About Nicholas Roerich

Nicholas Roerich, also called as Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh, was a Russian mystic, painter, philosopher, scientist, writer, traveler, and public figure. A prolific artist, he created thousands of paintings and about 30 literary works. Roerich was an author and initiator of a world pact for the protection of artistic and academic institutions and historical sites and a founder of an international movement for the defense of culture. Roerich earned several nominations for the Nobel Prize.

Early life :

Roerich in translation from the traditional Scandinavian means “rich of fame”. Members of Roerich’s family occupied prominent military and administrative posts in Russia since the reign of Peter I. Nicholas Roerich’s father Konstantin Fedorovich was a famous notary who was born in Courland. N. Roerich’s mother Maria Vasil’evna Kalashnikova was descended from a long line of merchants and traders. Among friends of the Roerich’s family were such famous personalities as D. Mendeleyev, N. Kostomarov, M. Mikeshin, L. Ivanovsky et al.

Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on October 9, 1874, the first-born son of lawyer and notary, Konstantin Roerich and his wife Maria. From childhood Nicholas Roerich was attracted to painting, archaeology, history and the abundant cultural heritage of the East. When he was nine, a noted archeologist came to conduct explorations within the region and took young Roerich on his excavations of the native tumuli. The adventure of presentation the mysteries of forgotten eras along with his own hands sparked an interest in archeology that would last his lifetime.

His father did not want him to practice painting as a career, but rather to study law. He made a compromise, and after finishing his studies in 1893, Roerich at the same time entered the Saint-Petersburg University and the Emperor’s Academy of Arts. From 1895, he studied in the studio of the famous Russian landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi. At that time, he closely communicated with different well-known artists, writers and musicians – V. Stassov, I. Repin, N. Rimsky-Korsakov, D. Grigorovich, and S. Diaghilev. During his student years in Saint Petersburg Roerich had already become a member of the Russian archeological society. He had conducted various excavations in St. Petersburg, Pskov, and Novgorod, Tver, Yaroslavl and Smolensk provinces. From 1904, along with Prince Putyatin, he recovered several Neolithic sites at Valdai. Roerich’s Neolithic findings excited real sensation in Russia and West Europe.

In 1897, Roerich graduated Petersburg Academy of Arts. His graduation painting the messenger was purchased by famous collector of Russian art P. M. Tretyakov. V. V. Stassov, well-known enemy of that time, highly appreciated this painting: “You definitely must visit Tolstoy let the great writer of Russian land himself promoted you in painters”. Meeting with Leo Tolstoy determined the way of young Roerich. Leo Tolstoy said to him: “Have you an occasion to pass the fast river on boat? It is necessary always to drive upstream of that place where you need or river carries away you. Then in the field of moral necessities one must to drive always higher so the life all the same carries away. Let your messenger keeps the rudder very high then he sailed!

The Three Witches

The Three Witches or strange Sisters are characters in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth (c. 1603–1607).

Their origin lies in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland. Other possible sources influencing their creation include British folklore, contemporary treatises on witchcraft, Scandinavian legends of the Norns, Greek and Roman myths concerning the Fates, and the Bard's own imagination. Portions of Thomas Middleton's play The Witch were incorporated into Macbeth around 1618.

Shakespeare's witches are prophetesses who hail the General Macbeth early in the play with predictions of his rise as king. Upon committing regicide and being seated on the throne of Scotland, Macbeth hears the trio deliver ambiguous prophecies threatening his downfall. The witches' dark and contradictory natures, their "filthy" trappings and activities, as well as their intercourse with the supernatural all set an ominous tone for the play.

In the 18th century, as Shakespearean as well as supernatural art began to become popular, the witches were portrayed in a variety of ways by artists such as Henry Fuseli. Since then, their role has proven somewhat difficult for many directors to portray, due to the tendency to make their parts exaggerated or overly sensational. Some have adapted the original Macbeth into different cultures, as in Orson Welles' presentation making the witches voodoo priestesses.

Film adaptations have seen the witches transformed into characters familiar to the modern world, such as hippies on drugs or Goth schoolgirls. Their influence reaches the literary realm as well in such works as The Third Witch and the Harry Potter series.

The weyward Sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the Sea and Land...

In later scenes in the first folio the witches are called "weyard," but never "weird." The modern appellation "weird sisters" derives from Hollinshed's original Chronicles in which they are referred to as weird sisters.

