Britain’s National Gallery has a nice collection of Corots digitized in high resolution on their website. You can’t beat it as a learning tool – you can zoom in and crawl all over these masterworks [...]

How do you critique a landscape painting? It helps to start with composition, value, and color, in that order. This painting has a lot going for it:  The composition is pretty solid; the high horizon [...]

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 [...]