Ivan Shishkin - Rain in an Oak Forest [1891]

Russian Artist - Rain in an Oak Forest [1891], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Ivan Shishkin (1832 - 1898) was a Russian painter.


[Oil on canvas, 124 x 203 cm]

Claude-Oscar Monet - Water-Lilies [after 1916]

Claude-Oscar Monet - Water-Lilies [after 1916], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Following his move to Giverny in 1883 and the exhibition in 1900 of his first series of paintings of the water garden (including The Water-Lily Pond), Monet conceived the idea of an ambitious decoration recreating the effect of the garden on a larger scale. A studio was built in 1916 to accommodate the large canvases the painter was working on. After his death a group of nineteen of these paintings were presented to the nation and installed in the Orangerie in Paris. This work is one of a number of canvases painted at the same period, but not included in the final scheme. Almost abstract in effect, it shows a close-up of the surface of the pond with groups of lilies highlighted against the shadows of trees in a rich colour harmony of green, blue and pink.

[Oil on canvas, 200.7 x 426.7 cm]

Dorothea Sharp - A Day at the Sea

Dorothea Sharp - A Day at the Sea, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Dorothea Sharp was born in Dartford in Kent in 1874 but it was not until the age of twenty-one that she began her artistic education in earnest. She soon moved to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the work of the Impressionists, which is evident in the spontaneous style and strong sense of colour and light that she is so well known for. Techniques, such as outlining figures with bright colours, were also adopted by Sharp after seeing the paintings of Matisse and van Gogh. In the mid 1940s she returned to London where she lived until her death in 1955.

[Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 96.5 cm]

Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala - Jesters Playing Cochonnet [c.1880]

Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala - Jesters Playing Cochonnet [c.1880], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala (c.1841 – January 14, 1871) was a Spanish academic painter who was born in Bilbao. He moved to Madrid in 1859, where he enrolled in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and studied with Federico de Madrazo. In 1860, he studied in Paris with Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891).

A cochonnet is a small wooden ball used in the playing of pétanque. It is what players of bowls would understand as the jack.

[Oil on panel, 46 x 35.6 cm]

William Merritt Chase - Friendly Call [1895]

William Merritt Chase - Friendly Call [1895], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

William Merritt Chase, an influential art teacher and one of the leading exponents of American impressionism, captured the genteel, privileged life of polite society in the 1890s. A Friendly Call, set in Chase's elegant summer house at Shinnecock Hills, Long Island, shows two fashionably dressed women in a large, airy room decorated with prints, paintings, hanging textiles, and a large, gilt-framed mirror. The artist's wife Alice, on the right, listens attentively to her visitor, who is still wearing her hat and gloves and carrying a parasol.

Chase's rendering of light, his facile brushwork, and his choice of everyday subject matter all recall the work of the French impressionists; yet, unlike his European contemporaries, the artist carefully composed his paintings to underscore abstract elements. Simple rectangular patterns of the floor, wall, and couch are echoed in the framed pictures and wall hangings while they are contrasted to the more curvilinear figures, chair, and plump pillows. The mirror framing Mrs. Chase offers a surprising reflection of a wall behind the viewer; Chase's compositional arrangement and his use of reflected imagery suggest that he may have been paying homage to the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Velázquez, whose much-admired painting Las Meninas displays a similarly inventive studio interior.

[Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 122.5 cm]

Georges Seurat - Hospice and Lighthouse of Honfleur [1886]

Georges Seurat - Hospice and Lighthouse of Honfleur [1886], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on panel, 15.8 x 25 cm]

Birge Harrison - Fifth Avenue at Twilight [c.1909]

Birge Harrison - Fifth Avenue at Twilight [c.1909], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Lovell Birge Harrison (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 28, 1854 – Woodstock, New York, 1929) was an American genre and landscape painter. Born in Philadelphia, he was the brother of T. Alexander Harrison, and studied with Carolus-Duran and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Cabanel. In 1881 he exhibited at the Salon and in 1882 he returned to America and subsequently spent considerable time (1889-93) painting and sketching in Australia, the South Seas, and New Mexico. He received numerous prizes and medals, including the gold medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1910.

[Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 58.4 cm]