remains from the time of their first uncovering in Persia in the fourth century. Eleven hundred years, it seems, were pedigree enough. Dürer follows tradition in representing the three kings as of three races and three ages, symbolizing that men of every race and age will worship Christ.

Dürer, carrying on the tradition of the factual Flemish school as established by the Van Eycks, was himself a sound and powerful influence upon the art of northern Europe of his time. A student of Italian art and of the works of antiquity, he was on the whole as little touched by southern influence as the Italians were unimpressed by his paintings. As a painter, Dürer is an important master of the important German branch of the great north European school of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As a wood cutter and engraver he is by virtue of consummate craftsmanship and superb imagination perhaps the greatest master of all time.

Albrecht Dürer

2007-11-12T14:34:00.000+02:00

DÜRER, SON OF a goldsmith of Hungarian descent, was born at Nuremberg in 1471. After a short apprenticeship in the goldsmith's trade he began his studies of art. Dürer worked in Basle, possibly in Strassburg, and later in Venice. Returning to Nuremberg he married; and with the growing burdens of a family applied himself industriously to the making of those engravings for which he is renowned. Of the wide European recognition that Dürer received in his lifetime, of that very special recognition by artists of the achievements of a brother in the arts which frequently characterized the Renaissance, there is no sweeter example than the reception tendered Dürer in Antwerp, as he has himself written of it.

"All their service was of silver, and they had other splendid ornaments and very costly meats. And as I was being led to the table the company stood on both sides as if they were leading some great lord. And there were among them men of very high position, who all treated me with respectful bows, and promised to do everything in their power agreeable to me that they knew of. . . . So when we had spent a long and merry time together till late at night, they accompanied us home with lanterns in great honour."

Dürer died suddenly in 1528 in his native city, deeply mourned by all who had come to know him.

Famous Works of Van Dyck

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Baltimore, EPSTEIN COLLECTION: "Rinaldo and Armida."
Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Lady with a Rose."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "The Entombment,""Portrait of Beatrice de Cusance,""Portrait of Helena du Bois,""Portrait of Margaretha de Vos, wife of Frans Snyders."
Brunswick, Maine, BOWDOIN COLLEGE: "The Governor of Gibraltar."
Cambridge, FOGG ART MUSEUM: "Portrait of Alexander Triest."
Charleston, S. C., RHETT COLLECTION: "St. John."
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "Samson and Delilah."
Cincinnati, EDWARDS COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Gentleman."
Cincinnati, MUSEUM ASSOCIATION: "Portrait of John of Nassau."
Cleveland, MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of Charles I."
Dallas, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Portrait of Diana, Countess of Oxford."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Portrait of a Man," "Portrait of the Marchesa Spinola," "Portrait of Jan Wildens and His Wife."
Grosse Pointe, Mich., BOOTH COLLECTION: "Portrait of the Countess of Buckingham."
Kansas City, NELSON GALLERY: "Rider with Horse."
Leningrad, HERMITAGE: "Portrait of Philip, Lord Wharton," "Portrait of Sir Thomas Wharton."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Portrait of Cornelius Van der Geest."
London, NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY: "Portrait of Sir Kenelm Digby."
London, WALLACE COLLECTION: "Philippe Le Roy with His Wife."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Portrait of Frans Snyders," "Portrait of Sir John Suckling," and other portraits.
New York, HISTORICAL SOCIETY: "Portrait of a Lady."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lenox," "Portrait of the Marchesa Durazzo," "Portrait of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and His Grandson," and other portraits.
Notre Dame, UNIVERSITY: "Crucifixion."
Ottawa, NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA: "Christ Blessing the Children," "St. Mary Magdalen in Penitence," "The Death of Adonis."
Paris, LOUVRE: "Portrait of Charles I with Horse and Attendants," "Portrait of the Duke of Richmond."
Portland, Me., REIMAN COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Lady."
St. Louis, CITY ART MUSEUM: "Portrait of a Goldsmith."
St. Louis, SHOENBERG COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Gentleman."
San Francisco, CALIFORNIA PALACE OF THE LEGION OF HONOR: "Portrait of Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery."
Toledo, MUSEUM OF ART: "St. Martin Sharing His Mantle with a Beggar."
Toronto, WOOD COLLECTION: "Daedalus and Icarus."
Washington, CORCORAN GALLERY: "Portrait of Charles Lord Herbert."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "St. Martin Dividing His Cloak with a Beggar," "Portrait of Philip, Lord Wharton," "Portrait of the Marchesa Balbi," "Portrait of William II of OrangeNassau as a Boy."

