The Railway Station, Redfern; Arthur Streeton

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

The more I see of Streeton’s work, particularly in high-resolution detail, the more impressed I am — rich, subtle color, lively brush marks, beautiful economy of notation, and striking, inventive compositions.

This piece, with its Degas-like almost empty foreground, geometric arrangement of buildings, marvelous sense of scale and atmospheric evocation of a wet day, is a beautiful case in point.

For more, see my previous posts on Arthur Streeton, below.

The Progress of Love: The Meeting, Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Link is to zoomable image on Google Art Project; high resolution downloadable version on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the Frick Collection.

This was part of a series of four large paintings depicting four stages of love. All four, along with several smaller canvasses, are now in the Frick Collection, which has special a Fragonard Room devoted to them.

The Ferry, E. Phillips Fox

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

Fox was an Australian artist who studied and worked in Paris, adopting the brilliant color and free brushwork of the French Impressionists. Like his counterparts, the American Impressionists, Fox did not share the French painters’ urgent rejection of academic values, and applied his color and style to an underpinning of traditional draftsmanship. His approach reminds me in particular of some of the brighter Impressionist-inspired paintings of American painter Edmund Tarbell (also here).

The Ferry is probably Fox’s best known work, based on his visit to a resort in the north of France, and made an impact on other Australian painters when it was shown in Sydney in 1913.