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Shelley’s Art Musings – Spotlight on Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks
Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in New York. He was brought up in a comfortable family setting as was a was a good student, showing the early signs of being an artist at the age of 5. His parents encouraged this, keeping him in supplies and learning material to hone his skills. In 1899 he started a correspondence course in art and soon transferred to the New York school of art and design. He studied there for 6 years learning about oil painting, he took inspiration from Manet and Degas, yet found it shocking to sketch from live models.
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Goya (English version)
Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. He proved that if a man has the capacity to live and multiply his experiences, to fight and work, he can produce great art without classical decorum and traditional respectability.
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Gustave Caillebotte – A patron among the Impressionists
The text below is the excerpt from the book Gustave Caillebotte (ISBN: 9781683256939), written by Nathalia Brodskaïa and Victoria Charles, published by Parkstone International. Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) is one of the most important figures of French Impressionism. He was not only a very passionate painter who created about 500 paintings, but also supported his contemporary fellow artists as a collector, patron, and initiator by funding and organising exhibitions. Nevertheless, he remains one of the less publicised Impressionist painters. Gustave Caillebotte was born on 19 August 1848 as the eldest of three sons of the twicewidowed cloth merchant, trade judge, and real-estate dealer Martial Caillebotte and his third wife Céleste Daufresne in Paris, where he…
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Spotlight on Felix Vallotton (1865-1925)
Exhibition: Felix Vallotton – Painter of disquiet Date: 29th October to 26th January 2020 Venue: At The Met Fifth Avenue The text below is the excerpt of the book Félix Vallotton, written by Nathalia Brodskaïa, published by Parkstone International. That very strange Vallotton – that was how Thadée Natanson, the publisher of La Revue Blanche magazine, referred to the friend of his youth. In fact, Félix Vallotton did not bare his soul immediately, even to close friends. In the artistic milieu of Paris to which they both belonged, there were no ordinary people, but even among them, Vallotton stood out as being a most unusual individual. The reasons lay not…
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Happy Birthday to Gustave Courbet
President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Gustave Courbet, the painter of scandal: the Vendôme Column, the case of The woman with the Parrot, and The origin of the world. The text below is an excerpt of the book Gustave Courbet, written by Georges Riat, published by Parkstone International. Child of materialism and positivism, Courbet was without a doubt one of the most complex painters of the nineteenth century. Symbolising the rejection of traditions, Courbet did not hesitate to confront the public with the truth by liberating painting of conventional rules. He became from then on the leader of pictorial realism. The Vendôme Column At the end of the deliberation of the…
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Whistler & Nature
Whistler & Nature casts a new light on the work of the great late-Victorian master, James McNeill Whistler. Born in America, but living in the UK for most of his life, he was known as an artist with a bold personality and a revolutionary attitude towards the natural world. Whistler suddenly shot to fame like a meteor at a crucial moment in the history of art, a field in which he was a pioneer. It was not by chance that the painter settled in London. Europe was, at the time, the greatest artistic and aesthetic battleground and this artist had a suitably combative temperament. Like the Impressionists, with whom he sided,…
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Shelley’s Art Musings – There is more to Whistler than his Mother…
I am sure that the first thing anyone thinks of when they hear the name James Abbott McNeill Whistler is the dower painting of his Mother. The muted pallet and stern setting of the piece along with the initial reaction to its original name made this a sure-fire masterpiece, but ask most people to name another piece by Whistler and they probably can’t. Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834 to Anna and George Whistler. He lived his first 3 years in a house which has now become “Whistler’s House Museum of Art”, dedicated to his artwork. In 1837 they moved to Stonington, Connecticut so that his father could…
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Isaak Ilyich Levitan
The Jewish Painter of the Tsar
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Nude and Confused: A Freud Family Dream
Like grandfather like grandson? Dripping with psychological commentary, Lucian Freud gave precisely zero shits about his subjects’ ‘best side’ when immortalising them on his canvases. With extreme realism, the breakdown of the models’ exteriors portray the spliced, multiple, and complex layers on the inside. Considering the tone of Lucian’s work, people are onions, not parfaits. Grandson to Sigmund Freud, Lucian artistically mirrored his famed grandfather’s unfalsifiable, and somewhat pseudo-science, theories in the world of psychology, threading out the troubled, repressed inner chaos so laboriously placed in the depths of the psyche. Everybody looks like the haggard, worst version of themselves – Freud was essentially the antithesis to Instagram filters. Lucian,…
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The Wyeths: The only family who didn’t fight at Christmas
Such a family imbued by fame and public praise could only have lively and refined discussions at the table during Christmas, right? That’s how I imagine them at least. Holding glasses of wine while lifting their little fingers, fondling the mustaches they probably didn't have, and taking turns to offer their aesthetically cultured opinions. Or, they could just be like the rest of us: tipsy at holiday parties and slightly aggressive with each other at family gatherings.
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