Steven Albert - En Francais

From the forests of Northern Maine, where he was raised, to the streets of San Francisco, Steven Albert's paintings have always been informed by patterns of clear, bright sunlight and shadows. Although architectural designs dominate his imagery, doors and windows are often the focus, creating a sense of portal into often missed aspects of our concrete reality, whether it be rooms of mysterious and Zen-like calm, or the fractured and frenetic multiplicity of urban cafes and storefronts. Albert seeks to highlight the small moments, common in our lives, but often unexperienced.

Albert's work is represented by galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York and has been exhibited in various museums and venues around America. His paintings are included in several important collections worldwide. In 2006, he was awarded a Pollack-Krasner Foundation grant.

[Oil on canvas, 48 x 40 inches]

James Tissot - Holiday [c.1876]

Yellowing leaves of the chestnut tree shade a group of well-dressed men and women who are enjoying a picnic beside a pond. The canvas, painted in the backyard of Tissot’s London house which was near Lord’s Cricket Ground, sparkles with colour and exquisite detail. In his depiction of daily life in an outdoor setting, Tissot shares the realism of French artists such as Eduoard Manet. His style is also akin to that of the Impressionists, who were working at exactly the same time as Tissot, but his paintings differ in their crystal-clear vision and elegant society subjects. Tissot often focused on finely dressed women, adorned in the latest fashions and casting a spell over their men. His paintings have recently enjoyed a well-deserved revival in popularity; for many years they were regarded as the epitome of late Victorian vacuous and decadent society.

[Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 99.5 cm]

Claudio Missagia - Composition [2010]

Claudio Missagia is an Italian artist born in Valdagno, Italy on May 27, 1959 - he has been an artist since 1994.

[Mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60 cm]

Thomas Eakins - Between Rounds [1898–99]

During the 1890s Eakins (American, 1844–1916) focused his energies on probing portraits, except for a few canvases devoted to boxing and wrestling in which he returned to male athletics, his groundbreaking theme of the early 1870s. Eakins's boxing and wrestling paintings are, however, even bolder in their subject matter than his early rowing pictures. Although the popular press about 1900 featured images of prize fighting and accounts of boxers such as John L. Sullivan, most artists turned away from depicting ring sports, which were associated with sanctioned violence, gambling, and alcohol. For his ringside view of a match in Philadelphia's Arena, Eakins invited Billy Smith, a local featherweight, to pose for the boxer, asked other figures from the boxing world to re-enact their real-life roles in his Chestnut Street studio, and enlisted friends and relatives to pose for the spectators. As usual, he minimises drama, showing Smith catching his breath rather than struggling against Timothy Callahan, his unseen, and ultimately successful, opponent.

[Oil on canvas, 127.3 x 101.3 cm]

Gertrude Beals Bourne - Haystacks, Autumn [c.1895]

Gertrude Beals Bourne (Boston, Massachusetts, 1868 - Boston, Massachusetts, 1962) grew up on Dartmouth Street in the Back Bay of Boston. Around 1890, she began to study art privately first with Henry Rice, 1853-1934 (who had learned his craft from Ross Turner, 1847-1915) and later, in the early 1910s, with Henry B. Snell (1858-1943), one of the founding members of the New York Watercolour Club. An important part of her education was the trips she took to Europe with her family in the 1890’s; she painted in Norway, France, and Great Britain.

[Watercolour and pencil on paper]

Edward Moran - Life Saving Patrol [c.1893]

Many of the paintings of Edward Moran (Bolton, England, 1829 - New York City, 1901) show powerful scenes of shipwrecks and storms that emphasise the struggle between man and nature. In Life Saving Patrol, however, the sea and the sky appear relatively calm. The dramatic scale of the lifeguard against the moonlit water suggests a balance of power between the ocean and the brave men who risk their lives to rescue its victims.

[Oil on canvas, 91.6 x 138.4 cm]

Isaac Israels -Donkey Riding on the Beach [c.1898-1900]

Three girls are riding donkeys on the beach while a boy walks along behind. Isaac Israels (Amsterdam, February 3, 1865 - The Hague, October 7, 1934) painted this cheerful seaside scene around 1900 with a loose brushstroke and light, bright colours. The artist was one of the Amsterdam Impressionists. 'Donkey Riding' was part of the huge collection of nineteenth-century art amassed by the Drucker-Frasers of London. The couple bequeathed a large part of their collection to the Rijksmuseum.

The girls in the picture are the Pauw sisters and their friend. Obviously it was not Israels's intention to paint portraits of the girls: the faces are rendered with a few rough strokes of paint. Isaac Israels painted numerous works on this theme. At the time Israels painted these works he was living in Amsterdam. In the summer he would go to The Hague, where his father lived. There he would find lodgings in Scheveningen and paint his characteristic paintings. He was fascinated by the clear light of the sea front.

