Category: Eye Candy for Today

Birds of a Flowering Branch, Watanabe Seitei In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use zoom or download icons below the image. Roughly 14×11 inches (36x27cm), ink and color on silk. The listing doesn’t say what kind of “color”. The white flowers look to me like opaque watercolor, but I don’t know. The…

Pronk Still Life with Holbein Bowl, Nautilus Cup, Glass Goblet and Fruit Dish, Willem Kalf Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project, downloadable high-res file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark, which also has a high-res downloadable file. “Pronk” still life means “splendid”, or…

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, Claude Monet In the Getty Museum, also on Google Art Project and Wikimedia Commons (also here). The Getty page offers a downloadble version that is very high resolution (60mb). The Getty version seems unnecessarily dark to me (I haven’t found museums to be particularly reliable when it comes to…

Arques-la-Bataille, John Henry Twachtman and preliminary version for same. When 19th century American painter John Henry Twachtman moved to Paris from Munich, he abandoned the dark palette of his original teachers, and adopted to some extent the brighter palette of the French Impressionists. However, he also moved away from their broken color and loaded brush…

Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, Johannes Vermeer In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; use the zoom or download icons under the image on the museum’s website. Of the 35 or 36 Vermeer paintings acknowledged to exist, I’ve had the good fortune in my time to have seen perhaps 20 in person.…

The King Governs by Himself, Charles Le Brun Zoomable version on Google Art Project; high-resolution (57mb) downloadable version on Wikimedia Commons; view from the other direction on The Athenaeum; original is in the Palace of Versailles. This is the centerpiece of a remarkable series of large scale works by 17th century French painter Charles Le…