Starting from Egyptian blue in ancient times, pigments preferred by painters for sky blue have changed repeatedly. Here’s a brief history.
Claude
From Giorgione, Dürer and Altdorfer to Turner, Pissarro, Monet and Renoir: landmarks in the composition of landscape paintings.
With its central role in visual art, light and its source plays a critical role in composition. It’s also one of the challenges to those painting in the studio or in front of the motif.
After Dido’s suicide, Aeneas takes a trip to the underworld, guided by the Cumaean Sibyl. He goes on to found the city of Lavinium, a precursor to Rome.
Great paintings of the masters telling Virgil’s epic of the life of Aeneas. From his conception and the fall of Troy, to his time with Dido in Carthage.
His early landscapes followed van Mander. He also expressed his love of Claude’s work, before composition dissolved into light and colour.
From the Flemish artist Paul Bril, to Claude Lorrain, and then through the French ports of Claude-Joseph Vernet to the oil sketches of Valenciennes.
An Austrian who trained at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, joined a gold rush in Australia, then painted the continent’s landscapes.
An exotic import until the Romans enlisted her support against the Carthaginians, her chariot is drawn by a lion and lioness – who desecrated an old shrine.
Finance by the spoils of the Temple of Jerusalem, a place of suffering and death, and for oppression of Christians. Success out of excess.
The Eclectic Light Company 