[Oil on canvas, 51 x 70 cm]

George Gower - Portrait of Elizabeth I [1600]

George Gower (c1540 – London, 1596) was an English portrait painter who became Sergeant Painter to Queen Elizabeth I in 1581. This allowed him to paint most of England’s aristocracy. The post also made him responsible for painted decoration at the royal residences, and on coaches and furniture. Among his works were a fountain (now destroyed) and the astronomical clock, both at Hampton Court Palace. He also inspected portraits of the Queen by other artists prior to their official release. Gower's best-known work is the version of the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth, painted to commemorate the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada.

The flamboyant image of Elizabeth seen here has become one of the most successful sovereign statements in English history. The contrast with Elizabeth’s earlier portraiture is striking. In the first portrait of her as Queen, the ‘Clopton’ portrait of 1558, Elizabeth is shown with conspicuous piety. She wears a relatively simple black dress, and holds a religious book in her hand. This portrayal accords well with what we know to be Elizabeth’s virtuous, even frugal youthful character.

[Oil on canvas, 101 x 97.8 cm]

Dmitri Kolujni - Morning

Dmitri Kolujni (born 1974) is a Russian artist.

[Oil on canvas, 61 x 77 cm]

Irene Rice Pereira - Evaporating Night [1951]

Irene Rice Pereira (Chelsea, Massachusetts, 1902 – Marbella, Spain, 1971) was an American abstract artist, known for her work in the Geometric abstraction, Abstract expressionist, and Lyrical Abstraction genres and her use of the principles of the Bauhaus school. Pereira was forced to begin work in her teens as a secretary to support her family after her father's death. In 1927, she enrolled in night art classes at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1931, she travelled to Europe and North Africa to further her painting studies and she studied with Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. In 1935 Pereira became one of the founders and first instructors at the Design Laboratory, a school patterned after the Bauhaus school.

[Oil on canvas, 92.07 x 76.83 cm]

Aaron Bohrod - Junk Yard [1939]

Aaron Bohrod (Chicago, Illinois, November 21, 1907 - Madison, Wisconsin, April 3, 1992) studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York and eventually earned Guggenheim fellowships which permitted him to travel throughout the country, painting and recording the American scene. His early work won him widespread praise as an important social realist and regional painter and printmaker and his work was marketed through Associated American Artists in New York. During World War II, Aaron worked as an artist, first in the Pacific for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, then in Europe for Life Magazine. In 1948, he accepted a position as artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and remained in that capacity until 1973.

[Oil on fibreboard, 61.0 x 76.5 cm]

Stanley Anderson - In Check

Stanley Anderson was born in Bristol, England in 1884 and died in Towersey, England in 1966.

[Line engraving, 15.9 x 20.3 cm]

Edvard Munch - Jealousy [1895]

The gloomy-looking figure gazing out of this scene is Munch's friend, the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Munch had an affair with his friend's wife, which is what the imagery refers to. The nude female figure picks an apple from the tree behind her - a reference to the temptation of Adam by Eve. Munch was simultaneously attracted to, fearful of, and puzzled by women. These conflicting feelings are presented in his art: desire is tinged with pessimism, anxiety and melancholy.

[Oil on canvas, 67 x 100 cm]

William Merritt Chase - The Lake for Miniature Yachts [c.1888]

The American Impressionists captured the energy and fragmentation of contemporary experience in Paris, Boston, New York, and other cities, often focusing on public parks, which allowed them to portray urban life without confronting urban hardship. Although he usually stressed pastoral charm in his park paintings, Chase (American, 1849–1916) allowed the pavement to dominate this view of the Conservatory Water, a small pond just inside the Fifth Avenue boundary of New York's Central Park, at Seventy-Third Street. He shows Fifth Avenue's rooftops invading the insulating screen of trees that surrounds the park, thus signalling growing challenges to the park's rural fiction. A boy in a fashionable sailor suit striding along at left and an older boy and a well-dressed younger girl at the pond's edge appear as if glimpsed in an instant, quietly pursuing their own interests without any concern for the viewer or for enacting an apparent narrative.

[Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 61 cm]

Camille Corot - Hauteurs de Sèvres, Chemin Troyon

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (Paris, July 17, 1796 – Paris, February 22, 1875) was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

In later life, Corot’s studio was filled with students, models, friends, collectors, and dealers who came and went under the tolerant eye of the master, causing him to quip, “Why is it that there are ten of you around me, and not one of you thinks to relight my pipe.” Dealers snapped up his works and his prices were often above 4,000 francs per painting. With his success secured, Corot gave generously of his money and time. He became an elder of the artists’ community and would use his influence to gain commissions for other artists. In 1871 he gave £2000 for the poor of Paris, under siege by the Prussians. During the actual Paris Commune he was at Arras with Alfred Robaut. In 1872 he bought a house in Auvers as a gift for Honoré Daumier, who by then was blind, without resources, and homeless. In 1875 he donated 10.000 francs to the widow of Millet in support of her children. His charity was near proverbial. He also financially supported the upkeep of a day centre for children on rue Vandrezanne in Paris. In later life, he remained a humble and modest man, apolitical and happy with his luck in life, and held close the belief that, “men should not puff themselves up with pride, whether they are emperors adding this or that province to their empires or painter who gain a reputation.

