Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Nicolas Poussin


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 17th Century artist of the Baroque movement, Nicolas Poussin [French, 1594-1665] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Poussin_Nicolas

Nicolas Poussin  (born 1594 Les Andelys, France, died 1665 Rome), was a French painter.

“Something celestial shone in his eyes; his pointed nose and wide brow ennobled his modest face.”

So wrote a biographer about Nicolas Poussin, a philosopher who expressed himself in paint. Pointing to his forehead, Gian Lorenzo Bernini called Poussin “a painter who works up here.” Born to Norman peasants, Poussin went to Paris in 1612, working with Mannerist artists and collaborating with Philippe de Champaigne. In Rome by 1624, he worked in Domenichino’s studio, absorbing his composition and cool colors. Poussin’s art developed slowly. His first major commission, an altarpiece for Saint Peter’s Basilica, was unsuccessful; in fact, he never painted again for a public building in Rome but concentrated on small pictures for collectors. In 1640 Louis XIII persuaded him to supervise a large decorative project in Paris, but Poussin soon returned to Rome, suited neither for large projects nor for court intrigue and competition. He usually painted what he chose, on speculation rather than commission, a practice that led to reputation, not riches. Despite weak, shaky hands — which plagued him as early as 1643 and were probably a symptom of syphilis — Poussin painted by himself, lacking the resources required to run a large workshop with assistants and apprentices. His pictures, rather than pupils, shaped European art for generations. Poussin was the chief formulator of the French classical tradition in painting. By the mid-1630s, he began exploring a serene, classical style inspired by Raphael and antiquity, emphasizing form and moral content. His late works are essays in solid geometry, with movement minimized and every element given a symbolic meaning and pictorial function.


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Rinaldo and Armida

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Apollo and Daphne

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Mars and Venus

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The Rape of the Sabine Women (detail)

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Eduard Gaertner


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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.


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Der Marktplatz mit der Nikolaikirche in Gent

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Klosterstrasse

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Die Bauakademie in Berlin

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Unter den Linden

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Die Brucke movement, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner [German, 1880-1938] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Kirchner_Ernst_Ludwig

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (b. Aschaffenburg 1880; d. Davos 1938) studied architecture in Dresden where he met and worked with Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. After finishing his studies, however, he opposed his father’s wishes and decided to become a painter. The intense artistic and intellectual relationship between the four artists soon led to the formation of the artist group “Die Brücke,” which, according to Schmidt-Rottluff, wanted to “attract all revolutionary and restless forces.”

The artists began to work on the “Viertelstundenakte,” drawings on nude models in the studio or in open nature. At first the group oriented itself to artists from Late Impressionism. The discovery of the Fauves, South Seas’ art and van Gogh led the painters to Expressionism. Due to the encounter with Italian Futurist works, the group’s painting style changed and became “tougher.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner studied the sculptures at the Völkerkundemuseum in Dresden, which influenced his own wood sculptures. In 1911 Kirchner moved to Berlin. Here Kirchner discovered new motifs — city and street scenes. He painted them in a simplified manner, with sharply contoured forms, expressive features and clashing colors. The city paintings became incunables of Expressionism and made Kirchner one of the most important German artists of the 20th century.

The beginning of world war I and the following years were a turning point in his life. The war experiences and military service caused an existential angst and led to illness and long stays in sanatoriums. The more remarkable was his artistic production of that time. Works like the woodcut “Frauen am Potsdamer Platz,” the “Bilder zu Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl,” the self-portraits and woodcut pictures from the sanatoriums, which are counted among the highlights of his œuvre, came into existence.

In 1917 Kirchner settled in Frauenkirch near Davos. The city scenes were now replaced by mountain landscapes and scenes of rural life. Around 1920 his painting style calmed down, his paintings had a carpet-like two dimensionality. Besides, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner also produced an extensive graphic work — wood cuts, lithographs and ink drawings. In 1923 Kirchner moved to the “Haus auf dem Wildboden” at the entrance of the Sertig Valley where he lived and worked until he committed suicide in 1938.


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Nollendorfplatz

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10 Thumbnails of various Artists

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A Group of Artists: Otto Mueller, Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff

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Siesta

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