Giovanni Boldini (Italian, 1842-1931) - Cléo de Mérode, 1901 (Oil on canvas) – Cléo de Mérode (1875-1966), an international sensation and one of the most photographed woman in the world in her time, was a French ballerina, who achieved fame with her face, not her feet. Cléo was a good dancer but her…
Elza Luijendijk with sculpture in “Tough Love” for US Vogue, July 2013. Photograph by Steven Klein - “Passion play. ‘You can really encourage desire,’ confirms one sexual-health expert. Model Elza Luijendijk, in a Dior coatdress and pumps, in New York’s Old Westbury Gardens.”
Kenton Nelson (American, b.1954): Interval - For an autodidact, Nelson is an extraordinary draftsman; his paintings meticulously crafted. He begins by photographing a model (he’s got what he calls a “morgue” file of countless pictures and images he likes), and then draws the subject before painting…
Florencia Chinellato and Alexandr Trusch, “Romeo and Juliet” - Hamburg Ballet, November 2013. Photograph by Marcus Renner. - Soloists Trusch and Chinellato took the spotlight in the first cast, with heartbreakingly sincere performances. Chinellato is a luminous Juliet, but very much a real girl,…
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864-1901) - Rousse dit aussi La Toilette, 1889 (Oil on cardboard. Musée d'Orsay) - The woman fills the centre of the composition and is shown close up, offering the spectator a view of a sculptural back. The wicker chairs around her suggest that the scene took…
Nude study with sculpture (1955-60) photograph by Zoltán Glass - By the mid-1950s, Glass was one of the most successful fashion and advertising photographers in London. One of his clients was Odhams Press who published Lilliput, a pocket-sized gentleman’s magazine that featured an assortment of…
Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) - Dans la prairie, 1876 (Oil on canvas) - In his Argenteuil days (1872-78), Monet frequently painted his first wife, Camille. Here is a perhaps lesser known work where Camille is almost submerged in the middle of a wealth of flowers as she reads her book. The…
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) - Dancer Adjusting Her Shoe, 1885 (Pastel on paper. Dixon Gallery & Gardens) - The dancer leans forward, her head low, a hand clasping her left foot. One looks down on her head and the bare expanse of her neck and upper back. This seated figure, knees spread, with…
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925) - An Artist in His Studio, c.1904 (Oil on canvas. MFA, Boston) - Sargent’s friend, the Italian artist Ambrogio Raffele, is deep in contemplation, working on a bucolic landscape. Raffele is using his cramped and untidy hotel room as a studio; he and his…
Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774-1840) - Cairn in Snow, 1807 (Oil on canvas. New Masters Gallery, Dresden) - Caspar David Friedrich was a romantic landscape painter, and was one of the first artists to portray winter landscapes as austere, forbidding and desolate. His winter scenes are solemn…
Frigyes Frank (Hungarian, 1890-1976): Mimi in the Deckchair, 1927 (Oil on canvas) - After World War I, Frank moved to Paris where his works were exhibited by the Societé des Artistes Français and the Salon d'Automne. At an exhibition in the Bleinheim Jeune Gallery in 1926, Mimi, a portrait, was…
Hugó Scheiber (Hungarian, 1873-1950): Dancer (Mixed technique) - The vivid colors of Dancer are a constant feature throughout Scheiber’s work. Details such as the rippling waves of hair and his spontaneous and active brush strokes are characteristic of Scheiber’s Futurist oeuvre of the 1920’s.…
János Thorma (Hungarian, 1870-1937): In the Field (Oil on canvas) - A representative figure of the Nagybánya artists’ colony, which started in 1896... Thorma moved through different styles... He shifted from the naturalism that was the aesthetic of the colony, to historical subjects, to romantic…
Frank Bramley (British, 1857–1915): Delicious Solitude, 1909 (Oil on canvas) - Here, a lady absorbed in reading is likely the painter’s wife Katherine… By this stage the painter had completely abandoned the systematic square brushwork of his youth and his handling of the work was more painterly…
Róbert Berény (Hungarian, Fauvism, 1887-1953): Woman Playing Cello, 1928 (Oil on canvas, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest) - When Berény returned to Hungary in 1928, he became a leading member of a group of artists whose main aim was to produce art that would draw on tradition, while retaining…