Guillaume Seignac

Solitude

1816-1918

French Academic painter Guillaume Seignac was renowned for his masterful treatment of the idealized nude. His languishing female subjects based on Greco-Roman prototypes were and rem...

This compelling portrait of Salome was composed by the French painter Marie Felix Hippolyte-Lucas. While the celebrated artist's oeuvre is filled with bright and cheerful portraits of aristocratic women surrounded by florals, here he takes a different approach. Hippolyte-Lucas' Salome is simultaneously exotic and highly modern, rendered in a style that is both theatrical and bold. The monumental work's rich color palette is filled with gem-inspired hues that lend drama to the scene, highlighting the blatant sexuality of this legendary seductress. Though Salome is not named in the New Testament, she has appeared time and time again in art and literature over the centuries, as both an innocent and a seductress. Her mother, Herodias, resented John the Baptist, who denounced her marriage to King Herod as unlawful. At one evening meal, Salome danced...

the most important American Impressionists of his age. While many of his contemporaries focused on the landscape, Frieseke gained his inspiration from the figural, and in particular the theme of femininity. His works capture female figures engaging in traditionally feminine roles — strolling in the garden or posed in a domestic interior. At the Mirror...

Guillaume Seignac 1870-1924 | French Mutine Signed “G. Seignac” (lower right) Oil on canvas A mischievous maiden dominates this garden scene by French Academic artist Guillaume ...

French Academic painter Louis-Joseph Courtat displays his mastery of composition and the female form in this entrancing oil on canvas. Entitled Baigneuses, the work was painted for and exhibited at the 1885 Paris Salon, the foremost exhibition of painters in the Western world. Large in size, it captures two nude bathers within a tranquil beach scene. While the artist's skill for landscape painting is on display, it is his command of form, light and color that bring this canvas to life. The artist specialized in paintings that glorified the nude, and his skill is clear in the luminosity of his models' skin and the classical beauty of their form and proportions. With their soft, undulating curves and flowing hair, Courtat's models reflect the two key influences on the young painter, that of the great Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres as well as his teacher Alexandre Cabanel. Like these two greats who came before him, Courtat similarly follows in the artistic tradition of the female nude that is traceable to classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. Born in Paris in 1847, Courtat studied at the famed École des Beaux-Arts under Cabanel. He was one of the Academic master's first students at the school, where he began to teach in 1864. Displaying considerable skill at an early age, Courtat won the Prix de Rome around 1870, and subsequently studied in Rome for a number of years. He returned to Paris in 1873 to make his debut at the Salon, where he was met with immediate success, receiving a third class medal. He received medals again in 1874 and 1875, a remarkable achievement for a painter of his age. In addition to the monumental nudes...

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...

C.BRIAND Young Lady With Cupid in The Park Oil on canvas circa 1880 signed low right Old Frame gilded with leaves Size canvas : 65 X 55 cm Size frame : 93 X 82 cm

Mathilde LEHAUT (1816- nc) Cherubs Musicians in oval pair Two Oils on wood signed low Framed by Gault (Paris) - Gold leaves Dim wood panel (each) : 27 ...

Julius EXNER (Copenhagen, 1825 - Copenhagen, 1910) Model stripping Oil on canvas H. 122 cm; L. 74 cm Signed and dated 1842 lower right Exhibition: most likely Charlottenborg Salon of 1845, under number 110, titled Modelfigur, awarded with a silver medal Provenance: Emilio Fernando Bolt (c.1860 - 1944), acquired from the artist around 1900, then by descent Our painting was produced as part of the summer sessions organized between 1839 and 1850 by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853), the master of Danish painting of the first half of the 19th century, in his private studio-apartment on the ground floor. floor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. The master brought together a few students there between June and September, rented one or two models for the season, which were painted from different angles, the artists (including Eckersberg himself) sitting side by side. Eckersberg used to paint a fairly small version, the pupils of the larger formats. The work fits more generally into the legendary context of the research and reforms carried out by Eckersberg concerning the studies of nudes and in particular of female nudes, to make this exercise a genre of painting in its own right. Following his two-year stint in Jacques-Louis David's studio in Paris in 1811, Eckersberg had been made aware of work on the nude and in particular on live models, in natural light, while in Denmark the drawings were then only made from casts of antique models or other mannequins. In 1822, when he had been a professor there since 1818, it was he who had the Royal Academy of Copenhagen authorize the study of nudes, no longer in the evening by candlelight, but in natural light; from 1833, it was still he who allowed students to work on nude female models, even if the official authorization of the Academy did not take place until 1839. It was this same year that he instituted his summer sessions, on a private basis, to orient his painting and that of his students towards a new conception of the representation of models: even if the nude remains the real theme, it does not however, this is more than just an academic exercise. The subject is placed in a contemporary interior, with a rather sophisticated decor, and occupied with an intimate activity (it is this type of intimate vein that we will find later in Degas or Cassatt for example); thus in our painting, the young woman is supposed to take off her clothes to wash. The objective is that the viewer forgets that the master and his students are painting a model during a posing session, and that he instead has the impression of being alone with the model, but invisible, almost like a voyeur in spite of himself. Moreover, in these paintings, the model never looks towards the spectator, inducing a psychological distance with him, whereas model and artist are actually physically very close. On the other hand, it is not a question of idealized nudes either, even if Eckersberg, proof of his debt to the antique, chooses fairly classic models and poses. The sensuality is real and very present, with dreamy, even innocent, and timeless expressions (the models do not seem to have a defined age), suave and slow attitudes and movements, and especially with clothes that hide or reveal skillfully parts of the female body: upper buttocks, pronounced hips... Made by an artist under 20, our sensual painting is probably one of the most beautiful and spectacular produced by the students of Eckersberg during these summer sessions. With a perfect balance between the firmness of an ancient statue (it recalls the Venus de Milo) and the softness of the feminine forms, highlighted by a harmonious palette, it captures the attention with many details: the almost photographic folds white clothing...

Alejandro Casanova Entanglement in Red and Blue 130 x 89 cm oil on canvas The Spanish artist Alejandro Casanova lives and works in Tenerife, where ...

Alejandro Casanova Playing around 100 x 100 cm oil on canvas The Spanish artist Alejandro Casanova lives and works in Tenerife, where he moved afte...

Artwork unframed 60 x 50 x 3 cm What are people's criteria for judging beauty? A beautiful face? A different existence? A feeling of pleasure? Or just follow what others say and make yourself feel the same way? People say the Winged Victory is very beautiful. Admirers come to the Louvre from all over the world. A lot of them just to take a picture to prove they saw it and say to friends, look, this is Winged Victory, how beautiful! Is it really that beautiful in her mind ? not necessarily. If it has head, do you still think it is beautiful? I am afraid many people will have a negative opinion. What is it that blurs the eyes of human beings and makes people's judgments of beauty vary widely? The painting uses knife...