Frank Sherwin was a British artist active in the early to mid 20th century. He is best known for his delightful travel posters, as well as his traditional watercolors.
He also painted watercolors for a number of “carriage prints” (images above, bottom, with details). These were horizontal format banners displayed in railway cars for the entertainment of passengers, much the way ads are often displayed in a row above the windows in subway trains and busses here in the U.S.
A cityscape by Adrianus Eversen.
The only examples I’ve found of this image are on Pinterest, so I don’t know the title, size or present location of the original. I found this copy of the image from this poster.
However, I like it a lot, so I felt it worth posting. I don’t care if he painted every brick; I don’t care if the fugures are wooden and look more like architectural accessories than people, I’m just a sucker for this kind of late 19th century cityscapes.
I think it’s my fascination with visual texture that draws me into these — that and the sense of atmosphere. For all it’s complexity, the values, colors, and the feeling of time and place all work harmoniously and look great to my eye.
Alfonso Font is a Spanish comiics artist and illustrator. He has worked o a number of comics projects with other creators, as well as on his oen self-penned stories, Taxi, Clarke & Kubrick and Prisoner of the Stars.
Font’s drawing style is a delightful combination of solid draftsmanship and loose gesture ink rendering — given them a lively sense of energy and life.
As good as his work looks in color, I thiink it’s a treat to see his orignials in black in white, which you can do in the Original Art ssection of his website.
If you want to see more of his work in color, you might want to simply do a search for Alfonso Font on Google Images.
You can find a number of the projects he’s illustrated on Amazon (Affiliate link).
Genoveva, Ludwig Richter, watercolor on paper, roughly 12 x 7 in (31 x 18 cm); in the collectin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has both a zoomable and downloadable version of th elarge image.
This painting by 19th century German painter and printmaker Adrian Ludwig Richter depicts the legend of Genoveva, a woman falsely accused of adultry while her husband was off to war. Condemmed to death, she sought refuge in the forest of Ardennes, where she and her son found shelter in a cave and were fed by a deer for six years.
In the version of the painting in the images above, bottom, I’ve done something I’ve often complained about others doing: taking an image of an artwork and cranking up the saturation to make it look “better” and “more modern”. Hopefully, in this case, I’ve done so judiciously with the intention of giving an indication of what I think the painting may have looked like when originally painted.
It’s my understanding that many watercolors from the 19th century are faded, partly from exposure to light for pigments that were less than lightfast, and partly from exposure to sulpher compounds from the pollution caused by the burgeoning industrial age, which interacted in particular with lead-based whites, yellows and reds. I’m just guessing that the painting was originally more vibrant than it is at present (perhaps even more than my rough approximation).
Élisabeth Sonrel was a French painter and illustrator who was active from the late 19th century to the mid-20th. She worked in both Art Nouveau poster style and in a more naturalistic Victorian style of painting.
