Why would an artist compose a painting to hide the face? Examples by Degas, Anders Zorn, John Singer Sargent and others. It’s our faces that make us human.
Degas
Children playing, amateurs rehearsing, music outdoors, and Schubert himself at the piano: paintings by Manet, Degas, Thomas Eakins, Édouard Vuillard and others.
Barely known in Europe, he studied in France for 5 years, then from 1888 was a major landscape painter in the US, one of The Ten.
New genres in literature gave the public a taste for different forms of narrative. Here’s a short account of the response in ‘problem pictures’ from Hunt to Collier.
More virtuoso glassware as painted by William Holman Hunt, Chase, De Nittis, Vallotton, and others in the 19th century.
In this period, his paintings moved away from Impressionism and simple landscapes, as he slowly became ‘pointillist’ and incorporated more figures.
Between 1874-79, Degas and Pissarro started painting fans, initially to relieve their poverty. Here’s the unknown history of fine art fan painting in Europe.
Fine examples from Millais, Berthold Woltze, Yeames, William Quiller Orchardson, and Degas.
Feet in social history, from Winslow Homer, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Jules Breton, Bonnard, Schiele, Degas, and others.
Two paintings from Edgar Degas have still, 150 years later, defied all attempts to resolve their narratives. Another from Britain, and one from the American Eastman Johnson.
The Eclectic Light Company 