Shakespeare's principal source for the Three Witches is found in the account of King Duncan in Raphael Holinshed's history of Britain, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587). In Holinshed, the future King Macbeth of Scotland and his companion Banquo encounter "three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world" who hail the men with glowing prophecies and then vanish "immediately out of their sight."

Holinshed observes that "the common opinion was that these women were either the Weird Sisters, that is… the goddesses of destiny, or else some nymphs or fairies endued with knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical science.

Roman God of the seasons

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527 - July 11, 1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books - that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the entire collection of objects formed a recognizable image of the portrait subject.

In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I Habsburg court in Vienna and, later, Maximilian II and Rudolph II to his son in the court of Prague. It was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.

Arcimboldo's conventional work in the traditional religious subjects, has been forgotten, but his portraits of human heads made of vegetables, plants, fruits, marine animals and tree roots, were much admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of Today's fascination. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. Most scholars argue that the point of view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and weird Arcimboldo, far from being mentally unbalanced, caters to the tastes of his time.

Arcimboldo died in Milan, who retired after the cessation of Prague. It was during this last phase of his career that produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II and his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career.

When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from the collection of Rudolph II.

His works can be found in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Habsburg Ambras Castle in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, Candie Museum in Guernsey and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid also own paintings by Arcimboldo .

Young girl at a window

Jan Victors or Fictor was a Golden Age Dutch painter who focused primarily on painting the subject of the Bible.

He was known in Haarlem in a catalog taxes in 1722 as a student of Rembrandt van Rijn. Although it is true that Rembrandt worked for, is clear from the girl at a window he had carefully examined the paintings of Rembrandt.

He was only twenty years old when he painted this scene, and look of expectation in the face of the girl shows a remarkable study of character.

Like many painters of Amsterdam after the rampjaar 1672, fell on bad times and took a position as ziekentrooster, a combination of professional work as a nurse and a priest, with the Company Dutch East Indies in 1676. He died shortly after his arrival in Indonesia.

About Douglas Baulch

Baulch was born in Malvern, Victoria, Australia, the only child youngest of three children of Ernest Stanley Baulch. It is commonly known as Douglas Baulch, the same as was used in all his works. Before the first birthday of his father Douglas was sent to fight in France during World War 1, only to return to hospital for the rest of your life is totally disabled until his death eight years later.

This had a traumatic and emotional impact as a small child Douglas seeing and knowing only her father from his deathbed. His father finally died in 1926, when Douglas was only 9 years old.

He still lives in Malvern this created severe stress on him financially and emotionally and family. They are forced to take a more responsible for the house at a very early age. Even while the boy had a love for art drawing happens all the time at home, her mother and sisters Doris Ann and encouraged Gloria.

However, soon after graduating disappointed when given two of his favorite pieces in a private gallery in Melbourne, which then claimed the pieces, was stolen. The gallery closed and his painting was never seen again. From that day on he became lonelier and monitoring the delivery of her artwork in several galleries and therefore significantly less exposed to other friends, like Sidney Nolan.

With the outbreak of World War II, signed a contract for the Royal Australian Air Force working mainly in the north of Australia and the Pacific as a commercial artist, between 1943 and 1945, being commissioned to produce various signs and signaling with the war effort. Then do a portrait of Sir Richard Williams.

He married in 1944 with Lyla Foster, who lived in Glen Iris then Armadale. Upon returning home from the Air Force started a large family with his first son Jeff was born in 1946.

In 1952 he moved to East Doncaster, as he liked the Australian landscape and needed to find a balance between family / financial commitment and his love of landscapes.

Common with the temples of Lower Warrandyte areas should and as an inspiration to portray the rugged terrain and shrubs in the area at the time. The landscape of this period show a natural beauty and positive vision of natural ecosystems and the environment that was not surface with a multiplicity of views, attracting the viewer to take in the scene.

Kustodiev Merchants Wife

Boris Kustodiev was born in Astrakhan into the family of a lecturer of philosophy, history of literature, and logic at the local theological school. His father died young, and all financial and material burdens fell on his mother's shoulders. The Kustodiev family rented a small wing in a rich merchant's house. It was there that the boy's first impressions were formed of the way of life of the simple merchant class. 

The artist later wrote, "The whole tenor of the rich and plentiful merchant way of life was there right under my nose... It was like something out of an Ostrovsky play." The artist retained these childhood explanation for years, recreating them later in oils and water-colors.

