Aficionados of the genre, and I certainly count myself one, will sometimes refer to a triumvirate of painters as “Masters of the Loaded Brush”: John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida and Anders Zorn. (See my posts here on Lines and Colors on John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Sorolla.)

This is a group that should be the definition when you look up the word “painterly”.

Of the three, Zorn is unjustly much less well known than Sargent and Sorolla (and to their number I would add the also unfairly discounted American painter Cecilia Beaux, but that’s another story).

Zorn is well known in his native country, and though highly regarded in 19th century European society as a portrait artist who rivaled, and competed with, Sargent, he has not been as well known to the world in general over the past century.

Of late, his star has risen, much as Sargent’s has in the last 20 years or so, and more attention is being paid to Zorn’s painterly mastery of portrait and figurative subjects.

Recently, in particular, there have been notable shows of Zorn’s work at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2013, and in an exhibition titled Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where it recently ended its run at the Legion of Honor, that is now on view at the National Academy Museum in New York.

Zorn was also a superb watercolorist and a master etcher, perhaps my third favorite after Rembrandt and Whistler. The retrospective now at the National Academy features over 90 works and will be on view until May 18, 2014.

An exhibition catalog has been published: Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter. There is a review by James Gurney on his always superb blog, Gurney Journey, where you can also find an article on the fascinating topic of the “Zorn palette“.

The smattering of examples here don’t begin to do justice to the depth of Zorn’s oeuvre, I will try to follow up with a more general post on Zorn with additional images and resources. See also my previous Lines and Colors post on Anders Zorn.

It is worth noting that the images previewed on the National Academy website open somewhat enlarged in a pop-up when clicked on. Though there is no mechanism to zoom, if you drag the images to your desktop, you will find that they are high-resolution, allowing you to marvel at Zorn’s wonderful brushwork.

[Thanks to Eric Kelly for the reminder.]

James Tennison is a painter and portrait artist based in Fort Worth, Texas.

In his gallery work, Tennison seems equally adept with watercolor and oil, carrying through his fascination with light and shadow in both mediums. I find particular appeal in those compositions in which Tennnison’s landscapes appear washed in sunlight at angles late in the day.

His website has galleries of oil and watercolor, as well a selection of portraits. In addition, Tennison maintains a blog, which is a treasure of works in progress or early stages, bits of process, and comments on other artists he admires, foremost of which are John Singer Sargent and Joquin Sorolla.

You can also find a series of time-compressed videos of the making of several of Tennison’s paintings on Vimeo. Unlike the hyperkinetic brush flipping of some time-lapse painting videos, these are done with simple, graceful fades between stages of the painting.

Like many, if not most, classifications of groups of artists, the “Hudson River School” was not a term invented by the artists themselves, but assigned by gallery owners and art historians to classify a number of artists with similar inclinations, most of whom worked in New York State in the mid-19th century.

Another assignment of a category by art historians on a sub-set of those painters is luminism, referring to painters who eventually began to dissolve the detailed representation of landscape into soft edged evocations of light and color.

Foremost among these was John Frederick Kensett, an American painter who studied in Europe, and whose initial admiration for the detailed naturalism of the 17th Dutch landscape masters, and the refined devotion to nature exemplified by Constable, gradually evolved into a Turneresque dissolution of detail-filled compositions into serene arrangements of land, sea and sky, in which light predominates.

Though dramatically different in painting style, the painters classed as luminists had in common with the later French Impressionists a desire to represent the effects of light and atmosphere. Over time, Kensett’s compositions became simplified, stripped of the inessential, and reduced to a poetic still point of light and color.

I very much like both phases of Kensett’s career: the wonderfully textural naturalism more commonly associated with the second generation Hudson River painters, and the lyrical whispers of his later canvasses.