Portrait of Charles I by Van Dyck

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CHARLES I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, second son of James I and Anne of Denmark. His character, weak through inheritance and vitiated by the royal circumstances of his upbringing is to be held in large degree responsible for that succession of events which led through revolution to his tragic end. A weak procrastinator, unscrupulously thankless even to his most devoted followers, obstinate beneath a pretence of compliance, devoutly religious, high-minded according to his feeble lights, virtuous in his domestic life, inordinately proud, weak, dignified, unhappy-all this that we may read in written records, we see in Van Dyck's portrait of the king.

Van Dyck, a descendant in spirit and craftsmanship from the great Venetian masters, a friend and contemporary of Rubens, is the last great master of a school that derived its being from the regal splendor of the feudal tradition. That portrait painting for a century to follow was to show Van Dyck's influence without in any real degree approaching the distinction of the master's work is to be attributed above all to the disappearance of that era of royalty's belief in itself which ended with the Stuarts.

Holding the king's horse in the accompanying Van Dyck portrait of Charles is James Hamilton, third Marquess Hamilton, the king's adviser on Scottish affairs. When the Covenanters banded together, Hamilton courted their friendship in order to betray them. He served both in England and Scotland as the leader of Royalist troops during the civil war. Defeated by Lambert and Cromwell at Preston, and captured, he was tried for treason on the ground that his title as Earl of Cambridge was English. He was beheaded in 1649.

Portrait of Cornelius Van der Geest by Van Dyck

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CORNELIUS VAN DER GEEST: That Van Dyck painted him we know. The painting lives. That Van Dyck was paid for his work we may assume. It follows that Van der Geest was a man of means. He was, moreover, a Fleming; and he unquestionably posed for the portrait prior to Van Dyck's departure for England at the age of twenty-one.

Besides Van Dyck's great achievements as a painter he brought into prominence the art of portrait engraving. His prolific accomplishments in both fields is to be accounted for not only by the early mastery of his talent, his indefatigable industry, and the fluent ease of his style, but by his employment of a large staff of pupils and associates.

Van Dyck - Dutch School

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ANTHONY VAN DYCK was born in Antwerp in 1599. He was of a good family; and because of the exceptional education which was afforded him, learned several languages. His education, his personal charm, and his polished manners contributed to the winning of that worldly success to which his great gifts as a portrait painter of the rich entitled him. He was a favored pupil of Rubens, their friendship and mutual admiration being unaffected by the professional rivalry which Van Dyck's early recognition and popularity as a master established. In 1620, when Van Dyck was but twenty-one, he went to England at the personal behest of Charles I. After returning once again to Antwerp and once again visiting Italy, he took up residence in London; and as painter-in-ordinary to the king and favorite of the highest court society lived out his life. Worn out by overwork, he died at forty-two.

Famous Works of Rubens

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Antwerp, MUSEUM: "Adoration of the Magi."
Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Portrait of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Rubens' Master and His Wife," "Portrait of Isabella Brant," "Peace and Plenty."
Brooklyn, MUSEUM: "The Risen Christ."
Cambridge, FOGG ART MUSEUM: "Portrait of a Lady."
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "Portrait of the Marquis Spinola," "Samson and Delilah."
Cincinnati, CHRIST CHURCH: "The Holy Family."
Cleveland, MUSEUM OF ART: "Triumph of the Holy Sacrament over Folly."
Des Moines, LEHNER COLLECTION: "Ecce Homo."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Abigail Meeting David with Gifts," "Philip Rubens, the Artist's Brother," "St. Michael Driving Out the Evil Angels."
Detroit, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Hartford, WADSWORTH ATHENEUM: "The Return from Egypt."
Kansas City, NELSON GALLERY: "Portrait of Thomas Parr at the Age of 142."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Le Chapeau de Paille," "Rape of the Sabines."
Los Angeles, Calif., KEELER COLLECTION: "The Duke of Mantua."
Merion, Pa., BARNES FOUNDATION: "Holy Family with an Angel Bringing Fruit."
Minneapolis, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "James I Designating Charles I King of Scotland."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Portrait of Ambrose Spinola."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "The Holy Family," "Return of the Holy Family from Egypt," "Madonna and Child," "Adoration of the Magi," "Pyramus and Thisbe," "St. Cecilia," and other examples including many portraits.
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Many examples.
Ottawa, NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA: "Head of an Old Woman," "Christ with the Cross."
Paris, LOUVRE: "Portrait of Elizabeth of France."
Philadelphia, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
St. Louis, CITY ART MUSEUM: "Portrait of Ambrose Spinola."
San Francisco, CALIFORNIA PALACE OF THE LEGION OF HONOR: "Archduke Ferdinand, Cardinal Infant of Spain" (possibly by Van Dyck).
Sarasota, RINGLING MUSEUM: "The Departure of Lot and His Family from Sodom," "Danaë and the Golden Shower," "Pausias and Glycera" (done together with Jan Breughel the Elder).
Toledo, MUSEUM OF ART: "The Holy Family."
Toronto, ART GALLERY: "The Elevation of the Cross."
Washington, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION NATIONAL COLLECTION OF FINE ARTS: "The Holy Family with St. Elizabeth."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Susanne Fourment and Her Daughter" (challenged as a Van Dyck).

