The Famous Painting

Waterlilies: Green Reflections I by Claude Monet

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Tue, 08 May 2012 04:27:00 +0000

Claude Monet used his gardens to try out his color idea. In his garden he could organize nature into variation and contrast of color.

Monet spent the last thirty years if his life painting water lilies in different composition, a series of 250 paintings.

Beginning in 1903 Claude Monet began to concentrate on works that dispensed with the conventional structure of landscape painting and focused directly on the surface of the pond and its reflection.

In Green Reflections, Claude Monet emphasized cool tones of blue and green to suggest the refreshing shade around the pond.

In May 1909, Monet exhibited forty eight of these Waterlilies in a highly successful exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris.

Waterlilies: Green Reflections I by Claude Monet

van Gogh’s Sunflowers

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:10:00 +0000

Sunflowers painting is influenced by Impressionism and Post-impressionism, as well as Japans art. The painting style is distinct and instantly recognizable.

Van Gogh proved himself to be a powerful influence in the world of art. He famous for his use of color which makes his paintings look almost alive.

The world a floral still life, is composed of progression of shades of yellow, from the table to the vase to the sunflowers.

Van Gogh varied the yellows from pale citron to deep ochre, with stems, centers and brighter grass-like strokes in the background making a vibrant contrast.

As typically of van Gogh’s paintings, he used thick painting to convey the dimensions and textures of these sunflowers.

van Gogh’s Sunflowers

Cathédrale de Rouen - Claude Monet

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:59:00 +0000

Rouen is a hub of commerce and also the capital of Normandy. It is the fifth-largest port in France.

Former occupants include Claude Monet who endlessly painted Rouen’s Cathédrale de Notre Dame. The Rouen Cathédrale paintings, more than thirty in all, were made in 1892 and 1893.

It was painted repeatedly by Claude Monet, who was fascinated by the subtle changes of light and color on the Cathédrale’s towering French Gothic facade.

The paintings known as Les Cathédrale of Rouen, exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in the spring of 1895. The series of twenty five huge canvasses, a feat requiring considerable physical endurance and indomitable perseverance.

Each canvas demonstrates the fact that the painter posses eyes marvelously sensitive to the most subtle modulations of light, and capable of the acutest analysis of luminous phenomena.

He painted more than 3o different studies of this frilly Gothic facade at a various times of the day.

Using the psychical building only as a rack upon which to hang light, mist, dusk and shadows, Monet was capturing ‘impressions’.

The paintings of Rouen Cathédrale, in particular, established Monet once and for all as among the greatest of French painters.
Cathédrale de Rouen - Claude Monet

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:32:00 +0000

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was painted by Pablo Picasso in 1932. It was a record breaking when it was sold at a Christie’s auction for $106.5 million in May 2010.

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust created on a single day. It is one of sequence of works showing the artist’s then love, his muse and mistress Marie-Theresa Walter.

Marie-Theresa Walter, a young woman whom Spanish born Pablo Picasso first encountered in 1927 when she was 17. He kept their relations secret form his wife and only began to paint her four years later.

Marie-Theresa committed suicide in 1977, four years after Picasso’s death at the age of 91.
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust

Seaport with Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba by Lorrain Claude

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 01:40:00 +0000

The Embarkation of the Queen Sheba, going to visit Solomon, formed a pendent to the preceding figure, which it resembles in its dimension. It is both a sea and landscape drawing.

This masterpiece was executed in 1648 by Lorrain Claude.

In this painting Claude employed several perspectival devise, for example, the figures and boats on the shoreline are much larger than those in the distance. Decreasing an object’s size makes it appear farther away from the viewer.

Also the top and bottom of the port building at the painting’s right side are not parallel horizontal lines, as they are in real building.

The drawing is on canvas, 4ft.11 in. high, 6 ft. 7 in. wide. It is the work of first class, breathing the inspiration of a great mind, and glowing in all the fascinating richness of luxuriant nature.
Seaport with Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba by Lorrain Claude

The Raft of Medusa

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:30:00 +0000

The Raft of the Medusa, masterpiece by Theodore Gericault at the Musee du Louvre. ‘The Raft of Medusa’ portrays victims of a shipwreck adrift on the sea without food and water at the moment they signal to a distant ship.

The painter chose to represent a dramatic moment of the instant when survivors regain hope of rescue.

Historian often regards the Raft of the Medusa as the most important painting of French romanticism.

By locating the scene off the coast of Africa, Gericault incorporated an element of exoticism. Nature – cruel and unforgiving – is central to the scene, reflected in the turbulent sea, dark clouds and imperiled raft.