In 1905, Kustodiev first twisted to book illustrating, a genre in which he worked throughout his entire life. He illustrated many works of classical Russian literature, including Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, The Carriage, and The Overcoat; Mikhail Lermontov's The Lay of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young Oprichnik and the Stouthearted Merchant Kalashnikov; and Leo Tolstoy's How the Devil Stole the Peasants Hunk of Bread and The Candle.

In 1909, he was nominated into Imperial Academy of Arts. He continued to work intensively, but a grave illness—tuberculosis of the spine—required urgent attention. On the advice of his doctors he went to Switzerland, where he spent a year undergoing treatment in a private clinic.

He pined for his distant homeland, and Russian themes continued to provide the basic material for the works he painted during that year. In 1918, he painted The Merchant's Wife, which became the most famous of his paintings.

Welsh art - Oil Painting

Welsh art refers to the traditions in the visual arts associated with Wales and its people. Wales cannot claim to have been a major artistic centre at any point, and Welsh art is essentially a regional variant of the forms and styles of the rest of the British Isles; a very different situation from that found in Welsh literature. The term Art in Wales is often used in the absence of a clear sense of what "Welsh art" is, and to include the very large body of work, especially in landscape art, produced by non-Welsh artists set in Wales.

Landscapes:
The best of the few Welsh artists of the 16-18th centuries tended to move elsewhere to work, but in the 18th century the dominance of landscape art in English art bought them motives to stay at home, and bought an influx of artists from outside to paint Welsh scenery, which was "discovered" by artists rather earlier than later landscape hotspots like the English Lake District and the Scottish Highlands. The Welsh painter Richard Wilson (1714–1782) is arguably the first major British landscapist, but somewhat more notable for Italian scenes than Welsh ones, although he did paint several on visits from London.

 His pupil Thomas Jones (1742–1803), has a rather higher status today than in his own time, but mainly for his city scenes painted in Italy, though his The Bard (1774, Cardiff) is a classic work showing the emerging combination of the Celtic Revival and Romanticism.

He returned to live in Wales on inheriting the family estate, but largely stopped painting. For most visiting artists the main attraction was dramatic mountain scenery, in the new taste for the sublime partly stimulated by Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), though some earlier works were painted in Wales in this strain. Early works tended to see the Welsh mountains through the prism of the 17th century Italianate "wild" landscapes of Salvator Rosa and Gaspard Dughet.

Fire of Moscow

The 1812 Blaze of Moscow bankrupt out on September 14, 1812 in Moscow on the day if Russian troops and a lot of association alone the city-limits and Napoleon's beat troops entered the city-limits afterward the Battle of Borodino. The blaze raged until September 18, antibacterial estimated three-quarters of Moscow.

Causes:

Before leaving Moscow, Count Rostopchin gave orders to have the Kremlin and major public buildings either blown up or set on fire. But this was not the foremost cause of the conflagration that destroyed the city. As the bulk of the French army moved into the city, there were some fires, which historians sympathetic to Napoleon's cause by tradition blame on Russian damage. It is believed that Count Rostopchin had made arrangements for anything that might have been of any use to the French army—food stores, granaries, warehouses, and cloth stores—to be torched once the city was evacuated by the Russians.

This version of events is established by General Armand de Caulaincourt.He states that they had been in Moscow for three days. That evening a small fire had broken out but was extinguished and 'attributed to the carelessness of the troops'. Later that evening Coulaincourt was woken by his valet with the news that 'for three quarters of an hour the city has been in flames'. Fires continued to break out in multiple separate points.

Incendiarists were arrested and interrogated and declared that their commanding officer had ordered them to burn everything. 'Houses had been designated to this end.' Later on in the same chapter he asserts 'The existence of inflammable fuses, all made in the same fashion and placed in different public and private buildings, is a fact of which I, as many others, had personal evidence. I saw the fuses on the spot and many were taken to the Emperor.' He goes on to write 'The examination of the police rank-and-file all proved that the fire had been prepared and executed by order of Count Rostopchin'.

Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruisdael

Cornelis de Graeff, also Cornelis de Graeff van was the most memorable member of the De Graeff family. He was a mayor of Amsterdam from the Dutch Golden Age and a powerful Amsterdam regent after the sudden death of stadholder William II of Orange. Like his father Jacob Dircksz de Graeff, he opposed the house of Orange, and was the reasonable successor to the republican Andries Bicker. In the mid 17th century he controlled the city's finances and politics and, in close cooperation with his brother Andries de Graeff and their nephew Johan de Witt, the Netherlands political system.

