Jonas Lie | Expressionist painter

Jonas Lie (April 29, 1880 - January 18, 1940) was a Norwegian-born American painter.

He is best known for colorful paintings of coastlines of New England and city scenes of New York City.

Jonas Lie was born in Moss, in Østfold county, Norway.

His father Sverre Lie, was a civil Norwegian engineer and his mother Helen Augusta Steele, was an American from Hartford, Connecticut.

His father was a brother of Thomasine Lie who had married their cousin Jonas Lie, the famous Norwegian author, whom the painter was named after.

Boris Grigoriev | Russian Avant Garde movement

Boris Dimitrievitch Grigoriev /Бори́с Дми́триевич Григо́рьев was a Russian painter born in Moscow. He was a part of the Russian Avant Garde movement who also wrote regularly for the magazine “Satyricon” and “New Satyricon”. For biographical notes -in english and italian- see Part 1 - Boris Grigoriev [1886-1939].

Paul Cézanne | The Drawings / Watercolours

"C’è una logica colorata: il pittore non deve che obbedire a lei, mai alla logica della mente".

"There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other".

Paul Cézanne

Robert de Niro | Abstract Expressionist painter

Robert Henry De Niro, better known as Robert De Niro, Sr. (May 3, 1922 - May 3, 1993) was an American abstract expressionist painter and the father of actor Robert De Niro.
Robert De Niro, Sr., was born in Syracuse, New York, to an Italian American father, Henry Martin De Niro (1897–1976), whose parents emigrated from Ferrazzano, in the province of Campobasso, Molise, and an Irish American mother, Helen M. (née O'Reilly; 1899–1999). He was the eldest of three children; he and siblings John and Joan were raised in Syracuse, New York.

Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen | Surrealist /Abstract painter

Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen (December 24, 1909 - September 13, 1957) was a Danish painter, writer and art theorist.

Born in Copenhagen, he studied under Axel Revold at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts from 1927-1929, and then, under Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at Bauhaus Dessau from 1930 to 1931.

He was a Surrealist painter and agitated for the style in several publications.

Stanislas Lepine | Seine painting

Born in Caen in 1836, Victor Edouard Stanislas Lépine (1836-1892) began his artistic career following the manner of the ship-painter Johan Barthold Jongkind and specialising in the rendering of nautical views such as Sailing Boats in Caen Harbour. In 1855 the painter moved to Paris and in 1859 he made his début at the Salon, exhibiting Port of Caen, Moonlight Effect.
Stanislas Lépine specialised in painting picturesque urban views, recurrently choosing to feature the River Seine and the old streets of Paris. In 1860 Lépine undertook a more professional apprenticeship under the guidance of Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot and during this period met the artist Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904).

Harald Engman | Cityscape painter

Harald Rudyard Engman (1903-1968) was a Danish painter. Above all, he is remembered for his fierce use of satire in criticizing and resisting the German occupation of Denmark during World War II.

Little has been published about Engman's life. It is known that he traveled as a working seaman and spent some time living in New York City's Chinatown around 1920.

He began to show paintings in Copenhagen in the mid 1920s. He became part of a group of self-styled "Underground Painters".

His shows always inspired controversy as he utilized caricature and satire to mercilessly criticize social ills and those in power especially the growing power of the Nazi Party in Germany.

Jan Mankes | Symbolist / Realist painter

Jan Mankes (15 August 1889, Meppel, Drenthe - 23 April 1920, Eerbeek) was a Dutch painter*. He produced around 200 paintings, 100 drawings and 50 prints before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 30.

His restrained, detailed work ranged from self-portraits to landscapes and studies of birds and animals. His work is now exhibited in his native Netherlands in the Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, Museum Belvédère Heerenveen and Museum MORE Gorssel.

Howard Schatz, 1940 | Surrealist photographer

The photographs of Howard Schatz are exhibited in museums and photography galleries internationally and are included in innumerable private collections.

He has received international acclaim for his work and has won virtually every award in his field including numerous “Photographer of the Year” awards and Gold Medals in the most prestigious competitions.

His work has been published in twenty-three monographs.

William Merritt Chase | The Plein Air Scenes

William Merritt Chase [1849-1916] won many honors at home and abroad, was a member of the National Academy of Design, New York, and from 1885 to 1895 was president of the Society of American Artists.

He became a member of the Ten American Painters after John Henry Twachtman died.

Chase's creativity declined in his later years, especially as modern art took hold in America, but he continued to paint and teach into the 1910s.

During this period Chase taught such up and coming young artists as Arthur Hill Gilbert and Edward Hopper.

One of his last teaching positions was at Carmel, California in the summer of 1914.

