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The Meiji Renaissance: Antonio Fontanesi and Japanese painting 2
In the first of these two articles about the history of European-style painting in Japan during the Meiji Renaissance, I showed the paintings of some of those who developed European styles. This...
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Don Quixote 57: Don Quixote’s death
In the previous episode, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rode away from the Duke and Duchess’s castle, each with their own regrets. When they stopped to rest after dark, Sancho resumed lashing himself in...
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Colour Notes 4: Under no illusions
Way back in 1968, the year before the BBC first broadcast TV in colour, the technology programme Tomorrow’s World showed a cunning demonstration of an illusion appearing to show colour on a monochrome...
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Sheer Delight 4: Gone with the wind
The sixteenth century brought great change to the way in which clothing and fabrics were depicted. In the first couple of decades, Raphael had mastered their appearance in much the same way that...
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Paintings of Paul Signac 4: Two deaths and marriage
In the autumn of 1889, Paul Signac (1863-1935) was busy completing a set of plates for two books by Charles Henry, a project which he estimated took him over six hundred hours. He was disappointed,...
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Pastel Portraits of Rosalba Carriera
The painting of portraits seldom brings great change to art. One notable exception to this is the work of Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757), one of the most brilliant of the first wave of painters in...
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Painting the Casualties of War 1
By a horrifyingly odd coincidence, in the months that I’m remembering a small and strange war that took place forty years ago in the Falkland Islands, we’re watching helpless as thousands of Ukrainians...
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Painting the Casualties of War 2
In the first of these two articles looking briefly at the impact of war on art, I covered two major painters who were killed in battle during the Franco-Prussian War, and some paintings of the carnage...
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Don Quixote: Book 2 summary and contents 1
This is the first of three articles providing a table of contents, summary and selected paintings for the second book of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Cervantes resumes the story with Don Quixote...
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Colour Notes 5: Fauvism in mainstream painting
For a few years in the early twentieth century, André Derain, Henri Matisse and others known as the Fauves (‘wild beasts’) dazzled those who viewed their avant garde art. Not only were their colours...
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Sheer Delight 5: Fooling the brain
During the Renaissance, artists developed one approach to the lifelike rendering of fabrics and their surface textures, that of precise representation using sophisticated painting techniques. Painters...
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Paintings of Paul Signac 5: Colour and anarchy
Following their marriage in November 1892, Paul Signac (1863-1935) and Berthe Roblès remained in Paris, where the artist was arranging the First Neo-Impressionist Exhibition, held the following month....
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Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: surviving by her portraits
One of the great women portraitists inspired by the art and career of Rosalba Carriera was Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), another painter in pastels who lived in spite of interesting...
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Painting the Fountain of Life 1
Fountains were originally natural springs which were controlled to deliver water in a manner that makes their supply more accessible. Instead of trickling away into a stream, their jet of water is...
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Painting the Fountain of Life 2
In the first of these two articles looking at the reading of fountains in paintings, I showed examples from around 550 CE to the middle of the nineteenth century. This article concludes with later...
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Exhibition: Come to London to see Venice through Canaletto’s paintings
If you’re in London this summer, and can get to Greenwich, you might like to enjoy a unique trip to eighteenth century Venice, courtesy of an exhibition of twenty-four of the most wonderful paintings...
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Calibrating your display in Monterey
There was a time when the Displays pane had two tabs, Display and Color. Select the latter, and you could choose a colour profile for that display or calibrate it to create a new one. These days, even...
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Don Quixote: Book 2 summary and contents 2
This is the second of three articles providing a table of contents, summary and selected paintings for the second book of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. As they were riding together towards...
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Colour Notes 6: One man in ten
I was giving my PowerPoint presentation in a full dress rehearsal for a VIP visit, in front of The Big Boss. Predictably, when it came to display a JPEG image, PowerPoint did the dirty and failed to...
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Sheer Delight 6: Flesh and fashion
While some eighteenth century artists were more concerned with the careful positioning of fragments of fabric on otherwise nude bodies, others further developed the depiction of clothing. Antoine...
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