Characteristic of his early period, from about 1646 to 1655, is the choice of very effortless motifs and the careful and laborious study of the details of nature. The time between his disappearance from Haarlem and his settling in Amsterdam may have been spent in travelling and helped him to gain a broader view of nature and to widen the horizon of his art.

A magnificent view of the Castle of Bentheim, dated 1654, suggests that his wanderings extended to Germany. In his last period, from about 1675 onwards, he shows a tendency towards overcrowded compositions, and affects a darker tonality, which may partly be due to the use of thin paint on a dark ground. Towards the end, in his leaning towards the romantic mood, he preferred to draw his inspiration from other masters, instead of going to nature direct, his favorite subjects being rushing torrents and waterfalls, and ruined castles on mountain crests, which are frequently borrowed from the Swiss views by Roghmau.

Charles IV of Spain and His Family

Carlos IV of Spain and His Family is oil on canvas painting by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya completed in the summer of 1800. It features life sized depictions of Charles IV of Spain and his family, pretentiously dressed in fine costume and jewellery. The painting was modeled after Velazquez's Las Meninas when setting the royal subjects in a naturalistic and reasonable setting.

As in Las Meninas, the royal family is actually paying a visit to the artist's studio, while Goya can be seen to the left looking outwards towards the viewer. In both, the artist is shown working on a canvas, of which only the rear is visible.

 However, the atmospheric and warm perspective of the palace interior of Velazquez's work is replaced in the Goya by a sense of, in the words of Gassier, "imminent suffocation" as the royal family are presented by Goya on a "stage facing the public, while in the shadow of the wings the painter, with a grim smile, points and says: ‘Look at them and judge for yourself!’

List some expressions of paint below

Allegory:
The allegory is a figurative mode of representation, which means transportation other than the literal. Allegory communicates its message through symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of speech but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language can go to view, and is often found in realistic painting. An example of a simple visual allegory is the image of the Grim Reaper. Viewers to understand that the image of the Grim Reaper is a symbolic representation of death.

Body painting:
Body painting is a form of body art. Unlike forms of tattooing and other forms of body art, body painting is temporary, painted on the human skin, and lasts only a few hours or at most a couple of weeks. Body painting is limited to the face is known as face painting. Body Painting is also known as temporary tattoos, large scale or full-body paint is most commonly known as body paint, while the smaller work or more detailed, usually referred to as temporary tattoos.

Figure painting:
Figure painting is a form of visual art in which the artist uses a live model as the subject of a piece of two-dimensional work of art with painting as a medium. The live model may be nude or fully or partially clothed, and painting is a representation of the whole body of the model.

Illustration painting:
Illustration paintings are used as illustrations in books, magazines and posters from a movie theater and comics. Today, there is growing interest in the collection and admire the original artwork. Several museum exhibitions, magazines and art galleries have devoted space to the illustrators past. In the world of visual art, illustrators have sometimes been considered less important compared to artists and graphic designers.

Landscape painting:
Landscape painting is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition.

Portrait painting:
Paintings portrait is a representation of a person in the face and its expression is predominant. The intention is to show the image, personality, and even the mood of the person. The art of portraiture flourished in the Greek and Roman sculpture, particularly, where sitters demanded realistic portraits and individual, even unflattering.

Still life:
A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be natural or artificial. With origins in medieval art and Greek / Roman, still life’s give artists more freedom in the arrangement of design elements within a composition that pictures of other subjects such as landscape or portrait.

Geertgen tot Sint Jans

George tot Sint Jans (ca. 1465 - ca. 1495), ook bekend als George van Haarlem, Gerrit van Haarlem, Gerrit Gerritsz, Gheertgen, Geerrit, Gheerrit, of enige andere vorm verkleinvorm van Gerald, was een Nederlandse schilder uit het noorden begin van de Nederland in het Heilige Roomse Rijk. Geen documentation op het moment van je leven is weekend; en de merest gepubliceerde verslag van zijn leven en zijn werk is van 1604, in Karel van Mander Schilder-Boeck.

