Month: March 2014

Cornelis Vreedenburgh was a Dutch painter active in the early 20th century, whose work is wonderfully painterly, richly colored and beautifully atmospheric. I can find little information about him, and only one image archive with a significant number of paintings: WikiPaintings. The reproductions there, however, are a bit small to appreciate how terrific Vreedenburgh’s paint…

Jacques-Émile Blanche was a French painter and portrait artist active in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was friends with Marcel Proust, whose portrait he painted (above, top), as well as other literary and artistic figures of the time such as Aubrey Beardsley (second down). I haven’t found a lot of information on…

Originally from Russia and now living in the U.S., Michael Cheval’s flights of imaginative visions might be called “magic realism”, though classifying this kind of work is always a slippery process. Certainly not “surrealism”, a term often used casually and incorrectly to describe fantastic art, though you may see nods to the visual language of…

I have to go on record as saying that Pierre Auguste Renoir is not one of my favorite painters. Certainly among the original French Impressionists, I find him the weakest and most inconsistent — not a painter at the level of his contemporaries in the Impressionist circle. Renoir was prolific, and I’ve seen enough bad…