Hopper- Nighthawks

This most famous of Hopper’s pieces of work was apparently painted just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. A melancholic time, reflected in the depiction of an empty street. This painting has a very solitary and lonely feeling to it.

“Nighthawk” may be Hopper’s take on the term “Night Owl”, used to describe someone who stays up especially late. The scene was inspired by a diner (since demolished) in Greenwich Village, Hopper’s home neighborhood in Manhattan. The now-vacant lot is known as Mulry Square, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue, and West 11th Street.

Sister Wendy, the nun and incongruous art critic, said of the piece: “Apparently, there was a period when every college dormitory in the country had on its walls a poster of Hopper’s Nighthawks; it had become an icon.”

Magritte’s Empire of Light

In Empire of Light, Magritte’s intention is to play on the fundamental understanding of life. Where
there are clear blue skies there is usually light
on the ground. Here the darkened ground is
unusually dark, more so than it would appear if the sky was dark and just the moon was shining. The bright sky and its association with clarity instead becomes unsettling giving over to the feelings that are usually associated with the darkness. The bizarre subject is treated in an impersonal, precise style, typical of veristic Surrealist painting and preferred by Magritte since the mid-1920s.

Sargent El Jaleo

The sensual energy of Sargent’s El Jaleo is both primal and contagious in all its glory. This painting shouts out to the viewer, “Party!” We are seeing a dance at the very peak of the song which has reached its zenith in energy. Sargent captures the movement and passion in the woman’s dress which is controlled by her fleeting hand. The woman is stomping her heels to the floor in time with the guitarists. The audience are in rapture and clapping their hands in the background along with the main character who is now in full swing. Her shadow projected on the wall just adds to the larger than life character created here. This painting cuts the scene well, screaming with positive figurative energy and movement. In my opinion this is one of Sargent’s finest pieces and he painted some fine ones!

Hiroshige - Man on Horseback Crossing a Bridge.

This print, the first from the set of landscape images that Hiroshige produced of his city and the surrounding rural areas was ground breaking stuff and just what the artist became infamous for. His solid construction type compositions, with their use of dynamic diagonal lines, add to that the romance within each image and you have a hugely influential artist who rightly so, marked their place in art history.

Van Gogh, to mention just one artist, was immensely inspired by the works of Hiroshige and created his own series of oriental prints which now hang in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. Needless to say, The Scream by Edward Munch followed similar rules of composition.

Turner, J. M. W. - The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken

In 2005, The Fighting Temeraire was voted the greatest painting in a British art gallery.
This wonderful painting by one of Britain’s greatest painters combines strength and power with fatigue and gracefulness. The blood red sunset shining down on the broken beams of this once magnificent ship is now tugged along the River Thames to its final resting place. Interestingly, the great ship is not the central focus point of the painting but is set to the left rising into the sunset majestically. It is the soot covered tug boat which is centre stage and, (incidentally) has always reminded me of big fat bug.

Before being broken up, the ship had been lying in the Chatham Dockyard as a hulk, having been used for a time as a prison ship. It had no masts or rigging or other superstructure, as depicted in the painting.

Thomas Eakins, 1875 The Gross Clinic

This painting by Eakins is admired for its totally uncompromising realism and also its portrayal of the inside of a surgical theatre which hadn’t previously been documented until the painting was displayed to the public. it was with great intrigue that people at the time would (and still do) view this painting to understand two things. Firstly, what surgery looked like when underway in the nineteenth century and secondly, (because surgery was usually solely associated with amputations) the healing nature of surgery. A ground breaking documentative painting in its day,

Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii

The Oath of the Horatiii is an extremely important paintingin the body of Jacques-Louis David work and in the history of French painting.

The story behind the painting dates back to 669 B.C and was taken from Titus-Livy. It was a time of war between Rome and Albait. It was decided that the dispute between each city would be settled by combat between two groups of brothers, the three Curiatii brothers and the three Horatii brothers. A sister of the Curiatii, Sabina, was actually married to one of the Horatti brothers and another sister, that of the Horatti brothers, Camilla, was married to a Curiatii. In here the drama lies. Despite the family ties and the lamentations of the women, the Horratti brother’s were ordered to combat by their father.

Giuseppe Arcimbold’s Winter 1573

The weird and wonderful works of Arcimboldo were left for centuries until rediscovered by the surrealists such as like Salvador Dalí in the 20th century, proving that Giuseppe’s concepts were so far ahead of themselves at the time. There really was nothing else like this in art before, or at the time and it wasn’t until some four hundred years later that the surrealist theme would once again be picked up on. Arcimboldo’s influence can also be seen in the work of Shigeo Fukuda, István Orosz, Octavio Ocampo, and Sandro del Prete, as well as the films of Jan Švankmajer. His painting, Water, was used as the cover of the album Masque by the progressive rock band Kansas.