Academic Figurative Paintings

Academic style figurative oil painting of a muscular male gondolier with Venice's St. Mark's Campanile in the background "Gondolier" painted by Mark Beard as Bruce Sargeant (pseudony...

Nude Lady Posing for artist on green throw by Josine Vignon (French 1922-2022) ...

Academic style figurative oil painting on canvas 48 x 24 inches unframed 58 x 32 x 3 inches in gold leaf wood frame This vertical, contemporary figurative painting of Le Martyr de Saint Sebastian was made by Mark Beard under his fictitious artistic persona, Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon. Painted in a modern Academic style, Beard paints this Christian saint with dramatic detail and emotional gravity. The scene is a common artistic depiction of Sebastian who according to traditional belief, was killed during the Roman emperor Diocletian's persecution of the Christians. Here the artist depicts a nearly nude Saint Sebastian standing stoically while tied to a rustic brown post. A lush green forested terrain decorates the background while a white neo-classical building sits in the distance, which is perhaps the tomb where Saint Sebastian's remains were laid to rest. Saint Sebastian's pale blue-grey, stone-like stone tone is characteristic of Mark Beard's work who often portrays muscular young men similarly to Greek statues. The vertical Academic style figurative oil painting is complimented with a vintage style gold leaf wood frame. The painting is signed 'H. A. Michallon 1872' in red oil paint in the lower right corner. The gold frame is also signed and inscribed with black oil paint in several places (please see images). Mark Beard is a contemporary artist who made this work under the pseudonym Hippolyte A. Michallon who painted during the late 1800's so slight wear (see images) is intentionally staged to align with the factitious artist's purposed history. About the artist: Mark Beard is perhaps the most literal example of an artist pulled in so many different directions that he chose to “invent” six different personae in which to channel his overflowing energy and need for expression. Each painting style is radically different from the next, so it remains entirely believable that the work could stem from six completely different people of different time periods and different schools of thought. With a background in set design, Beard has always been one who could conjure total magic with anything available. Mark Beard has exhibited with Carrie Haddad Gallery for nearly twenty years and there has never been a dull moment. Mark Beard, born in 1956 in Salt Lake city, now lives in New York City. His works are in museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton University Art Museums; among many others. We would not be the least bit surprised to see new ‘personas’ emerge in the coming years. About: Hippolyte - Alexandre Michallon, 1849 -1930 The long and peripatetic artistic career of Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon began in a conventional fashion. The only son of prosperous bourgeois parents in Tours, he first studied drawing with his mother, an accomplished amateur painter of insects. His father, an undertaker who appreciated his son's talent and supported his ambition to become a painter, sent him to Paris at age sixteen to enroll in the studio of Francois-Edouard Picot (1786-1868), an eminent history painter and professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with whom he studied for three years, until Picot's death. Under his aging teacher's guidance and tutelage, Michallon entered the preliminary stages of the Prix de Rome contest at the Ecole three times, winning an Honorable Mention in 1869 for his composition entitled The Solider of the Marathon. For the next twenty years Michallon regualarly exhibited paintings on historical and biblical themes at the Paris Salon, as well as commissioned portraits. By his own account, the most ambitious work of Michallon's career was a thirty-foot canvas depicting Noah's Ark, which he exhibited in the Salon in 1875. Michallon began painting atmospheric but zoologically correct images of exotic animals in the wild. These achieved a certain popularity among French and foreign collectors alike, providing Michallon with financial security for the first time in his career. Michallon moved to England in 1893. His outstanding technical skills easily earned him a position on the faculty of the Slade School of Art in 1900. The craze for animal paintings proved short-lived. He continued to teach at Slade for the next two decades, but his classes gradually dwindled in size as the academic approach and methods he espoused went from outmoded to downright unpopular. Finally in 1922, finding himself reduced to a single pupil, the talented young American Bruce Sargeant, he retired from Slade, persuading Sargeant to leave with him and undergo private instruction at home. Several years later he retired to a cottage at St. Ives, Cornwall, where he lived quietly until his death in 1930, forgotten by all but a few former students, among them Edith Thayer Cromwell...

Beautiful oil on canvas from the end of the 19th century figuring the portrait of a young woman. The painting is signed Y Pol on the bottom left . The artist in his performance perfe...

The Education of Achilles by the Centaur Chiron Signed and dated "A.C. Chrétien 1861" (lower right) Oil on canvas A masterpiece of French N...

Blue Chroma, by Jose Ricardo Contreras González From the Movies series Oil on canvas 30 cm. H x 25 W cm. Unframed José Ricardo Cont...

Academic style figurative portrait painting of a handsome young man against a grey background "Gio Taking Off His Singlet", By Mark Beard as Bruce Sargeant (pseudonym in homage to the fashion photographer, Bruce Weber, and figurative painter, John Singer Sargent) 14 x 11 inches 18.5 x 15.5 inches framed Excellent condition Signed by the artist, upper left "B. Sargeant" This vertical, portrait painting of a young man was made by Mark Beard under his fictitious artistic persona, Bruce Sargeant. Painted in a modern Academic style, the handsome man is posed stoically against a pale grey background as he gingerly removes his wrestling singlet...

Léon François Comerre 1850-1916 French L'odalisque à l'éventail (The Odalisque with the Fan) Signed "Léon Comerre" (upper left) Oil on canvas Combinin...

‘Hera’ by Eduard Niczky (1850-1919). The painting - which depicts the Greek queen of the gods in golden diadem and yellow robe - is signed by the artist and hangs in a newly commis...

Oil on canvas

Olga Sazykina (b. 1990) Russian painter and artist. In the years 2011-2013, she studied in the field of painting under the direction of V. Nevzorov, then in the years 2013-2016 at th...

Beautiful female nude in profile. European, ca. 1920-30. Oil on canvas, 31.5 x 35.75 inches; 35.5 x 39.75 inches framed. Sign indistinctly upper right. A few areas of paint loss (v...