La Blanchisseuse by Toulouse-Lautrec

La Blanchisseuse was painted by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, oil on canvas, 36 1/2 by 29 1/2 inches. It is a moody portrait of a Parisian laundress painted in 1886-87.

Toulouse-Lautrec is known along with Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin as one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impression Ist period. In a 2005 auction at Christie's auction house a new record was set when 'La blanchisseuse', an early painting of a young laundress, sold for $22.4 million U.S.

He was a French painter, printmaker, illustrator and draughtsman whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 1800s yielded a collection of images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times.
La Blanchisseuse by Toulouse-Lautrec

Goldfish and Sculpture by Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse painted Goldfish and Sculpture in 1912, with its indeterminate spatial panes, its intense, unsubtle colors, and is indication of contained movement conveyed through the bright red goldfish swimming at sharp angles to one another in their bright green tumbler.

The bright red goldfish are surrogates for the artist himself, gazing at the world through his thick eyeglass.

Confined within the miniaturized pond of their bowl, the goldfish, restlessly contemplate the reclining nude.

On tabletop, nature is miniaturized and transformed into proxies: the bowl for the pond, the flowers for foliage, the sculpture for a real woman.

The nude at the right, posed to reveal full breasts and hips, possess in fact only faint, remembered sensuality: it is only a terra cotta statuette, outlined without erotic insistence.
Goldfish and Sculpture by Henri Matisse

Café terrace at Night by van Gogh

Also known as The Café Terrace, Van Gogh painting of this café at night on industrially primed canvas in Arles, France, mid-September 1888. He painted it on the spot, instead of in his studio from sketches.

In the uptown Café Terrace at Night Van Gogh represented the Café du Forum as a more cheerful locale, using strong yellows and deep Prussian blues to convey the way artificial illumination transformed and colored the night.

The presence of stars in this painting might be taken as benign, their grouping underlining the companionship of seated and strolling couples featured on the streets or on the café terrace. This is the firsts painting he did with his famous starry background.

During his 15 months stay as Arles, Van Gogh painted some 200 pictures, but did not sell one.

It is ironic that paintings the citizens of Arles thought so little of are now so expensive that nether the Espace Van Gogh or the Foundation Vincent Van Gogh Arles can afford one, with the result that there are now none of Vincent’s paintings in the town.
Café terrace at Night by van Gogh

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is one of the Georges Seurat’s (1859-1886) best known works of postimpressionism.

The Island of La Grande Jatte is in the Seine in Paris between La Defense and the Neuilly. The painting was the result of Seurat’s ‘scientific’ approach to painting.

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 used thousands of tiny dots of color and principles of color mixing. 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 at the banks of the Seine River near Paris.

The scene includes forty-eight people, eight boats, three dogs, and a monkey.

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. He had begun this painting on May 22, 1884, with little oil sketches on wood panels about the size of typewriter paper.

Indeed, it has become one of the most important works in what is still called the canon of Western art. 

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 by Georges Seurat

The Night Café by van Gogh

In 1888, he relocated to Arles in southern France, where he painted Night Café, one of his important and innovative canvasses.

A night café was an establishment, typically in the South of France. Van Gogh stayed up three nights to paint this picture, sleeping only during the day.

The Night Café was a picture of people seeking solace late at night, but in this case it was no warm and comforting refuge.
p
According to him, ‘I have sought to convey that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, commit crime’.

In Night Café, van Gogh explored ways colors and distorted forms can express emotions. The thickness, shape and direction of his brushstrokes create a tactile counterpart to the intense color.
The Night Café by van Gogh

Van Gogh’s House in Aries (Yellow House)

The earlier version of the painting named The House and its Environment and The Street. Later van Gogh engaged to The Yellow House.

Van Gogh’s painting The Yellow House offers what could be called a blueprint for his yellow period.

He left Paris in February 19th. Van Gogh rented two rooms the Yellow House at 2 Place Lamartine, unfurnished in early May 1888, but did not sleep there until mid-September.

The renting of this little house had enormous emotional significant for van Gogh: it was a symbol of possession, of security and of freedom from hotel keepers.

He envisioned the house as an open space where artists could come to freely share ideas and resources.

By 29 September, he finished the painting representing the house and its surroundings in sulphur colored sunshine, under the sky of pure cobalt.

He painted two of his most famous works there. One was The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night. The other was The Night Café in the Place Lamartine in Arles.
Van Gogh’s House in Aries (Yellow House)