Mid-19th Century Nude Paintings

French 19' century painting oil on canvas . Young Venus nude figure surrounded by delicious playing putti . Finely carved and gilt-wood frame of the same period . Measurements w...

This beautiful British mid 19th century oil on board painting is by Edward William Wyon. It was painted in 1843 when Wyon would have been in his early thirties. The composition is a ...

Outstanding Mid 19th century old master "Susanna and the Elders" after Martinelli Brilliant old master painting of Susanna and the Elders. Original oil on canvas. Dimensions 26.5" ...

Work on canvas

French 19' century painting oil on canvas . Young Venus nude figure surrounded by delicious playing putti . Finely carved and gilt-wood frame of the same period . Measurements w...

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...

Even if placed in one of the poses conventionally adopted in the Academy for exercises in copying nudes, the elderly model treated here is studied with the anatomic sensibility to ho...

Artist: Eugenio Agneni Title: Diptych “The Cries of Fire”; “The Voices of the Stream”, c. 1865-71. Medium: oil on canvas mounted on wood, cm 128 x 60 each Signature: Signed at the bottom on the base of the frames provenance: Marquis Corsi Salviati; Rome, private collection The two canvases mounted on wooden supports are clearly attributable to Eugenio Agneni (Sutri, 1816 - Rome, 1879), a paradigmatic figure of an Italian painter of the Risorgimento years who combined a successful and continuous international artistic activity with an intense political and military activity, starting from the Roman effervescence following the election of Pius IX to the Mentana expedition and then in the early years of Rome as capital city, a period in which he held various administrative posts. The clarity of attribution of the works derives not only from the large central inscription inserted in the elaborate neo-Gothic scenic layout that encloses the two works in a diptych, but also from the direct kinship that links them to the cycle of frescoes painted between 1865 and 1868 for Marquis Antonio Maria Corsi Salviati in the reception hall of the family villa in Sesto Fiorentino. Agneni resided more or less permanently in the Florentine area between 1863 and 1871 after a phase of European-wide wanderings that began at the end of the Roman republican experience of 1849, in which he was involved to the point of having to hide for some time from July of that year at the home of Marquis Salviati, whom he therefore already knew before his subsequent move to Florence. The need to stay away from Italy, as well as his connections with Mazzinian exiles and evidently also a proven ability to reinvent himself in different cultural spheres allowed Agneni to profitably frequent the artistic scenes of London and Paris, cities in which he lived and worked, obtaining commissions of absolute importance (he decorated several rooms at Buckingham Palace, the Covent Garden Opera and the Louvre), and presenting his works at the Royal Academy in London. Therefore, if we are to keep faith with the remarks of his friend Luigi Calamatta ("you are full of money...

Classical 19th century French Nude of a lady in the Barbizon Forest landscape. Richet spent much of his adult life in Paris. It was there that he met and became a student of Jules L...