The painting concerned the situation of the shipwreck of the French fleet ship Medusa in 1819 off coast of Senegal due to human error and the catastrophic rescue effort of the survivors at sea, abandoned by the ship’s crew.
The Raft of Medusa

Mycenaean paintings

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 03:59:00 +0000

Many pictures of Mycenaean warriors have been found. Most wear helmets and leg guards but no body armour.

Mycenaean painting is related to Minoan art, with military themes and abstraction becoming evident.

One of the latest examples of Mycenaean painting is the krater – bowl for mixing wine and water – commonly called the Warriors vase after to prominent frieze of soldiers marching off to war, while a woman stands and looks after them.

The painting on this vase reveals no setting and the landscape elements that characterized earlier Minoan and Mycenaean art.

However, the liveliness of the representation and the careful observation, especially in details of costume are no less apparent.

Mycenaean culture as reflected in its art was preoccupied with death and war. It is no coincidence that many of the richest finds have come form tombs.
Mycenaean paintings

White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 03:13:00 +0000

The price of $72.84 m in 2007 for Mark Rothko’s 1950 work White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose).

It was painted by an artist who died in 1970, Mark Rothko’s picture does not exactly qualify as ‘contemporary.’

However it have been received the seal of public approval over a long period of time. And White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) hold the world record for the most expensive piece of contemporary art ever sold.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970) belongs to the generation of American artists who completely revolutionized the essential and design of abstract painting. He was born in Latvia and migrated to United States at the age of ten with his parents.
White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)

Mona Lisa

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:29:00 +0000

Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci began work on the Mona Lisa in Florence Italy in 1503, during the height of the Renaissance period.

Historically, Mona Lisa was nobody special, probably the young wife as a Florentine merchant named Gioconda.

The portrait set the standard for high Renaissance paintings in many important ways. The use of perspective, with all lines converging on a single vanishing paint behind Mona Lisa’s head, and triangular composition established the important of geometry in painting.

The original name of the painting was not Mona Lisa – it was La Gioconda.

The Mona Lisa painting is more than a piece of remarkable artwork – it is adventure into the unknown. It is a human quality to want to know and understand others, even to understands ourselves.

In this sense, the Mona Lisa, is an attempt to look through the veil of the public self and into the mystery of the real self.

A young lady appears before us, yet she is unreachable and eternally unknowable, permanent enigma that centuries of art experts have not been able to solve.

Her cross hands complement perfectly the shape of her face, the torso and the landscape background.

Leonardo kept his painting with him until the day he died saying that it was still unfinished. He even carried the remarkable painting with him as he moved form city to city.

By 1952 more than 61 versions of the Mona Lisa had been created. From Marcel Duchamp’s goateed portrait in 1919 to Andy Warhol’s silkscreen series and Jasper Johns image in 1983, the Mona Lisa is not only the most admired, but also the most reproduced image in all art.
Mona Lisa

Japanese Bridge By Monet

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:13:00 +0000

Japanese Bridge By Monet
Late July 1895 Monet take up his paintbrushes, he executed a series of canvases featuring the Japanese bridge viewed from traditional linear perspectives. These compositions include planting the banks as well as their watery reflections.

The painting he made of the Japanese Bridge at his garden in Giverny provide some of the best example of his cataract operations affected his color perception.

In 1900 Monet exhibit his first group of pictures of the garden devoted primarily to the Japanese Bridge.
Japanese Bridge By Monet

The Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:56:00 +0000

The Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens
The Massacre of the Innocents depicts the soldiers of Herod, intent on murdering the Christ child, and the Spanish troops of the Hapsburgs, ravaging the Low Countries or equally nefarious ends.

The massacre was ordered by King Herod. He had been told by the Three Wise Men that a King of the Jews had been born, and decided to prevent him from becoming a rival.

Rubens died soon after painting his Massacre of the Innocents, his school indeed lived on, but it may nevertheless b truthfully said that he carried the great art of his country into the grave with him.

The painting languished in an Austrian monastery as the work of Jan van den Hoecke, a Rubens follower.

In 2002 reattributed to Rubens himself, the painting was sold at auction for $76 million.
The Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens

Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Sat, 01 May 2010 04:52:00 +0000

Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier
It was painted in 1893-1894 by French artist Paul Cézanne. Born in southern France, he inherited wealth at thee early age and this wealth allowed him to devote his time to creating art.

On May 10, 1999 when Sotheby’s conducted the bidding process for Paul Cézanne work, Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier was to be estimated that the final selling price going into the auction would be $25 and $35 million, but the final hammer price with the buyer’s premium was $60,502,500.

Paul Cézanne was a great pot impressionist French artist. In all his artworks Cézanne establishes his command over color design, composition and draftsmanship of art.

