Jeunes Bohemiennes

Jeunes Bohemiennes, William Bouguereau

PS

See you next year!

Bashi-Bazouk

Bashi-Bazouk, Jean-Léon Gérôme

Oh yes, I know who this one reminds you of.

Christmas time in Maori Land

Christmas time in Maori Land, Charles Goldie

Better resolution, here.

The Guitar Lesson

The Guitar Lesson, Balthus

The Slippers

The Slippers Samuel Van Hoogstraten

The Lute Player

The Lute Player, Caravaggio

The Death of Marat

The Death Of Marat , Jacques-Louis David

St Francis and the Birds

St Francis and the birds, Stanley Spencer

Les calvinistes de Catwijck

Les calvinistes de Catwijck aka 'Hell and Doubt'or 'Old Superstitious Dreamers', Jan Toorop

The Kiss

The Kiss, Gustav Klimt

Galadriel

I only have a link, and not an image. Head over here.

Galadriel, John Howe

Mother and Child

Mother and Child, Jessie Willcox Smith

Neptune's Horses

Neptune's Horses, Walter Crane

PS

If you have read certain fantasy books, you'd probably wonder if this artwork gave the author the idea of white horses arising out of the river to wash away the evil wraiths.

Rhine maidens warn Siegfried

Rhine maidens warn Siegfried, Arthur Rackham

Pirates fighting over treasure

Pirates fighting over treasure, Howard Pyle

In hindsight, I wish I'd picked this one instead.

Circe and Ulysses

Circe and Ulysses, Edmund Dulac

One can't help but wonder how Circe looks almost Hindu Goddess like.

Morning

Morning, Maxfield Parrish

Also: Poems of Childhood, illustrated by the artist

PS

Yes, yes, Lady K is two days behind, she is catching up, fear not.

Eleven Heads

Eleven Heads, Pavel Filonov

Flowers of the World Blooming

Flowers of the world Blooming, Pavel Filonov

Head

Head, Pavel Filonov

Kings

Kings , Pavel Filonov

War with Germany

War with Germany, Pavel Filonov

Magi ( Wise Men)

Magi (Wise Men), Filonov

East and West

East and West, Pavel Filonov

Officially we are on break. I am making up for the week I missed last month. This week would feature the works of Russian Genius- Pavel Filonov.

Time for the Winter Break...

The Red Cape, Claude Monet

We should be away for two weeks, as always, though the conscientious one says that he will use a break week to make up for his missed week. If that happens, we shall enjoy the surprise. Otherwise, we shall enjoy the break.

Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time

Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, Agnolo Bronzino

Venus of Urbino

Venus of Urbino, Titian

Sleeping Venus

Sleeping Venus, Giorgione

Venus Rising from the Sea

Venus Rising from the Sea, Sir Edward Burne-Jones

Venus at her Toilet aka Rokeby Venus

Rokeby Venus, Diego Velazquez

Venus Anadyomene

Venus Anadyomene, Titian

The Birth of Venus

The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli

The Military Admirer

The Military Admirer, Gerard ter Borch

In a Barn

In a Barn, Adriaen van Ostade

A Dutch Courtyard

A Dutch Courtyard, Pieter de Hooch

Signing of a Marriage Contract

Signing of a Marriage Contract, Jan Steen

Carousing Couple

Carousing Couple, Judith Leyster

Merry Company at Table

Merry Company at Table, Dirck Hals

The Watchman

The Watchman, Carel Fabritius

Girl at Sewing Machine

Girl at Sewing Machine, Edward Hopper

The Dance

It must be warm in the room, walls the color of over-steeped tea,
the sun high,
coating the yellow brick exterior of the apartment building,
angling in on
the girl, stripped down to camisole and petticoat, sewing.
She's a busty girl,
soft, no doubt perspiring, slippery under her breasts, moisture
trapped on the back
of her neck under all that chestnut hair. She doesn't notice,
though; you can see
she's intent on her seam. She doesn't slump over the machine
but bends from the hip,
her body as attuned as her hands. Her feet, though not shown
in the painting,
are bound to be pudgy, are probably bare, pumping the treadle
ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk

but that's unconscious. Her point of concentration is the needle,
silver, quick,
its chick chick chick chick chick, necessity to keep the material
in perfect position,
position. What is she making? The fabric looks heavy and yet
billowy, like
whipped cream, or cumulus clouds; certain girls, while large, move
with grace (when nobody's
there) but in public, conceal, or try to conceal, their bodies
beneath long clothes.
They favor long hair, feeling it wimples and veils embarrassment.
Yes, I know this girl.
Only in her room, only when unseen, can she relax at all, peel off
a hot blouse,
a brown skirt, like the one heaped on her bed in the background,
take pleasure in

a good hairbrush, the bottle of scent on the dresser, the picture
of her own choosing
on the wall. Whatever she's making--let's go ahead and say it's
a dress for herself--
she is not, as you might think, dreaming of a party, a dance,
or a wedding. No, she's
deciding to flat-fell that seam--time-consuming, but worth it--
stronger, better-looking.
I'm sure she knows by now not to expect much attention from boys.
She's what? twenty?
eighteen? She will, in time, use many words to describe herself,
not all of them bad;
but not once will one of them be "pretty," or "lovely." Those
aren't for a fat girl
though she can take a mass of cloth, and a cast-iron machine,
and make a beautiful shape.