Camille Claudel | L’Abandon, 1988-1905

The present work, known in its final state as L’Abandon, can trace its origin to the 1888 plaster by Claudel known as Sakountala. Based on the eponymous Indian legend of the 5th century in which the heroine loses the affection of her beloved prince, only to regain it once more, the plaster was awarded an honorable mention at the Salon that same year. In fact, Sakountala most likely inspired Rodin and his famous composition of the following year, L’Eternelle idole.

Max Buri | Portrait / Genre painter

Max Alfred Buri (1868-1915) was an Swiss painter. While still at school he was given drawing lessons by Paul Volmar (1832-1906) in Berne.

From 1883 he was a pupil of Fritz Schider (1846-1907) in Basle, where he became acquainted with the works of Hans Holbein the younger and Arnold Böcklin.

In 1886 he went to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, transferring in 1887 to Simon Hollosy's painting school.

Picasso: Painting is a blind man's profession..

Pablo Picasso - Two figures, 1904

La pittura è una professione da cieco: uno non dipinge ciò che vede, ma ciò che sente, ciò che dice a se stesso riguardo a ciò che ha visto - Pablo Picasso

Barry Gross, 1948 | Portrait / Surrealist painter

In art historical terms, the early works of Barry Gross, American painter, combine the hyperfocus of Surrealism with Renaissance spirituality and humanism.

It is then all set to motion with the dynamism and drama of Baroque.

Dali and Fra Angelico join forces with Bernini.

Auguste Rodin | Drawings

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was a prolific draughtsman, producing some 10,000 drawings, over 7,000 of which are now in the Musée Rodin, Paris.

His drawings were seldom used as studies or projects for a sculpture or monument. The draughtsman’s oeuvre developed in tandem with the sculptor’s.

Rainer Maria Rilke | Letters on Cézanne /Lettere su Cézanne

The extraordinary letters (translated from the german by Jane Bannard Greene), show to what degree the eye of one artist can penetrate to the essence of another art.

The most distinguished of modern German poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, was born when Paul Cézanne had already been painting nearly a decade.

Leonardo da Vinci | Quale scienza è meccanica, e quale non è meccanica

Trattato della Pittura

Parte prima | Capitolo 29

Leonardo da Vinci | Trattato della pittura | Testo Integrale

Dicono quella cognizione esser meccanica la quale è partorita dall'esperienza, e quella esser scientifica che nasce e finisce nella mente, e quella essere semimeccanica che nasce dalla scienza e finisce nella operazione manuale.

Ma a me pare che quelle scienze sieno vane e piene di errori le quali non sono nate dall'esperienza, madre di ogni certezza, e che non terminano in nota esperienza, cioè che la loro origine, o mezzo, o fine, non passa per nessuno de' cinque sensi.

Leonardo da Vinci | Conclusione del Poeta, del Pittore e del Musico

Trattato della Pittura

Parte prima | Capitolo 28

Leonardo da Vinci | Trattato della pittura | Testo Integrale

Tal differenza è in quanto alla figurazione delle cose corporee dal pittore al poeta, quant'è dai corpi smembrati agli uniti, perché il poeta, nel descrivere la bellezza e bruttezza di qualunque corpo, te lo dimostra a membro a membro, ed in diversi tempi, ed il pittore tel fa vedere tutto in un tempo.

Il poeta non può porre colle parole la vera figura delle membra di che si compone un tutto, come il pittore, il quale tel pone innanzi con quella verità ch'è possibile in natura.

Madre Teresa | The most beautiful day / Il giorno più bello

Agim Sulaj, 1960

The most beautiful day: Today.

The easiest thing: Equivocate.

The biggest obstacle: Fear.

The gravest error: give up, to despair.

Giovanni Panza | Impressionist /Genre painter

Giovanni Panza (Miseno, March 9, 1894 - Napoli, December 20, 1989) was an Italian painter.

Born into a family of poets and painters, he was the nephew of Salvatore Postiglione and Luca Postiglione, sons of the painter Raphael Postiglione, who introduced him to painting.

Besides being a painter was Panza, like Uncle Luke, also a poet and writer.

His painting remained faithful to the tradition-romantic nature, tracing the figurative tradition of the Neapolitan school of the nineteenth century.

Represented landscapes, figures, roads, bucolic scenes, markets that he derived from the daily life of the neighborhoods in Naples.

Charles Angrand | Neo-Impressionist painter

Charles Angrand (1854-1926) was a visible presence in the Parisian avant-garde in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Associated with a circle of artists known as the Neo-Impressionists, Angrand emulated the shadowy crayon drawings of Georges Seurat, Neo-Impressionism's standard-bearer.

Here Angrand presents himself, not at all as an artist, but as a bourgeois dandy, impeccably dressed and smoking a small cigar.

Rainer Maria Rilke | La sera / The evening

Johan August Malmström (1829-1901) Dancing Fairies, 1866

Come una indefinibile fata d'ombre...