He died in Paris of a stomach disorder aged 78 and was buried at Père Lachaise.

[Oil on canvas, 23.5 × 36.8 cm]

Josef Albers - Homage to the Square: Gained [1959]

Josef Albers (Bottrop, Westphalia, March 19, 1888 – March 25, 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century.

With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933, Albers emigrated to the United States and joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he ran the painting program until 1949. Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favoured a disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat coloured squares arranged concentrically on the canvas.

[Oil on composition board, 101.6 x 101.6 cm]

Peter Blume - Vegetable Dinner [1927]

The two women in Vegetable Dinner are both images of Peter Blume's companion Elaine, with whom he lived during the 1920s. The woman on the left, with her fashionable clothing and lit cigarette, evokes his love of parties and freedom, while the woman on the right chops vegetables to represent commitment and domesticity. This expresses Blume's conflict between his affection for Elaine, who "had very competent hands," and his need to live the bohemian life of an artist. The dramatic cropping of the two figures, together with the knife pointing ominously at one woman's thumb, transforms this ordinary scene into something far more menacing, and suggests that neither of Elaine's roles would have made the artist completely happy. Blume (Smorgon, Russia, 1906 - New Milford, Connecticut, 1992) eventually parted from Elaine, remembering later that their relationship was "always in a state of high tension anyway. It could never have survived as a marriage."

[Oil on canvas, 64.2 x 76.8 cm]

Chaim Gross - Beach, Coney Island [1939]

Chaim Gross (Wolowa, Austria, 1904 March 17, 1904 – New York City, May 5, 1991) was an Austrian born American sculptor. Primarily Gross was a practitioner of the direct carving method, with the majority of his work being carved from wood. Works by Chaim Gross can be found in major museums and private collections throughout the United States.

[Pen and ink and watercolour on paper sheet, 27.8 x 37.9 cm]

Raimondo Roberto - Kiss [2009]

Raimondo Roberto was born in Bologna, Italy in 1959 where he lives and works.

[Oil on canvas, 94 x 73 cm]

Dario Puggioni -Icarus Suspended #2 [2009]

Dario Puggioni was born in Brunei, Indonesia in 1977; he lives and works in Rome. He attended the Artistic Grammar School in Rome and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome.

[Mixed media on canvas, 200 x 140 cm]

Cornelis Springer - View of The Hague [1852]

Cornelis Springer and his former teacher, Kaspar Karsen, painted an enormous canvas with a view of The Hague as it must have looked in the seventeenth century. The work is painted with a quick brushstroke and bright, cheerful colours. In this 'townscape', the city lies in the background, the focus is on the cloudy sky - painted with broad, visible brushstrokes - and the countryside around the city: the wooden mills, the reflection in the water and the barge in the canal, towed by the horse on the towpath. On the grass just outside the city, white sheets are bleaching in the sun, depicted with slight touches of white impasto paint.

Isidore Pils -Nude Woman [c.1841]

The languorous, sensuous pose of this woman is strongly reminiscent of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' popular paintings of odalisques, female slaves and concubines in Turkish harems. Much of this canvas has been left thinly painted or entirely blank, suggesting that it was a figural study rather than a finished work of art. The French Academy in the 19th century viewed the depiction of the nude as the ultimate measure of an artist's skill. Because models changed poses frequently, students had to work quickly and without embellishment. Here Pils (French, 1813 – 1875) completed only those areas needed to emphasize the contours of the model's body.

[Oil on canvas, 71.8 x 92 cm]

Samuel F B Morse - Gallery of the Louvre [1831–33]

This picture directly confronts the problems Morse (American, 1791–1872) perceived in the New York art scene: a flood of fake European masterpieces on the market and insufficient training for artists. As an antidote, he created an Americanised Kunstkammer featuring himself and others, including his friend the author James Fenimore Cooper, studying, making, and discussing art in a gallery. In effect, Morse brought home the collection of European paintings he thought most vital to the success of American art at large. He began with the Salon Carré at the Louvre (and the Grande Galerie beyond) and stripped it of its installation of modern French paintings and re-hung it as a gallery of Italian Old Masters. He placed himself in profile at centre, training an American student to see the world of art from his perspective.

