History of Western Painting – Part 2

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This article is the continuation from previous article Part 1. This article discussed some more painters from west side.

HISTORY OF WESTERN PAINTING -- PART 2

GUSTAV COURBET

GUSTAV MOREAU

FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH

DANTE GABRIEL

CAMILLE PISSARO

EDOUARD MANET

JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER

EDGAR DEGAS

WINSLOW HOMER

PAUL CEZANNE

CLAUDE MONET

PIERRE RENOIR

HENRI ROUSSEAU

PAUL GAUGUIN

GEORGES SEURAT

VINCENT VAN GOGH

GUSTAV COURBET

Gustav Courbet was an artist who led the realist movement in 19^th century French painting. By 1850, he was shocking the public with the style known as Realism, and with the scale of his paintings. One of Courbet's most important works is 'Burial at Ornans'. This painting of the funeral of his grand uncle became the first masterpiece in the Realist style. People who had attended the funeral were used as models for the painting.

Courbet worked with social issues, and focused on the peasantry and the grave working conditions of the poor. Courbet's particular kind of realism influenced a number of artists who followed him.

GUSTAV MOREAU

French artist Gustav Moreau knows for his strange and mystical works, often portraying scenes from mythology or religion. Moreau painted for a number of years without exhibiting his work, but during this time, he developed his unique style. He spent many hours studying Persians, Indian and Japanese prints. He became one of the leading artists of the symbolist style.

Moreau emphasized the morbid side of the life and death. His landscape often showed steep and rocky cliffs with twisted trees. He had a feeling for the bizarre and developed a style that is highly distinctive in subject and technique. When he died, on the 18^th April 1898, he left to the state his house, containing about 8000 pictures, water-colours, cartoons and drawings, which form the Moreau gallery. It is considered one of the best organized collections in Paris.

FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH

The Iceberg

Frederic Church was an American painter who belonged to the Hudson River School of landscape painters. He followed a pattern of travel, hiking and sketching from spring through autumn, and spent winter in newyork. Church was inspired by the fascinating variety and complexity of nature was essentials to grasp unique underlying truth of universe.

In 1853 and 1857, he visited South America and made many sketches of tropical and Andean scenery, which he afterward developed into large pictures. Several years later, an expedition to the coast of Labrador gave him material for his great picture entitled 'Icebergs', which attracted much attention on its resulted in important works depicting nature. His most famous painting is; The Andes of Ecuador'.

DANTE GABRIEL

Self-portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a cofounder of the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of English painters and poets who hoped to bring to their art the richness and purity of the medieval period. He was both poet and a painter. Romantic love was his main theme. His first paintings were based on religious themes with elements of mystical symbolism. They were 'The Girlhood of Mary Virgin' and 'Ecce Ancilla Domini'.

Rossetti painted only one type of woman who became known as the 'Rossetti girl'. In most of Rossetti's early pictures his idle ladies were portraits of his wife, the beautiful Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. He had met her in 1850, and they married in 1860 when she was already in poor health. After his wife died 1862, Rossetti buried with her the only complete manuscript of his poems. The manuscript was recovered seven years later and published in 1870. His included most of his best verse and established his reputation as a poet.

CAMILLE PISSARO

Two Women Chatting By The Sea

French painter Camille Pissaro was one of the major members of the style of painting called French Impressionism. This was a major movement, first in painting and later in music that developed chiefly in France during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Pissaro painted a wide variety of subjects including cityscapes, still life, portraits, landscapes, scenes of peasants. Pissarro progressed from dark landscapes, to brighter impressionism. He often chose high view points, painting a city landscape for example, from a top window. He never sold his paintings for much during his lifetime; today they fetch millions of dollars in art auctions.

EDOUARD MANET

 A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Eduoard Manet was a French Painter who was often identified with the 'Impressionists', and was influenced by them. However, because the Paris art world generally didn't favour this style, he chose not to exhibit them. He was a revolutionary in that he broke new ground in choosing subjects from the events and people of his own time. However, he craved official recognition, and preferred to show his work in the more conservative exhibitions sponsored by the French government. Manet's early works 'The Luncheon on the Grass', and 'Olympia', created great controversy, and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create the style known as Impressionism. Today, they are considered to be the genesis of modern art.

JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER

Whistler's Mother

Whistler was an American painter and etcher, who absorbed Japanese art styles, made technical innovations, and championed modern art. Though American, Whistler lived and worked mainly in Britain and France.

Whistler had no easily defined style, and had spent most of his life travelling abroad, his work was multi-faceted. His earlier pieces were etchings, thanks to skills he picked up working as a cartographer. He painted portraits in the style of Realism, and later turned and abstracted landscapes. He is best known for his nearly black-and-white full length portrait of his mother known as 'Whistler's Mother'.

EDGAR DEGAS

The Dance Class

Edgar Degas was a French artist, famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. His career was a long one, and his style, unlike that of most famous artists who worked into their old age, never ceased developing, always seeking out new means of expression and technique. His personal wealth gave him the freedom to devote himself to art, and his subjects were usually from his own background. Degas also painted portraits of his family and friends and a number of historical subjects, in which he combined classical and romantic styles. In the early 1870's, the female ballet dancer became his favourite theme. He sketched from a live model in his studio and combined poses into groupings that depicted rehearsal and performance scenes. Degas regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist.