Le Chapeau de Paille by Rubens

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MY MOTHER groan'd! My father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

It might have been of little Peter Rubens' birth that Blake wrote this.

Helpless?--perhaps he never was. But naked! Naked beyond good and evil; naked with the pagan exuberance of the good god Bacchus in childhood; piping?--he trumpeted! Wake up, dead world! You who are oppressed with sorrow, bowed in grief or prayer, solemn in worship, worn from thinking, broken by despair: Wake up! The sun has risen! Life, all life, life bathed in sunlight, in the flesh, is good! Wake up, be happy; live and love. Rubens is the incarnation of impulse, of swift, unreflecting, unrestrained response to life, to the beauty of men and women, their countenances, limbs, flesh, movements, to the world they live in, to the light--so warm and beautiful!--that envelopes them. Loving life so, his brush caressed it.

Rubens - Flemish School

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BORN IN SIEGEN, Westphalia, during a temporary exile of his family, living in Germany until his twelfth year, young Peter Paul Rubens came to Antwerp where he was successively apprenticed to three unimportant masters. At the age of 23 he left upon a tour that took him to Florence, Rome, Mantua, then Spain, then Italy again. Not until eight years later did he return, being honored by an appointment as court painter. He established a workshop, assembled about him a large number of pupils and assistants, and entered upon a career scarcely less notable for the varied activities that it included than for its vast and distinguished achievements in painting. After the death of his first wife, Isabella Brant, in 1626, Rubens entered the diplomatic service of the Archduke Albert and subsequently made several trips to England and Spain. His second wife was Helena Fourment who appears in many of his paintings.

Despite the innumerable and constant distractions which his varied duties entailed, and his genial social gifts invited, the volume of work from Rubens' hand and workshop was immense. He is not only one of the great masters of painting but an enduring influence upon the art of the western world.

Rubens died from gout at the age of 63 at his Castle Steen near Brussels.

Famous Works of Mabuse

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Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Portrait of Anne de Veere."
Brooklyn, PRATT COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Man."
Buffalo, GOODYEAR COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Lady."
Cincinnati, MUSEUM ASSOCIATION: "Portrait of Queen Eleanor of France."
Detroit, HAASS COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Man."
Grosse Pointe, Mich., BOOTH COLLECTION: "Madonna and Child."
Hampton Court, PALACE: "The Children of Christian II."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Adoration of the Magi,""A Man Holding a Rosary,""A Man Holding a Glove,""Portrait of Jacqueline of Burgundy."
New York, HISTORICAL SOCIETY: "Virgin and Child and Cherubs."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of a Man," "Madonna and Child."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Many examples.
Notre Dame, UNIVERSITY: "Madonna and Child."
Ottawa, NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA: "Portrait of a Man Wearing the Collar of the Golden Fleece."
Paris, LOUVRE: "The Blessed Virgin and Child" in a diptych with "Portrait of Jan Carondelet."
Pasadena, ROMADKA COLLECTION: "St. Jerome Penitent."

The Adoration of the Kings by Mabuse

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AMONG the more celebrated of the paintings of Mabuse in his own time was a "Descent from the Cross" on the high altar of the monastery of St. Michael of Tongerloo. At the command of Philip of Burgundy, Mabuse executed a replica of it for the church at Middleburgh. Dürer--such was the fame of the picture-traveled there to see it. He had already seen the great altar piece of the Van Eycks, at Ghent, and written of it in his diary: "A most precious and important painting." Of the Mabuse he noted that it was not so good in design as in execution. This may be taken as a not ungenerous estimate of the work of Mabuse in its entirety.

