Frants Henningsen - A Funeral [1883]

Frants Henningsen - A Funeral [1883], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

A pregnant woman and her two small children are following their husband/father to his grave. A thoroughly tragic situation that Henningsen (1850 - 1908) has chosen to accentuate with gloomy winter weather, a meagre gathering, and the woman’s greyish-white complexion.

A burial among the poor, conducted at the Assistens graveyard in the Nørrebro area of Copenhagen. At first glance, the painting seems to be a realistic record of a tragic, life-changing event. However, the artist has employed a number of effective devices in order to intensify the unhappy story. The gloomy winter weather, the naked wall, the small number of people in the gathering, the children in the middle, the greyish-white complexion of the young woman’s face. She even appears to be pregnant and now only has her old father to lean on. Every device is brought to bear in order to accentuate the hopelessness of the situation.

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg - Bella and Hanna [1820]

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg - Bella and Hanna [1820], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

During the years around 1820, Eckersberg was busy painting portraits of the affluent citizens of Copenhagen. The artist’s greatest patron during his young years, the merchant Mendel Levin Nathanson, commissioned two large family portraits. n one of the two works he painted Nathanson’s two oldest daughters, Bella and Hanna, in a sparingly furnished drawing room with simple panelling and furniture, including a table bearing a parrot’s cage. The two girls are shown in uncompromising poses, one strictly frontal, the other strictly from the side, and as they look very much alike, it seems likely that the painter wished to create a variation on a theme; variations like those created by the famous Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen around the same time.

The parrot opens up the scene to symbolic readings. Due to their ability to imitate human voices parrots were often seen as symbols of good breeding, a suitable allusion for a picture of two young middle-class woman. At the same time, however, the caged bird can also be regarded as a metaphor for the two unmarried women’s sheltered situation while waiting, perhaps longing, to move out into real life.

Anna Ancher - A Funeral [1891]

Anna Ancher - A Funeral [1891], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Anna Ancher’s first exhibited work depicted two poor colourful characters, Per and Stine Bollerhus, going home from the church in Skagen. Several years later she attended Stine’s funeral and gathered her impressions in the painting A Funeral. As in most of Anna Ancher’s pictures, no-one attempts to create eye contact. We are free to investigate the space unnoticed, find our place, and let ourselves be absorbed by the meditative calm. The low-ceilinged room is filled with light, allowing Anna Ancher (1859 - 1935) an opportunity to demonstrate her mastery of colour in the meeting between the blue, pink, and green hues; colours that also serve a symbolic function in showing the old woman the road to another world. 

Along with Theodor Philipsen (1840-1920), Anna Ancher is regarded as the most important Impressionistic painter on the Danish art scene. But whereas the French Impressionists were intimately linked with modern life, Anna Ancher painted her paintings on the outskirts of the modern: from Skagen, the remotest part of Denmark, more opposed to than in tune with the hectic and the ephemeral.

Louise Catherine Breslau - La Toilette [1898]

Louise Catherine Breslau - La Toilette [1898], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Louise Catherine Breslau (Munich, December 6, 1856 - Paris, May 12, 1927) was a German born Swiss artist. Although she naturalised to Switzerland, she showed her loyalty for the French by drawing numerous portraits of French soldiers and nurses on their way to the World War 1 Front. After the war, Breslau retired from the public and spent much of her time painting flowers from her garden and entertaining friends. In 1927 Breslau died after a long illness.

[Oil on canvas, 24.75 X 25.75 inches]

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - Ambassadors, Aristide Bruant in his Cabaret [1892]

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - Ambassadors, Aristide Bruant in his Cabaret [1892], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Aristide Bruant (Courtenay, May 6, 1851 – Paris, February 10, 1925) was a French cabaret singer, comedian, and nightclub owner. He is best known as the man in the red scarf and black cape featured on certain famous posters by Toulouse-Lautrec. He has also been credited as the creator of the chanson realiste musical genre.

[Colour lithograph on paper, 150 x 100 cm]

René Magritte - The Lovers [1928]

René Magritte - The Lovers [1928], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 54 x 73.4 cm]

Claude Monet - Bazille and Camille, Study for Déjeuner sur l'Herbe [1865]

Claude Monet - Bazille and Camille, Study for Déjeuner sur l'Herbe [1865], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

An elegant young couple steps into a sunlit clearing from the cool of the Fontainebleau forest. Brightness dances off their clothes, creating the strong highlights that define the curve of the man’s hat and catch the bunched hem of the woman's dress. Shadows fall, not in blacks or grays, but as deeper concentrations of the colours around them.

Monet was one of the young artists who frequented the Café Guerbois, where Manet and other members of the avant-garde discussed art and literature. Monet championed painting out-of-doors as the only way to capture the sensory experience of light and atmosphere. He sought to transcribe a single instant onto the canvas, and here that momentary quality is enhanced by the pose of the couple, who seem only to have paused. Monet knew the pair. The man is his friend and fellow painter Frederic Bazille, described by novelist Emile Zola as we see him: "Blond, tall and thin, very distinguished." The woman may be Monet's mistress Camille, whom he would eventually marry.

This painting was made as an oil sketch for a much larger work (15 x 20 feet) whose size made painting outdoors impossible. Instead Monet made smaller preparatory paintings out-of-doors, including this one. Only fragments of the final large canvas survive. Monet left it with a landlord to cover a debt, and it was ruined by moisture and neglect.

[Oil on canvas, 93 x 68.9 cm]