--Mary Leader

PS- Sincere Apologies for the back-log last week.

The Dance

The Dance or The Peasant Dance, Brueghel

The Dance

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

-William Carlos Williams

Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon coming on (The Slave Ship)

Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon coming on (The Slave Ship), JMW Turner



Before You Read the Plaque About Turner's "Slave Ship"*

See the bare canvas. A pure white
bone that splits the sky's
weak, warm skin of colors.

What will be left on the ocean floor,
What will be left under the swells,
What will be left is unspeakable
and vivid and not the vicious beauty
of cracking masts against the atmosphere
writing lines of blood. Not the blended light,
or the curious gulls. Not the market's
fanacious hope.

Not the gods' desperation to include us in this disaster,
without our will. But the bare, bright,
smoothed bones of many, many hands,

so cold, down where the master
could not imagine,
could not light
the darkest depths.


~ David Wright


Note: This is one of the most intense paintings I have seen, in real tiem and space it is imposing on consciousness. And with the content on conscience.

Also, couldnt manage to publish to original spacing of the poem, Html challenged sorry.

The Great Wave

The Great Wave, Katsushika Hokusai



The Great Wave: Hokusai

But we will take the problem in its most obscure manifestation, and suppose that our spectator is an average Englishman. A trained observer. carefully hidden behind a screen, might notice a dilation in his eyes, even an intake of his breath, perhaps a grunt. (Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art)

It is because the sea is blue,
Because Fuji is blue, because the bent blue
Men have white faces, like the snow
On Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color of their
Boats. It is because the air
Is full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing
Will harm these frail strangers,
That high over Fuji in an earthcolored sky the fingers
Will not fall; and the blue men
Lean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a mountain leans
Against the sky.

In the painter's sea
All fishermen are safe. All anger bends under his unity.
But the innocent bystander, he merely
'Walks round a corner, thinking of nothing': hidden
Behind a screen we hear his cry.
He stands half in and half out of the world; he is the men,
But he cannot see below Fuji
The shore the color of sky; he is the wave, he stretches
His claws against strangers. He is
Not safe, not even from himself. His world is flat.
He fishes a sea full of serpents, he rides his boat
Blindly from wave to wave toward Ararat.


~Donald Finkel

The Village of the Mermaids

The Village of the Mermaids, Paul Delvaux

The Village of the Mermaids


Who is that man in black, walking
away from us into the distance?
The painter, they say, took a long time
finding his vision of the world.

The mermaids, if that is what they are
under their full-length skirts,
sit facing each other
all down the street, more of an alley,
in front of their gray row houses.
They all look the same, like a fair-haired
order of nuns, or like prostitutes
with chaste, identical faces.
How calm they are, with their vacant eyes,
their hands in laps that betray nothing.
Only one has scales on her dusky dress.

It is 1942; it is Europe,
and nothing fits. The one familiar figure
is the man in black approaching the sea,
and he is small and walking away from us.

~Lisel Mueller

The Man with the Hoe

The Man with the Hoe, Jean Millet

The Man with the Hoe

God made man in His own image
In the image of God He made him.--Genesis

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And markt their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More packt with danger to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rife of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quencht?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidlous wrongs, Immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

~Edwin Markham

American Gothic

American Gothic, Grant Wood

American Gothic

Just outside the frame
there has to be a dog
chickens, cows and hay

and a smokehouse
where a ham in hickory
is also being preserved

Here for all time
the borders of the Gothic window
anticipate the ribs

of the house
the tines of the pitchfork
repeat the triumph

of his overalls
and front and center
the long faces, the sober lips

above the upright spines
of this couple
arrested in the name of art

These two
by now
the sun this high

ought to be
in mortal time
about their businesses

Instead they linger here
within the patient fabric
of the lives they wove

he asking the artist silently
how much longer
and worrying about the crops

she no less concerned about the crops
but more to the point just now
whether she remembered

to turn off the stove.

~John Stone

1669

Notes:

It wasn't until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when scholars studied Rembrandt's oeuvre as a whole, that it was discovered how very many times the artist had portrayed himself. The number is still a matter of contention, but it seems he depicted himself in approximately forty to fifty extant paintings, about thirty-two etchings, and seven drawings. It is an output unique in history; most artists produce only a handful of self-portraits, if that. And why Rembrandt did this is one of the great mysteries of art history.
Most scholars up till about twenty years ago interpreted Rembrandt's remarkable series of self-portraits as a sort of visual diary, a forty-year exercise in self-examination. In a 1961 book, art historian Manuel Gasser wrote, "Over the years, Rembrandt's self-portraits increasingly became a means for gaining self-knowledge, and in the end took the form of an interior dialogue: a lonely old man communicating with himself while he painted."

quoted from Rembrandt and his Self Portraits.

1658

1648

1641

PS: apologies for the lag this week. One got lost in living rather than posting the theme

1634