Online Paintings

In 1876, Eakins joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Painted the same year, Baby at Play depicts Ella Crowell, the artist’s two-and-one-half-year-old niece, in the side yard of his own Philadelphia home. Ella is totally absorbed with alphabet blocks, having cast aside her ball, doll, and toy horse and cart.

In accord with late nineteenth-century attitudes about education, she has progressed from infantile pursuits to more advanced stages of development. By stacking up the blocks, the child practices language and motor skills. Eakins communicates his niece’s serious concentration by arranging her into a solid, pyramidal mass that is nearly life-size and aligned geometrically with the toys, blocks, and paved walk. The brown bricks show Eakins' expertise in mechanical drafting and, with the dark shrubbery, set off Ella’s sunlit figure.

Eakins’ skill in modeling with light and shadow also marks three small oil studies in the National Gallery of Art. These quick life sketches of African-American subjects are the same size as their final pictures. Two relate to Negro Boy Dancing of 1878, a watercolor now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. For an oil painting of 1908 now in The Brooklyn Museum, Eakins made The Chaperone, in which an old servant knits while a young girl poses nude for a fine art sculptor.

In the decade following the Civil War, rowing became one of America’s most popular spectator sports. When its champions, the Biglin brothers of New York, visited Philadelphia in the early 1870s, Thomas Eakins made numerous paintings and drawings of them and other racers. Here, the bank of the Schuylkill River divides the composition in two. The boatmen and the entering prow of a competing craft fill the lower half with their immediate, large-scale presence. The upper and distant half contains a four-man rowing crew, crowds on the shore, and spectators following in flagdecked steamboats.

Himself an amateur oarsman and a friend of the Biglins, Eakins portrays John with his blade still feathered, almost at the end of his return motion. Barney, a split-second ahead in his stroke, watches for his younger brother’s oar to bite the water. Both ends of the Biglins’ pair-oared boat project beyond the picture’s edges, generating a sense of urgency, as does the other prow jutting suddenly into view.

The precision of Eakins’ style reflects his upbringing as the son of a teacher of penmanship. He studied under academic artists in Paris and traveled in Europe from 1866 to 1870. To further his understanding of anatomy, Eakins participated in dissections at Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College in 1872-1874.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, though a near contemporary of both Homer and Eakins, was a very different sort of oil painter. Hermitlike and visionary, he explored biblical, literary, and mythological themes. His Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens was inspired by Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelungs. Ryder claimed, “I had been to hear the opera and went home about twelve o’clock and began this picture. I worked for forty-eight hours without sleep or food.” Nevertheless, when he exhibited the canvas in New York in 1891, he had been revising it for three years.

Lit by an eerie moon, the Rhine River nymphs recoil in horror when they realize that the German warrior Siegfried possesses their stolen, magic ring. After he refuses to return it, they predict that he will die violently. To evoke impending doom, Ryder devised tortured shapes, crusty textures, and an unearthly green color scheme.

John Sloan, once a newspaper illustrator in Philadelphia, became a painter at the urging of Robert Henri and moved to New York. The apparent spontaneity in Sloans City from Greenwich Village is deceptive. Noting it was “painted from memory,” Sloan made more preparatory studies for this canvas than for any of his other pictures.

One pencil sketch shows the elevated train tracks at the slight angle they would create from a sixth-story rooftop. In the final oil painting, the railway is pushed down at a steeper perspective, opening the foreground into a vast space of reflections off wet pavement. The soaring Woolworth Building dominates the distant skyscrapers. Since that shimmering vision actually would not have been visible from this low level, the skyline derives from other studies done at higher elevations.

Sloan described the personally meaningful site: “Looking south over lower Sixth Avenue from the roof of my Washington Place studio, on a winter evening. The distant lights of the great office buildings downtown are seen in the gathering darkness. The triangular loft building on the right had contained my studio for three years before.”

This idyllic scene illustrates an episode from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, published in 1590. The lengthy Elizabethan poem concerns a Christian soldier’s search for Truth. Early in his quest, the knight encounters two lovely personifications of virtue. Faith, gowned in purest white and surrounded by a halo of divine light, holds a chalice with a serpent she need not fear. Hope, garbed in heavenly blue, carries a small anchor that recalls the biblical mention of hope “as an anchor of the soul.” To quote Spenser, the Red Cross Knight himself wears “on his brest a bloudie Crosse.”

The models were the oil painting artist’s own handsome children, now seventeen years older than when they posed for The Copley Family. John, the boy hugging his mother in that oil painting, is the Red Cross Knight. Elizabeth, the daughter standing in the center of the family portrait, is Faith, and Mary, the infant on the sofa, is Hope. The Red Cross Knight, Copley’s only oil painting inspired by literature, was shown at the Royal Academy in 1793.

