The passionate affair lasted only months. The Great Artist, sculptor August Rodin, found his next model and muse and moved on. But the young woman obsessively in love with him, the painter Gwen John (1876–1939), [...]
This is a black and white painting by one of the artists of the famed Lyme art colony in Connecticut. It’s a virtual blueprint of landscape technique – the absence of color lets us study [...]
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), drew inspiration from wells of emotion. Wyeth called Spindrift (1950) a “portrait” of one of his Maine acquaintances. It’s done in tempera on panel, and the colors are opaque and muted and the surface is matte. [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
Far more than offering us a rustic church nestled in a quiet grove of trees, Casper David Friedrich’s Abbey among the Oak Trees set the stage for 200 years of gothic horror. This artist had [...]
In the winter of 1883 Édouard Manet, then 51 and confined to bed, was dying a painful death. And yet, over the course of his final year of life, the artist had been distilling the [...]
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame, I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done, I [...]
“The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers …. The artist must not think of critical rewards or money he will get for [...]