Whether or not "The Adoration of the Kings" be felt to fall under Dürer's criticism of the Middleburgh painting, it unquestionably yields under Italian influence some measure of that national integrity which, like integrity of character in man, is a precious element of art.

Mabuse Jan Gossaert - Flemish School

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MABUSE (JAN GOSSAERT) was born in the Flemish town of Mabeuse from which he took his name. His life was spent in Antwerp where, at the age of 31, he became Master of the Guild of St. Luke. After a residence of some years in Antwerp, Mabuse entered the service of Philip, bastard of Philip the Good of Burgundy. This service was to have an unfortunate effect upon the school of art which had achieved important national distinction through the work of the Van Eycks. In 1508 Mabuse accompanied Philip to Italy where he acquired those influences which were not only to alter the character of his own art but establish Italy as the field of study for the Flemish painters.

Vasari, knowing of Mabuse's earlier work by hearsay, wrote of the progress that the painter had made in "the true method of producing pictures full of nude figures and poesies," though the pictures as we know them hardly justify that well-meant praise.

Mabuse's later work is of greater distinction, though it is felt that his chief claim to recognition rests on his craftsmanship. He was much in favor with the wealthy patrons of his day, being once commissioned by Christian II of Denmark to paint the portraits of his dwarfs. At the death of Philip, Mabuse designed and erected his tomb. It was under the patronage of Philip's successor, about the year 1534, that Mabuse died.

Famous Works of Hans Memling

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Antwerp, MUSÉE ROYALE: "Portrait of Niccolò Spinelli."
Bruges, HOSPITAL OF ST. JOHN: "Arrival of St. Ursula at Cologne,""Triptych of Brother John Floreins,""Diptych of Martin Van Nieuwenhove."
Brussels, MUSEUM: "Portraits of William Moreel and His Wife."
Chatsworth, DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE'S COLLECTION: "Triptych of Sir John Donne."
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "Madonna."
Chicago, EPSTEIN COLLECTION: "King David with a Boy."
Cincinnati, EDWARDS COLLECTION: "St. Stephen and St. Christopher."
Cleveland, MUSEUM OF ART: "Madonna and Child."
Munich, ROYAL GALLERY: "Christ the Light of the World."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of Tommaso Portinari," "Portrait of Maria, Wife of Tommaso Portinari," "Portrait of an Old Man," two examples of the "Madonna and Child," "Christ Blessing," "Betrothal of St. Catherine."
New York, MORGAN COLLECTION: "Man with a Pink," and two wings of a triptych.
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Several examples.
Philadelphia, JOHNSON COLLECTION: "Christ Crowned with Thorns," "Annunciate Virgin."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "The Man with an Arrow," "Madonna and Child with Two Angels."

Portrait of Niccolò Spinelli by Hans Memling

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Portrait of a Man

IT WAS the nature of Memling to be moved by only what was good. The splendor of the Flemish Bruges, the opulence of its nobles and great merchants, the famed beauty of its women, the richness of its temporal life, the healthful, deep, unquestioning fervor of its people's worship--all these to him were Bruges. Memling believed it all and loved it. And as a realist who lived in Paradise, he painted it.

To Bruges came many of the leading craftsmen of Europe. Among them was a skilled metal cutter, Niccolò Spinelli, or Niccolò il Fiorentino as he was known in his lifetime. And Memling painted him. None of us looking at a reproduction of this great portrait would suspect that the original panel was but twelve inches high.

Memling C. - Flemish School

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OF MEMLING'S EARLY youth very little is known, even the exact date of his birth being uncertain. His life, so far as we know it, was tranquil and uneventful and altogether unattended by that tragic poverty and want which has been the lot of numberless men of genius. His great industry, coupled with the regularity of his life, brought him-quite apart from his wife's dowry--considerable wealth and prosperity. It is therefore a little puzzling to discover that not long after his death Memling's name and work fell into such oblivion that only in comparatively recent times was his identity with his paintings re-established.

Between 1470 and 1480 Memling married the daughter of a wealthy burgher of Bruges and became thereby a well-to-do citizen. He purchased a large stone house with two smaller adjacent houses. As time went on his wealth increased; we find his name among those of the 247 richest citizens of Bruges who were called upon to contribute to the expenses of the war between the Emperor Maximilian and the King of France. But the turmoil of the fifteenth century in no degree disturbed Memling's serene outlook. His gentle, peaceful, kindly nature came to live, and lives today, in all that he did.

