Painters and Visual Artists

Continuing with Naturalists, here is another who was known for his photo-realism: Louis Pion. Though most of his paintings, actually, don't look that realistic, I'll include the exceptions.


The Apprentices






Or is this, what it looks like?








Couple Pulling A Plow






Unfortunately, I did not see one in color, but I think it's safe to guess that this is not a bright, colorful work.







Here is an interesting theme, one occasionally sees, of a painting which includes other paintings. Watteau did a very famous painting of this sort-- perhaps the first of its kind.

And here is a realistic portrait that, once again, looks black & white. Texts and Pretexts:








Now, a couple that are less than Photo-realistic.














With a little space left, for this post, I'll start another French artist, with a long name: Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret. He was apparently one of the leaders of the Naturalist school, along with Bastien Lepage. I will say this much for him: he was talented at portraiture. He also did some unusual looking paintings.

But I have to start with this one, because after my mentioning Watteau's painting of a gallery, filled with paintings, I came across this work: Watercolorist In the Louvre







The painting behind the watercolorist, is Watteau's most famous painting, Voyage to Cythera.

Super photo-realism, here, and a little bit odd.







And here is a bit more of a taste of that strangeness: Marguerite au Sabbat.







Continued, next post

 

Pascale Dagnon-Bouveret, continued.

This artist did more religious paintings than average, though not as many as I had initially thought, when I saw all the white headware, of the women-- only some are nun's habits, but most are just the hats worn by the women in Brittany, France, at that time.


Consolatrix Afflictorium







Ophelia





That was not the only painting of his I'd seen, referencing Hamlet.













Woman from Brittany




















Brittany Girl







A Woman from Bern, Switzerland







Young Woman in a Garden of Oranges








Not done yet. More in next post.

 

Dagnon-Bouveret, further continued.

I'll start off with some scenes, and work towards purer portraits. This first, is a highly unusual, straight landscape painting, Willows By A Stream







The Duet






Horses at the Watering Trough




















The Letter




























Continues, one more time.

 

And here is what remains of what will equal about three full posts of Dagnon-Bouveret's paintings. These are all portraits.
























I'm only including this one, because of the clear difference between the style of the painting of the girl, and the rest of her environment, as had been previously noted, in some other Naturalist work. Corot did something like this, in his Venus Bathing, which I began to copy, though never got further than the underpainting.




















I'll end here, because I want to move to a couple of English Naturalists next.

 

While DEFinning is corralling work from some English Naturalists I thought I'd bump this thread above the spam bot threads polluting this section with a variety of pieces from one of my favorite Northern Renaissance artists, Albrecht Dürer.


Self Portrait (1500)

10 things to know about Albrecht Dürer
https://www.christies.com/features/Albrecht-Durer-10-things-to-know-8053-1.aspx

As I was sifting through his prints and paintings I came across some pieces that are highly unusual for Dürer - more on that later - but I wanted to start with his more famous work.

As we can see, Albrecht Dürer was an accomplished painter, but he is arguably more famous for his fantastic engravings and woodcut prints. Here are a couple examples of this master printmaker's work:


Knight, Death and the Devil (1513)

Detail:



The amount of work he put into his engravings is nothing short of amazing.

Continued below...

 

(cont.)

Here's another gone of Dürer's finer engravings, Saint Eustace (c. 1501):



Once again, the work and detail he put into this piece is incredible, and it illustrates why he is considered by many artists to have set the standard for printmakers 500 years ago...

(Albrecht Dürer cont. below)

 

(cont.)

As I mentioned earlier, while I was sifting through Dürer's work I serendipitously stumbled across some paintings that I had never seen before, and they struck me for several reasons, most particularly how "modern" they were. All of these pieces are watercolors - something Dürer isn't well known for - and here are the first two pieces I ran across:


Quarry (1506)


Quarry (1510)

What struck me as "modern" about these pieces is the abstraction one encounters in these paintings. In most of Dürer's prints and paintings (particularly his prints) one sees an incredible level of detail in his work that is absent in these and other watercolors. I suspect that this is because Dürer treated these paintings as sketches, yet we still see the work pushing towards abstraction. To what degree he was conscious and deliberate about this I can't say, but these particular paintings are very much unlike the rest of his work, which I find very interesting.

(Cont. below)

 

(cont.)

To wrap things up, here are a couple of landscapes I ran across later:


View of Trient (1494)

Looking at this painting I can't help but be reminded of Paul Cezanne's paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Finally, I ran across this piece (sorry, no name and date), which is not as nice as View of Trient, but is rather unusual in its abstract and gestural qualities:



In contrast, this watercolor Hare (1502) is more typical of Dürer's watercolors and paintings where we see the extravagant amount of detail we expect in his work: