Category: Gallery and Museum Art
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Ben Sack
Benjamin Sack creates wonderfully complex large scale drawings of imaginary cities, often in detailed, map-like projections. There is a fascinating video on YouTube that steps through his process in filling out the drawing shown above, top (with detail). I particularly like his fun take on Van Gogh’s The Starry Night (above, bottom, with detail). In…
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Portraits of Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon: Zorn vs. Sargent
Though I’ve never had the chance to see the original in person (it’s not always on display), I’ve admired this portrait of Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon (née Virginia Purdy) by Anders Zorn in the high-resolution images on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website. The Met’s description of the painting is brief, and mentions that both…
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April Fool-the-eye Day: trompe l’oeil by Andrea Pozzo
Instead of a fake post, or some similar nonsense, let’s celebrate April Fool’s Day with a nice bit of “fool the eye” (trompe l’oeil) by Andrea Pozzo. This is his false dome for the Jseuit Church in Vienna, a fresco painted on a gently curved surface on the ceiling. This is essentially a anamorphic projection,…
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More “not the usual Van Goghs”
I’ve written before about how most book publishers tend to take a safe, “greatest hits” approach to publishing works by Vincent van Gogh, leaving much of the fascinating variety of his subjects unseen. In honor of Van Gogh’s birthday, here is another modest selection of some works of his you don’t often see. Most of…
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Graphite drawings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Today, March 30, is — we are told — “National Pencil Day“, marking the advent of a patent on the pencil with an attached eraser. I’ll put aside the fact that this hardly represents the most significant event in the history of the pencil, and the inaccuracy of the linked WN article about Lipman creating…
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Eye Candy for Today: Carl Blechen interior
Interior of the Palm House, Carl Blechen On Google Art Project. Downloadable high-resolution version on Wikimedia Commons. Original is in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. I had seen reproductions of this painting before, and has assumed it was a watercolor from the translucency of the leaves and the graphic nature of some of…