Art Articles

Article from Chris Crombé

Women and art

Throughout the ages Women were barely recognized as artists. It was partly thanks to the research of the first (1860) and the second (1960) emancipation wave, that their names came alive. In the eighties of last century a lot of articles and books dedicated to the work of female artists were published. Despite this, women remained the underdog of the history of art. We therefore speak of HIStory.

Art history as a scientific discipline has arisen in the 19th century in Germany and spread all over the world. Despite the globalization the present-day art history remains focused on Western art made by men. This has largely to do with the privileged position of the classics as a putative cradle of Western civilization. The 19th century considered the Greek and the Roman civilizations as starting point of Western history...

Article from Luca Molnar

Edwin Long (1829-1891)

Raphael Delorme (1885-1952)

Alphonse Mucha, the painter (1860-1939)...

Article from Coco Depink

Gaetano Gandolfi was the most talented member of a family of artists that dominated Bolognese painting in the second half of the eighteenth century. Early in his life he studied with his elder brother, Ubald; he later was a pupil of the sculptor-anatomist Ercole Lelli at the Accademia Clementina in Bologna. In 1760, under the auspices of an important early patron, Bolognese merchant Antonio Buratti, Gaetano and Ubaldo travelled to Venice for a further year of study. In Venice, Gaetano was deeply impressed by the art of Sebastiano Ricci and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, painters whose fluent brushwork and effortless technique had a dramatic influence on his art...

Article from Coco Depink

Ovid in his Metamorphoses tells the story of Andromeda, the daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopea of Ethiopia. The mother’s claim to beauty so agreed the Nereids that Neptune sent a sea monster to ravage the kingdom.to free the country from his scourge, Chepheus was forced to sacrifice Andromeda. Anthony van Dyck depicted the moment of sacrificed Andromeda, chained to a rock near the monster lair, is rescued from her faith by Perseus, who flies above from his winged horse, Pegasus. The sea monster can be seen thrashing about in the waves below. The subject was a popular one among artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Offering the challenge of portraying the female nude in distress. Both Rubens and Rembrandt painted the story of Perseus but this is the only example of van Dyck, who rarely painted mythological pictures...

Article from Luca Molnar

From time to time we all experience creative blocks, these can be some of the hardest times for an artist and it happens to all of us. Even if you don’t have such a problem at the moment, you might have in the future but either way being more creative can’t hurt. In this article I will show you 5 methods to be more creative and get back to creating right away...

Article from Sophy Laughing

Sophy Laughing (Soph Laugh) is a California-born artist who specializes in the conservation, preservation, and restoration of antiquities. Laughing began making studies of portrait drawings after visiting the Maastricht Fine Art Fair. Inspired by masterpieces held in institutions and in private collection, Laughing began exploring drawings of the Old Masters.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones’ Study for a head for the painting THE CAR OF LOVE (1895) is one of Laughing’s favorite drawings. The drawing is a preliminary study for the head of a central female figure dragging the CAR mounted on huge wheels through the narrow streets of a city resembling Siena, which Burne-Jones visited in 1871. The male figures in the drawing are reminiscent of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, where Burne-Jones spent many hours studying and copying Michelangelo’s male figures. While the painting remained unfinished at the artist’s death in 1898, the features found in this beautiful head study became Laughing’s muse, shaping her perspective of ideal female beauty, as portrayed in pencil. So entranced by her face, as well as by the illuminated faces painted by Raphael, Laughing has since studied portrait drawings of the Old Masters...

Article from Coco Depink

When Giambattista Tiepolo was called from his native Venice in 1730 by the Archinto family to decorate their palace in Milan, he was embarking on a career that would establish him as Europe’s foremost decorative painter. Tiepolo studied with Giorgio Lazzarini, but it was the vast ceiling paintings by Paolo Veronese, the sixteen-century master, and the impressive altarpieces of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Tiepolo’s contemporary, that had the most profound effect on his art. As early as 1726 Tiepolo was referred as ‘celebre Pittor’ (by the Udine town council) and his fresco decorations along with his sketches and easel paintings, where soon in high demand throughout Europe. He would enjoy an illustrious international career, working for the courts of Wurzburg and Madrid before dying in Spain in 1770.

