Online Paintings

Exasperated by the demands of his sitters, Sargent proclaimed portraiture to be “a pimp’s profession” and by 1907 resolved never to accept another oil paintings portrait commission. During his later years, the fine art reproduction artist devoted himself to creating decorative murals for public buildings and to oil paintings watercolors and small canvases purely for pleasure.

In 1911 Sargent vacationed with his sister’s family in Switzerland, where he painted Nonchaloir (“nonchalance”). A casual character study instead of a formal oil paintings portrait, it depicts Sargent’s niece Rose-Marie Ormond Michel, whom he nicknamed “Intertwingle” because of her agile, intertwined poses. Influenced by the “fine art for art’s sake” movement, the oil painter unified the color scheme with the amber light of a lazy afternoon. The straight lines of the posh furnishings in the Swiss hotel accentuate the swift brushstrokes used to delineate his niece’s fingers, hair, cashmere shawl, and satin skirt.

Late in life, Sargent also returned to landscapes oil paintings, working almost exclusively outdoors. He spent the autumn of 1908 relaxing on the Spanish island of Majorca. Valdemosa, Majorca: Thistles and Herbage on a Hillside is a tour de force of Sargent’s brushwork. Against the sandy soil, the sunny highlights that gleam from roots and twigs create abstract networks of white paintings.

Although best known for his fashionable formal portraits, Oil paintings, Fine art gallery reproductions John Singer Sargent was equally adept at landscapes paintings and scenes of daily life. His early fame and astonishing facility with a brush prompted the American expatriate novelist Henry James, his close friend, to comment on “the slightly 'uncanny' spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.”

Another of Sargent’s friends was the French impressionist Claude Monet, with whom he shared a love of painting en plein air, or out-of-doors. Street in Venice, created during the second of Sargent's numerous visits to that city, was done on the spot. Mediterranean sunshine penetrates the narrow confines of the Calle Larga dei Proverbi, a back alley near the Grand Canal.

The emptiness of the silent street implies that Sargent depicted siesta, the time when many Italians rest for three hours at midday. One of two men conversing in the shadows is distracted by a girl strolling alone. Her skirt’s rustling hem and shawl’s flowing fringe are rendered with indistinct strokes that suggest her rapid pace will soon carry her beyond his lingering gaze. This combination of technical skill and emotional intensity goes far toward explaining why Sargent received more honors and medals than any previous artist, European or American.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, seat of Mecklenburg County, on September 2, 1911, Romare Bearden, an oil painters grew up in a middle-class, African American family. Both parents Bessye and Howard were college-educated, and it was expected that Romare would achieve success in life. About 1914, his family joined the Great Migration of southern blacks to points north and west. Although slavery had been abolished during the early part of the 20th century, Jim Crow laws kept many blacks from voting and from equal access to jobs, education, health care, business, land, and more. Like many southern black families, the Beardens settled in Harlem section of New York City. Romare would call New York home base for the rest of his life.

Throughout his childhood, Bearden spent time away from Harlem, staying with relatives in Mecklenburg County, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Lutherville, Maryland. Bearden's memory of these experiences, as well as African American cultural history, would become the subjects of many of his works. Trains, roosters, oil paintings, fine art gallery reproductions, cats, landscapes, barns, and shingled shacks reflected the rural landscape of his early childhood and summer vacations. Scenes of his grandparents' boardinghouse, bellowing steel mills, and African American millworkers recalled his Pittsburgh memories.

In Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, Bearden reflects on his childhood memories of Mecklenburg County. There is a focus or elevation of the everyday that becomes a frequent motif in both his North Carolina and Harlem imagery. Bearden employed a variety of media to create this collage, including cuttings from magazines, sample catalogs, wallpaper, art reproductions, oil paintings and painted papers. Parts of the surface have also been reworked with spray oil paint and charcoal or graphite. Over the next thirty years, Bearden's collages would continue to evolve, employing flat areas of color defined by cut papers as wells as more patterned or textured areas created by cuttings of preprinted images, hand-painted papers, foils, and fabrics. Surface manipulation was also an ongoing concern for the oil painting artist, who explored news ways to rework the surface, including the use of bleach or peroxide, sandpaper, and perhaps even an electric eraser.

Although Bearden is best-known for his work in collage he achieved success in a staggering array of media, including watercolor, gouache, oil, painting, drawing, monotype, edition prints, photography, designs for record albums, costumes and stage sets, book illustration, and one known wood sculpture.

As a freelance reporter sketching the Civil War’s front lines for newspapers and magazines, Winslow Homer developed an incisive candor. His debut as an oil painter occurred in the spring of 1863, with the enthusiastically reviewed exhibition of Home, Sweet Home. Two Union infantrymen pause while a military band plays the familiar ballad, reminding them poignantly that their campsite is neither sweet nor home. The conflict of 1861-1865 changed American society profoundly. With men gone to combat, women managed family businesses and assumed professional roles, such as teaching. These newly independent women, working or relaxing, figure prominently in Homer’s postwar subjects.

Homer treated many of his favorite motifs in serial format, creating variations in different media. The Dinner Horn depicts a farm maid who also appears in two other oil paintings, Original oil paintings, oil painting on canvas, fine art gallery reproductions as well as in an illustration in Harper’s Weekly. A crisp autumn sunshine is imparted by the bright shadows on her dress and the colorful flutter of leaves blowing across the grass. As she summons the field hands for their meal, a gust of wind reveals a provocative bit of petticoat and her shapely ankles. The Red School House, showing a solemn young teacher clutching her book, is among his many scenes of country schools. As one personification of a season, Autumn alludes to fashionable attire and, thus, to modern life.