Memling died on August 11, 1494, at the probable age of 67. He was buried in Bruges.

Famous Works of Van Dyck

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Berlin, GALLERY: "Portrait of a Man Holding a Pink."
Brooklyn, MUSEUM: "Portrait of a Pilgrim."
Bruges, GALLERY: "Portrait of the Artist's Wife," "The Virgin and Child Protected by St. George."
Leningrad, HERMITAGE: "The Annunciation."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "John Arnolfini and His Wife," "Portrait of a Man,""Tim. otheus."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of a Donor," "Crucifixion," "Last Judgment" (two wings of a triptych).
Paris, LOUVRE: "The Virgin and Child and Donor."
Philadelphia, JOHNSON COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Man,""St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "The Annunciation."

The Virgin and Child and Donor by Jan Van Eyck

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"THE VIRGIN AND CHILD AND DONOR" is painted on wood two feet square. It sparkles today with a gem-like luster scarcely if at all diminished since the colors of the Van Eyck brothers were the envy of their contemporaries.

And what a monument to his own unquestionable virtue Chancellor Nicolas Rolin reared when he commissioned Jan Van Eyck to paint him so devoutly kneeling to the Virgin and Child! The likeness is convincing, the piety of Nicolas is impressive, and the memory of this worthy patron of the arts is assured forever. Between the columned arches lies what would appear to be a dream city but the magnifying glass has revealed its details for identification with many of the still existent buildings of Bruges.

There have been many distinguished craftsmen in the arts throughout the ages: the Van Eyck brothers are of their company. There have been none whose craftsmanship has served a more devout, believing, and tenderly perceptive soul than Jan Van Eyck's.

Jan Van Eyck - Flemish School

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IT IS BELIEVED that Jan Van Eyck was born at Maaseyck about 1386 and that he was some fifteen years younger than his less celebrated brother, Hubert. No details of his art studies are known, but his reputation must have been firmly established by 1425 when he entered the service of Philip of Burgundy as court painter. From records of the duke's expenditures it appears that the painter was frequently employed on private missions, but their exact nature can only be guessed. Important among the many works upon which the brothers Hubert and Jan worked together is the famous "Adoration of the Lamb," which adorns Ghent Cathedral.

Not only were the Van Eycks, Hubert and Jan, known by those values upon which true distinction in painting rests; they were important innovators through the introduction into their compositions of actual portraits in three-quarter view meticulously faithful to the characteristics of their sitters, and, through their rendering of light and distant detailed landscapes, the precursors of the realism which was to follow. While they were not the first to employ oil pigments, their use having been known since the tenth century, the Van Eycks developed them to such perfection as to establish them in the favor of the Flemish school.

Famous Paintings of Moroni

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Baltimore, WALTERS COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Lady."
Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Portrait of an Italian Nobleman."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Count Alborghetti and Son, of Bergamo."
Chicago, ART INSTITUTE: "Portrait of Ludovico Madruzzo."
Cleveland, MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of a Gentleman and His Wife."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ART: "Portrait of a Man with a Ruff."
Dresden, GALLERY: "Portrait of a Man."
Dublin, NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND: "Portraits of a Gentleman and His Two Children."
Florence, UFFIZI GALLERY: "Portrait of a Scholar," "Portrait of a Knight."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: Portraits of "A Tailor," "A Lawyer," "An Italian Lady," "An Italian Noble," "An Ecclesiastic."
Munich, GALLERY: "Portrait of a Lady."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of Bartolommeo Bongho," "Portrait of a Warrior," "Portrait of Lucrezia Cataneo."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Ottawa, NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA: "Portrait of a Man in Black."
Philadelphia, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Princeton, UNIVERSITY MUSEUM: "Portrait of a Donor."
Worcester, ART MUSEUM: "The Bergamask Captain," "Portrait of a Musician."

Portrait of a Tailor by Moroni

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FOR Moroni and a few others, we of today might not so fully appreciate the dignity and the substantial position of that middle class of the Renaissance which through its skill in the arts and crafts contributed to much to the accomplishment of what the nobles, patronizing them, are celebrated for. The tailor of that period of splendid costume is perhaps to be ranked with the craftsman artists of the Renaissance.

