Originally from Arkansas, educated in Colorado and New York and currently living in Denver, Daniel Sprick is an American painter who focuses on portraits, figures and still life, and occasionally landscape.

Sprick’s subjects are clearly observed, precisely drawn and rendered with finess, but to my eye, they always seem to carry with them an element of chaos — passages at the edges that feel rough and unfinished, a suggestion not only that this is paint on a surface, but a hint that reality itself is fuzzy at the edges, and perhaps this is a truer representation than absolute fidelity.

When you view the works in the portfolio and archives sections of his website, be sure to click the “view larger” link at the upper right of the images. The difference in size isn’t great, but Sprick’s approach is still more rewarding with an incremental increase in the size of the reproduction (leading, of course, to a wish that they were reprodied even larger).

In his still life subjects, I find a particular fascination in the way he uses texture and edges to control focus, again seeming to weave refinement and roughness into a coherent whole.

There are videos from the Denver Art Museum and the Delaware Art Museum in which Sprick briefly discusses his work, an interview on Painting Perceptions and an essay by Jane Fudge from the Denver Museum show archived on Sprick’s site.

Marie Egner was an Austrian painter active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who focused largely on floral still life and landscapes that often incorporated floral subjects along with architectural elements and woodland scenes.

Egner was adept with both oil and watercolor, her approach in both mediums combining bold statements with passages of great delicacy.

Generally classified as a Symbolist, Konstantin Fedorovich Bogaevsky was a Ukrainian painter active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He studied at the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts, where his instructors included Arkhip Kuindzhi — a highly regarded Ukrainian landscape painter and a member of the Peredvizhniki who defended Bogaevsky from factions at the Academy who felt Bogaevsky’s work inappropriate and beneath their standards.

Bogaevsky gained acceptance in the larger world of Ukrainian and Russian arts, and he became a noted Symbolist painter.

Influenced by the Romantic French landscapes of Claude Lorraine and the stony, monumental backgrounds of Andrea Mantegna, Bogaevsky painted landscapes both of his native Crimea and of a fanciful dreamworld his friends called “Bogaevia”.

As was discussed in the comments on my recent post about Thomas Fearnley, the Scandinavian countries seem to have produced a disproportionately high number of wonderful landscape painters.

Johan Krouthén was a Swedish painter active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm at the same time as Anders Zorn, and quit at the same time in a rejection of the institution’s restrictive policies.

Krouthén traveled to Paris and was exposed to the Impressionist avant-guarde there, and became acquainted with other Scandinavian painters while painting for a time in the art colony at Skagen in Denmark.

His subjects over time included room interiors, portraits and figures, but it is his landscapes for which he is best known. They are direct, clear observations of landscape elements and the effects of light, often with hight chroma passages but without the overt broken color of Impressionism.

The good news is that there are a large number of images of Krouthén’s paintings available on line; though many of those are unfortunately of less than desired quality. Those that are well reproduced, however, are worth searching out amid the others.

The largest selection I’ve found is on The Athenaeum, with over 400 images available. The largest reproductions are on the Bukowski’s auction site.

There is a dedicated site for Krouthén, www.johan-krouthen.se, maintained by Hans Nilsson, a professor of History at Linkoping University. The site is in Swedish, but it’s easy enough to navigate. The third navigation link, “Malningar”, translates as “Paintings” and there are sub-sections for time periods.

I’ve listed other resources below.