It have long been recognized as among the greatest achievement, the works on which can be seem most clearly the innovations that led to the stylists development of early 20th century art.
Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier

Turquoise Marilyn by Andy Warhol

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:41:00 +0000

Turquoise Marilyn by Andy Warhol
Warhol used a wide range of colors especially in his numerous Marilyn paintings (there are Marilyn in silver, mint, pink, blue, turquoise, lemon and other colors) to underline her image as a public symbol, a cultural product.

Andy Warhol was fascinated with fame for himself, but also of those that were famous.

He painted many other celebrities and iconic people from history.

The painting was bought by Steve Cohen in 2007 form Chicago collector Stefan Edlis for around $80 million.
Turquoise Marilyn by Andy Warhol

Eight Elvises by Andy Warhol

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:18:00 +0000

Eight Elvises by Andy Warhol
The picture of Eight Elvis, a 12 ft canvas was part of a much larger 37 feet canvas with 16 Elvises.

In 2008 it was sold for $100 million to unknown buyer. It was reported by the Economist.

The painter Andy Warhol was born in August 6, 1928. He was known as painter, printmaker and film maker.

His art works are comprised of over 12,000 pieces of art which includes his drawings, paintings, photography, sculptures , films and prints.
Eight Elvises by Andy Warhol

Painter on his way to work by van Gogh

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:29:00 +0000

Portrait of Joseph Roulin

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:59:00 +0000

Portrait of Joseph Roulin
It was painted by Vincent Van Gough in 1889. Oil painted on canvas, 81.2 x 65.3 cm.

The postman was his friend that he is a “good soul and so wise and so full of feeling and so trustful” .

Van Gough did several versions of Roulin the postman, including a number of paintings and drawings.
Portrait of Joseph Roulin

Le Bassin aux Nymphéas

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:56:00 +0000

Le Bassin aux Nymphéas
Impressionist art, which took place primarily in the 1870s and 1889s, frequently captured sensations and landscapes using light, vivid and pure colors visible brush storks, thick plaint and real life subject matters.

Impressionism was very objective and appears “cold”.

Claude Monet was a famous French impressionist painter and one of the most prominent artists of the time.

Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas is one of the series of water lilies painting by him. It is an oil canvas measuring 100.4 x 201 cm (39.5 x 78.5 in).
Le Bassin aux Nymphéas

The Birth of Venus

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:18:00 +0000

The Birth of Venus
Visual poetry Sandra Botticelli (1444-510) remains among the best known of the artists who produces works for the Medici.

One of the works he painted in tempera on canvas for the Medici was his famous Birth of Venus. A poem on that theme by Angelo Poliziano one of the leading humanist of the day, inspired Botticelli to create this lyrical image.

Zephyrus (the west wind) blows Venus, born of the sea foam and carried on a cockle shell, to her sacred island, Cyprus. There, the nymph Pomona runs to meet her with a brocaded mantle. The lightness and bodilessness of the winds move all the figures without efforts.

The artist’s use especially on such a large scale of an ancient Venus statue of the Venus pudica (modest Venus) type - a Hellenistic variant of Praxiteles’ famous Aphrodite of Knidos – as a model could have drawn the charge of paganism and infidelity.

But in the more accommodating Renaissance culture and under the protection of the powerful Medici, the depiction went unchallenged.
The Birth of Venus

Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:56:00 +0000

Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat

Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat is painting by Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh went on to paint several versions of this painting.
It is oil painting on canvas 92.0 x 73.0 cm. It was painted late June 1890.

The painting has changed hands several times. In 1997, Stephen Wynn paid $47.5 million for the painting.

On October 7, 2005, it was announced that Stephen Wynn had sold the painting along with Gauguin's Bathers to Steven A. Cohen for more then $100 million.

Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:14:00 +0000

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is one of the Georges Seurat’s most famous works.

The Island of La Grande Jatte is in the Seine in Paris between La Defense and the Neuilly.

In creating the picture Seurat employed the then new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with oranges and blue pigments.

Seurat, who is known to be the ultimate example of the artist as scientist, used the technique of pointillism, or divisionism, on a massive canvas on order to depict a number of people enjoying a sunny afternoon in a park.

Seurat spent two years painting this picture, concentrating painstakingly on the landscape of the park before focusing on the people always their shapes, never their personalities.

Seurat was only 26 when he first showed Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the eight annual and final Impressionist Exhibition inm 1886. It immediately changed the course of vanguard painting, initiating a new direction that was baptized “Neoimpressionism.”
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Les Noces de Pierrette

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:46:00 +0000

Les Noces de Pierrette
Picasso created this painting during the most critical period of his life, when he suffering of continuous depression from the death of his friend Carlos Casagemas.

