Category: Eye Candy for Today

Still Life with Fruit and a Cup on Cock’s Legs, Abraham Mignon In the Rijksmuseum. Ostensibly a still life, Mignon’s not-so-still composition is actually teeming with insect, arachnid and mollusk life, in addition to the beautifully rendered plant forms and man made objects — not to mention the cock’s leg base for the decorative cup…

The Trout Pool, Worthington Whittredge In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the younger generation of the Hudson River School painters, Whittredge often favored intimate forest scenes as much as large dramatic landscapes. Here, through the framing device of the dark mature trees, their leafy canopy and the fallen log, we are invited to…

Mount St Michael, Cornwall, Clarkson Stanfield On Google Art Project, downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the National Gallery of Victoria. Stanfield drew on his eight years as a sailor to create this scene in which he has set the offshore island in the midst of a tempest. Along with a number of…

Portrait of Alida Christina Assink, Jan Adam Kruseman In the Rijksmuseum. Nicely refined and deftly handled society portrait by a 19th century Dutch painter, working in many ways in the style of popular English portrait paintings of the time.

Interior with Women beside a Linen Cupboard, Pieter de Hooch In the Rijskmuseum. This is another of Pieter de Hooch’s marvelous “keyhole paintings”, in which we are not only invited to enter the painting, but to effectively pass through it — first in the form of the window behind the women, which offers a glimpse…