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Paintings of Paul Signac 6: Consumption and demolition
Just before the end of 1895, Siegfried Bing opened his gallery l’Art Nouveau in Paris. Its first exhibition included paintings by Cross, Van Rysselberghe and Paul Signac (1863-1935). In the New Year,...
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Perfect pastels by Jean-Étienne Liotard
Another of the great masters of pastel painting in the eighteenth century, and a portraitist of renown, was the Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789). He is perhaps best-known for The Chocolate...
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Paintings of painters painting 1: John Singer Sargent
At its best, introspective art can amaze: the almost eight-minute long opening shot of Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) is an example I still love to return to. Introspective painting also has the...
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Paintings of painters painting 2: Louis Béroud and the missing Mona Lisa
In yesterday’s article, I showed paintings by a modern master, John Singer Sargent, showing other painters at work painting. Today I look at the relatively obscure painter Louis Béroud (1852–1930), who...
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Don Quixote: Book 2 summary and contents 3
This is the third and final article providing a table of contents, summary and selected paintings for the second book of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The Duke and Duchess arranged a proxy for the...
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Colour Notes 7: Colourspaces and rendering
Painters match colours by eye, but computers and printers need a mechanism to ensure that the colours they display are as faithful as possible. To give you an idea of how badly this can go wrong, here...
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Sheer Delight 7: Uniformity and dissolution
While the portrait painters of the late eighteenth century were working surface texture into the fine dress of their sitters, art was on the change with the arrival of Neoclassicism and its bright,...
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Paintings of Paul Signac 7: Rivers of France
In the summer of 1899, Paul Signac (1863–1935) published his book From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, in which he gave his account of the evolution of painting in the nineteenth century. Paul...
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In the shadow of Manet: The forgotten art of Eva Gonzalès
Of the four women French Impressionists, Eva Gonzalès (1849–1883) was the youngest, died first, and in her brief career was probably the most prolific. Yet while most remember Mary Cassatt, Berthe...
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Gorgeous Landscapes 1: Wolf to Cole
Gorges didn’t exist before the middle of the eighteenth century. That’s to say that what we now call a gorge, a narrow and rocky opening between hills, wasn’t so named. There were passes, ravines and...
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Gorgeous Landscapes 2: Lessing to Hodler
In the first of these two articles showing paintings of gorges, I included a work by Carl Gustav Carus, one of Caspar David Friedrich’s pupils. This sequel starts with two works by another equally...
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Don Quixote: Overall summary and contents
This article provides an overview of the contents of my series of 57 articles covering the two books of Don Quixote. Rather than attempting to summarise it completely, it lists significant episodes and...
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Colour Notes 8: The scarlet woman
Colour is widely known for its symbolic use, which also pervades language. In this article I look at what might appear a fairly clear and straightforward example, the scarlet woman. There are two...
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Sheer Delight 8: Rags and tatters
From the middle of the nineteenth century, depiction of clothing and fabrics in paintings divides into three: social realism and Naturalism, where the reality of the clothes worn by the poor became...
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Paintings of Paul Signac 8: Venice
In November 1903, Camille Pissarro died in Paris. Although his relationship with Paul Signac (1863-1935) had been strained at times, and ‘Père’ Pissarro had been a fierce critic of Signac’s...
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Édouard Manet’s pastel paintings
One curious observation about the art of Eva Gonzalès is her competence in pastels when she was still a student of Édouard Manet (1832–1883) in about 1869-70. It’s plausible that Gonzalès learned to...
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Carroll Beckwith’s paintings 1: Paris and the under-age model
Given the strong, even violent, responses to some paintings, it’s perhaps surprising that more painters haven’t come to violent ends. Two who may have been murdered are Masaccio and Caravaggio....
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Carroll Beckwith’s paintings 2: The Spanish dancer and a jealous husband
In 1901, the talented, respected and rather staid Carroll Beckwith had painted a racy portrait of the young, almost certainly too young, Evelyn Nesbit. James Carroll Beckwith (1852–1917), Portrait of...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays: Introduction to a new series
I’ve now retold the stories in nine major works of literature, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Goethe’s Faust, alongside their many paintings and illustrations. Over the coming months, I’ll be doing the...
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Colour Notes 9: Chroma, class and the modern
We live in a very colourful world. Until the advent of modern synthetic dyes and pigments, and the social revolutions of the last couple of centuries, for the vast majority their immediate surroundings...
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