Category: Eye Candy for Today

The Arab Jeweler, Charles Sprague Pearce In the Metropolitan Museum of Art; use zoom or download icons under the image. This piece by the 19th century Boston painter of an Egyptian craftsman and his tools — a subject common among “Orientalist” painters — looks refined on the surface; but on closer inspection in the nicely…

Flute Concert with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci, Adolph Menzel Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the Alte Nationalgalerie, National Museums in Berlin. The ostensible subject, Frederick the Great — about whom Menzel painted a series of works — is almost lost among the…

Madonna and Child with Saints, Girolamo dai Libri Tempera and oil on canvas; 16th century, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use the zoom or download icons under the image. To my mind, this could be titled “Madonna and Child with Laurel Tree“, so striking is the tree’s presence, painstakingly detailed and dominating the composition.…

The Concert, Gerrit van Honthorst In the National Gallery of Art, DC; there is also a downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons. Like many of his northern European contemporaries, 17th century Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst was taken with the dramatic chiaroscuro and dynamic compositions of Caravaggio. Honrhorst, however, brought his figures into full light and…

Present Aspect of Gaines’s Mill, Looking East; Harry Fenn Link is to a zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable version on Wikimedia Commons; original is in Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Clear observation and crisp, textural rendering give Fenn’s drawing of a brick-walled mill and nearby wooden houses a tactile sense of presence and…