The craft guild movement of the middle ages was the prototype, though not the progenitor, of the craft unions of today. It was the expression of the natural interest of the skilled workers of each of the various crafts in establishing such standards of workmanship and compensation as were consistent with the importance and dignity of their crafts. In the northern European countries the rapid development of crafts into industries led to the formation of associations headed by such syndics as are the subject of Rembrandt's painting of that name; and, with the expansion of commerce, to such modern trade associations as, beyond the exploitation of the craftsman, are not concerned with him.

The slowness of Italy's industrial progress permitted the guilds to retain for a long period their true character; and their membership to continue in the enjoyment of their individual prerogatives and pride.

Moroni - School of Brescia

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SCHOOL OF BRESCIA

THE SMALL GROUP called the school of Brescia was a kind of provincial branch of the great Venetian school of painting, its members having either been trained in Venice or influenced by the Venetian masters. Among the Brescian painters was Alessandro Bonviccino Moretto, or the Blackamoor, a devout and sincere painter of religious subjects; the most famous of his pupils is Moroni, one of the distinguished portrait painters of the Renaissance. While other painters were captivated by the magnificence of Venetian pageantry, stirred by the pomp of an era when history was in the making, impressed, or subsidized by princes and nobles and their women, Moroni, touched apparently by no more than the human dignity of his contemporaries of his own class, faithfully painted them. His portraits unpretentiously conceived, well drawn and painted are among the valued documents of history and art.

Famous Works of Paris Bordone

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Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Christ in the Temple."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Portrait of Lavinia, Titian's Daughter."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Portrait of a Genoese Lady."
Milan, BRERA GALLERY: "The Lovers."
New York, HISTORICAL SOCIETY: "Repose on the Flight into Egypt."
Paris, LOUVRE: "Portrait of a Man."
Philadelphia, JOHNSON COLLECTION: "Christ Taking Leave of His Mother."
Philadelphia, WIDENER COLLECTION: "The Baptism of Our Lord."
Toronto, ART GALLERY: "Portrait of a Man."
Venice, ACADEMY: "Fishermen Presenting the Ring."

The Lovers by Paris Bordone

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Brera Gallery, Milan

"THE LOVERS" in the Brera collection at Milan is a wellknown example of Bordone's smaller subject pictures.

"The Lovers," writes one critic, "expresses deep and intense feeling." Let us judge of that for ourselves, reminding ourselves, lightly, of the quality of love by these little couplets by George Chappell:

When love is given
Love is heaven.

When love is lent
Love is spent.

When love is sold
Love is cold.

When love is bought
Love is naught.

Paris Bordone - Venetian School

2007-11-12T06:21:00.000+02:00

PARIS BORDONE was born in Treviso. He lived and died in Venice. A pupil of Titian, strongly influenced by Giorgione and others, he lived in the period of the decline of the Venetian Republic and of what had been the most sumptuous school of painting that the world has known. He was of a noble family; yet such was the position of the artist in the community of Venice in that period that his father encouraged him to follow the career of art.

Much of Bordone's work was done for churches. His masterpiece is held to be the large painting known as "The Fisherman Presenting the Ring of St. Mark to the Doge," a work which characterized the Republic in Bordone's time.

After various successes in Italy, Bordone was invited by Francis I to visit France. Here besides executing several commissions for that distinguished royal patron of the arts, he painted portraits of members of the court.

Works of Correggio

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Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Girl with Thorn."
Brunswick, Maine, BOWDOIN COLLEGE: "Madonna and Child" (drawing).
Cambridge, FOGG ART MUSEUM: "Study for a Head."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Mater Amabilis," "Madonna of the Basket," "St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness," "Angels," and many drawings.
Dresden, GALLERY: "Madonna and St. George."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Madonna della Cesta," "Ecce Homo," "The Education of Cupid."
Paris, LOUVRE: "The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine," "Jupiter and Antiope."
Parma, CAMERA DEL CORREGGIO: Frescoes.
Parma, CATHEDRAL: Frescoes.
Parma, GALLERY: "Virgin and Child with St. Jerome."
Parma, CHURCH OF SAN GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA: Frescoes.

The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine by Correggio

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IN THIS religious subject, Correggio manifests quite clearly an affinity with the style of Leonardo, chiefly in the painting of the head of the Madonna. There is a softness, almost a lush quality, in the handling of the subject; this "effeminate" treatment is very frequently found in Correggio's works. It is, on the whole, but one example of a growing tendency in Italian painting to soften, at times, sweeten, the religious subject--in short, to humanize it.

Here the representations of the Christ-child, the Madonna, Saint Catherine, and Saint Sebastian are delicate, relaxed, and lyrical. It is a healthy and poetic conception, unmystical and warm. This is no doubt the quality to which literary men were alluding when they spoke of the "correggiosity" of Correggio.

