Skyscrapers and human landscapes in New York City, tennis in Rhode Island, and Mardi Gras on Coney Island – and more.
Church
Bridges have had huge impact on man, but aren’t normally considered aesthetically attractive. Paintings from van Eyck to Jongkind show increasing interest among artists.
First popularised for use with glue tempera, ‘canvas’ quickly developed into the first choice for oils. In Venice, canvases as large as tennis courts were used by Veronese and Tintoretto.
The depiction of Pandora opening her box and unleashing all its ills on the world remained popular, with paintings by Alma-Tadema, Bouguereau, Waterhouse, Rackham, Redon, and others.
The mental images which we perceive are created in the brain, which has some fixed ideas about how to do that. They’re not the same as optical laws used in cameras and related devices.
Paintings of the spectacular coast of Maine, from Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, and others.
Some of the finest travel paintings of the century, covering areas which were still seldom visited, and ending with a spectacular view of the world’s 3rd highest mountain, Kangchenjunga.
Two people looking at a cross in the middle of a vast canvas filled with lush plains, rising hills, and distant snow-capped peaks. How should we read them?
What are accessories or ‘staffage’, what narrative, and what intrinsic to the reading and style of a landscape?
Rainbows are one of nature’s grand spectacles. How careful, then, have painters been to get their colours in the ‘right’ order?
