From Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding to Velázquez’s Las Meninas, how the skilful use of mirrors can add to a painting in mirror play.
reflections
When you see the same face in a mirror that you presume that figure can also see, despite that being optically impossible. An exploration.
Unusual use and manipulation of reflections by Ferdinand Hodler in his Parallelism, and by Gustav Klimt painting through a telescope on his summer holidays.
Although he painted many reflections, Paul Cézanne’s are the most enigmatic, as they almost all have substantial anomalies according to optical principles.
Technically challenging for painstaking Divisionist techniques, those who chose to depict reflections used studies to help, and Seurat was generally optically faithful. But the best of all was Théo van Rysselberghe.
Is it feasible to paint optically accurate reflections quickly in front of the motif? Examples from CamilleCorot, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley demonstrate that it is.
Increasingly challenging reflections by Caillebotte, Martin Rico, Normann in the Norwegian fjords, specialist Frits Thaulow, and an essay in optics by Kazimierz Sichulski.
Accurate when on his home ground, Constable appears to have altered reflections for effect. Turner even more so, with frequent vertical exaggeration, but wonderful effects.
An overview of reflections in landscape paintings by van Eyck, Dürer, Cuyp, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Canaletto, and Claude-Joseph Vernet in 1771.
Introduction to the geometry of reflections on water, and a composite image to aid their analysis. How Turner altered some of the reflections he painted.
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