The Madonna of the Carnation

This painting is considered to be one of the first independent works accomplished by Leonardo in Florence.

The pose of the Madonna, with her hand raised, delicately holding a flower in her fingers, is borrowed from Verrocchio’s models; and her face still resembles a type of female head common to the repertoire of the workshop where Leonardo had served his apprenticeship.

The faces are put into light while all other objects are darker, f.e. the carnation is covered by a shadow. The child is looking up, the mother is looking down - there is no eye contact. The setting of the portrait is a room with two windows on each side of the figures.

Dating from 1478-1480, the title is also known as the Madonna of the Leonardo da Vinci; Munich Madonna; Madonna with the Carnation; and the Madonna with the Vase, for the vase beside the Blessed Mother.

This original oil painting is in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany.
The Madonna of the Carnation

View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint Remy

The painting is an oil canvas painting by van Gogh in 1889. It was painted during van Gogh asylum at Saint-Remy. The painting was completed only a month before he killed himself by shot in the chest at the age of 37.

The painting is a view of the asylum and church at Saint-Remy. The painting reflects the sadness and vulnerability of the painter himself.

Actress Elizabeth Taylor bought the painting in an auction for $260,000 in 1963 at a Sotheby’s auction in London.
View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint Remy

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

False Start by Jasper Johns

False Start by Jasper Johns 

In 1988, False Start brought $17 million at the auction at Sotheby’s. In year 2006, the painting was sold to the Kenneth C. Griffin, for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting to be sold by a living artist. 

The False Start is one of the popular oil paintings of Jasper Johns and was made on a canvas 170.8 centimeters long and 137.2 centimeters wide. The colorful painting has always impressed the people since the time it was released. The magnificent use of varied kinds of colors in painting is most impressive. 

False Start manages to be both clotted and expansive, a field of interlocking patches and passages of red, yellow, and blue with orange and gray, each of which is named throughout the compositions. Such as it is, this composition is an allover affair with no hierarchy of parts, in good, second generation abstract expressionist. 

False Start by Jasper Johns