Showing posts with label impressionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label impressionism. Show all posts

Thursday, December 22, 2016

The Umbrella by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Painted in two phases during the 1880's, The Umbrellas is owned by the National Gallery in London as part of the Lane Bequest, though it is displayed alternately in London and at the Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane.

The Umbrellas by Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts a busy street scene in Paris with several people using umbrellas against the rain.

The people in the painting are not posing. To the right, a mother looks down at her daughters, both fashionably dressed in the styles of 1881 for an afternoon promenade.

A female figure at the center of the female, mostly concealed by the mother, is caught in the act or raising or lowering her umbrella, suggesting that the rain is about to begin or cease.

The main figure on the foreground is a young woman (modeled by Suzanne Valadon) who is carrying what appears to be a basket or perhaps hat box. She is looking straight at the viewer as if resigned to her fate and the oncoming rain.

A young bearded gentleman seems to be about to offer her shelter under his umbrella. She, and one of the two girls to the right with a hoop and stick, look out at the viewer, while most of the rest of the figures go about their business.
The Umbrella by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Monday, September 8, 2014

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

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