Winding the Skein, Lord Frederic Leighton

Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

I think the Google Art Project version — and the downloadable version of that file on Wikimedia Commons — are too warm and saturated. The images on the Art Gallery of New South Wales site are much lighter and seem more naturalistic (in contrast to the tendency many museums have to post images that are too dark). For the images above, I’ve adjusted the file from Wikimedia Commons to be closer in appearance to the smaller images from the museum.

While the Art Gallery of NSW doesn’t offer a high resolution image, they do feature a number of detail enlargements on their page for the painting.

Leighton’s dreamily idealized bit of labor is set against the backdrop of a real place, the bay of Lindos on the Greek island of Rhodes.

Banquet Piece with Mince Pie, Willem Claesz Heda

Oil on canvas, roughly 56 x 58 inches (143 x 147 cm).

In the National Gallery of Art, DC, which has both a zoomable and downloadable version. The largest downloadable version (which requires a free sign-in account) is 4000 pixels wide and 20 MB in file size.

There is also a zoomable file on Google Art Project, and a downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons. The largest version of the latter is even larger, at 10,000 pixels wide and 43 MB in file size.

Grand paintings of luxurious meals served in expensive dinnerware — or the aftermath of such meals — were popular with the wealthy merchant class in the Netherlands in the 17th century. Willem Claesz (Claeszoon) Heda was one of the supreme masters of the form.

It’s interesting to compare his paintings in this genre to his similarly masterful contemporary Pieter Claesz.

Pomegranates and Other Fruit in a Landscape, Abraham Brueghel

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art; use the download or zoom links under their image.

This 17th century still life is an example of how tenuous the attribution of historic art can be. Over time, it has been ascribed to Diego Velázquez, Giuseppe Ruoppoli, and Giovanni Paolo Spadino.

The current attribution is to Flemish painter Abraham Brueghel (son of Jan Brueghel the Younger, grandson of Jan Brueghel the Elder and great Grandson of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, quite a family heritage).

Still life set against a landscape is not an unusual compositional device in painting, but this one looks wonderfully strange. If you take the background shapes to be mountains, the three fruits in the background are atop and escarpment, and those in the right foreground seem to hang above a waterfall.

Whether still life at a giant scale is actually the artists intention, I don’t know, but I enjoy being able to interpret it that way. I also like the tiny (and/or giant) lizard in the foreground.

Regardless of illusions of scale — intended or imagined on my part — it’s a beautiful still life.

It’s naturalistic at a distance, but I love how brushy and painterly this is in close-up — wonderful for a 17th century still life — the apples, figs and grapes look as though they might have come off the brush of Manet, 200 year later.