Originally from Austalia and now based in Paris, portrait artist Ralph Heimans has received much attention for his striking portraits of musician and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy (image above, top three) and Princess Mary of Denmark (fourth and fifth down), among others. He has recently accepted a commission to paint an official portrait of the Queen of England.

Heimans uses a traditional glazing technique more common in the 17th and 18th centuries than in contemporary painting, and his approach shows his admiration for masters of chiaroscuro like Caravaggiao and Velazquez. For some reason, though, my first thought was of Jacques Louis David (though much warmer), perhaps because of the importance that the settings play in his portraits.

It’s interesting to note that most of Heimans’ portrait compositions are horizontal — “landscape” rather than “portrait” orientation. The settings say something about the sitter, putting them in a context, and also create a great deal of the visual interest in the works when viewed as paintings, rather than as portraits of specific individuals.

He experiments with his compositions in other ways, taking chances on unusual angles and points of view, working with cast shadows, and creating wonderfully engaging images within his images in the form of reflections.

In addition to the (unfortunately limited) selection of work on his site, there are a few short videos that delve into the creation of two of his signature pieces.

[Via Bo Bartlett on Twitter]

Art Nouveau was a movement that encompassed more than visual art, extending into packaging design, decorative arts and architecture. Art Nouveau artists, designers and architects wanted to beautify the world. In some small part, at least, they succeeded.

A Russian language LiveJournal blog post by an individual identified as “marinni” titled (as close as I can get with Google Translate) “Windows in the Art Nouveau Style and the mystery of Moscow Windows” is loaded with photographs of glorious Art Nouveau style windows and building facades from various cities in Europe.

There are links at the bottom of the post (before the comments) to Flickr sets, presumably from which the images were drawn.

Can you imagine if this architectural movement had taken hold, and buildings like these defined our cities, instead of the Bauhaus boxes that rise in their stead?

[Via the always alert to visual wonders author of BibliOdyssey, by way of Twitter.]

My love of British Pre-Raphaelite painting goes back to childhood.

I grew up just outside of Wilmington, Delaware, and from an early age my artistic diet was rich in the the glorious storytelling of Howard Pyle and his students, and the dazzling works of the Pre-Raphaelites, both of which are represented by strong collections at the Delaware Art Museum.

I remember being impressed in particular by paintings in the Pre-Raphaelite collection by John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, with their mesmerizing detail, intense color and preternaturally sharp focus.

it was later, as a teenager who had been exposed to more art at the Philadelphia Art Museum and on school trips to museums in New York, that I became just as interested in work by less well known artists associated with the movement, like Frederick Sandys, Marie Spartelli Stillman, Edward Burne-Jones and Albert Joseph Moore. (I was then, as now, somewhat lukewarm on the work of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but not the strongest of the painters in the group.)

The Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art at the Delaware Art Museum is one of the best outside of England, and it was tapped recently for the loan of key works (images above, top two) for a new major exhibition at the Tate Britain titled Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde.

The exhibition contains over 150 works and I believe it is the largest of its kind since a show at the Tate in the 1980’s. Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde just opened on the 12th and will be on display until 13 January 2013.

(For those in the U.S. and Russia, read on — I’m happy to say that a traveling version of the exhibition, at least 130 works, will be crossing the Atlantic for a run at the National Gallery in Washington, DC from February 17 to May 19, 2013. Those in Russia can look for it in Pushkin State Museum in Moscow in Summer 2013.)

The Tate has a small selection of works on their page for the exhibit, supplemented by a Pinterest page and some mentions on a blog, but in general follows the cluelessness that major museums seem to have about using the internet to promote their exhibitions. (Here’s a clue: it’s about the art, i.e. images of what’s in the show!)

As is often the case, newspapers do a better job of showing what’s in the exhibition than the museum itself; there are articles with images on the Guardian (slideshow and audio tour), The Telagraph and Bloomberg. Artist and writer Katherine Tyrell has a review and list of resources relevant to the exhibit on her blog Making a Mark.

You can also take hints from the works shown or mentioned and look them up. Wikipedia has a list of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. I list some additional links to resources on my 2007 post on The Pre-Raphaelites.

The exhibition looks to be a major event, with an extensive overview of this group of painters, highlighted many of their most important and well-known works.

This is despite a theme that reflects the Tate’s wrong-headed attempt to cast the Pre-Raphaelites as somehow precursors to Modernism, when in fact they were deliberate throwbacks and perhaps the last hurrah of artistic traditions that 20th century Modernism would come to revile as ‘false” and “illusionist” in the face of Modernist “truth”.

The weird theme of “Victorian Avant Garde” attempts to tie the Pre-Raphaelites into the lineage of Modernism by painting them as rebels and ahead of their time (and linking their penchant for plein air studies to the Impressionists), but comes off as an attempt to avoid the embarrassment that major art institutions still feel when catering to the public fascination with Victorian art.

It’s made more ridiculous by the way the Pre-raphaelites in particular were despised by the Modernist establishment, not only for their avowed truth to nature (illusion! illusion!), but by their narrative elements (mere illustration!!). Sigh.

Not that I’m saying the Pre-Raphaelites are without their flaws and excesses (they certainly had those, but that’s part of the fun); just that to break the flow of art history and relegate a quarter of a century of art to worthlessness on the basis of some pesudo-intellectual theories by Modernist art critics is what should really be embarrassing — but we apparently haven’t reached that point yet.

Those of us who have always loved Victorian painting, and the Pre-Raphaelites in particular, can take heart that they are at least receiving some light in major shows, under whatever excuse necessary.

[Correction: One of the exhibition’s co-curators has been kind enough to write a comment and correct my premature assumption about the museum’s intentions in the theme of the exhibit (see this post’s comments). I stand corrected and apologize for projecting my predisposed generalities on someone else’s intentions. (I should know better, not that it will likely stop me from doing it again when I get my dander up about the pervasiveness of Modernist influence in the arts, but I really should be more careful.) In this case, it’s nice to know I was wrong.]

(Images above, Frederick Sandys, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Sir John Everett Millais, Henry Wallis, William Holman-Hunt, Ford Maddox Brown)

(For the benefit of those familiar with the Delaware Art Museum’s Pre-Raphaelite collection, I’ll point out the the version of William Holman-Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil [above, third down] that is in the Tate show is the large one from the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, not the smaller but equally beautiful one from the Bancroft Collection.)