Correggio - School of Parma

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SCHOOL OF PARMA

CORREGGIO, WHOSE TRUE name was Antonio Allegri, received his title from the city of his birth. He first studied anatomy and then went to the school of Francesco Ferrari Bianchi. It is probable that he studied too with the followers of Andrea Mantegna at Padua.

He married and settled at Parma in 1520. It was here that he executed his two greatest works, "The Ascension of Christ" and "The Assumption of the Virgin," both enormous frescoes designed to cover the cupolas of the Church of San Giovanni and the Cathedral at Parma. From a purely technical point of view, these frescoes are both daring and advanced. Through violent foreshortening, far beyond anything his contemporaries ever ventured, he was able to achieve the wonderful feeling of "uplift" and "floating" in both of these large decorations. There are extant about forty works that can be definitely attributed to Correggio. He received no direct influence from a single personality and left little mark on his pupils. Bernardo Gatti is probably the only one of his followers who deserves mention.

Famous Works of Andrea Del Sarto

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Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Madonna, Child, and St. John" (jointly with pupils).
Cleveland, MUSEUM OF ART: "The Sacrifice of Abraham."
Florence, UFFIZI GALLERY: "Madonna of the Harpies," "SelfPortrait."
Florence, PITTI PALACE: "Assumption of the Virgin."
Florence, SAN SALVI: "The Last Supper" (fresco).
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "The Holy Family," "Self-Portrait."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "The Holy Family."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Ottawa, NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA: "The Magdalen" (attribution not certain).
Paris, LOUVRE: "Charity," "The Holy Family."
Philadelphia, JOHNSON COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Young Man."
Vienna, GALLERY: "The Holy Family."

The Madonna of the Harpies by Andrea Del Sarto

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IT IS significant of no more than the vast number of Madonnas painted by the Italian masters of the Renaissance that an obscure detail of this "Madonna and Child" by Andrea Del Sarto has given the picture its name. Curious, but of no particular interest in the composition, are the little winged female figures of the harpies. They may suggest, if we incline to seek such meanings, the contrast between good and evil.

Choosing, with questionable wisdom, Andrea Del Sarto as a symbol of the artist in his attitude to life and work, Browning has made him say:

I am grown peaceful as old age tonight.
I regret little, I would change still less.
Since there my past life lies, why alter it? . . .
This must suffice me here. What would one have?
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance--
Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel's reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo, and me
To cover,--the three first without a wife,
While I have mine! . . .

Andrea Del Sarto - Florentine School

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FLORENTINE SCHOOL

ANDREA D'AGNOLO, or, as he has come to be known, Andrea Del Sarto, was born at Florence and was apprenticed in early youth to a goldsmith. A few years of earnest study were followed by tuition from Piero di Cosimo. His taste for drawing, however, led him to learn industriously from the line works of Michelangelo and Leonardo. His skill in copying the works of the masters and the alleged astonishing precision of his painting gained for him the reputation of "the faultless painter."

In 1518 he went to France at the invitation of Francis I and painted the monarch and many members of the court. Commissioned by the king to return to Florence to acquire works of art for him, the painter launched into a life of dissipation, squandering even the money entrusted to him for purchases on the king's behalf. Stung with remorse and utterly in despair, he died and was buried at Florence in 1531.

Famous Works of Raphael

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Baltimore, EPSTEIN COLLECTION: "Emilia Pia de Montefeltro."
Boston, GARDNER COLLECTION: "Pietà,""Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami."
Boston, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: "Virgin and Child in Glory Worshiped by St. Francis and St. Anthony" (attribution questioned).
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Two Scenes from the Life of St. Nicholas of Tolentino" (shop of Raphael), "Portrait, presumed to be of Taddeo Taddei."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "The Ansidei Madonna," "The Vision of a Knight," "St. Catherine."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints," "The Agony in the Garden."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Some examples.
Notre Dame, UNIVERSITY: "Madonna of the Oak."
Paris, LOUVRE: "La Belle Jardinière," "St. George."
Philadelphia, WIDENER COLLECTION: The small Cowper "Madonna and Child."
Princeton, UNIVERSITY: "Holy Family" (by Raphael with assistants).
Rome, VATICAN: Seventy frescoes.
St. LOUIS, SHOENBERG COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Young Man."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLEY OF ART: "St. George and the Dragon," the large Cowper "Madonna and Child," and another "Madonna and Child."