Degas style, subject matter, and artistic sensibility set him apart from other impressionists of the time.

WINSLOW HOMER

Thanksgiving in Camp

Winslow Homer is considered one of the foremost painters in 19^th century America, and one of the best known artists to come out of the Civil War. He was landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his paintings of the sea. He subsequently took up oil painting, and produced major studio works.

Homer's mother was a gifted amateur water colourist. She and her son have a closure relationship throughout their lives with Homer's first teacher. His early works were mostly commercial engraving of urban and country social scenes.

Homer's also illustrated women during war time, and showed the effects of the war on the home front. He produced series of war related paintings based on his sketches, among them 'Sharpshooter on Picket Duty', 'Home, Sweet Home' and 'Prisoners from the Front'. After the war, Homer turned his attention to scenes of childhood and young women. Even today, 150 years after his birth, one sees the influence of Homer's watercolours in American Art.

PAUL CEZANNE

Paul Cezanne was a French artist whose work is said to form the bridge between late 19^th century impressionism, and the early 20^th century's new artistic style, Cubism. His work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftmanship.

Cezanne was born in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, on January 19^th, 1839, the son of a wealthy banker. Many of Cezanne's early works were painted in dark tones. Later, Cezanne shifted from dark tones to bright hues and began to concentrate on scenes of farmland and rural villages.

CLAUDE MONET

Claude Monet was one of the founding fathers of the French Impressionism. His life as a painter did not begin until he was befriended by Eugene Bounding, who introduced Monet to the practice – then uncommon – of painting in the open air. He then turned away from the traditional style of painting inside a studio. In 1890 Monet began to paint systematically the same subject under different conditions. The first subjects were Haystacks behind his house. As the light changed during the day faster than he could paint, he worked simultaneously on several canvases. In the end he had painted twenty –five different versions of the Haystacks.

Many more paintings followed, the Rouen Cathedral, views of Venice or the Thames in London with the house of parliament and other landmarks in London, often in the fog. At his home in Giverny, Monet created the water-lily pond that served as inspiration for his last series of paintings.

PIERRE RENOIR

Pierre Renoir was a French painter originally associated with the Impressionist movement. However he differed from the other Impressionist painters in that he was more interested in painting individuals or family groups than in painting landscapes. His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparking colour and light. By the mid-1880's, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women.

Renoir began work as a painter in a porcelain factory in Paris. Later, he began to study painting formally. In the early 1870's, Renoir and his friends joined with other artists to form a loose-knit artistic circle now known as the Impressionist movement. He later grew with dissatisfied with the formal restrictions of pure impressionism.

Renoir is perhaps the best loved of all impressionist's, for his subjects like pretty children, flowers, beautiful scenes which have instant appeal.

HENRI ROUSSEAU

Henri Rousseau created some of the most popular and memorable paintings of the modern era. He never received any formal training, and his work therefore, has an innocence and charm that made his painting very famous.

Rousseau is celebrated for his visionary jungle paintings. The scenes are painted with incredible detail and precision. What is amazing is that the artist never saw the tropical scenes he brought so much to life. Rousseau claimed 'No teacher other than nature', and his works have influenced later painters, including Picasso.

PAUL GAUGUIN

Paul Gauguin is considered one of the leading painters of the post impressionist period. Gaugin began his career as a stockbroker in Paris 1872. He attended the Impressionist's first exhibition in 1874, and was captivated by the impressionist style. In 1883, the bank that employed Gauguin experienced financial difficulties, and he found himself free to paint full time. Much of his work during this period was influenced by the Impressionists, especially Pissarro. Later, he began to adopt his own independent style.

Gauguin's break with the Impressionists came when he painted 'Vision after the Sermon', where he tried to depict the inner feelings of his subjects. This painting also marked the start of a new painting style that came to be known as 'Symbolism'.

GEORGES SEURAT

Georges Seurat was a French painter and drafts man. His large work 'Sunday Afternoon on the islands of La Grande Jatte' is his most famous painting. It altered the direction of modern art, and is one of the icons of 19^th century painting.

Georges Seurat is the ultimate example of the artist as scientist. He spent his life studying colour theories, and the effects of different linear structures. His 500 drawings alone establish Seurat as a great master. He will always be remembered for his technique of portraying light using tiny brush strokes of contrasting colours. This technique became known as pointillism, Using this technique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work, but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Vincent Van Gogh is generally considered the greatest Dutch Painter after Rembrandt. His work was produced during a period of only ten years. It hauntingly conveys through its striking colour, brushwork, and forms, the anguish of mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide.

Among Van Gogh's masterpieces are numerous self-portraits, and the well-known 'The Starry Night'. Although he often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment, his output in the ten productive years of his life was amazing about 800 paintings and a similar number of drawings. The most famous picture from him is 'The Potato Eaters'.

He sold only one painting during his lifetime 'Red Vineyard at Arles', and was little known to the art world at the time of his death.

Part 1