Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat

Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat

Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat is painting by Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh went on to paint several versions of this painting.
It is oil painting on canvas 92.0 x 73.0 cm. It was painted late June 1890.

The painting has changed hands several times. In 1997, Stephen Wynn paid $47.5 million for the painting.

On October 7, 2005, it was announced that Stephen Wynn had sold the painting along with Gauguin's Bathers to Steven A. Cohen for more then $100 million.

Young Peasant Woman with Straw Hat Sitting in the Wheat

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is one of the Georges Seurat’s most famous works.

The Island of La Grande Jatte is in the Seine in Paris between La Defense and the Neuilly.

In creating the picture Seurat employed the then new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with oranges and blue pigments.

Seurat, who is known to be the ultimate example of the artist as scientist, used the technique of pointillism, or divisionism, on a massive canvas on order to depict a number of people enjoying a sunny afternoon in a park.

Seurat spent two years painting this picture, concentrating painstakingly on the landscape of the park before focusing on the people always their shapes, never their personalities.

Seurat was only 26 when he first showed Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the eight annual and final Impressionist Exhibition inm 1886. It immediately changed the course of vanguard painting, initiating a new direction that was baptized “Neoimpressionism.”
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Les Noces de Pierrette

Les Noces de Pierrette
Picasso created this painting during the most critical period of his life, when he suffering of continuous depression from the death of his friend Carlos Casagemas.

The paintings considered as a blue period masterpiece. Les Noces de Pierrette (translated as ‘The Marriage of Pierrete’) was painted in 1905, a time when Picasso faced poverty early in his career.

In this painting, Picasso uses many shades of blue. The blues help express the somber mood of the painting.

Picasso portrays rich socialites gossiping and suited up in gowns and top hats yet no person seems to express any real emotions.

This being done in one of the most down and out points of his life, Picasso was probably implying that, that was not a happy life either.

In 1989, it was sold for US$49.3 million.

Benois Madonna

Benois Madonna
Madonna and Child with Flowers otherwise known as the Benois Madonna, could be one of two pictures of Madonna started painting by Leonardo da Vinci, as he remarked himself in October 1478.

It was proved to be one of Leonardo’s most popular. It was extensively copied by young painters, including Raphael, whose own version of Leonardo’s design (the Madonna of the Pinks) was acquires in 2004 by the National Gallery, London.

The motif of the Madonna with the child in her lap, a robust, chubby faced child, is still of the fifteenth century; the round head of the Madonna, with the very high forehead, the thin, curved eyebrows and the small round childish chin, is Florentine; the Gothic window in the background, here giving no view beyond, is early Florentine fifteenth century.

This oil painting demonstrated extremely realistic human features with a rich depth of expression, apparent especially in the Madonna’s facial and hand gestures.

The child in the painting has an absorbed expression of silent concentration on his face, his eyes intently observing, with hypnotic intensity, not so much the flower held out to him by his mother - the crucifera, symbol of Passion – as, along its stem, the shining berries which he squeezes between his plump fingers and which are reflected in the oval brooch of his mother in a heraldic suggestion of the Medici arms.
Benois Madonna