Vien da lungi la Sera, camminando

per l'abetaia tacita e nevosa.

Mother Teresa /Jeanie Tomanek ~ Love life /Ama la vita

Jeanie Tomanek, 1949 ~ Allegorical/Narrative painter

Love life as it is
Love her fully, unpretentious.
Love her when they love you or hate you when.
Love her when no one understands you,
or when you include everyone.
Love her when all forsake you,
or when you exalt like a king.
Love her when they steal everything,
or when you give it.
Love her when it makes sense
or when it seems not to have even a little‘.
Love her in complete happiness,
or in absolute solitude.

Sir George Clausen RA | Realist painter

Sir George Clausen RA (18 April 1852 - 22 November 1944), was an British artist working in oil and watercolour, etching, mezzotint, dry point and occasionally lithographs. He was knighted in 1927.

George Clausen was born in London on 18 April 1852, the son of a decorative artist. From 1867-1873, he attended the design classes at the South Kensington Schools in London with great success.

He then worked in the studio of Edwin Long RA, and subsequently in Paris under Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury. He was an admirer of the naturalism of the painter Jules Bastien-Lepage; about whom he wrote in 1888 and 1892.

Leonardo da Vinci | Il pittore dà i gradi delle cose opposte all'occhio..

Trattato della Pittura

Parte prima | Capitolo 27

Leonardo da Vinci | Trattato della pittura | Testo Integrale

Benché le cose opposte all'occhio si tocchino l'un l'altra di mano in mano, nondimeno farò la mia regola di venti in venti braccia, come ha fatto il musico infra le voci, che benché la sia unita ed appiccata insieme, nondimeno ha pochi gradi di voce in voce, domandando quella prima, seconda, terza, quarta e quinta, e cosí di grado in grado ha posto nomi alla varietà di alzare e abbassare la voce.

Leonardo Da Vinci - Musical Rebus

Leonardo da Vinci | Come la Musica si dee chiamare sorella e minore della Pittura

Trattato della Pittura

Parte prima | Capitolo 25

Leonardo da Vinci | Trattato della pittura | Testo Integrale

Viola Organista c. 1493-95

La musica non è da essere chiamata altro che sorella della pittura, conciossiaché essa è subietto dell'udito, secondo senso all'occhio, e compone armonia con la congiunzione delle sue parti proporzionali operate nel medesimo tempo, costrette a nascere e morire in uno o piú tempi armonici, i quali tempi circondano la proporzionalità de' membri di che tale armonia si compone, non altrimenti che faccia la linea circonferenziale per le membra di che si genera la bellezza umana.

Marie Laurencin | Cubist painter

Marie Laurencin (1885-1956) French painter, designer, illustrator, etcher and lithographer.

Born in Paris.

Studied at the Académie Humbert, where Braque was a fellow pupil. Met Picasso, André Salmon and Apollinaire; influenced by Picasso and Matisse, and began to paint pictures mainly of sloe-eyed girls in a decorative, arabesque-like style. Painted 'Apollinaire, Picasso and their Friends' 1909.

Lorado Taft ~ The Solitude of the Soul /La solitudine dell'anima, 1914

In stone, four life-sized figures, two male and two female, posed around and halfway emerging from, or captured by, an indistinct central volume.

By the American sculptor Lorado Taft, 1860-1936. In the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Neoclassicism of the sculptors Harriet Hosmer and Randolph Rogers was replaced in the second half of the 19th century by the more realistic naturalism of French-trained sculptors such as American sculptor Lorado Zadoc Taf (1860-1936). An instructor in modeling at the School of the Art Institute for 20 years, Taft created public monuments for Chicago that made the city a center for sculpture. The figures in this work are only partly freed from the marble, a technique that emphasizes the mass and outline of the stone.
Explaining The Solitude of the Soul, Taft wrote, “The thought is the eternally present fact that however closely we may be thrown together by circumstances . . . we are unknown to each other”.

Dita Omuri | Fashion/Abstract painter

Award winning artist Dita Omuri, born and raised in northern Albania, escaped her home country running towards the unknown and away from the restricted ways of expressing her emotions through art.
From a very young age, Dita’s sketchbook was her constant companion. By winning a young art competition she secured a scholarship at a traditional Art school aged 14. Learning the “Old Masters Techniques” and becoming aware that the only legal art form in Albania was Social Realism. Her passion for art, freedom and creativity was stifled in Albania.

William Shakespeare | The Sonnets, 1609

Italian translation ➦ William Shakespeare ~ I Sonetti, 1609

Sonnet V

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel:

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there;

Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:

Then, were not summer's distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:

But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Tom Lovell | Western painter and illustrator

Tom Lovell (1909-1997) was a founding member of the National Academy of Western Art. He received many honors for his illustrations and paintings. He was winner of the prestigious Prix de West award twice for his paintings. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators in 1974. In 1992, Lovell received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Robert Lougheed Memorial Award for Traditional Painter of Western History.