According To van Mander, was George Probably a pupil of Albert Bowater, who was one of the first oil painters in the Northern Low Countries. Both painters lived in the city of Haarlem, where it was attached to the house George of the Knights of Saint John, Perhaps as a lay brother, he painted For Whom an altarpiece. In van Mender’s book he states George That Took The name or St. John without joining the order, Galan thus His last name "to St. John" was derived from the order's name and means "unto Saint John"

Hopewell Van Mander net hem George tot Sent Jans, schilder uit Haarlem, watt aangeeft dat hij was uit Haarlem, is het mogelijk dat hij mischief were georef in Leiden, daarna in de Bourgondische Nederland in het Heilige Roomse Rijk, rond het jar 1465.

De opdracht van Leiden ALS zijn geboorteplaats is herleidbaar naar een 17e eeuwse prent van Jacob Matham, waar hij wordt aangeduid als Gerardus van Leydanus. Er is geen bekende archief bewijs voor deze bewering door Matham. Deze prent van De bewening van Christus uit 1620, toont in de linkerbenedenhoek "Cum privil Sa Cae M. 

Grand Secretary and the ministries of six

Government institutions in China were consistent with a similar pattern of about two thousand years, but each dynasty set up special offices and offices, reflecting their own interests. The Ming government had the Grand Secretaries to assist the emperor with the documentation to them and finally reign underYongle appointed officials of agencies and Grand Preceptor, a senior, non-functional as a public official under Emperor.

The Secretariat drew his Great Hanlin Academy members, and is considered part of the imperial authority, not ministerial. The Secretariat is a coordinating body, while the six ministries, which were personal income, Rites, War, Justice, and Public Works, were direct state administrative organs.

The Ministry of Personnel is responsible for appointments, merit ratings, promotions and demotions of officials, and the granting of honorary degrees. The Ministry of Finance was in charge of collecting census data, tax collection and management of state revenues, while there are two exchange bureaux that were subordinate to him.

The Ministry of Rites was in charge of state ceremonies, rituals and sacrifices, but also oversaw the records for the Buddhist and Taoist priests and to the reception of ambassadors from tributary states.

The War Office was in charge of appointments, promotions, demotions and military officers, the maintenance of military facilities, equipment and weapons as well as the courier system. The Ministry of Justice was in charge of the processes judicial and penal, but had no supervisory function over the Censorate or the Grand Court of Revision.

The Ministry of Development was in charge of government construction projects, hiring artisans and workers of temporary services, government equipment manufacture, maintenance of roads and canals, the standardization of weights and measures, and recruitment resource field. 

The Merchant Of Venice

In the 14th century, the city of Venice in Italy was one of the richest in all over the world. Among the wealthiest of its merchants was Antonio. He was a kind and generous person. Bassanio, a young Venetian, of noble rank but having squandered his estate, wishes to travel to Belmont to woo the beautiful and wealthy heiress Portia. He approaches his friend Antonio, who has previously and frequently bailed him out, for three thousand ducats needed to subsidies his travelling expenditures as a suitor for three months.

Antonio agrees, but he is cash-poor; his ships and merchandise are busy at sea. He promises to cover a bond if Bassanio can find a lender, so Bassanio turns to the Jewish moneylender Shylock and names Antonio as the loan’s guarantor.

Shylock hates Antonio because of his anti-Semitism, shown when he insulted and spat on Shylock for being a Jew. Additionally, Antonio undermines Shylock's money lending business by lending money at zero interest. Shylock proposes a condition for the loan: if Antonio is unable to repay it at the specified date, he may take a pound of Antonio's flesh. Bassanio does not want Antonio to accept such a risky condition; Antonio is surprised by what he sees as the moneylender's generosity, and he signs the contract. With money at hand, Bassanio leaves for Belmont with his friend Gratian, who has asked to accompany him. Gratiano is a likeable young man, but is often flippant, overly talkative, and tactless. Bassanio warns his companion to exercise self-control, and the two leave for Belmont and Portia.

Meanwhile in Belmont, Portia is awash with suitors. Her father has left a will stipulating each of her suitors must choose correctly from one of three caskets – one each of gold, silver, and lead. If he chooses the right casket, he gets Portia; if he loses, he must go away and never trouble her or any other woman again with a proposal of marriage.

About Jan Kobell

History:

Jan Kobell was a Dutch animal and landscape painter.

