Claude Verlinde is a French painter who works in the vein of “fantastic realism”, sometimes called “magic realism”, and his work shows the lineage of fantastical art from Bruegel and Bosch to the Surrealists and contemporary magic realists.

I would also suspect that a number of the Surrealists, and certainly contemporary magic realists, were influenced by his work (not to mention the production designers of the Harry Potter movies).

Verlinde’s website, which is in French, has works divided into thematic galleries. (Note that the link I give is direct to the gallery categories, the main page for “La Galerie” produces a looping JavaScript error, at least in my browser.) There is also a section for drawings and watercolors.

His often darkly themed works employ the dark earth tones of the early Renaissance, as well as some of the visual staging and precise rendering characteristic of that period. He sometimes uses a brighter palette, but his work always has a feeling of referencing another time, if not another world.

The images on his site are sometimes a bit larger than they appear (click for larger versions), but usually not as large as one might like, though a few of them are accompanied by detail crops.

There is a trove of larger versions on the Russian Blog Beyond time, beyond space. There are also galleries on beinArt Surreal Art Collective and Ten Dreams.

There is a French collection of his work, Claude Verlinde: Peintures et dessins (Visions), that is out of print, but may be found through used book sources.

[Via adamvasco on MetaFilter]

[Note: some images should be considered NSFW]