Category: Color
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Simultaneous contrast in Monet’s Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn)
Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn), Claude Monet; oil on canvas, roughly 28 x 40 in. (66 x 28 cm); in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which offers both zoomable and downloadable images on their site. Here’s a question for you: in this painting by Monet — one of several in…
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Eye Candy for Today: Jules Bastien-Lepage genre painting
Le Père Jacques (The Wood Gatherer), Jules Bastien-Lepage, oil on canvas, roughly 77 x 71 inches (197 x 182 cm). Original is in the Milwaukee Art Museum. One of the things that has always fascinated me about 19th century French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage is his use of value relationships. Notice how vibrantly the young girl,…
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Values in Monet’s Impression, Sunrise
Originally exhibited in the April 1874 exhibit of the Societe’ Anonyme des Artistes, Peintires, Sculpters, Graveurs, Etc. (Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc.), now referred to as the First Impressionist Exhibition, this painting by Claude Monet appeared with the title: Impression, Sunrise. The name was picked up by unsympathetic critics and used derisively to…
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“Colour Wheels, Charts, and Tables Through History” on Public Domain Review
The Public Domain Review (a fascinating site, if you’re not familiar with it) has a nice short article on the history of the graphic organization of color over time. Many of the images are drawn from an article by Sarah Lowengard (published on Gutenberg-e): The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, that was also the…
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A few books on the history of pigments and colors
First of all, this is not an end-of-year book list, or a series of reviews, or even recommendations. I just realized there seems to be a kind of mini-genre of books about the history of various pigments and colors, many of which are of interest in terms of artist’s pigments. I haven’t read these, I’ve…
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A Revolution of the Palette at Norton Simon
Though it had been slowing expanding over the centuries, the range of paint colors available to artists increased most dramatically in the 19th century, when a number of new synthetic pigments began to come into production, partly as a result of the industrial revolution. Prior to that, new color discoveries were few and scattered, and…