Sigh. Another day, another treasure trove of high resolution masterpieces on the Google Art Project — this one from the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest.

(Images above: Maximillian Lenz, Albrecht Dürer, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Leonardo da Vinci, Dominico Fetti, Arnold Böcklin, Renbrandt van Rijn, Claude Monet)

Arto Isotalo, a self-taught painter living in Espoo, Finland, appears to have taken as his source of instruction his admiration for painters like Anders Zorn and Joaquín Sorolla.

He wears his influences on his sleeve, and wears them well, with fresh, fluid brushwork, crisp value delineations and subtle control of color in his figures, portraits and landscapes.

The galleries on his blog/website are divided into those categories, along with drawings. In the figurative section you can find figures in streams or in the shallows at the seaside, a wonderful practice of Zorn and Sorolla espectively.

Set aside some time when going through Isotalo’s blog. It includes a number of works you will find in the galleries, but many additional pieces, along with detail crops and several step-throughs of paintings in progress.

Also, in a practice I particularly enjoy, he often provides photographs of his location and painting setup along with the respective plein-air landscape paintings. He sometimes sets up the photos in a Magritte-like juxtaposition of the painting against the real landscape (images above, bottom) — a nice touch, made possible by the fact that he generally works sight-size.

There is also a good post on photographing oil paintings.

If that weren’t enough, Isotalo has been generous in sharing high-resolution photographs from his visits to the Museo Sorolla, the Zorn Museum and several other museums and exhibits. (The posts on Zorn make Isotalos’ blog one of the better resources for Zorn on the web, which is sorely lacking in large images of his work.)

Ernest Biéler was a Swiss artist active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose works incorporates elements of Art Nouveau and Symbolism.

Biéler studied in Paris at the académie Julian, returned to Switzerland and later moved back and forth between there and Paris, staying for years at a time.

His painting style varied from naturalistic oils to beautifully graphic watercolors, including a fascinatingly graphic series of watercolor and tempera portraits.

One of the best sources I’ve found for his work is a LiveJournal blog in Russian, with a section on his watercolor portraits. (You can use Google Translate to roughly translate from Russian to English, or another language.)

This site is in French, with a selection of works. There is also a sampling of works on Art Inconnu.

You can also look for Bieler tagged posts on Tumblr, and I’ve listed what other resources I could find below.

Kehinde Wiley, an artist originally from Los Angeles and now based in New York, paints striking, larger than life portraits that often incorporate intricate patterns.

These can be naturalistic, as in repeated patterns of realistically rendered leaves or flowers, or decorative, sometimes borrowing from the baroque or Art Nouveau, but often reflecting the cultural heritage of countries visited in the course of his “World Stage” project.

The galleries on his website are divided into series, the World Stage series is further divided into regions he visited in his pursuit of the project.

The works are large scale, sometimes 8×25′ (2.5×7.5m), though that aspect is unfortunately lost (along with any hint of paint handling or surface quality) in the small scale images provided on the site (you can get an idea of scale from this photo of an installation).

Wiley has pursued classical painting technique and is willing to take on daunting challenges of foreshortening, as well as taking chances with backgrounds and patterns that might threaten to overwhelm his subjects, were they not painted with enormous strength and visual punch.

He frequently uses backlighting to emphasize the dimensionality of his figures and faces, and has enough control of his backgrounds that, despite their intensity of color, they can actually serve to push the subjects forward rather than distract from their presence.

Some of his backgrounds are rendered in the kind intense paired complimentary colors found in op art or 1960’s psychedelic poster art.

Wiley sometimes allows his background patterns to come forward, passing in front of his subjects or interacting with them like physical structures. At other times they are more lightly suggested and drift in and out of naturalistically depicted scenery.

In spite of the terrible navigation on his website (links that disappear and move when you mouse over or click – WTF?), it’s worth reading his artist’s statement and FAQ (in the Research section). There is also a series of interview videos in the Media section.

Wiley’s painting Three Wise Men Greeting Entry into Lagos (above, top) was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts here in Philadelphia, though I haven’t had a chance to see it yet.

Some of the galleries listed below have larger images of the work than the artist’s own site.