Biography:

He was a pupil of Willem Rutgaart van der Wall at Utrecht. He studied thoroughly from nature, and took Paul Potter for his model, acquiring his talent for animal as well as landscape work. In 1812 he went to Paris, where he won the gold medal and high praise from art critics. His popularity increased rapidly until his early death. Of his cattle pieces, noted for their technique and accuracy of drawing, there are excellent specimens in the museums of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

Family:

Jan Kobell was the son of Hendrik Kobell. He is often called Jan Kobell II to distinguish him from his uncle, or Jan Kobell the elder to distinguish him from his cousin. The Uncle Jan Kobell engraved anatomical plates, and his only well-known work was a series of historical portraits (1787). The cousin Jan Kobell was a landscape and cattle painter. He was the son of Jan the engraver uncle. He attended Rotterdam Academy, and painted his principal work, a life-size cattle piece, in 1830. Anna (1795-1847), sister of Jan the younger, was also a noted artist.

Landscap's English Art

In the popular imagination English landscape painting from the 18th century onwards typifies English art, inspired largely from the love of the pastoral and mirroring as it does the development of larger country houses set in a pastoral rural landscape. It was developed initially by Dutch and Flemish artists, from the late 17th century onwards.

As the population of England grew during the industrial revolution, a concern for privacy and smaller gardens becomes more notable in English art. There was also a new found appreciation of the open landscapes of romantic wilderness, and a concern for the ancient folk arts. 

William Morris is particularly associated with this latter trend, as were the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Another important influence, from about 1890 until 1926, was the growing knowledge about the visual art of Japan.

Being a coastal and sea-faring island nation, English art has often portrayed the coast and the sea. Being a nation of four distinct seasons, and changeable weather, weather effects have often been portrayed in English art. Weather and light effects on the English landscape have been a pre-eminent aspect of modern British landscape photography.

The Turtle Dove Small

Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1823 – 10 March 1903) was a French-born British artist who specialized in genre painting of children and women, typically in rural settings. Her work is loosely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Sophie was born in Paris, the daughter of Charles Gengembre, an architect, and his English wife. She had two brothers, Philip and Henry P. She was largely self-taught in art, but briefly studied portraiture with Charles de Steuben in Paris in 1843. The family left France for the United States to escape the 1848 revolution, first settling in Cincinnati, Ohio, then Manchester, Pennsylvania, where she met and married British genre artist Walter Anderson.

In the USA, Anderson initially worked in portraiture, including work for the chromolithographers Louis Prang & Co. In 1854 the Andersons moved to London, where Sophie exhibited her works at the Royal Academy. They returned to New York in 1858, and then settled in London again around 1863. In 1871, they moved to the island of Capri for health reasons, but Sophie continued to send her work back to London for exhibitions. They returned permanently to England in 1894, settling in Falmouth, Cornwall.

Anderson's work was widely exhibited at venues including the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA), the British Institution, Grosvenor Gallery (1878-87) and many regional galleries in England. She also exhibited in the USA at the Pittsburgh Artists Association and the National Academy of Design, New York. Her early works showed strong attention to botanical and other detail, in common with the Pre-Raphaelites.

She died at home in Falmouth, Cornwall in 1903. Her husband Walter died in the same year. Her brother Henry P. Gengembre (b. 1825) was also an artist, active in Cincinnati in the early 1850s.

Mr and Mrs Andrews

Mr and Mrs Andrews (1750) is an oil painting by British artist Thomas Gainsborough. The artist was in his early twenties when he painted this canvas, which combines the two genres in which he specialized – portraiture and landscape. By his own account, he preferred the latter. The twenty-two-year-old Robert Andrews married sixteen-year-old Frances Carter in November 1748 and Gainsborough made this portrait of them shortly after the wedding. The couple is shown in front of a stout oak tree – the husband standing and the wife sitting. A real, sprawling landscape stretches out behind them: everything here is unmistakably English.
It was purchased in 1960 by the National Gallery, London, with contributions from the Pilgrim Trust, The Art Fund, Associated Television Ltd, and Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Spooner. It is an oil painting, on canvas, and measures 69.8 by 119.4 cm

Scene:

Robert Andrews cradles his shotgun under his arm as his dog looks up at him. He stands proudly in the middle of his huge estate, which had just become even more extensive thanks to his marriage. His outlook is aloof yet businesslike. Frances Carter is sitting on a wooden Rococo bench. Her satin dress shows Gainsborough at his best, while it also reveals strong Rococo elements. The extent of Van Duck’s continued influence on English portraiture can be seen through the capturing of fabrics in paint. The play of light, movement and the choice of the other colors make the light blue of the informal hunting dress spring to life. Her pose might have been lifted straight from a book of etiquette. Both sitters gaze coolly at the spectator. The oak tree in front of which they stand has several connotations beyond the choice of location: stability and continuity, and a sense of successive generations taking over the family business. The landed gentry had even been contemporaneously compared to the oak, holding Britain together.

