The painting that won Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) the first prize at the Grand Prix of Rome in 1752 was a far cry from the Rococo paintings that made him famous. Many of his most famous paintings reflect the free attitude of the people at the French court during the final decades of the Ancient Régime. …
Paintings
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art or LACMA is one of the most popular museums in Los Angeles, California. It’s located on Wilshire Boulevard, one of the main thoroughfares in the city, in the Miracle Mile District in the northwestern part of the city. The museum has a history that goes back to the …
When two of the most renowned Flemish artists in history collaborated in the early 17th century, they produced one of the most stunning series of paintings ever produced. Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) were close friends and they worked together on several amazing paintings of the Baroque era. Each artist …
When Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) moved from France to Rome during the 1620s, The French artist only briefly returned once to his home country. He had made a name for himself in the Italian capital since his arrival in 1624. When he returned to France, he was overloaded with work by King Louis XIII and Cardinal …
The adventurous life of Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541-1614), an artist better known as “El Greco,” took a permanent turn shortly after he arrived in Spain. He earned several important commissions after arriving in Toledo, an important city at the time, and never left this place. He was one of the most influential artists of the Mannerist …
One of the most famous Renaissance sculptors in history started out his career as a young boy copying famous Renaissance paintings in Florence, Italy. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti (1475-1564) grew up at the height of the Renaissance period, a time when the transition away from medieval art was just about completed. Florence was at the …
One of the leading Baroque artists of the 17th century was in high demand in the highest circles of European society. One of the commissions that Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) earned in the early 1620s came straight from Marie de Medici, the former Queen of France and widow of King Henry IV of France. It’s …
Fruit hasn’t been the most popular subject matter for painters. It has been regarded as too simplistic to be transformed into a masterpiece. Caravaggio (1571-1614) had a brief spell in which he realistically depicted fruit, some of it rotten such as in his famous Basket of Fruit. He was one of the few Old Masters …
Very few paintings in the oeuvre of J.M.W. Turner define the artist’s career as this remarkable masterpiece of the Romantic era. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was an English artist who defined the world of art. He managed to convey a special atmosphere into his works which made him stand out from other Romantic artists …
Surrealism is an art movement that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and which continued to flourish well into the 1950s. Surrealist artists developed a technique that allowed the unconscious mind to produce the painting. This resulted in paintings with an illogical subject matter. André Breton (1896-1966), a French writer and poet, wrote …