Author Archives: Fine Art Presentations Featured Artist

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 16th Century artist, Pieter Bruegel the Elder [Flemish, 1525-1569] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Bruegel_the_Elder_Pieter

Pieter Bruegel (about 1525-69), usually known as Pieter Bruegel the Elder to distinguish him from his elder son, was the first in a family of Flemish painters. He spelled his name Brueghel until 1559, and his sons retained the “h” in the spelling of their names.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, generally considered the greatest Flemish painter of the 16th century, is by far the most important member of the family. He was probably born in Breda in the Duchy of Brabant, now in The Netherlands. Accepted as a master in the Antwerp painters’ guild in 1551, he was apprenticed to Coecke van Aelst, a leading Antwerp artist, sculptor, architect, and designer of tapestry and stained glass. Bruegel traveled to Italy in 1551 or 1552, completing a number of paintings, mostly landscapes, there. Returning home in 1553, he settled in Antwerp but ten years later moved permanently to Brussels. He married van Aelst’s daughter, Mayken, in 1563. His association with the van Aelst family drew Bruegel to the artistic traditions of the Mechelen (now Malines) region in which allegorical and peasant themes run strongly. His paintings, including his landscapes and scenes of peasant life, stress the absurd and vulgar, yet are full of zest and fine detail. They also expose human weaknesses and follies. He was sometimes called the “peasant Bruegel” from such works as Peasant Wedding Feast (1567).

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.

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.

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.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida [Spanish, 1863-1923] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Sorolla_y_Bastida_Joaquin

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (February 27, 1863 – August 10, 1923) was a Spanish painter, born in Valencia, who excelled in the painting of portraits, landscapes, and monumental works of social and historical themes. His most typical works are characterized by a dexterous representation of the people and landscape under the sunlight of his native land. Joaquin Sorolla was the eldest child born to a tradesman, also named Joaquin, and his wife, Concepcion Bastida. His sister, Concha, was born a year later. In August 1865 both children were orphaned when their parents died, possibly from cholera. They were thereafter cared for by their maternal aunt and uncle. He received his initial art education, at the age of fourteen, in his native town, and then under a succession of teachers including Cayetano Capuz, Salustiano Asenjo. At the age of eighteen he traveled to Madrid, vigorously studying master paintings in the Museo del Prado.

After completing his military service, at twenty-two Sorolla obtained a grant which enabled a four year term to study painting in Rome, Italy, where he was welcomed by and found stability in the example of F. Pradilla, the director of the Spanish Academy in Rome. A long sojourn to Paris in 1885 provided his first exposure to modern painting; of special influence were exhibitions of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Adolf von Menzel. Back in Rome he studied with Jose Benlliure, Emilio Sala, and Jose Villegas.