American painter Robert Bruce Crane became associated with the American Impressionists of the Old Lyme Art Colony in Connecticut. In his later career, he developed into a Tonalist — diffusing his scenes of fall and winter landscapes into misty passages of light and color.

This is the companion piece to Van Eyck’s Crucifixion, which I featured yesterday.

Though the Crucifixion panel is a strong and impressive painting — particularly given the small size of the panels of this diptych, each of which is only 22×7″ (56x20cm) — this panel of the Last Judgement is just astonishing.

I can’t say it gives a compelling picture of the glories of Heaven (though the angel is pretty impressive), but Van Eyck’s depiction of Hell here is a pull-out-the-stops tour-de-force of “You really don’t wanna go there!”

Not as well known as the famous vision of hell in Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted some 50 or 60 years later, this one is right up there in the scare you into towing the line department.

Given that the small size indicates that the original triptych, of which this was a part, was likely commissioned for personal devotion by an individual patron, one has to wonder about the state of mind of that individual. Or, perhaps his request for the subject of the work was more general, and he didn’t really know what he was getting until Van Eyck delivered the finished paintings.

I’ve even left out the most viscerally gruesome and horrific part of the image of hell, which is in the left portion of the panel.

Yow.

Alfred Joseph Casson was a member of the Group of Seven — likeminded Canadian landscape painters active in the early part of the 20th century.

Casson worked in watercolor, oil and printmaking, capturing in his landscapes both the nature of the land, and his own fascinating vision — in which the shapes of trees, rocks and other natural forms take on a muscular strength and a semi-abstracted geometric structure — sort of Thomas Hart Benton meets Cezanne.

Unfortunately, I’ve found limited resources for his work online, but I’ve listed what I could find below.

[Via One1more2time3’s Weblog]

This painting by the 15th century Netherlandish master, assisted by members of his workshop, is part of a remarkable set of two panels (thought to be originally a triptych, of which the third panel is missing). Each panel is only 22 by 7 inches (56x20cm). The other panel depicts the Last Judgement (more on that in a later post).

Van Eyck, perhaps the first great master of oil painting, has imbued his image with remarkable depth, and dedicated his attention to extraordinary detail, from the individual character of the multiple faces to intricate rendering of costume and such painterly touches as the reflection of figures in the shield of one observer.

Under a sky whose clouds might be a scientific study for meteorology, the visceral telling of the story unfolds against a background that recedes through a contemporary European city and over a river, on back to the atmospherically blued mountains beyond.

Presumably, in common with Van Eyck’s other paintings, almost everything here has significance, from the horse and rider in the middle distance to the identity and role (and expressions!) of those in attendance — whether historic in the context of the moment, or contemporary in relation to the patron for whom the work was created. (It might be assumed that the small scale work was created for personal devotion rather than display in a church.)

The original is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.