Mariana - John Everett Millais

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Inspired by: John Everett Millais - Mariana

This painting was inspired by an Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem. The Pre-Raphaelites based many of their paintings on Shakespeare and Tennyson’s themes. Millais used Tennyson’s “Mariana” to create a narrative for his painting. It tells the story of Mariana, a character in Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure”. In the play, she is rejected by her fiancé Angelo, after her dowry is lost in a shipwreck. In Shakespeare’s version, Mariana ends up seducing Angelo and getting him to marry her. In contrast, Tennyson dwells on her isolation and loneliness, which is never resolved. Millais hung the poem along with his painting at its first showing,
The Pre-Raphaelites focused much of their work on single female figures. These women were typically based on tragic heroines sourced from myths or literature. The women always possessed a remarkable and distinctive kind of beauty often coupled with a mystical power or dominance over men. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) originated in 1848 with seven members. They studied painters who came before Raphael, hence the “Pre- Raphaelites”. They set up camp in Dante Rossetti’s mothers house, and put a plaque with PRB on front door. Some people thought it stood for “please ring bell”. See original: bit.ly/42E5A1w

Michelangelo - The Torment of Saint Anthony

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Inspired by: Michelangelo - The Torment of Saint Anthony – 1487-88

Anthony was a religious hermit, who lived for twenty years in solitude on a mountain by the Nile. There he
began his long struggle against the temptations of the devil, which became a legend of Christian history. This painting depicts one of his visionary levitations. He is being attacked by the devil, who is disguised in the form of animals and beasts.
This is the first known painting by Michelangelo, painted when he was thirteen years old. The work is one of only four easel paintings generally regarded as having come from his hand. This may have been a practice painting, since it is a colorized version of an existing engraving by the fifteenth-century German master Martin Schongauer.
The engraving had no background, so Michelangelo added his own. His background is filled with water, even a boat, but St Anthony was a desert dweller. I guess young Michelangelo didn’t do his homework.

To see original: https://bit.ly/3XCdndj

Winslow Homer - The Fog Warning

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Homer lived in Boston until his early twenties. He was mostly self-taught. His mother, a gifted watercolorist, got him started. After a short apprenticeship with a commercial lithographer, he began his career in illustration. For the next twenty years, he made his living working for magazines like Harper’s Weekly. He subsequently picked up a paint brush. His love was oils, but his watercolors were cheaper, they sold well, and brought him greater recognition.
He loved the ocean, and in the 1880s, he moved to Prouts Neck on the coast of Maine. It was here that he began to paint his water scenes. He not only painted the sea itself, but pitted "man against the elements" to show how powerful the water could be. He later stopped painting human figures all together and just focused on the sea. Today, Homer is known as the foremost American marine painter.
This painting was inspired by a trip to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Canada. There, aboard fishing vessels, he watched men, cast adrift on the open sea, take their chance with the waves and weather. To see the original painting:   https://bit.ly/4hSO2DK

The Ambassadors

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In 1533 Henry III divorced Catherine and married Anne Boleyn. The Pope refused to annul his first marriage and recognize the second. In 1534, Henry broke from the Catholic church and made himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Francis I of France was not sure whether to side with the Pope or strengthen his alliance with England. He sent two of his most trusted men, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, to test the waters. Dinteville being a seasoned diplomat and de Selve a young Bishop.

This painting is filled with symbols. The items on the table represent the two main characters. The top represents the heavens and those on the bottom represent the affairs of the world. The most intriguing item is the skull at the bottom of the painting. Its inclusion is a memento mori, literally a reminder that we all must die. The skull is rendered in anamorphic perspective, a technic by which an object looks distorted when viewed from one angle, but normal from another. The first examples of this technique appear in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. This skull can only be discerned when viewed from upper right or lower left. For this reason, it is thought it was to be hung on a stairway. To see original: https://bit.ly/4aID6pU

Henri Matisse - The Dance

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Inspired by: Henri Matisse - The Dance

The Dance was commissioned by a Russian businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin, with whom
Matisse had a long association. This painting hung together with Matisse’ Music on the staircase of Shchukin's Moscow mansion. A year after the Russian Revolution his house and collection was confiscated via a decree signed by Lenin. His home then became the State Museum of New Western Art. In 1948, Stalin signed the

decree which closed it down because of its “bourgeois artwork”. The contents were then split between the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Hermitage Museum.