An area in the woman’s lap has been left unfinished for an unknown reason. Maybe it was reserved for a child’s portrait, or for a book, or even a dead game-bird. Our eyes are drawn from a fertile field with recently harvested golden sheaves of corn to meadows of grazing sheep, a stand of trees and the hills in the distance. These suggest that the work for the painting was done in late summer, 1749. The fertility on view within the field, and the young tree growing between two others can both be considered a reflection on the newly-married couple in the foreground.

The clouds touch the land at the horizon. The enclosure of the sheep was a recent development – livestock had previously wandered about freely and the neat parallel rows of corn produced by Jethro Tull's revolutionary and controversial seed drill show that this is a thoroughly modern and efficient farm. Andrew’s estate, Auberies, is sited in Bulmer Tye, North Essex, and just a few miles across the county border from Gainsborough’s native county of Suffolk. The small tower in the left background of the piece is St. Peters Church in Sudbury. The church in the middle of the piece is that of All Saints, Little Cornard, very close to Gainsborough's hometown of Sudbury. The oak tree is still extant, though considerably larger.

Sunflowers Oil Painting

Sunflowers are the subject of two series of still life paintings by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. The earlier series executed in Paris in 1887 gives the flowers lying on the ground, while the second set executed a year later in Arles shows bouquets of sunflowers in a vase. In the artist's mind both sets were linked by the name of his friend Paul Gauguin, who acquired two of the Paris versions.

About eight months later Van Gogh hoped to welcome and to impress Gauguin again with Sunflowers, now part of the painted decoration he prepared for the guestroom of his Yellow House where Gauguin was supposed to stay in Arles.

After Gauguin's departure, Van Gogh imagined the two major versions as wings of the Berceuse Triptych, and finally he included them in his exhibit at Les XX in Bruxelles.

As Van Gogh anticipated in 1889,the Sunflowers finally became his, and served — combined with self-portraits — as his artistically arms and alter ego up to the present day: no retrospective Van Gogh exhibition since 1901 voluntarily missed including them, and a wealth of forgeries as well as record-setting price paid at auction acknowledges their public success: Perhaps, because Van Gogh's Sunflowers are more than his or him — they may be considered, as Gauguin put it, the flower.

Bodegon Oil Painting

The term bodega in Spanish can mean "pantry", "tavern", or "wine cellar". The derived term bodegon is an augmentative that refers to a large bodega, usually in a derogatory fashion. In Spanish art, a bodegon is a still life painting depicting pantry items, such as victuals, game, and drink, often arranged on a simple stone slab, and also a painting with one or more figures, but significant still life elements, typically set in a kitchen or tavern.

Starting in the Baroque period, such paintings became popular in Spain in the second quarter of the 17th century. The tradition of still life painting appears to have started and was far more popular in the contemporary Low Countries, today Belgium and Netherlands (then Flemish and Dutch artists), than it ever was in southern Europe. Northern still life’s had many sub-genre's; the breakfast piece was augmented by the trompe-l'œil, the flower bouquet, and the vanities.

In Spain there were much fewer patrons for this sort of thing, but a type of breakfast piece did become popular, featuring a few objects of food and tableware lay on a table. Though now considered a Spanish invention, the classic trompe-l'œil presentation of fruit on a stone slab was common in ancient Rome.

Still life painting in Baroque Spain was often austere; it differed from the Flemish Baroque still life’s, which often contain both rich banquets surrounded by ornate and luxurious items with fabric or glass. In bodegon, the game is often plain dead animals still waiting to be skinned.

The fruits and vegetables are uncooked. The backgrounds are bleak or plain wood geometric blocks, often creating a surrealist air. Both Netherlands and Spanish still lives often had a moral vanities element. Their austerity, akin to the bleakness of some of the Spanish plateaus, never copies the sensual pleasures, plenitude, and luxury of many Northern European still life paintings.

The Velazquez paintings The Water seller of Seville, Old woman frying eggs, and The lunch are often described as bodegon due to the artist's depiction of jars and foodstuff. Some people reject this use of the term, calling them instead a mixture of genre painting in Bamboccianti style and still life.