Robert Hagan, 1947 | Western painting

Robert Hagan raised in the lush, languorous sub-tropical northern New South Wales, Australia and educated at Newcastle University, he communicates in a typical offhanded Aussie manner.

Widely traveled with studios in Suffolk, England, San Diego, USA, Southport, Australia and Pattaya, Thailand.

Lorenzo Bartolini | Neoclassical sculptor

Lorenzo Bartolini (7 January 1777 - 20 January 1850) has been recognised as one of the great sculptors of Europe.

His style is quite different from the traditional Neo-Classical style of Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, because it is not based on the antique or on standard Academic principles.

He was a controversial and polemical artist.

His fascinating life has all the drama of a novel by Stendhal.

Giambologna | Hercules and the Centaur Nessus, 1599

The marble group of Hercules and the Centaur Nessus, was completed in 1599 by Flemish sculptor Giambologna, born Jean Boulogne (1529-1608). The sculpture was carved, impressively, from a single block of marble by Giambologna and it sits in the open-air gallery Loggia dei Lanzi on the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, among the square's other famous marble occupants.

Showing an advanced understanding of anatomy - visible in Hercules' rib cage, showing through his taut skin and the veined legs of the centaur, poised in battle - Giambologna's statue is a powerful evocation of the strength of mortal man.

Lorenzo Bartolini | The Nymph Arnina, 1825

For the first time ever, the original marble The Nymph Arnina by Lorenzo Bartolini (1777-1850), was exposed to the public for the first time on 18 November until February 8th 2015, accompanied by his beautiful plaster cast, owned by the Academy Gallery, returned after being deposited for a few decades at the Civic Museum of Prato, and together with some documents aimed to evoke the complex history of the work that Bartolini, in this version, shows the dedication to Giovanni degli Alessandri, leading figure in the cultural life of the early nineteenth century Florentine.

Pio Fedi | The Rape of Polyxena, 1865

The Rape of Polyxena is a marble statue located in the Loggia dei Lanzi, the open-air museum in Florence, Italy’s Piazza della Signoria.

It was sculpted in 1868 by Italian sculptor who worked chiefly in the Romantic style, Pio Fedi (1815-1892), but it was placed alongside several sculptures from the Renaissance.

The Rape of Polyxena embodies Hellenistic, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassicist mannerisms regarding its style and theme.

Giambologna ~ The Rape of Sabine, 1579-83 | Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

The manneristic celebrated group Rape of the Sabines by the Flemish artist Jean Boulogne, better known as Giambologna (1529-1608), is part of the statuary under the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence’s Piazza Signoria.
The massive statue is 4.10 meters high (statues became much bigger after Michelangelo’s David) and depicts a young man lifting a girl up over his shoulder, as an older man is crouched at his feet in complete dismay. For this reason, the statue is also known as the "Three ages of Man". At the base of the statue there is a bronze plaque that depicts scenes of the abduction of the Sabine women in bas-reliefs.

Giambologna | The Appennine Colossus, 1579-1580

Shrouded within the park of Villa Demidoff, in Medici Villas (Unesco World Heritage List, 2013), Pratolino, Vaglia, Tuscany, just 7 miles north of Florence, Italy, there sits a gigantic 16th century sculpture - 14-meter-tall masterpiece statue - known as Colosso dell'Appennino, or the Appennine Colossus. The brooding structure was first erected in 1580 by Flemish sculptor Giambologna, pseudonym of Jean de Boulogne (Douai, 1529 - Florence, 1608).

Antonio Canova | Psyché et l'Amour, 1788-1793

"Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss" is a sculpture by Antonio Canova first commissioned in 1787 by Colonel John Campbell. It is regarded as a masterpiece of Neoclassical sculpture, but shows the mythological lovers at a moment of great emotion, characteristic of the emerging movement of Romanticism.

It represents the god Cupid in the height of love and tenderness, immediately after awakening the lifeless Psyche with a kiss. The story of Cupid and Psyche is taken from Lucius Apuleius' Latin novel The Golden Ass and was popular in art.

- Joachim Murat acquired the first or prime version (pictured) in 1800. After his death the statue entered the Louvre Museum in Paris, France in 1824;

Antonio Canova | Drawing

Antonio Canova - Autoritratto, 1792

Antonio Canova (1757-1822) was the leading proponent of Neoclassicism and Italy's last internationally famous artist.
The sculptor Antonio Canova, born in the village of Possagno in 1757, rose to celebrity from humble origins. For biographical notes -in english and italian- and works by Canova see Antonio Canova ~ Neoclassical sculptor.