Eye Candy for Today: Alois Arnegger spring landscape

Alois Arnegger spring landscape, oil on canvas
Alois Arnegger spring landscape, oil on canvas

Primavera, Alois Arnegger

I don’t know about you, but I could use a bit of Spring right about now, even if it’s only in the form of a painting.

Austrian painter Alois Arnegger, who was active in the early 19th century, invites us to walk into an idyllic spring day, rich with textural brushwork and spattered suggestions of blossoms.

I don’t know anything official about this painting, like its size or location, though I assume it’s oil on canvas. I found this image in a post of various art images on a Russian blog (scroll down) published under the name of “marylai”, (large image here).

 
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Hopper in Paris

Hopper in Paris. paintings
Hopper in Paris. paintings

When Edward Hopper was in his early twenties, he lived in Paris for a year, and later returned on several occasions. He painted and sketched while he was there, as well as being exposed to art and artists he might not have encountered otherwise, laying the groundwork for his developing signature style.

Hopper in Paris” was a recent show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, consisting of paintings on loan from the extensive collection of the Whitney Museum in NY.

The Phillips Collection’s online presence for the exhibit unfortunately seems limited to one of those annoying “virtual gallery” interfaces, in which you must drag and click, drag and click, drag and click just to get a view of an individual image. I thought we had gotten rid of these gimmicks back in the 90s, but they’re apparently back thanks to the popularity of VR.

Fortunately, there are better places to view the images, such as this article on Fine Art Connoisseur, and this one on France Amérique.

 
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Eya Candy for Today: Stillman’s Love’s Messenger

Love's Messenger, Marie Spartali Stillman, watercolor and tempera
Love's Messenger, Marie Spartali Stillman, watercolor and tempera

Love’s Messenger, Marie Spartali Stillman, watercolor, tempera and gold paint on paper, 32 x 26 inches (116 x 100 cm).

I’ve stood in front of this beautiful painting in the Delaware Art Museum more times than I can count, marveling not only at the beautiful composition and subtle color, but at the remarkable painting technique and the delicately textural surface.

It appears to be a stipple technique often used by late 19th century British watercolorists, to wonderful effect.

For a long time, I remember the medium listed as simply “watercolor”, and I assumed the obviously opaque passages, such as the white highlights on the bird’s head and wings, were gouache. The museum’s webpage for the painting now lists the materials as watercolor and tempera. I’m still unsure what that means, exactly, as the term “tempera” is often applied to paints other than egg tempera.

For more, see my previous posts on Marie Spartali Stillman.

 
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Charles Dana Gibson

Charles Dana Gibson, pen and ink illustration
Charles Dana Gibson, pen and ink illustration

Charles Dana Gibson was one of America’s great “Golden Age” illustrators, and one of its finest proponents of pen and ink illustration.

He is particularly known for his drawings of the “Gibson Girl”, an idealized example of what at the time was becoming known as the “New Woman”. The Gibson Girl became a symbol of women who were coming to the fore and taking on new roles in society. Gibson’s drawings also made the Gibson Girl a fashion icon.

There are a number of remarkable pen and ink artists from that period, toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, but few had the same combination of delicate subtlety and bold freedom that exemplified Gibson’s command of the pen.

His illustrations ranged to many other subjects. The Library of Congress has a nice online exhibition feature that outlines some of his major areas of interest, while focusing on the Gibson Girl.

Many of the reproductions of Gibson’s drawings appear to reflect the discoloration of the paper on which they were drawn, but they are still highly enjoyable.

For more, see my previous posts on Charles Dana Gibson.

 
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Eye Candy for Today: Daniel Ridgway Knight figure in landscape

Daniel Ridgway Knight figure in landscape
Daniel Ridgway Knight figure in landscape (details)

Unfortunately, I can’t find the title, size or other information on this beautiful paining by turn of the 20th century American artist Daniel Ridgway Knight. [Addendum: artist James DeBoer has been kind enough to provide that information: the title is Partant pour le Travail (Leaving for Work), the painting is 32 x26″ (81 x 66 cm), and was painted in 1899.]

I found the image as part of this blog post (direct link to the image here).

Like many of Knight’s paintings, this one shows a young rural woman set against an idyllically beautiful landscape, painted with a muted palette and a keen sensibility to value relationships.

For more, see my other posts about Daniel Ridgway Knight.

 
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Hiroshi Yoshida exhibit in Tokyo

Hiroshi Yoshida japanese woodblock prints exhibit in Tokyo
Hiroshi Yoshida japanese woodblock prints exhibit in Tokyo

Hiroshi Yoshida the wonderful Japanese printmaker — active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — was trained in western art styles and painting and eventually combined those aesthetics with the traditions of Japanese art to create beautiful woodblock paints in the shin hanga style.

A new exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum commemorates the 70th anniversary of Yoshida’s death, and the online highlights of the exhibition offer a selection of high quality examples of his prints. The exhibition runs until March 28, 2021. I don’t know how long the exhibition website will be onine.

For more images and links to his work, see my previous posts on Hiroshi Yoshida.

 
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