Reeling from a front-page scandal threatening to derail his career, the American painter John Singer Sargent spent the summer of 1885 healing his emotional wounds at a country estate in England. Though he was fantasizing about [...]
The Number One Thing you need to paint better trees is to understand trees better. That’s the surprising verdict of 20th century landscapist and author John Carlson. Carlson literally wrote the book on landscape painting [...]
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” -Andrew Wyeth [...]
In more than one sense, the 15th century Cestello Annunciation proclaimed the beginning of a new chapter in human history. The Cestello Annunciation by Sandro Botticelli is a painting in tempera on wood that adorns [...]
Artists have delighted, over the years, in giving visual form to imaginative ideas and passages from literature, doubly so when the source itself is straight out of imagination. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “double, double, [...]
Not long ago we compared equally innovative still life flower painters Eduard Manet and Henri Fantin-Latour: two 19th century French artists painting at close to the same time – 1882 - 1885 – with very [...]
A typical Crane of his later period (1920s). Robert Bruce Crane (1857 – October 30, 1937) learned his tonalistic approach from French landscapist Jean Charles Cazin (1841–1901), with whom he studied for a period. Cazin was [...]
Can scent form the basis of an artwork? Can there be a visual aesthetics of smell? The Soul of the Rose by John William Waterhouse is a visual testament to intangible qualities we know and feel [...]
By daring big leaps from one plateau to the next, Dwight Tryon (1849-1925) became a famous early 20th century Tonalist, a poet-in-paint of the raw New England countryside. Like his fellow Tonalists (most of whom [...]
Blazing foliage and sun-dappled dirt roads lined with red-gold oaks maples – wonderful fall motifs. But the ingenious work of artist Daniel Gerhartz proves you can create paintings that say “autumn” without having to depict [...]
