Was modernism only about style?
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-04, oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art) When discussing style we have to look at what the word actually means. A […]
Bruce Everiss
Henri Matisse. A modern artist for two ages.
In 1905, accompanied by the artist Andre Derain, Matisse (then 35) went to Collioure in South West France, near the Spanish border. Here he moved on from Neo Impressionism to […]
Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling compared
Rogier van der Weyden (a.k.a. Roger de la Pasture) (c1399-1464) was born in Tornai in the Burgundian Netherlands and served an apprenticeship there between 1427 and 1432 with the great […]
Northern Renaissance and Religion
In the mid fifteenth century there were very few media that suspended human disbelief, just visual art and acted plays, so the power of a virtual window into an alternate […]
Roadmenders in the rue de Berne, Eduard Manet
Painted in 1878, oil on canvas, measuring 63cm X 79cm. This painting portrays Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris as it is actually happening, additionally it is one of Manet’s paintings that […]
Facade, 10b Elizabetes iela, Riga
Serendipity brought a number of factors together in the early 1900 to propagate an unprecedented building boom in Latvia that created the largest concentration of Art Nouveau architecture in the […]
Berthe Morisot, her Subjects and Reception
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) spent her entire adult life (except for vacations) living in the Passy district of Paris. She was one of the founders of Impressionism, one of its greatest […]
Gustav Klimt. Three Ages of Woman
This is a square oil painting on canvas, 180cm X 180cm, completed in 1905, when Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was at his artistic peak. It won the gold medal at the […]
La Primavera
Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492), leader of the family banking business, was one of the richest men in Europe and was effectively ruler of Florence at a key stage in the […]
Great Artists and Syphilis
Syphilis almost certainly came to Europe from America with Christopher Columbus’ crew. The first written records of syphilis in Europe occurred in 1494/5 in Naples, Italy. Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut Syphilitic Man […]