The Ansidei Madonna by Raphael

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THIS altarpiece, painted about 1507, was commissioned by the Ansidei family of Perugia to be placed in the Church of San Fiorenzo. It is in a remarkably fine state of preservation, having lost little of its original freshness of color. The delicacy and minuteness with which Raphael handled detail in this altarpiece recalls the painting of Flanders and is testimony to Raphael's early admiration of the work of Roger van der Weyden and Justus of Ghent.

It is foolish to think of the term "eclectic" only in an unfavorable sense. Mere imitation of another style is, of course, no great achievement. The use of another style to make one's artistic expression personal is more worthy of praise and admiration. Raphael, during his entire development, was always receptive to new influences if they could be adapted and translated to help his painting. This panel shows more than Raphael's admiration for the Flemish painters; it has, too, the unmistakable imprint of Perugino, his teacher. But nowhere is there imitation or mimicry. While Raphael took freely from others, he gave even more largely of his own personal, intimate self.

Raphael Umbrian School

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UMBRIAN SCHOOL

RAPHAEL'S FATHER was a painter in the employ of the Duke of Urbino. He died when Raphael was only eleven, but it was during this formative period that Raphael received his original impetus and the seed of his future development. It is fruitless to attempt to define Raphael's progressive absorption of external influences. The imprint of Perugino, with whom he studied, was obvious at first, but soon became submerged. Raphael seems to have had the perfect faculty of eclecticism, consciously taking the best of everything and adapting it in a purely personal, unobtrusive way.

Raphael worked first in Urbino and Florence, but his large monumental paintings date from the time of his activity in Rome where, as one of the many painters invited by Pope Julius II to improve the Vatican, he decorated the Stanza della Segnatura with the famous "Disputa," a magnificent, strong conception, and with the "School of Athens," even bolder in design. He was always surrounded by a large retinue of pupils who formed a sort of "personal court" about him. During the years in which he was engaged upon these large decorations, Raphael continued to produce innumerable Madonnas, designs for tapestries, portraits, and even architectural designs.

He died on Good Friday in 1520 and was entombed, fittingly, in the Pantheon.

Works of Titian

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Baltimore, EPSTEIN COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Man."
Chicago, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS: Several examples.
Cincinnati, MUSEUM ASSOCIATION: "Portrait of Philip II of Spain."
Detroit, FORD COLLECTION: "Andrea Navagero."
Detroit, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "Man with a Flute," "Judith with the Head of Holofernes," "The Appeal" (jointly with others).
Florence, PITTI GALLERY: "The Magdalen," "Head of Christ."
Florence, UFFIZI GALLERY: "Flora," "Venus and Cupid," "Portrait of the Duke of Urbino."
Indianapolis, TARKINGTON COLLECTION: "Portrait of a Man."
Kansas City, NELSON GALLERY: "Portrait of Antoine Perrenot, Cardinal de Granvelle."
Kenosha, ALLEN COLLECTION: "Portrait of the Doge Andrea Gritti."
London, NATIONAL GALLERY: "Bacchus and Ariadne," "Noli Me Tangere," "Holy Family and Shepherd."
Minneapolis, INSTITUTE OF ARTS: "The Temptation of Christ."
New York, FRICK COLLECTION: "Man with a Red Cap," "Portrait of Pietro Aretino."
New York, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Portrait of the Doge Andrea Gritti," "Portrait of Alfonso d'Este," "Venus and the Lute Player."
New York, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS AND SALES GALLERIES: Several examples.
Ottawa, NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA: "Portrait of Daniele Barbaro."
Paris, LOUVRE: "Man with a Glove," "Madonna with St. Agnes."
Philadelphia, WIDENER COLLECTION: "Portrait of Irene di Spilimbergo,""Portrait of Emilia di Spilimbergo,""Venus and Adonis."
Rome, VILLA BORGHESE: "Sacred and Profane Love," "Education of Cupid."
St. Louis, CITY ART MUSEUM: "Christ Shown to the People."
Sarasota, RINGLING MUSEUM: "Portrait of Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus."
Venice, FRARI: "Assumption," "Madonna dei Casa Pesaro."
Venice, SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE: Ceiling pieces, "St. Mark Enthroned," "Descent of the Holy Spirit."
Washington, UNITED STATES NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: "Toilet of Venus,""Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John Bringing a Lamb to the Child,""Portrait of Andrea Franceschi" (uncertain).