[Oil on canvas, 187.3 x 274.3 cm]

Gustave Caillebotte - Study for Le Pont de l'Europe [1876]

Gustave Caillebotte, (August 19, 1848 - February 21, 1894) was a French painter and a generous patron of the impressionists, whose own works, until recently, were neglected. He was an engineer by profession, but also attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He met Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir in 1874 and helped organise the first impressionist exhibition in Paris that same year. He participated in later shows and painted some 500 works in a more realistic style than that of his friends. Caillebotte's most intriguing paintings are those of the broad, new Parisian boulevards. The boulevards were painted from high vantage points and were populated with elegantly clad figures strolling with the expressionless intensity of somnambulists. Caillebotte's superb collection of impressionist paintings was left to the French government on his death. With considerable reluctance the government accepted part of the collection.

[Oil on canvas, 83.18 x 122.55 cm]

Walter Beach Humphrey - Patriotic Montage [c.1933-43]

Known as an historical illustrator and muralist, Walter Humphrey (Elkhorn, Wisconsin, 1892 - Glens Falls, New York, 1966) often received commissions for text book and magazine illustrations. World Book Encyclopaedia, Liberty, Colliers, and the Saturday Evening Post, for whom he often did covers, were among his clients. He had a particular focus on Colonial America and the war for independence. He initially studied at Dartmouth College and then went to the Art Students League of New York.

[Oil on canvas, 86.6 x 124.3 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Landscape in the Vicinity of Louveciennes, Autumn [1870]

Within a few hundred yards of his home, Camille Pissarro painted a view of peasants working in a shady, wooded garden alongside a group of village houses. In the foreground, a woman carrying a bucket pauses to talk with a young boy carrying his school satchel over his shoulder. The gray sky and the trees losing their leaves indicate autumn.

Painting in the open air alongside Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pissarro followed a new practice of breaking up surfaces with loosely placed brushstrokes. This revolutionary technique, the cornerstone of Impressionism, helps to reveal how light and movement affect the perception of objects. Pissarro made the canvas a field of textures and movement; the character of the brushstroke varies according to the texture and form of the object it describes. For example, the haystack is painted with straw-shaped brushstrokes, the leaves are suggested by jagged daubs of paint, and the stucco walls are depicted with broad, smooth strokes.

[Oil on canvas, 89.0 x 116.0 cm]

John Morrell - Chateau IV

John Morrell (born Albany, New York, 1951) is an American painter. Morrell's first solo exhibition showed landscape paintings done in Brittany, France in 1978. Seventeen other solo exhibitions followed, along with many group exhibitions, and numerous commissions for private and corporate collections. In 1980 the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired Morrell’s mixed-media drawing Chateau IV.

Nicholas Hilliard - Mary, Queen of Scots [c.1610]

The daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise, Mary Stuart succeeded to the Scottish throne as an infant but spent most of her childhood in France. After the death of Mary I she laid claim to the English throne. Mary returned to Scotland after the death of her husband Francis II and ruled for seven turbulent years. During her reign she married Lord Darnley, connived with the Earl of Bothwell at Darnley's murder, married Bothwell and was finally forced to flee to England. The Latin inscription in this portrait tells us that it was painted when she had been a prisoner in England for ten years. The cross attached her rosary bears the letter 'S' for Stuart on each of its arms. At its centre is an enamelled scene of Susannah and the Elders (symbolising the triumph of right through divine aid) surrounded by a Latin motto which signifies 'troubles on all sides'.

Nicholas Hilliard (c.1547 – January 7, 1619) was an English goldsmith and limner best known for his portrait miniatures of members of the courts of Elizabeth I and James I of England. He mostly painted small oval miniatures, but also some larger cabinet miniatures, up to about ten inches tall, and at least two famous half-length panel portraits of Elizabeth

[Oil on panel, 791 mm x 902 mm]

John George Brown -The Card Trick [1880–89]

Brown's narratives maintain the explicitness of mid-nineteenth-century works, though he painted many of them much later. In this canvas, three white bootblacks watch a black youth perform a card trick. Brown (American, 1831–1913) ascribes street smarts and gamesman's skills to this clever character. One of the few American painters before 1900 to grapple with the subject of the urban poor, Brown specialized in sentimental depictions of industrious immigrants, especially street urchins who project optimism and good cheer despite the hardships of city life. These ragamuffins, counterparts of Horatio Alger's homeless fourteen-year-old bootblack Ragged Dick and other resourceful characters, flourished and inspired Brown until compulsory public education laws ended their enterprise.

[Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 66 x 78.7 cm]

Leng Jun - Portrait

Leng Jun (born China 1963) graduated in 1984 from the Wuhan Hankou Branch Art Department.

See: http://lengjun.artron.net/main.php

[Oil on canvas]

Gustave Courbet - Falaise d’Étretat aprés, la Porte d’Aval

For information about this artist please click label.

[Oil on canvas 79.8 × 99.6 cm]