Bertha Wegmann was a Danish painter active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Known primarily for her portraits, her subjects also included landscapes, still life and room interiors.
She is noted as the first woman chairholder at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She was friends with the Swedish painter Jeanna Bauck, who painted a portrait of Wegmann at work.
Villa Mancini in the Vicinity of Signa, Giuseppe Zocchi; pen and black in on paper; roughly 11 x 19 inches (28 x 47 cm). In the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum, which has both zoomable and downloadable versions of the image.
Giuseppe Zocch was an 18th century Italian painter and printmaker active in Florence.
I love the way Zocchi has used different tones of ink in this drawing to create atmospheric perspective and suggest at least four planes of distance.
Joke Frima is a painter originally from the Netherlands now working and living in France. Her highly refined paintings often are of close views of fruits, flowers, gourds and other plants in their natural state, sort of intimate landscapes or living still life.
She also paints more formal still life subjects as well as more traditional landscapes. Her website features galleries of recent work, drawings, and archives of a number of subjects. The basic site is in Dutch, but you can choose a language from the drop-down at upper right of the page.
I’m not certain how her first name is pronounced, but my best guess would be somethng like “yo-kay”. In addition to her website, her work is featured on the Art Renewal Center website as one of their “Living Master” artists.
A beautiful Hal Foster 1939 Prince Valiant Sunday newspaper comic strip from the glory days of newspaper adventure comics.
This is a photo of the original art. It would have been printed in color as a full newspaper page, at a time when newspapers were much larger than the ridiculous size they’ve been reduced to today (in an apparent effort by publishers to remove the last remnants of what used to make newspapers a pleasure to hold and read).
I place Foster in the tradition of great pen and ink artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as he, Alex Raymond, Winsor McCay and others followed in their footsteps.
Sourced from Heritage Auctions, large image here.
Myles Birket Foster was a British painter, engraver and illustrator active during the mid to late 19th century. He worked primarily in watercolor, as well as engraving and drawing media.
He was noted for his landscapes, a subject of his that I run hot and cold on. I like those that focus on the evocation of the natural world, and pull back from a large number of them that offer sentimental idealized scenes of rural life.
Glasgow Docks, John Atkinson Grimshaw; oil on card, roughly 12 x 20 inches (30 x 50 cm). Link is to Wikimedia Commons, I don’t know the location of the original. SInce the Wikimedia image was sourced from Bonham’s auctions, I would assume it’s in a private collection.
This nicely atmospheric painting by the Victorian era English artist looks detailed and highly finished at first glance, but reveals itself to be quite rough and gesturally rendered on close inspection.
