As much as I happen to enjoy paleontological reconstruction art, which is essentially paintings of no longer extant animals, I have to say that I usually don’t respond well to contemporary wildlife art.

Too often it feels staged and artificial, and seems to lean on over-rendering and sentimentality in place of more solid artistic concerns. Of course there are plenty of exceptions to those (perhaps unfair) generalizations. Ralph Oberg is a case in point.

His paintings of landscapes in the western mountains of the the US and some of the larger wildlife of the area are fresh, painterly and immediate. The impression I had when I first encountered his work was that he was a landscape painter who happened to include animals, rather than a wildlife artist.

That impression was borne out when I read his biography. After attending Colorado State University on an art scholarship and studying at the Seibel School of Drafting in Denver, Oberg briefly worked in commercial illustration and then devoted himself to wildlife painting for ten years. He then became interested in plein air painting, and has dedicated himself to that practice for the past ten years, only recently reintroducing the study of animals into his work.

The result is a lively combination of plein air and alla prima techinque with a knowledge of animal anatomy and characteristics that come from long study.

Oberg uses an almost impressionistic application of paint that gives even his more finished studio canvases the feel of outdoor painting; and his wildlife subjects are rendered with the same painterly approach. Oberg’s years of plein air work have honed his sense of color and ability to suggest complex textures with an economy of brushwork.

His animals are represented naturalistically, incorporated into their settings rather than staged against a backdrop of landscape. Oberg avoids the overly dramatic poses of animals sometimes found in the genre, and incorporates them into his compositions as though they were as much a natural part of a landscape as rocks or trees; which, of course, they are.

A question from a reader prompted me to revisit my 2006 post on Marie-Denise Villers, a talented but little known French portrait painter whose “one-hit-wonder” claim to fame was that her painting, now called Young Woman Drawing (detail, above), was for some time attributed to Neo-classical master Jaques-Louis David (also here).

The painting, which I believe is a self-portrait, shows a beautiful and intensely focused young woman staring directly at the viewer and drawing in a portfolio sheaf in her lap. Through an enigmatically cracked window pane behind her, what may be a pair of lovers confers on a railed walkway atop a wall. The painting is beautiful and striking when you see it in person, and it seemed unfortunate that there was little information on the artist or her other works at the time I was writing.

As the art resources on the Web are constantly being added to, I went looking to see if more information on Villers had cropped up in the three years since my post. The bad news is that there isn’t much more available on her. Apparently there just isn’t much information about her in general; though I did manage to find some links that I’ve added to the original post and listed below.

The good news is that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the painting in its collection, has added a larger, more color-accurate image to their listing, as well as a zoomable version of the image, which makes is possible to see the painting in more detail if you can’t make it to the Met to see it in person. I’ve used it to show the detail image above; for a view of the entire painting, and more of my comments on it, see my previous post on Marie-Denise Villers.

The Met has also added the painting to their Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History and makes mention of Villers and her sister, Marie-Victoire Lemoine, who was also a painter, in their related article on Eighteenth-Century Women Painters in France.

I also found a few other tidbits, including a painting in a past auction from Sotheby’s, A Young Woman Seated by a Window, which also has a zoomable image; though this work seems less accomplished than the piece in the Met. (I don’t know how long this auction image will remain available.)