Category: Art

Manet (23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French Modernist painter often referred to as the father of modernism. He was a crucial figure in the change from Realism to Impressionism and was close friends with other pivotal figures of the time such as Renoir, Monet and Degas, meeting the latter as early as 1859, when the pair would be found together copying paintings in the Louvre as practice. Publicly, Manet was a divisive figure. He was rejected year after year by the Paris Salons, a professional art society which was seen as the quickest way for...

Housed at the extraordinary Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Boy in a Turban Holding a Nosegay is a masterpiece by Michael Sweerts (1618-1664). Sweerts was a Flemish painter most recognised for his allegorical and genre paintings as well as portraits and tronies (common type, or group of types, of works common in Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque painting that show an exaggerated facial expression or a stock character in costume.) Sweerts was rather a busy painter, having worked in Rome, Brussels, Amsterdam, Persia and India (Goa). It may interest the reader to know I have been to all...

This is an obscure artist so I’ll ask you to bear with. I cannot remember where I found him but I am glad I did. This artist has provided me with a wealth of wonderfully colourful surrealist pieces, one of which I shall eventually purchase (promotions permitting) and hang on my wall. See below three of my favourite pieces by Mr Naumovski. Vangel Naumovski was born in 1924 in the Macedonian city of Ohrid (then part of Yugoslavia). He was interested in art at a young age, but this led nowhere as he left school after third grade and...

Hanna Hirsch Pauli (1864-1940) was a Swedish scenery and portrait painter. She was a friend of Eva Bonnier, whom she followed through the painting school of August Malmström, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm. It is currently in the Nationalmuseum in Sweden. Breakfast Time played a role in Pauli’s breakthrough in the Nordic art scene in the 1880s. Let’s have a look at it below. As was the case with most other Swedish artists of her generation, her painting stood closer to the French juste milieu painters than to most impressionists; nevertheless, the thickly applied paint...

Le retour du braconnier otherwise known as The Wounded Poacher is a painting by Henry Jones Thaddeus, completed in 1881. It now lives in the National Gallery of Ireland, where we were supposed to go in March. Unfortunately a little global effect occurred which prevented us from doing so. This was most unfortunate indeed. Henry Jones Thaddeus was an Irish painter born and trained in County Cork. He won the Taylor prize twice in 1878 and 1879. He was a realist artist and portrait artist, most famously perhaps commissioned to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X, seen above....