romantique solitude

classic art, beauty & antiquities

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Seki Shūkō: Fishes, ca. 1890–92 Album leaf; silk, 34.6 x 27.6 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Seki Shūkō: Fishes Swimming, ca. 1890–92 Album leaf; ink and color silk 36.2 x 26.7 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Ye Guang: Fisherman viewing the moon, ca. 1600 Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk 146.1 × 74.9 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the banks of a river, two men in moored fishing boats gaze at the moon. Their rumpled robes and unkempt hair indicate their separation from the ambitions of public service, just as their rapt focus on the moon suggests their connection to nature. Of the few surviving paintings from the hand of the late-Ming painter Ye Guang, most are romantic images of fishermen, so it is likely that he specialized in the genre.

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Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Raft Riders (Ikadanori) [or Goldfish and frog on boats], from the series A set of Goldfish (Kingyō zukushi), c. 1838-1840 color woodcut, 24.3 x 17.9 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art

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Jean-François Millet: First Steps, c. 1859–66 black chalk and pastel on beige laid paper Cleveland Museum of Art In the 1860s Jean-François Millet began to add pastel to his black chalk drawings of peasants and rural life, with the hope that the addition of color would make his monochromatic drawings more marketable. Between 1865 and 1869, he worked almost exclusively in pastel, producing more than 100 works. The taste for “enhanced” or “pastelled drawings,” as Millet described them, grew among collectors and artists, and inspired a revival of the medium in the 1870s and 1880s. Here, in a fenced-in garden behind a house, parents encourage their child to walk for the first time. Delicate passages of blue, green, yellow, and red enliven the composition. via

Vincent Van Gogh (after Millet): First Steps, 1890 oil on canvas, 72.4 x 91.1 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art In fall and winter 1889–90, while a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted twenty-one copies after Millet, an artist he greatly admired. He considered his copies "translations" akin to a musician's interpretation of a composer's work. He let the black-and-white images—whether prints, reproductions, or, as here, a photograph that his brother, Theo, had sent—pose "as a subject," then he would "improvise color on it." For this work of January 1890, Van Gogh squared-up a photograph of Millet's First Steps and transferred it to the canvas. via

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Edward Frederick Brewtnall - Mermaid, 1896 watercolor, 47 x 78 cm Private collection

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Sebastian Münster - Sea monsters. Sea Wonders and Strange Animals. 1570s edition Sebastian Münster (1489 - 1552) was one of the three best-known cartographers of the 16th century, along with Mercator and Ortelius. Münster's Geographia and Cosmographia Universalis are two of the most widely read books of the century. Editions of Ptolemy Münster's Geographia appeared between 1540 and 1552 with 48 illustrated woodcuts, supplementing the standard 27 maps with 21 new maps. These new maps, together with a separate one, depict the known continents and a number of masterpieces of regional cartographic development in Central Europe. Münster's main work, the Cosmographia, was published in nearly 30 editions, translated into 6 languages, between 1544 and 1578, and then republished from 1588 to 1628 in a revision by Sebastian Petri. The Cosmographia was as much a geographical as a historical and ethnographic description of the world. Find in it maps from the Geographia, added local maps and cities, with nearly 500 illustrations, the work of art became one of the most popular pictorial encyclopedias of the 16th century. It is one of the most unique cartographic specialties and provides a unique view of the Renaissance approach to the unknown lands beyond the civilized worlds.

The illustration shown in the picture can be described as a summary of monsters that were believed to exist in the 16th century. Many later mapmakers used these monsters to illustrate areas of unexplored landscapes and waters. Above you can see land creatures: reindeer, elk (here while pulling a sled), snakes, leopard and bear. Most of the "monsters" are cruel sea creatures who swallow sailors, sailors, ships, land animals, and even each other. In one scene, you can see a giant lobster with a human in its claws and a whale with huge tusks, which shoots water from its head like a fountain, and we can also admire a tree that seems to produce ducks as fruit. On the reverse side, with German text, we can see additional illustrations depicting polar bears and sea monsters living in the lake near the village. The illustration detail comes from Münster's Cosmographia and shows "Monsters of Norway", first published in 1550.

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Ferdinand Max Bredt (1868-1921): By the fountain oil on canvas, 96,5 x 147 cm Private collection

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Fényes Adolf: Kugler sütemények (Kugler cakes), 1909 oil on canvas, 38.5 x 54 cm Private collection

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Félix Vallotton: Femmes nues aux chats, ca. 1897 oil on board, 41 x 52 cm Gottfried Keller Foundation

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Louis Wain: Bridge of Sighs

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Louis Wain: A Springtime countryside

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Louis Wain: A cat with a fan

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Louis Wain: Afternoon tea

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Antonín Hudecek (1872–1941): Night on the Pond

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Ivan Choultsé (1874–1939): Evening in Autumn

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Backstage at John Galliano Spring 2008

[7pleiades7]

Actaea, the Nymph of the Shore (1868) by Sir Frederic Leighton (British, 1830 – 1896), oil on canvas, 57.2 cm × 102.2 cm (22.5 in × 40.2 in), National Gallery of Canada