Seward Johnson | The Awakening, 1980

The Awakening, is a 21 m statue of a giant embedded in the earth, struggling to free himself, located at National Harbor in Prince George's County, Maryland, USA, just outside the District of Columbia.

The statue consists of five separate aluminum pieces buried in the ground, giving the impression of a distressed giant attempting to free himself from the ground.

The left hand and right foot barely protrude, while the bent left leg and knee jut into the air.

The 5.2 m high right arm and hand reach farther out of the ground. The bearded face, with the mouth in mid-scream, struggles to emerge from the earth.

Vincent van Gogh | Houses at Auvers, 1890

"Houses at Auvers" is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh, located at the Toledo Museum of Art.

It was created towards the end of May or beginning of June 1890, shortly after he had moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town northwest of Paris, France.

His move was prompted by his dissatisfaction with the boredom and monotony of asylum life at Saint-Rémy, as well as by his emergence as an artist of some renown following Albert Aurier's celebrated January 1890, Mercure de France, review of his work.

In his final two months at Saint-Rémy, van Gogh painted from memory a number of canvases he called, "reminisces of the North", harking back to his Dutch roots.

The influence of this return to the North continued at Auvers, notably in The Church at Auvers.

He did not, however, repeat his studies of peasant life of the sort he had made in his Nuenen period. His paintings of dwellings at Auvers encompassed a range of social domains. | Source: © Wikipedia

Vincent van Gogh | Houses at Auvers, 1890 | Toledo Museum of Art

Claude Monet at the Museum Barberini

The Hasso Plattner Collection - Museum Barberini - contains more than 100 works by Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters, including 34 paintings by Claude Monet.

With over one hundred paintings, the Museum Barberini presented from 22 February - 19 July 2020, the largest retrospective ever to be devoted to the Impressionist painter Claude Monet in a German museum.

The exhibition drew primarily on the Hasso Plattner Collection and the Impressionist holdings of the Denver Art Museum, augmented by numerous loans from museums and private collections in many different countries, including the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Alexander Mark Rossi | Genre painter

Alexander Mark Rossi (1840-1916) was a successful British artist, specializing in genre works who flourished in the late 19th century.

He was born on the Greek Island of Corfu, the son of Dr Mark Rossi, an Italian who was one of the three judges presiding over the Ionian Islands during the time of British rule. On a visit to Preston, England in 1866, Rossi met and later married Jane Gillow.

He remained in the United Kingdom thereafter. In the 1870s he moved to London.

Auguste-Émile Pinchart | Genre painter

Auguste-Émile Pinchart, or Émile-Auguste Pinchart (10 August 1842, Cambrai - November 1920, Tunis) was a French painter and designer who is best remembered for his Orientalist scenes.

He began as a student in the workshops of Jean-Léon Gérôme, then signed a contract with the art dealers, Goupil and Cie, to produce drawings for reproduction as prints, creating genre scenes of everyday life that proved to be quite popular.

His first exhibit at the Salon came in 1864.

During the Paris Commune, he became friends with the writer, Émile Bergerat, who recalls in his memoirs that Pinchart occasionally worked as a butcher, to help his fellow artists survive the siege.