Dance (II) was commissioned by a businessman and art collector Albert Barnes with whom Matisse also had a long association. It hung above the windows in the main gallery of his home (which housed 24 other Matisse paintings). After a lengthy lawsuit following his death, the Barnes Foundation collection was appropriated by the city of Philadelphia, and relocated to the Parkway near the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A third version (which was a study for the first) was acquired by Nelson Rockefeller, a businessman and art collector, and donated to the MOMA. I guess businessmen just “Wanna Dance”.

To see original: https://bit.ly/4jhX5PU

Fishing in the surf at Kajikazawa

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Inspired by: Katsushika Hokusai - Fishing in the surf at Kajikazawa

An Anglicized title for this print is “Fishing in the surf at Kajikazawa”. It was the first in the series, “Thirty Six Views of Mt Fuji”, the most famous of which was “The Great Wave of Kanagawa”. He started this series when he was 73, at the height of his career. He worked until he was 89 and felt he got better as he got older. Just before he died he wrote, “If only the heavens could grant me another five years I would become a great artist”.
The first impression of this print was all blue, but the number of colors was increased in later additions. Around 1790 the Dutch traders brought Prussian Blue pigments to Japan. At first this was very expensive, but by 1820 the price came down and the ukiyo-e began using it in their prints. Hokusai was one of the early adopters and the original version of many of his prints were all blue, including The Great Wave.  The Japanese called the new color Beru-ia, which comes from their word for Berlin, the city where the pigment was manufactured.
Like many of the Japanese artists of the era, Hokusai changed his name several times during his career. These changes often marked different stages of life, or it could have just been a way of refreshing the brand. By the time he got to the Mt Fuji series he was using the name Gakyo rojin (Old man crazy to paint). To see original: https://bit.ly/4fAztDn https://bit.ly/4fAztDn

Mary Stevenson Cassatt - The Tea

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Mary Stevenson Cassatt - The Tea

Tea parties were a real thing back in the day. Starting with Victorians, the afternoon tea was a daily event in any respectable well-off family. The fashion quickly spread all over Europe, and reached the US, during its Gilded Age (the period from the 1870s to about 1900). Here affluent families used teas as debutante parties.

Mary Cassatt was a great admirer of Edgar Degas. Both artists had a long period of collaboration. Cassatt said: "How well I remember seeing for the first-time Degas' pastels in the window of a picture dealer. I would flatten my nose against the window and absorb all I could of his art." Degas would help Cassatt get models for her work. Here one of those models was the woman sitting with Cassatt’s sister Lydia.

Heavy snow and visitors to the Shiba Jingu Palace - Ichiryusai Hiroshige

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Inspired by: Ichiryusai Hiroshige - Heavy snow and visitors to the Shiba Jingu Palace – 1858

Hiroshige was one of the last great ukiyo-e artists. He was a member of the Utagawa school, which was one of the four major schools and stood at the forefront of this 19th century movement. Since Japanese artists often took on the name of their school, for part of his life he was known as Utagawa Hiroshiga.

During Hiroshige’s time, the print industry was booming. Tourism was also on the rise, and these prints became the equivalent of travel postcards for the Japanese. This print was published 1858, the year of Hiroshige’s death. It is part of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, an illustrated guidebook to the city now called Tokyo.

Ukyo-e first appeared in the West after Japan began trading with the Dutch in 1609. At that time the prints were only used to wrap parcels for shipping. They didn’t gain real attention until they appeared at the Paris world’s Fair of 1855. There, they caught the attention of the Impressionists, who went nuts over them. They were all over the walls in Monet’s home in Givernny. Van Gogh also covered his walls, and made several direct copies of Hiroshige's work.