On 7 April 1778, William Pitt, the first earl of Chatham, rose to speak in the House of Lords. In the midst of debate about the colonial revolutionaries, he suffered a stroke. The earl’s death removed one of Britain’s leading political moderates during the critical years of the American War of Independence. This small oil painting is Copley’s preliminary compositional sketch for a large oil on canvas now in the Tate Gallery, London.

In proper academic procedure, Copley first used browns and grays to work out the overall distribution of the scene before considering the color scheme and details. Sunshine pours in from a roundel window over the throne canopy, spotlighting the stricken Pitt. The pencil lines drawn over this study create a proportional grid called “squaring” that enabled the fine artist to transfer and enlarge the fine art reproduction design. In 1781, after two years’ work, Copley installed his ten-foot-wide picture in a pavilion and charged admission to his popular one-work show. How Copley had persuaded fifty-five noblemen to sit for their oil portraits became the talk of British society.

This gripping pictorial drama resulted from a collaboration between Copley and Brook Watson, a former English sailor. When Watson was fourteen in 1749, he had been attacked by a shark while swimming in the harbor at Havana, Cuba. The blood in the water proves that Watson already has lost his right foot. Rushing to his aid, his shipmates register many different reactions, ranging from heroism to horror. Watson fails to catch a rope hurled by a West Indian. Meanwhile, boathook poised, a harpooner takes aim at the man-eating monster. Copley grouped the rescuers into a dynamic composition that forms the silhouette of a sharply thrusting triangle.

Brook Watson bequeathed the oil painting to a London orphanage, where it conveyed the reassuring moral that anyone can succeed through “activity and exertion”—as stated by the biographical plaque on the original frame. In spite of being orphaned himself and also disabled, Watson had earned ennoblement as a baronet.

The depiction of a noteworthy event in an ordinary person’s life was an American innovation. European oil painters normally restricted such harrowing scenes to saints' martyrdoms. This unusual oil on canvas caused a sensation that assured Copley’s international reputation after its exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1778. A full-scale replica that the artist painted for himself is in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts Reproductions.

An instructor at the Boston Museum school, Frank Benson created lovely daydreams of women and children frolicking outdoors. One of his daughters recalled their family vacations in North Haven, Maine: "Papa would often have us put on our best white dresses and then ask us to sit in the grass or play in the woods. We thought it was so silly and the maids made such a fuss when they saw the clothes afterwards."

These modeling sessions resulted in such idyllic works as Summer of 1909, now in the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. In that breezy grouping, Margaret Strong, a seventeen-year-old neighbor, looks uphill toward three other girls who, in turn, converse with her or peer out to sea. Delighted with Benson's art portrayal of their daughter and also anticipating her forthcoming marriage, Margaret's parents asked him to paint her individually just as she had posed in Summer.

In a very daring maneuver for a commissioned portrait, Benson left Margaret's face still turned away from the sun. He did modify the design by raising the beach line of the distant cape so that, here, it would not cut across her profile. Her striking, coppery red hair frames her head, keys into the warm tan grass, and complements the blue Atlantic and the cool, iridescent shadows. Above all, the dazzling virtuosity of Benson's rapid brushwork captures attention.

Peale was a major figure in both art and science during America's revolutionary and federal periods. In 1786 he converted the painting gallery attached to his Philadelphia home into a museum of "Natural Curiosities." Peale's enthusiasm for learning was such that he named most of his seventeen children after famous scientists or painters.

In 1788 the Lamings of Maryland commissioned Peale to paint this double portrait. In addition to working on the picture, which incorporates a "view of part of Baltimore Town," Peale studied natural history and collected specimens while in residence at the Lamings' suburban estate. Peale's diary records his progress from 18 September, when he "sketched out the design" after dinner, to 5 October, when he added the finishing touches "and made the portrait much better."

Peale cleverly devised a leaning posture for the husband so that his portly figure would not overshadow his petite wife. This unusual, reclining attitude binds the couple together and tells of their love. The spyglass and exotic parrot may indicate Laming's mercantile interest in foreign shipping. Mrs. Laming's fruit and flowers, although symbols of fertility, might refer to her own gardening activities. The detailed attention to the bird, plants, scenery, telescope, and complicated poses attests to Peale's encyclopedic range of interests.

The history of Western art painting represent an incessant, however disrupted, custom from ancient times. Until the early on 20th century it relied mainly on representative and Classical motif, after which time more merely theoretical and abstract modes gained favor.

Originally serving religious patronage, Western art painting later on found audience in the nobility and the middle group. From the Middle Ages throughout the resurgence art painters works for the church and a rich aristocracy. Start with the Baroque era artist received confidential commission from a more cultured and rich middle class. By the 19th century western art painters became unconventional from the demands of their benefaction to only depict scene from mythology, portraiture, religion or history. The thought "art for art's sake" began to find appearance in the work of western art painters like John Constable, Francisco de Goya, as well as J.M.W. Turner.

Developments in Western art painting in history parallel those in Eastern painting, in common a few centuries later. Indian art, Chinese art, African art, Islamic art as well as Japanese art each had momentous influence on Western art painting.