Lets set the Wayback Machine and take a walk through the year 1896 by way of the Wikimedia Commons page for that category.

Yes, the image quality is uneven, but there are gems to be found, and this is just a selection from the introductory page for this category. You can drill down into subcategories, and of course into listings for individual artists.

For more on browsing image resources on Wikimedia Commons, see my post from 2010.

(Images above: Daniel Ridgeway Knight, Albert Anker, Ivan Shishkin, Alfons Mucha, Ilya Repin, Carl Schuster, James Jabusa Shannon, John William Waterhouse, Anders Zorn, Kryzhitsky Ozero, Viktor Vasnetsov)

I’ve always been fascinated with works of realism in which the representational image, which presents an illusion of reality, transitions to obvious marks on paper or paint strokes on canvas at the edges, allowing us to see both the drawn or painted illusion and the reality of marks on a surface in the same image.

In many of the paintings of Charles E. Williams II, this effect is pronounced and takes the form of dripped paint marks at the bottom edges of his compositions, which are often of scenes involving creeks, streams or other bodies of water.

The effect is striking, highlighting both our perceptions of three dimensional scenes on a two dimensional surface, and Williams’ skills as a realist painter, without which the effect would be negligible.

Williams was born and is based in South Carolina; he studied fine art at the Savannah College of At and Design in Georgia.

In addition to his website, Williams posts his work to a blog, and you can also find galleries of his work on Bluecanvas and Robert Lange Studios.

[Via Escape Into Life]