Saturday, January 31, 2015

Piero di Cosimo, The Liberation of Andromeda (1510/ 1513).

 
Piero di Cosimo, The Liberation of Andromeda (1510/ 1513).
Photo Uffizi Gallery.
 
Nearly 500 years after his death, Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522), an Old Master painter and inspiration to surrealists including André Breton, will be having his first solo exhibition, reports the Art Newspaper.
The exhibition, which will open at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. February 1, will be a comprehensive look at the idiosyncratic artist and his work offering up 34 original works by Piero and four attributed paintings.
Giorgio Vasari, a 16th century painter and art historian known for penning the seminal art historical text The Lives of the Artists, once described Piero as an unhygienic, solitary person, "more animal than human." Vasari reported that Piero died alone, having been found by his few friends at the base of his staircase. Curator at the National Gallery, Gretchen Hirschauer and associate professor of Italian Renaissance art at NYU, Dennis Geronimus, wanted to pull back the veil of mystery that shrouds the underrated Piero, a contemporary of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec - At the Moulin Rouge - The Clowness Cha-U-Kao

 The Clowness Cha-U-Kao
 
 
When the Moulin Rouge cabaret opened, Toulouse-Lautrec was commissioned to produce a series of posters. His mother had left Paris and, though Henri had a regular income from his family, making posters offered him a living of his own. Other artists looked down on the work, but Henri was so aristocratic he did not care. The cabaret reserved a seat for him and displayed his paintings. Among the well-known works that he painted for the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian nightclubs are depictions of the dancer Louise Weber, known as the outrageous "The Glutton" who created the "French Can-Can".

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Auguste Renoir Paintings



 
Renoir's paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions. The female nude was one of his primary subjects. In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of color, so that his figures softly fuse with one another and their surroundings.

Georgia O'Keeffe Blossom

 
 
O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916. She made large-format paintings of enlarged blossoms, presenting them close up as if seen through a magnifying lens, and New York buildings, most of which date from the same decade. Beginning in 1929, when she began working part of the year in Northern New Mexico—which she made her permanent home in 1949—O’Keeffe depicted subjects specific to that area. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the Mother of American Modernism

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

The Battle of Trafalgar

 
Twenty-seven British ships of the line led by Admiral Lord Nelson
 aboard HMS Victory defeated thirty-three French and Spanish ships.

 
 
The Victory Breaks the French Line. The Battle of Trafalgar naval engagement fought by the Royal Navy against the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies, during the War of the
Third Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle was the most decisive naval victory of the war.

Dale Chihuly, is an American Glass Sculptor



 
Dale Chihuly, is an American glass sculptor and entrepreneur.
His works are considered unique to the field of blown glass,
"moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture,".

The House of Fabergé made Imperial Faberge Eggs - Russian Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II gave to their wives and mothers.


Erik Numiya - Original art - Acrylic on board




Franz Xaver Winterhalter - German painter, known for his portraits of royalty in the mid-nineteenth century. His name has become associated with fashionable court portraiture.

 
 Edouard Andre, 1857

 
Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland in the Robes of State

Giovanni Boldini - Consuelo Vanderbilt the Duchess of Marlboro and her son, Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill



Cynthia "Cindy" Morris Sherman is an American photographer best known for her conceptual portraits.



Antoine Watteau Painter




Antoine Watteau (French: October 10, 1684 – July 18, 1721) better known as Antoine Watteau was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in color and movement (in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens). He revitalized the waning Baroque style, and indeed moved it to the less severe, more naturalistic, less formally classical Rococo.

Jean-Honore Fragonard French Painter in the Troubadour Style

 
 

Vincent Van Gogh


"I often think the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

The Kiss - Romance is in the Air



Vincent Van Gogh


"The way to know life is to love many things." ~ Vincent Van Gogh

Friday, January 1, 2010

PaintingsToGo.com - Corporate and Residential Fine Art Firm for Interiors






PaintingsToGo.com Corporate and Residential Fine Art Firm
Rita de Acuna Founder/President of Paintings To Go, Inc.

As a corporate and residential art firm, we bring knowledge and experience to creating and finding artwork for the enhancement of interior space. Services include the creation of custom oil paintings, fine art museum-quality oil painting reproductions, murals, portraits, custom frames and delivery/ installation.

PHILOSOPHY
We honor the power of art to calm our senses, focus our attention, challenge our intellect, and expand our imagination. Art has the ability to create a conversation, make us laugh, or tell a story. Bringing this to our clients is our measure of success.

OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH YOU
A great collaboration is central to the successful outcome of every project. Developing a dynamic partnership takes attention to detail, clear communication and a sense of adventure. We respond by finding solutions that are fresh and unique.

ENRICHMENT OF YOUR SPACE
From empty to enriched, random to refined, and unremarkable to memorable, finding artwork appropriate to each interior space creates balance and makes a statement. Based on knowledge, experience, and intuition, we implement creative concepts that are progressive and practical. Achieving our vision with diligence and care cultivates thoughtful and well-integrated solution.

PAINTINGSTOGO.COM works closely with corporations, architects, designers, art dealers, public and private sectors. Ms. Acuna has long been acclaimed for her ability to blend New York sophistication with her warm, winning ways with her fine art clientele. A broad exposure to the fine art from the Italian and Northern Renaissance, through Contemporary art and artists has won her much popularity online, and within her community. "I have a strong belief that all budgets deserve great art; because everyone deserves to live life in high style, with beautiful art." ~ Rita Acuna

FEATURED ARTISTS
Alama-Tadema, Bierstadt, Bonnard, Bosch, Botero, Botticelli, Bouguereau, Bruegel, Cassatt, Cezanne, Chagall, Church, Copely, Da Vinci, David, Degas, Duchamp, Dufy, Durer, Fantin-Latour, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Gauguin, Giotto, Van Gogh, Goya, Hals, Heade, Hogarth, Holbein, Hopper, Ingres, Inness, Kahlo, Kandinsky, Klimt, La Tour, Leighton, Leutze, Magritte, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Munch, O'Keeffe, Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, Vermeer, Wildbank, Warren Godfrey, Ivan Sherman.

Art as shown above:

Artist, Ivan Sherman
Out of the Box:
Art Created From
Recycled Corrugated Boxes


Artist, Warren Godfrey

Original Folk Art
Garden of Eden -
Acrylic on Canvas


PaintingsTogo.com
Custom Oil Painting Reproduction.
Children of Charles 1 - Original artist
Anthony van Dyke, Windsor Castle,
Royal Collection, UK 1637,
Custom Canvas Oil Painting: 40"w X 50"h

Monday, December 21, 2009

Claude Monet (1840-1926)



Born November 14, 1840, in Paris, France. Claude Monet was raised in Le Havre, where he developed a reputation as a caricature artist by the time he was 15. In 1858, the young artist met landscape painter Eugène Boudin, a mentor who first introduced him to outdoor painting. Monet was reluctant to leave the studio and the familiarity of indoor scenes, but plein air painting eventually became the basis for his life’s work.

Against his parents’ wishes, Claude Monet left home for Paris in 1859 to pursue a career in painting. There, he was inspired by the work of Eugène Delacroix, Charles Daubigny, and Camille Corot. He studied at the free Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro, and was a frequent patron of the Brasserie des Martyrs, a gathering place for fellow realist artists such as Gustave Courbet.

Claude Monet took a brief hiatus from his artistic pursuits to serve in the military in Algeria from 1860 to 1862. Upon his return to Paris, he picked up where he left off, studying art, experimenting with new styles, traveling, and forming important friendships with fellow painters, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Édouard Manet. He also worked in the forest at Fontainebleau with the Barbizon artists Théodore Rousseau, Jean François Millet, as well as with Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.

During the 1960s, Claude Monet was constantly traveling, having become captivated by natural light, atmosphere, and color. The artist continually sought to convey the remarkable variety and subtle particulars of each new landscape. Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1867) exemplified this experimentation with its shimmering array of bright, natural colors, eschewing the somber browns and blacks of the earlier landscape tradition. Tragically, few of Monet's canvases from this early period survived. The artist was financially unstable and frequently destroyed his own paintings rather than have them seized by creditors.

In 1870, Claude Monet married his wife, Camille, and the two traveled to London and eventually settled at Argenteuil. His best-known, most popular works were produced during this time at Argenteuil, where he often painted alongside Renoir, Sisley, Caillebotte, and Manet. Monet regularly exhibited his paintings in the private Impressionist group shows, which first took place in 1874. During that first show his painting Impression: Sunrise (1872) inspired a hostile newspaper critic to call all the artists "Impressionists," a name that persists to characterize the artistic movement today.

Claude Monet's paintings from the 1870s, notably Red Boats at Argenteuil (1875), are fine examples of the new Impressionist style. The paintings are essentially illusionist, but ring with a chromatic vibrancy. Monet worked directly from nature and revealed that even on the darkest, gloomiest day, an infinite variety of colors exist. To capture the fleeting lights and hues, Monet had to employ a new painting technique using short brushstrokes filled with individual color. The result was a canvas alive with painterly activity, the opposite of the smooth blended surfaces of the past.

