Category Archives: 19th Century

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 19th Century artist of the Post-Impressionist movement, Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin [French, 1848-1903] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Gauguin_Paul

(Eugène-Henri-Paul) Gauguin (b. June 7, 1848, Paris, Fr. – d. May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia), one of the leading French painters of the Post-impressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art. After spending a short period with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through color.

Gauguin, in what we now might call a “mid-life crisis”, left his career and family to pursue painting, traveling as far as Tahiti to “find himself”. From 1891 he lived and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South Pacific. Inspired this tropical environment, Gauguin moved away from Impressionism (and the style of his mentor, Pissarro) and became known for using flat forms and wild color. His best known works all came from this later period. His masterpieces include the early

• Vision After the Sermon (1888) and

and the later works:

• Tahitian Women, (1891)
• Nevermore, (1897)
• Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98).

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 19th Century artist of the Hudson River School movement, Thomas Cole [American, 1801-1848] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Cole_Thomas

Thomas Cole is often called the “Father of the Hudson River School of Art.” In 1826 he helped to found the National Academy of Design in New York City. In 1827 he made his first visit to the White Mountains. While best known for his allegorical paintings such as the Voyage of Life and the Course of Empire series, he did many White Mountain paintings including Flume in the White Mountains; View of Mount Washington; Mount Chocorua; Notch of the White Mountains; View Near Conway; and Mount Washington from the Upper Saco Intervale.

Cole was apprenticed to a calico designer and wood engraver in England before he came to the United States with his family in 1818. The rest of his life he spent much of his time sketching from nature in the Catskills, White Mountains, Adirondacks, and the coast of Maine. In 1827, at the behest of Daniel Wadsworth, Cole visited the White Mountains for the first time. He visited the New Hampshire mountains again a year later with fellow artist Henry Cheever Pratt, only eight years after the first footpath was opened to Mount Washington. He returned to New Hampshire for the last time in 1839. In the winters, Cole returned to his New York City studio to paint romantic, amalgamative, grand, and enormous allegorical works such as the Voyage of Life and Course of Empire from the accumulated sketches of his summer excursions. Though he preferred allegorical subjects, he also painted many landscapes, often at the specific request of patrons. All his paintings are romantic in vein, for Cole felt it his duty to depict nature, especially American nature, as the “visible hand of God.” From 1829 to 1832 Cole traveled abroad, but his unique genius was not affected by Old World contacts. His only pupil was his neighbor in Catskill, Frederic Church.

Cole died in 1848 at only 47 years of age. He is buried at Thomson Street Cemetery, Catskill, New York. Upon his death, William Cullen Bryant presented a funeral oration at the National Academy of Design. See The Funeral Oration Given by William Cullen Bryant on the Death of Thomas Cole.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 19th Century artist, Eduard Gaertner [German, 1801-1877] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Gaertner_Eduard

Eduard Gaertner was German Romantic painter, architect and printmaker (also Johann Philipp Eduard Gaertner). He was known by documenting Berlin in his paintings, carefully depicting the architectural and technological wonders of the time.

The years between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the revolutions of 1848, known as the Biedermeier era, were a time of relative peace, prosperity, and innovation in German-speaking Europe. The art of the period came to be characterized by what a critic of the day called “rigorous simplicity.”

Berlin was expanding rapidly, growing to fulfill its role as a major European capital. Imposing new public buildings by Schinkel and his disciples were being constructed. Painters like Eduard Gaertner and Johann Erdmann Hummel chose Berlin as their subject.

In Gaertner’s paintings, emphasis was given to the objective recording of natural phenomena, and he sought to achieve an enamel-like finish that masked individual brushstrokes. We see how landscape and portraiture grew in importance while history painting declined.

Gaertner was carefully depicting the architectural and technological wonders, like the huge granite bowl that adorned the center of the city. They also turned his attention to the magnificent boulevards, as in his view of Schinkel’s Neue Wache (New Guardhouse), whose Doric portico faces Unter den Linden, the city’s most elegant promenade and parade ground.