Emerald Rings And Earring And Broaches

Ralph Peacock was a painter and illustrator born in Wood Green, London on August 14th, 1868. He was trained as a civil servant, but when he was 18 years old, he took art classes at the Lambeth School of Art, attending twice a week in the evenings. John Pettie saw one of his portraits and was so impressed he recommended that Peacock should take up painting professionally. Following his advice, Peacock attended the St John's Wood Art School, where he stayed for a year and then in 1887, he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. Peacock would have been familiar with all the famous contemporary artists of the period such as Sir Frank Dicksee, Lord Frederic Leighton, William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones and Herbert Draper. It was a common practice for artists to exchange models and Mary Lloyd, a professional artist's model, sat for Leighton and Alma Tadema and was introduced to Peacock by Herbert Draper. Peacock painted her in A Study of 1896. Peacock was also good friends with J.W. Godward. The influence of these artists on Peacock in his early years was very strong, and he won a Gold Medal and traveling scholarship from the Royal Academy for his historical painting Victory. He also won the Creswick prize. From 1890, Peacock also did book illustrations, signing his rather lively wash drawings with a flourishing signature or sometimes just 'R.P.' In 1892, he traveled around the Mediterranean and Switzerland. He exhibited his works, winning medals in Vienna in 1898 and Paris at the Exposition Universelle in 1900. By this time, Peacock's main interest was portraiture and he made his career as a very successful portraitist. Holman Hunt was among his sitters but he specialized in elegant society portraits of ladies and children. A double portrait called The Sisters is in the collection of the Tate and Peacock painted this in 1900. The elder of the two girls, Edith Brignall became his wife and they lived with their two sons in Wimbledon. He eventually moved to Camden and died there on January 17th, 1946. Peacock exhibited many society portraits at the Royal Academy and elsewhere and this charming picture is a fine example of the artist's genre. While illustrations by Peacock are widely distributed in the magazines of the day, including Punch, paintings by him are hard to find other than in public collections.

Realist art attempts to portray its subject matter without artifice. Similar to naturalism, authentic realist paintings and prints see an integration of true-to-life colors, meticulous detail and linear perspectives for accurate portrayals of the world. 

Work that involves illusionistic techniques of realism dates back to the classical world, such as the deceptive trompe l’oeil used since ancient Greece. Art like this became especially popular in the 17th century when Dutch artists like Evert Collier painted objects that appeared real enough to touch. Realism as an artistic movement, however, usually refers to 19th-century French realist artists such as Honoré Daumier exploring social and political issues in biting lithographic prints, while the likes of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet painting people — particularly the working class — with all their imperfections, navigating everyday urban life. This was a response to the dominant academic art tradition that favored grand paintings of myth and history. 

By the turn of the 20th century, European artists, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were experimenting with nearly photographic realism in their work, as seen in the attention to every botanical attribute of the flowers surrounding the drowned Ophelia painted by English artist John Everett Millais.

Although abstraction was the guiding style of 20th-century art, the realism trend in American modern art endured in Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and other artists’ depictions of the complexities of the human experience. In the late 1960s, Photorealism emerged with artists like Chuck Close and Richard Estes giving their paintings the precision of a frame of film.

Contemporary artists such as Jordan Casteel, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Aliza Nisenbaum are now using the unvarnished realist approach for honest representations of people and their worlds. Alongside traditional mediums, technology such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and immersive installations are helping artists create new sensations of realism in art.

​​Find authentic realist paintings, sculptures, prints and more art on 1stDibs.

An elegant and sophisticated decorative touch in any living space, portrait paintings have remained popular throughout the years and are widely loved pieces of art for display in many homes today.

Portrait paintings are at least as old as ancient Egypt, where realistic, lifelike depictions of the recently deceased — commonly known as “mummy portraits” — were painted on wooden panels and affixed to mummies as part of the burial tradition.

For centuries, painters have used portraiture as a means of expressing a subject’s nobility, societal status and authority. Portraits were given as gifts in Renaissance Europe, and a portrait artist might have been commissioned to help mark a significant occasion such as a wedding or a promotion to high office. Prior to the advent of photography, which eventually replaced painted portraits as a quicker and more efficient way of capturing a person’s essence, the subject of a portrait had to sit for hours until the painter had finished. And during the 18th century in particular, if an artist commissioned for a portrait struggled with how to adequately memorialize and capture a subject’s likeness, sometimes a portrait painting wasn’t completed for up to a year.

Whether it’s part of the gallery-style approach to your living-room or dining-room walls or merely inspiration as you devise an eye-grabbing color scheme in your home, a portrait painting is a timeless decorative object for any interior. A landscape painting or sculpture might give you the kind of insight into a specific region of the world or a different culture that you can ascertain only through art. Similarly, when you take the time to learn about the subject of a portrait painting that you bring into your home — the sitter’s history, the relationship between the sitter and the artist should one exist, the story of how the portrait came to be — that work can become intensely personal in addition to its place as an object for an art-hungry corner of your apartment or house.

On 1stDibs, visit a vast collection of famous portrait paintings or works by emerging artists. Search by medium to find the right portrait paintings for your home in oil paint, synthetic resin paint and more. Find portrait paintings in a variety of styles, too, including contemporary, Impressionist and Pop art, or search by artist to find unique works created by painters such as Mark Beard, Steve Kaufman and Montse Valdés.