Apollo and Phaethon is an extremely important record of Tiepolo’s painting cycle at the palazzo Achinto, which was destroyed by bombs in 1943. Unpublished and unknown to the scholarly community before it appeared at auction in 1985, the painting is directly related to a fresco that decorated the ceiling of one of the four reception rooms in the palace. It tells the story of the semi divine Phatheon who sought to prove his mother’s assertion that he was the son of the god Apollo. He did this by coaxing Apollo’s permission to allow him to drive the Charriot of the Sun, which the sun-god guided across the zodiac to usher in each new day. Apollo, who actually was Phaethon’s father, reluctantly agreed, but the young man, unable to control the feisty stallions in their charge across the sky, flew too close to earth, scorching it and creating the desert of Africa. The planet was spared total immolation by Jupiter, who halted Phaethon’s ill-advised ride by rocking him from the chariot with a thunderbolt...

Article from Coco Depink

Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence 1839–1906) was a Post-Impressionist painter whose work set the roots of the shift from the 19th-century idea of artistic endeavor to an innovative and drastically altered realm of art in the 20th century. Cézanne's frequently repetitive, experimental brushstrokes are decidedly distinctive and undoubtedly identifiable. He adopted planes of color and minute brushstrokes that shape up to create intricate themes. The paintings deliver Cézanne's passionate analysis of his subjects.

For many years Cezanne occupied himself with the theme of male or female bathers in a landscape, its apotheosis being the three large compositions with bathing women in London, Philadelphia, and Merion, Pensylvania. In addiction to these paintings, Cezanne created many watercolos and numerous sketches in pencil and black chalk relating to this theme. In fact, representations of bathing figures are known among the artist’s earliest works, and his correspondence with Emile Zola constantly indulges in reminiscences of their joint excursions along the brooks in the countryside around Aix-en-Provence.

From the 1870 on Cezanne explored this theme in dept. He was probably inspired by the paintings of nudes in nature by old masters like Giorgione, Titian, Peter Paul Rubenz, and Nicolas Poussin; but also by those of a direct predecessor like Goustave Coubret, or a contemporary artist like Eduard Manet. Clearly, Cezanne did not aim to render solely the nude, but rather to combine nude figure with nature...

Article from Coco Depink

Rutilio Manetti was one of those busy and reliable provincial painters whose manner was derived from the innovations of more important artists in major artistic centers and who, in certain works, brought an injection of metropolitan excitement to the art of his hometown. He fulfilled a purely local demand for altarpieces, decorations, and history paintings in styles reflecting several of the fashions of the day, some reminiscent of Caravaggio, others of the Gentileschi, and so on. Manetti has benefited from the stimulating resurgence in Italy in the last twenty years of local interest in native talent, even thought he was not one of the innovators in the history of Italian painting not even one of those artists with a quirky and appealing poetry who sometimes emerges despite a provincial heritage.

If Siena, where Manetti was born in 1571 and where he spent most of his life, was a less significant city under the late Medici rule in the seventeenth century that it had been as an independent city-state in medieval times, it still was quite an important religious center and there was a lively demand for a good painter or two to serve the church, city and private patrons. Little is known of his early career. After completing the altar piece of the Death of the Blessed Anthony Patrizi ( Sant’ Agostino Monticiano) in 1616 a painting that betrays some knowledge of the advanced art of Artemisia Gentileschi who was active in Florence at that time, Manetti likely went to Rome...

Article from Chris Crombé

We all know, almost without thinking, famous male painters like, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dijck, Cézanne, Van Gogh etc. But if we have to cite a female one our memory fails. And still they were there. In one of my articles I will try to explain the raison of this phenomena. But I start as a trigger with one of an not very well known, but exceptional talented animal painter. Cats have been a favorite subject of artists for many decades, and many big names in the art world have produced impressive works. One of them is Henriette Ronner-Knip. HENRIËTTE RONNER-KNIP (1821 – 1909) Henriette Ronner, born KNIP, was born on the 21st of may 1821 in Amsterdam. Her father, grand-father , uncle and one of her aunts, where fine artists too. All four of them had…