Last March I wrote about a show called From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection that was on view at the time at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The NGA’s page for the exhibit offered a slideshow of 24
images and a PDF of the exhibition brochure, though neither were as satisfying in displaying the works as one might hope.

Though the exhibition is long over, I recently stumbled across an article on the exhibition on About.com, not usually a site I think of as a destination for art images.

I may have to re-think that assessment as the article is accompanied by an 84 image gallery of works, which you can view as thumbnails on the article page (note “Next >” link at bottom for more thumbnails), or by starting with the first image and clicking through.

The images on the individual pages are linked to much larger versions. Though not quite high resolution by the standards of some web images these days, they are large enough to be quite satisfying. I’ve tried to show the relative scale with the detail crop of each of the images above.

(Image pairs above: William Merritt Chase, Jean-Baptiste-Camile Corot, Claude Monet, Henri Fantin-Latour)

Chilean painter Claudio Bravo only studied art formally in the studio of Miguel Venegas Cienfuentes at an early age. Bravo had his first exhibition at the age of 17. In the 1960’s he moved to Madrid where he developed a reputation as an in demand society portrait painter. In the 1970’s he moved to Tangier, where he would live until his recent death on June 4, 2011.

Though known as hyper-realist, I find his work far from “photographic” and particularly enjoy his still life paintings. In his later work, Bravo began to take his fondness for depicting drapery and surfaces of crumpled paper and make them the subjects of large scale paintings, rather than simply aspects of still life or portrait compositions.

I also admire his De Hooch-like glimpses of rooms through doorways, and his paintings of paintings, usually on artist’s easels but in a relatively finished state.

His website is in Spanish, but can be navigated easily enough by non Spanish-speakers. “Obras” is works, and the galleries are divided into years. Note that within most galleries are multiple pages of thumbnails accessed by a row of numbers above the images.

There is also a nice selection of his work on Cuidad de la pintura, with over 180 works, and an additional gallery on Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.

One of the images in this post on Orange Crate Art shows the scale of his larger works.

There are at least a couple of collections of his work: Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings, and Claudio Bravo And Morocco; though the former is not inexpensive and the latter seems out of print, but may be available used.

[Via Art Daily]

[Addendum: Matthew Innis has posted a nice tribute to Bravo on his blog, Underpaintings.]

Spanish painter Joaquin Mir (also called Joaquin Mir Trinxet or Joaquim Mir i Trinxet) was born in Barcelona and studied there at Escuela Oficial de Bellas Artes (the School of Fine Arts), He was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was known primarily for his landscapes.

He worked in a lush, painterly style, often with a bright color palette. Some of his compositions utilize Art Nouveau inspired design elements and others blend representation with elements of abstraction or even drip painting.

Though the biographical information I could find about him was limited, there are a number of sources of images on the web, in particular on Cuidad de la pintura, which has over 300 images of his works (about half of which are drawings or sketches).