Jacques-Émile Blanche was a French painter and portrait artist active in the late 19th and early 20th century.

He was friends with Marcel Proust, whose portrait he painted (above, top), as well as other literary and artistic figures of the time such as Aubrey Beardsley (second down).

I haven’t found a lot of information on Blanche; I’ve listed a few resources below.

Originally from Russia and now living in the U.S., Michael Cheval’s flights of imaginative visions might be called “magic realism”, though classifying this kind of work is always a slippery process.

Certainly not “surrealism”, a term often used casually and incorrectly to describe fantastic art, though you may see nods to the visual language of Surrrealist painters like Dalí, Magritte and Paul Delvaux in Cheval’s work, you’ll find even more reference to baroque and classical painters.

In classifying his own work, Cheval bypasses these concerns by using the term “absurdity”, referring to his various series by names like “Nature of Absurdity”, “Eternity of Absurdity”, “Illusions of Absurdity”, and so on.

In addition to the galleries on his website of those series, he also has a section of drawings, and another of portraits, in which he has cast his sitters in his absurdist roles and settings, often with reference to their occupations or preoccupations.

Cheval has obviously given some study to classical painting technique and brings a sophisticated touch to his freely imagined subjects. Cheval plays with scale, recursion, perspective and collage-like juxtapositions of objects and spaces, toying with the viewer’s expectations and preconceptions. He often repeats themes such as chessboards, marionettes, jesters, musicians, theatre and fancy dress balls.

[Note: some of the images can be considered NSFW]

[Via Artist A Day]

I have to go on record as saying that Pierre Auguste Renoir is not one of my favorite painters.

Certainly among the original French Impressionists, I find him the weakest and most inconsistent — not a painter at the level of his contemporaries in the Impressionist circle. Renoir was prolific, and I’ve seen enough bad Renoirs to last a lifetime, even if at the Barnes Foundation alone.

That being said, I will turn around and say that I like very much some of Renoir’s landscapes, particularly those in which he has not lapsed into such a profusion of soft edges as to make the landscape seem melted.

At his best, Renoir’s landscapes can be richly colored, atmospheric and rendered with a subtle range of values. There are paintings in which Renoir uses his proclivity for softness to advantage, contrasting it with more sharply focused passages.

The links I give below are to general resources for Renoir images on the web; you’ll have to dig through them to find landscapes, particularly those landscapes in which Renoir is at his best. But if, like me, you have a tendency to dismiss Renoir from seeing too many weak portraits and figures, you may find his best landscapes worth seeking out.

Those who just love love love Renoir can feel free to flame me in the comments (grin).