William Alexander Witherington

Gathering Hops, British Realist, William A. Witherington, Genre, Figural

Henri van Seban was born in Brussels in 1825. He was a pupil at the Academy of Den Haag, studied with Hubertus van Hove and at the School of Xylography in Den Haag. An accomplished p...

Charles Hunt, Jr. was born in Kensington, London, in 1829 and was part of a dynasty of painters. He was the son of the genre painter Charles Hunt (1803-1877) and father to four sons ...

"Crossing a Stream in the Highlands" featuring children and their dog wading through a mountain stream was painted by the British artist, Edward Holmes, in 1880. Holmes was born in 1841, the brother of renowned Victorian genre painter, George Augustus Holmes...

Marine painter Warren W. Sheppard was born in Greenwich, New Jersey, to a ship captain father who instilled in his son a love and respect for the sea. He studied privately with Mauritz F. H. De Haas and took courses in drawing at Cooper Union in New York City. He traveled along the Mediterranean coast in 1879, sketching the ports of Naples, Gibraltar, Genoa and Messina. Sheppard’s foreign tours continued between 1888 and 1893, with stays in Paris and Venice, where he captured the architecture and busy canals of the Floating City. This fondness for travel also translated to his home country. He sailed along the East Coast from New Jersey to Maine in search of subjects and was an expert navigator, eventually writing the book Practical Navigation. Yacht design became a second career for Sheppard and he participated in a number of sailing competitions himself, most notably winning the New York-to-Bermuda race twice while skipper of the Tamerlane. Sheppard exhibited at the Denver Exposition, Chicago Exposition...

In this small painting I try to enter into the serenity of a private moment of literary contemplation. The work focuses on the essence of the instant, capturing the magic of a woman ...

Gianluca Corona is a still-life and portraiture contemporary Italian painter who looks for the inner truth of what he paints. His beautiful fruits, flowers, vegetables and food subj...

Literary Origins of Angelica The subject of this painting is Angelica, a princess from the epic chivalric romances of the Italian Renaissance. She first appears in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1483) and reappears famously in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532). In these poems – part of the Matter of France cycle of Charlemagne and his paladins – Angelica’s extraordinary beauty ensnares many knights, including Orlando (Roland) and his cousin Rinaldo, sparking rivalries and adventures. Ariosto’s narrative particularly highlights Angelica’s tumultuous journey: at one point she is stripped and chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster (a scene mirroring the myth of Andromeda) before being dramatically rescued by the valiant knight Ruggiero on his winged horse. Ultimately, however, Angelica chooses her own destiny. She falls in love with a humble Saracen soldier, Medoro, whom she nurses back to health, and she returns with him to her far-off Asian kingdom – an affair that drives the heartbroken Orlando to madness. This independent resolution (marrying outside the circle of Christian knights) made Angelica an emblem of feminine agency and romantic idealism in Renaissance literature. Her story remained popular in art and literature through the centuries, symbolizing the allure and elusiveness of love. Kronberg’s Portrayal and Composition In Julius Kronberg...

The artist has divided the image into three vertical bands, reminiscent of a flag, where each section represents a distinct and autonomous reality. On the left, against a vibrant cri...