Autumn Landscape with Four Trees, Vincent van Gogh

You might come across versions of this image on the web that are much more colorful — with bright oranges and reds — but despite Van Gogh’s penchant for brilliantly high-chroma paintings in his later career, I don’t believe that’s the case here.

I haven’t see the original, but this is from the middle of Van Gogh’s career, a point at which he was surprisingly true to nature (and to the 17th century Dutch painters from which he initially took inspiration), and it looks to me like these are brown leaves on an overcast day.

The best reproduction I’ve found is on WikiArt (large version here). The original is in the Kröller Müller Museum, whose small, dim website reproduction is not very helpful.

Flowers and fruit, Jean-Baptiste Robie

A stunning tour de force of subtle color, texture, light and dark by the Belgian still life painter.

On Google Art Project, high-resolution downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and measures roughly 64×54 inches (164x137cm).

As is often the case, the museum’s reproduction and that on the Google Art Project don’t quite agree. The Google image seems too warm and saturated; the museum’s version looks crisp but cold in comparison, particularly in the color of the metal.

Having never see one of Robie’s originals, I’ve taken a best guess here and color corrected my copy of the Google file to somewhere in-between.

The Mast-tree Grove, Ivan Shishkin

One of my favorites by the great Russian landscape painter. “Mast-tree Grove”, means a stand of trees suitable for making the masts of large sailing ships.

I have to stand back in awe at the way he has handled a subject that could be reduced to sameness in the hands of a lesser painter. As you scan across the painting, Shishkin treats you to a dozen different sets of foreground to background relationships.

The entire, complex scene reads clearly and simply at any distance, thanks to his deft control of his compositional elements and lighting effects. An absolutely masterful example of the use of value in landscape painting.

The original is in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, which does not really have any of their collection online; just a tiny reproduction of the painting on this highlights page.

The Google Art Project has an inexplicably terrible, color-shifted image here (zoomable no less). How that got past anyone, even an algorithm, I don’t know.

The best online image I’ve found of this well known work is on the Elsewhere blog (which, incidentally, is an excellent art blog, for which I will issue a Timesink Warning).