Category: Art

This wonderful offering by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), a Philadelphian artist, depicts the events of a famed rowing race on the Schuylkill River in May 1872. Eakins was an important American painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. H graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 1866. He is said to have carried American Realism to its height. The Gross Clinic (1875) is considered one of the most importance pieces of American art. But today, we shall focus on The Biglin Brothers, featured below. Thomas Eakins was at the forefront of Realist painters who shifted the focus of...

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was a key figure in the impressionist and post impressionist movement. His works were key in the progression of both. He counted amount his great friends and colleagues Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. He preferred to work in the outside, capturing gorgeous moments like the one below. An interesting fact about Pissarro is that he married his mother’s maid and had eight children with her. The painter Camille Pissarro was the most artistically innovative and socially concerned, most revered, and eldest of the famed and courageous group of French painters known as the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists,...

Augustus Leopold Egg (1816-1863) is a minor British Victorian era artist known most for his tryptic, Past and Present, depicting the breakup of the traditional Victorian family. This is worth a post in itself so I will save it for a later date. Travelling Companions was painted towards the end of his life. I think it is a terribly prescient work of art and so look forward to discussing it with/at you. August Egg was at pain to combine popularity with moral and social activism in his paintings which was similar to how his friend, the writer Charles Dickens...

Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) was an American surrealist artist, whose works denoted sparsely furnished interiors, barren landscapes, self-portraits, and still-lifes. Based in Chicago, she was known as the ‘Queen of the Bohemian artists”. Abercrombie was involved in the Chicago jazz scene and was friends with musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, whose music inspired her own creative work (Warren, Lynn, Art in Chicago 1945-1995, Thames & Hudson, 1996) It should be noted that Abercrombie was a fan of René François Ghislain Magritte, on whom I will likely do a piece in the coming weeks. Let us now...

Where to begin with Dalí? Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was a Spanish painter known for his technical skill, visionary craftsmanship and bizarre imagery in his work. He was influenced by Renaissance and Impressionist masters, beginning his early career with a fascination with Cubism. In the late 1920s, Dalí developed a keen interest for surrealism. This interest was introduced in his most famous work, The Persistence of Memory 1931 (below). This is perhaps one of the most famous surrealist paintings of all time. Today, however, we will be looking at a later surrealist offering, the Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937. Dalí’s artistic...