Birth of Les Nabis

The Talisman is a painting by French artist Paul Sérusier made in 1888, under the guidance of Paul Gauguin at the artist’s colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany. This painting, the starting point and icon of the group of young painters called The Nabis, was a landmark in early Post-Impressionism, Synthetism, and Cloisonnism. It is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Something New on a Cigar Box

Returning from a stay at Pont-Aven where he painted under the tutelage of Paul Gauguin, Sérusier returned to Académie Julian to show his friends a small landscape he had painted on the lid of a cigar box.

According to Maurice Denis, Gauguin had told Séruzier :…

Who Is Gustave Loiseau?

Gustave Loiseau (3 October 1865–10 October 1935) was a French Post-Impressionist painter, remembered above all for his landscapes and scenes of Paris streets. ^[1] Wikipedia

Loiseau and the Coasts of Normandy

Born in Paris in 1865, Gustave Loiseau, like many of the Impressionist painters, found inspiration in the coast of Normandy. InFalaises de Saint-Jouin, Loiseau eliminates almost every sign of human presence, choosing instead to focus on nature itself.The composition is anchored by the dramatic cliffs on the right, and framed by a wide expanse of sea and sky.

Sotheby’s

Bonnard’s relationships were approaching crisis by the start of 1921. Still living unmarried with Marthe, who had been his partner and muse since they met in Paris in 1893, he was then deeply in love with Renée Monchaty, and stayed with her in Rome for much of March, abandoning Marthe in le Midi.

In the early summer, twenty-four of his paintings were exhibited at the Gallerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. In June, he worked in Saint-Honoré-les-Bains (central France), in September in Luxeuil-les-Bains (eastern France, to the west of the Alps) and Saint-Gervais-les-Bains (to the NW of Mont Blanc in the Alps).

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Landscape with Green Trees (c 1921), oil on cradled panel, 36.8 x 46 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

Landscape with Green Trees (c 1921) is a rich twilight view towards the end of the harvest, most probably in central or northern France. There appears to be a…

I ended the first article of this two-part series with Vincent van Gogh’s first paintings of cypress trees, made during his stay in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole mental asylum at Saint-Rémy near Arles.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889), black chalk and pen, 47 x 62 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.

During a period of intense creativity in June and July of 1889, he first drew parts of this view, then turned those drawings into paintings.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889), oil on canvas, 73.2 × 93.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

This, his first oil sketch, was finished by early July, when he wrote to his brother Theo, “I have a canvas of cypresses with some ears of wheat, some poppies, a blue sky like a piece of Scotch plaid; the former painted with a thick…

The great majority of paintings show a single moment in time. One of the fundamental questions when reading them is when that moment occurred: the time of year, and time of day. Sometimes these can be identified with great precision, but other images prove a real puzzle. Today and tomorrow I’m going to look at one relatively common question: does this painting show sunrise or sunset?

There are some who feel, from their observations, that there are clear visual differences in the light of dawn compared with that at dusk. Although there are specific circumstances when this may be true, careful optical studies have failed to reveal any consistent differences on which the observer or viewer can rely. In this article, I look at some of the clues we can use to distinguish paintings of dawn from those dusk; in the next I’ll show ten paintings, some of them famous…

Yesterday, I showed some of the unusual if not unique nocturnes over the city of Stockholm painted by Eugène Jansson (1862–1915). Although commercial success was slow in coming, by the end of the nineteenth century, his paintings had become more sought-after, and he was able to travel a little after 1900.

Eugène Jansson (1862–1915), Motif from Timmermansgatan (1899), oil on canvas, 172 x 120 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Image by Szilas, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1899, Jansson started to paint more views which he had memorised from outside his studio. This Motif from Timmermansgatan shows one of the sets of steps leading up to Mariaberg, where he had his studio, from this square in Södermalm, the southern part of Stockholm. This is set on a cloudy night, and the sky is full of the swirled forms of those clouds, which have been painted vigorously with some graffiti.

Eugène Jansson…

This serene and startingly colourful nocturne took painting from the heights of Impressionism towards several radical movements of the twentieth century.

PainterVincent Willem van Gogh
PaintingStarry Night over the Rhône
Year1888
Mediaoil on canvas
Dimensions 72.5 x 92 cm (28.5 x 36.2 in)
Collection Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Wikipedia

The Painting

A clear and starry night on the bank of a wide, calm river, with the water and sky filling most of the painting. In the foreground, at the mid-right of the bottom edge, a couple walks towards the viewer, arm in arm. Immediately behind them are vague partially-lit forms suggesting objects under tarpaulins, with three small yachts moored to the bank.

In the distance, the bank curves from the centre of the left edge, up and back to a gap to the right of centre. The other bank forms a shorter, slightly inclined line from that…

Vincent van Gogh’s career as an artist was brief, intense, only successful long after his death, but of enormous influence. Of the post-Impressionists, he remains the most popular today, his paintings drawing crowds wherever they go on display.

Van Gogh painted in several genres, and is now perhaps best-known for his floral still lifes. However, he started and ended his career as a landscape artist, and painted a large number of highly innovative representations of trees. Indeed, some types of tree such as the cypress are very strongly associated with him.

Biography

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was born and raised the oldest surviving son of a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, in a village in the southern Netherlands. He was trained as an art dealer with Goupil, and sent to their London branch in 1873. Although successful there, when moved to Paris, he became increasingly resentful of art being…

No one painted trees, particularly cypresses, like Vincent van Gogh. These didn’t come out of the blue, but had evolved over a period of a couple of years, as his brushstrokes became more organised into co-ordinated waves and swirls in their foliage.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Blossoming Chestnut Tree (1887), oil on canvas, 56 x 46.5 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Wikimedia Commons.

Early signs appear in his painting of a Blossoming Chestnut Tree from 1887. Although there are a couple of glimpses of the underlying anatomical trunk and branch structure, this chestnut, in full leaf and flower, has a more solid canopy built from visible and organised brushstrokes. These marks are starting to form whorls and swirls in places, including the background vegetation. The tree is only demarcated from that background – the grass below, and trees behind – by discontinuity in the structure and orientation of his marks.

After Cézanne, the other great Post-Impressionist painter of still lifes was Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Still Life with Two Sacks and a Bottle (November 1884), oil on canvas on wood, 31.7 x 42 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Van Gogh painted this Still Life with Two Sacks and a Bottle in November 1884 when he was living in Nuenen, in the Netherlands. This is one of the earlier examples from the many he made in his initial exploration of the genre during 1884-85. Most feature sombre earth colours and show everyday objects, here two sacks, a corked bottle, and framed mirror, against a found background.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Still Life with Bible (1885), oil on canvas, 65.7 x 78.5 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.

The following year, this Still Life with Bible (1885) continues the sombre look, with an even narrower…