More challenging than figurative paintings, landscapes painted in the studio could avoid shadows altogether, or adopt other solutions to look right even if not optically faithful.
Potter
Coppice stools, cut to just above ground level, and pollards cut high enough to stop them from being damaged by cattle, were commonly used to produce supplies of timber.
Paintings of Jacob van Ruisdael, probably the first in which species can be distinguished reliably, and leaf forms are depicted accurately, plus delights from Paulus Potter and Jan van der Heyden.
From the end of the Thirty Years’ War, settlement of Cape Colony, the United East India Company as the largest in the world with a private army of 10,000, Vermeer’s Milkmaid, to invasion by France and decline in 1672.
One of the founding fathers of animal painting, his Young Bull is almost life-sized and ranked alongside Rembrandt’s work, but he died at the age of only 28.
Washerwoman below stairs, a kitchen maid, haggling in the market, selling fish door-to-door, pouring milk, farming families, and drinking.
In Gérôme’s early success The Cock Fight, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Murillo’s Adoration of the Shepherds, and many farmyard paintings.
Early explorations in the landscapes of Aelbert Cuyp, tortoises from Brazil, the first dedicated animal painter in Paulus Potter, and a concert of birds by Melchior d’Hondecoeter.
In 1579, 7 of the more northerly provinces in the Low Countries formed the Dutch Republic. That soon prospered from its international trade, and saw the creation of millions of paintings that changed European art.
From Dürer’s groundbreaking hare to the fable of the hare and the tortoise, a hidden hare in a well-known Turner and a white rabbit for the first of the month?
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