While traditional landscape artists painted what they saw in their mind, Claude Monet, sought to paint the world exactly how he saw it, not how he knew it should look. So rather than painting a myriad of separate leaves, he depicted splashes of constantly changing light and color. It’s important to note that in this aspect, Monet belongs to the tradition of Renaissance illusionism. In depicting the natural world, he based his art on perceptual rather than conceptual knowledge.

In 1883 Claude Monet moved to Giverny, and likewise most of his Impressionist colleagues left the security of the cohesive group to explore their own directions. While his home was in Giverny, he never ceased traveling—to London, Madrid, and Venice, as well as within his native country. Thanks to the art dealer Durand-Ruel, Monet gradually gained critical and financial success during the late 1880s and the 1890s. A lifelong supporter of Monet and his work, Durand-Ruel sponsored one-man exhibitions as early as 1883 and organized the first large-scale Impressionist group show in the United States.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

How to Spot a Real Rembrandt


A new Getty show offers tricks for telling the difference between master and pupils

By CANDACE JACKSON

A show that opened this week at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles features dozens of authentic Rembrandt drawings—and just as many that aren't. The idea is to reveal to museum-goers the tricks experts and art scholars use to identify his unsigned artwork, something the museum world rarely publicizes.

The "fake" Rembrandts in the Getty's show are all drawings attributed to the Dutch master painter for hundreds of years, until as recently as a few years ago. Over the past 30 years, new scholarship and cataloguing techniques have helped scholars determine that at least half of the more than 1,000 "Rembrandt" drawings were by others.

One reason for all the confusion: Rembrandt had one of the largest teaching practices in his day, with at least 50 pupils studying closely alongside him in his sprawling Amsterdam studio. The curriculum included close imitations of his style and subject matter, says Lee Hendrix, the Getty curator for the show.

In the 17th century, some students eventually became more famous than Rembrandt, though of course that's not true today. (In the latter years of his life, Rembrandt's naturalistic style fell out of favor with wealthy patrons, who came to prefer a more flattering, less realistic painting, says Ms. Hendrix.) The Getty show features early training drawings by several of his best-known pupils, including Ferdinand Bol.

Another problem for scholars has been that although Rembrandt drew prolifically, very few of his drawings are signed. Scholars have used the signed drawings, and drawings connected to signed paintings, to find themes and symbols common to the unsigned work. These characteristics—like his use of storytelling, expressive faces and directional light— form the basis for determining modern historians which unsigned works are actually Rembrandts.

"Most people see [authenticating artwork] as a sort of scary, mystical process," says Ms. Hendrix. "It's not."

The Getty has organized the show in several galleries. In each, it has paired drawings side by side, on the left a real Rembrandt and on the right a work done by a student, with text explaining the clues to authorship. There's a central room that viewers can visit and revisit to check, via touch-screen video and text, the tips for identifying Rembrandts.

One pair includes one drawing that depicts St. John the Baptist preaching to a group (Rembrandt often painted biblical subjects), another of St. Paul preaching. On the left, Ms. Hendrix points out, the listeners' eight faces each have a distinct expression (bored, fascinated, confused, skeptical). In the other, the listeners are roughly sketched, their faces similar. These drawings were chosen to illustrate Rembrandt's tendency to focus on facial expressions.

Several pairs at the Getty depict the same nude model or street scene, but drawn from slightly different angles, a tip-off to scholars that one might not be a Rembrandt. Ms. Hendrix says the master would often join his students in drawing exercises—but of course would have a slightly different view, depending on where he was standing. Two drawings titled "A Quack and His Public" roughly sketch a snake-oil salesman putting on a show for a street crowd. For years they were both thought to be Rembrandts, but the one painted from a side view shows a defined emotion in the charlatan's face, while student Gerbrand van den Eeckhout has drawn the man from behind, with no expressions on faces in the crowd, Ms. Hendrix says.

Further confusing the matter is that some drawings even feature corrections done by Rembrandt himself, or lines drawn to show students what they should have done.

The exhibition is one of several devoted to the artist's work opening soon in Southern California. On Jan. 9 a show featuring Rembrandt prints will open at the Hammer Museum in L.A. On Jan. 22, the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego opens a show focusing on Rembrandt's New Testament prints from the 1650s. The Getty show closes Feb. 28 and won't travel: The drawings are too delicate.

Ms. Hendrix says that even though scholars generally agree that the drawings designated as Rembrandts in the Getty's show are legit, "in the end, it is always hypothetical."

Write to Candace Jackson at candace.jackson@wsj.com