I sometimes wonder how many potentially great women artists have been lost to art history, simply because the training and opportunity to enter into a career as an artist was denied to them by a culture that considered it an “unsuitable” role for women.

Some managed to make their way through the gauntlet and make their mark, however, particularly as society became more affluent towards the end of the 19th Century.

Marie Spartali, later Stillman, was one of the outstanding women artists to come out of the Victorian era, and was a notable painter in the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

Stillman studied with Ford Madox Brown and her work shows his influence as well as that of John Everett Millais, Edward Byrne Jones (particularly in the latter part of her career) and Renaissance painters like Sandro Botticelli.

In addition to being a talented artist, Stillman was physically beautiful in a way particularly in favor with the Pre-Raphaelites (a “stunner”, in their words) and she served as a model for paintings by Brown, Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Byrne Jones., and was the model for Byrne-Jones’ famous painting The Begiuling of Merlin. Stillman also posed for pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cemeron.

I’ve picked out two of Stillman’s paintings to show you here. The image at left, bottom is The Rose From Armida’s Garden; I don’t know where it currently resides.

The image shown at top is Love’s Messenger, perhaps Stillman’s best known work. It is part of the Delaware Art Museum’s wonderful Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite works and, like the rest of that collection, is on an extended tour of other museums (currently at the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh). I’m spoiled, having grown up with easy access to the museum, and I really miss having the Pre-Raphaelites here.

Even among the jewels in the museum’s collection, Love’s Messenger is striking, grabbing your attention from across the room and rewarding you when you approach with wonderful details and a beautiful handling of the paint.

Stillman painted in watercolor, a medium considered “more suitable” for women than oil, and often used opaque watercolor in a detailed manner, imbuing her images with a lustrous texture that makes their surface a visual treat, above and beyond the overall character of the painting. Her subject matter was in keeping with that of the other Pre-Raphaelites and she had a tendency toward a flattened “naive” perspective, as in early Renaissance painting.

I, for one, am glad an artist like Marie Stillman made it through the barriers society put in the way of young women of her time, and was able to train and flower as an artist.

Somewhere between earth and sky, landscape and seascape, mountains and clouds, natural forms and imagined shapes, float the drawings of Hilary Brace.

Her richly toned, detailed charcoal drawings (she calls them “landscapes”) carry suggestions of twisted cloud towers, intimations of tornados and watersopouts, visions of waves and mountains and hints of mysterious tubes and tunnels.

Dark cloud-like forms collide with each other above textured ridges that could be mountains, waves or another layer of clouds. Light breaks through walls and layers, reflects off of some forms and shines translucently through others with angelic luminance.

Arches and domes, caves and breakers, rain, smoke or wisps of mist roil and tumble through her images, always blurring the lines between imagination and reality, natural forms and flights of fancy.

Brace consistently walks that line and refuses to give you solid ground to stand on, forcing your imagination to flap its own wings and make its own choices. The result is almost hypnotic.

Brace works in charcoal, that most plastic of drawing mediums, exploring and composing as the drawing is created. She draws on polyester film, starting with a completely darkened surface and pulling the forms out by subtraction rather than addition.

The drawings are small in scale, more or less postcard size, but their imaginative scope is as large as the sky. (Or is it the land, or the sea?)

Suggestion courtesy of Andrea O. Kaspryk.

Like Edmund Tarbell, John Twachtman is usually labeled an “American Impressionist”. Also like Tarbell, that essentially means he took what he liked from French Impressionism and generally went his own way.

In Twachtman’s case, what he took was the light and atmosphere, the fascination for brilliantly lit landscape, the free and direct application of paint and the rich color captured by painting en plein air.

What he left out were the separate dabs of pure color, “optical color mixing” and Impressionist theories, substituting instead a fascination for the texture of roughly applied brushstrokes, scumbled pigment, drybrush effects and large blocks of color that presaged Cezanne’s eventual trek up the mountain of abstraction.

Twtchman’s approach varied throughout his career and reached in both directions through time. His palette was often darker than the French Impressionists, owing more to Courbet than Monet, and his Whistler-influenced masses of soft color reached past Impressionism to what would later be called “Post-Impressionism” and knocked on the door of Modernism.

Twachtman was born in Ohio and studied with Frank Duveneck. He traveled to Europe with Duvenek and William Merrit Chase, studying in Munich, Venice and Paris, where his paintings took on the soft look sometimes called “tonalist” as in the beautiful example above, Arques-la-Bataille, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

After returning to America, he settled in Connecticut, married and spent many years painting his own house and gardens. He was good friends with J. Alden Weir; and along with Weir, Childe Hassam, Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell and others, formed the “Ten American Painters”, a loose alliance of Impressionist-influenced painters, mostly in New York and Boston, who were linked primarily for their desire to push outside the bounds of traditional art.

I don’t know of any individual books on Twachtman that I can recommend, although you’ll find him in books on American Impressionism.

As you look through Twachtman’s paintings and graphics (he was an accomplished etcher), don’t be too quick to judge whether you like his work until you have sampled it from several points in the history of his many stylistic reinventions.

Twachtman was restless in his approach, but his paintings can be the essence of tranquility.

You will often find contemporary artists, particularly young artists, who become so fascinated with Surrealism, or a particular Surrealist, that they immerse themselves in that artist’s style, as if trying to live in their skin. The results are usually less than inspiring.

Polish artist Jacek Yerka, on the other hand, has swum in the Surrealist oceans, absorbed the influences of Surrealists like Dali and Magritte through his pores, gulped in the turgid waters of Brueghel and Bocsh, bathed in the calm pools of Northern European masters and tuned his sonar to the frequencies of Escher.

To this heady brew he has added his own other-worldly visions and produced a unique synthesis of fantastic art. Yerka borrows tools from those masters, but bends gravity, reverses time and pulls reality out of its own hat in his own unique way.

His bright, sharp-focused acrylics make outside in, up down, and near far. Walls and doors exchange places with trees and sky. Cities float and blow away as they age. Sea and sand change roles, household objects become towns, buildings become land, land becomes animals, animals become mountains and islands. Hidden worlds wait around every corner and magic seeps through every door.

There is a book of Yerka’s work matched to the writing of science fiction author Harlan Ellison, Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka, the Fiction of Harlan Ellison and a collection, The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka.

Yerka is one of those delightful artists that I have a very hard time picking a single image for. It would be difficult to pick any single image and say it was “representative” of his work. I picked this one because I like it, but I like many of his images. Dive in, and swim through Yerka’s sea of imagination for yourself.