The paintings considered as a blue period masterpiece. Les Noces de Pierrette (translated as ‘The Marriage of Pierrete’) was painted in 1905, a time when Picasso faced poverty early in his career.

In this painting, Picasso uses many shades of blue. The blues help express the somber mood of the painting.

Picasso portrays rich socialites gossiping and suited up in gowns and top hats yet no person seems to express any real emotions.

This being done in one of the most down and out points of his life, Picasso was probably implying that, that was not a happy life either.

In 1989, it was sold for US$49.3 million.

Benois Madonna

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:02:00 +0000

Benois Madonna
Madonna and Child with Flowers otherwise known as the Benois Madonna, could be one of two pictures of Madonna started painting by Leonardo da Vinci, as he remarked himself in October 1478.

It was proved to be one of Leonardo’s most popular. It was extensively copied by young painters, including Raphael, whose own version of Leonardo’s design (the Madonna of the Pinks) was acquires in 2004 by the National Gallery, London.

The motif of the Madonna with the child in her lap, a robust, chubby faced child, is still of the fifteenth century; the round head of the Madonna, with the very high forehead, the thin, curved eyebrows and the small round childish chin, is Florentine; the Gothic window in the background, here giving no view beyond, is early Florentine fifteenth century.

This oil painting demonstrated extremely realistic human features with a rich depth of expression, apparent especially in the Madonna’s facial and hand gestures.

The child in the painting has an absorbed expression of silent concentration on his face, his eyes intently observing, with hypnotic intensity, not so much the flower held out to him by his mother - the crucifera, symbol of Passion – as, along its stem, the shining berries which he squeezes between his plump fingers and which are reflected in the oval brooch of his mother in a heraldic suggestion of the Medici arms.
Benois Madonna

The Old Horse Guards by Canaletto

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 03:06:00 +0000

The Old Horse Guards by Canaletto
This painting has been dated as 1748. It certainly shows the building as an active military garrison – its demolition commenced in early 1750.

The complete Guard, totaling possibly 100 all ranks, is seen on Guard Mounting parade with the Colour at its center.

The earliest surviving written orders describing such parades, with the Colour being trooped and lodged with attendant courtesies and procedures, are dated February 1749 in First Guards and Coldstream Guards.

Giovanni A. Canal was born in Venice but later simply became known as ‘Canaletto’. His father was a theoretical scene painter so, as soon as he was knee high to a palette knife, little Canaletto began helping poppa in the studio, after he went to Rome and studied perspective with Panini, the architectural artist who got him interested in painting the trendy new cityscapes known as ‘veduta’.
The Old Horse Guards by Canaletto

Codex Hammer

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:38:00 +0000

Codex Hammer
The Codex Leicester (previously known as Codex Hammer) is a collection of largely scientific writings by Leonardo da Vinci. The codex is named after Thomas Coke, later created Earl of Leicester, who purchased it in 1717. Of Leonardo's 30 scientific journals, the Codex may be the most famous of all.

This codex consists of 36 sheets (18 double sheets) measuring approximately 29.5 x 22 cm, which Leonardo compiled mainly in the years from 1504 to 1506, with some sheets added up to 1510, according to a principle that consisted of filling each of the double sheets separately and keeping them one within another as unbound units.

It is not known whether Leonardo himself decided to put them together in the form of a bound volume; however in recent times the sheets have been disassembled and are now kept loose as they were in the original state.

It is also known as the Codex Leicester from the name of the former owner who purchased it in Italy in the early 18th century.
Codex Hammer

Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889

noreply@blogger.com (Solomon) — Tue, 05 May 2009 10:06:00 +0000

Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889
A Wheatfield with Cypresses was created by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh in 1889. The painting made its mark of being one of most famous artworks by Vincent Van Gogh.

Writing to his brother Theo from the asylum in Saint-Rémy in early July 1889, van Gogh described his latest work in the series he had begun in June: "I have a canvas of cypresses with some ears of wheat, some poppies, a blue sky like a piece of Scotch plaid; the former painted with a thick impasto . . . and the wheat field in the sun, which represents the extreme heat, very thick too."

Vincent Van Gogh created the oil painting, A Wheatfield with Cypresses in 1889 on a canvas, with 51.5 x 65 cm dimension. A Wheatfield with Cypresses was one among the many paintings created by Van Gogh during the last two years of his life.

A Wheatfield with Cypresses was created by the artist when he was in the mental asylum at St. Remy in May 1889. The painting was one of the three versions of 'A Wheatfield with Cypresses'.

Van Gogh regarded this sun-drenched landscape as one of his "best" summer canvases, and he reproduced the composition in a reed pen drawing (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) and in two variants in oil paint (National Gallery, London, and private collection).
Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889