Helene Schjerfbeck was born on July 10, 1862, into an originally Swedish family living in Helsinki when Finland was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. At 4 years old the toddler Helene fell down a flight of stairs and injured her hip. The fall left her with a distinct and life-long...
Art & Design.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s life, and his art rose and fell with the two world wars. W W1 would lead him to his spirit place and his mojo. World War 2 would would see his work vilified. Born in 1880 in Aschaffenburg, Germany, the wildly creative Ernst Ludwig Kirchner studied architecture in...
Breitner sought social realism in his work. He was one of the first artists to use photos as studies for specific paintings, not just of street scenes but in the studio as well. He integrated this perspective into his studio portraits by making a point of employing working class models. One...
In 1873, Ogawa Kazumasa (1860-1929) a 13 year old Tokyo schoolboy from a family of Samurai was introduced to photography by a British missionary. Enthused, he bought himself a second-hand camera and it seems it never left his hands. His career moved quickly. After leaving school he started an apprenticeship locallywith...
If you lived in France for the 2 years between 1897 & 1899, every month, for 3 francs and 50 centimes, you could pick up your monthly installment of L’Estampe Moderne which would contain 4 original high quality lithographs. This monthly treat was printed and published by Imprimerie Champenois of Paris...
The French artist, Jean-Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) had a reticent and introspective nature so the subject of the interior served as a symbol for his interior self, separate from the rest of the world. This is an aspect of a modernist idea – the notion that one’s personal viewpoint, a subjective view...
Born in 1853, the same year as Van Gogh, Ferdinand Hodler didn’t have the easiest start in life. His father scraped a meagre living as a carpenter & his mother was of peasant stock. By the time he was 8 years old, he’d lost his father and 2 younger brothers to...
Born Johann Heinrich Füssli, Henry Fuseli (1741 – 1825), the second of 18 children to a Swiss painter, had a unique life journey forged by strange events. In Switzerland, shortly taking holy orders as a Protestant minister in 1762, and together with his friend the poet, philosopher, fellow minister, ex-schoolmate and...
“A charming story of a sweet adolescent love” or Histoire charmante de l’adolescente sucre d’amour is a love story set in the Middle East. It was written in 1927 by one Dr. Joseph-Charles Mardrus (1868-1949), who described himself as “Muslim by birth and Parisian by accident.” Born in Egypt and educated...
The Swiss born French painter, wood engraver, printer, editor, bookbinder and illustrator François-Louis Schmied (1873-1941), was all about quality and definitely not quantity. He had an unusual modus operandi for a painter. He produced books. Extremely rare books. A Schmied book was extremely expensive and time consuming to produce and was...
With Goltzius there’s no need to think about it too much. Nearly five hundred years later, you can still see and feel it. Authentic genius. Mastery. Hendrick Goltzius, or Hendrik (1558–1617), was a German-born Dutch printmaker, draftsman, and painter. He was the best Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period. He...
The work of French painter Georges Valmier (1885-1937) encompassed the great movements in the history of modern painting, starting with Impressionism in his early years, then Cubism which he discovered when he was around 25 years old, and finally Abstractionism from 1921. He also designed sets and costumes for theater and...
So much of the very best painterly talent in has been squandered on grand military scenes, battles and victories: pompous portraits of royals, noble people and generals: and insipid genre scenes. It comes as a pleasant surprise when amongst all this wallpaper, accomplished as it may be, we discover a small...
Born into a family of peasants living in Austria’s mountainous Tyrol region, Karl von Blass (1815-1894), went on to become a painter known for his portraits and religious compositions executed on canvas as well as in the form of huge frescoes in prominent churches. Amongst all the religiousity and historical pomposity...
Jan Harmensz. Muller. The technically gifted and royally well connected master enrgraver of Haarlem.
A gifted engraver and draughtsman, Jan Harmensz. Muller (1571–1628) was the son of Harmen Jansz. Muller, a printmaker and art dealer who ran a successful Amsterdam print publishing business. Muller became his father’s pupil and was hugely inspired and influenced by the work of Hendrick Goltzius, in whose Haarlem studio he...
Adalbert Stifter was an Austrian writer, painter and poet closely associated with the Biedermeier, a movement that originated in Vienna. After studying at the University of Vienna, he worked as a tutor for aristocratic families before becoming a supervisor of elementary schools. As a teacher he was super strict, a “pedagogue”....
During the mid-Edo period of 1603-1867, Japan sealed itself off from the world outside and was ruled by the Tokugawa, a feudal military shogunate of samurai. The shoganate forged a stronghold over the 300 regional daimyō, feudal lords with vast hereditary land holdings. This made for 250 years of stability, a...
The undersung French artist Paul Berthon (1872-1910) studied under two of the great Parisian Art Nouveau artists of the time, Luc-Oliver Merson and Eugène Grasset. Grasset in particular, became something of a mentor to him. Berthon’s studies of the decorative arts had an influence on his printmaking as did the strong lines...
The island of Helgøya, in Hedmark county, Norway is has an area of 18.3 km² and is the largest fresh-water island in the country. It was in this unlikely setting that Peder Andersen was born. He grew up on the mainland, in Ringsaker and from the 1820s lived on the Balke family...
There’s scant biographical information on Johann Nepomuk Rauch (1804-1847). He was born in Vienna, Austria, studied at the Vienna Academy and lived in Florence between 1829 and 1831. He then spent about a decade in Moscow. There he lived on commissions for watercolors and paintings, among his patrons were Prince Golitsyn...
Maxfield Parrish was an insanely prolific and popular American painter and illustrator working in the first half of the 20th century. Famous in his day for his almost psychedelically saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery, his career spanned fifty years. His painting Daybreak (1922) is the most popular art print of...
The son of a Evangelical inner-mission parish priest, Danish painter and graphic artist Johannes Holbek was born in a small town called Årby, near Kalundborg, Denmark in 1872. Just thirty one years later he walked into, or was brought into Copenhagen Municipal Hospital’s Sixth Ward suffering with manic-depressive psychosis after a huge...
The multi talented British architect and designer Owen Jones (1809 – 1874), was one of the most influential design and colour theorists of the 19th century. His specialism was in interior decoration but his ideas spanned a huge range of other fields including architecture, wallpaper, furniture, ceramics and textiles, all of...
Kamisaka Sekka was a Kyoto artist born into a Samurai family. He was the last, and greatest proponent of the traditional Rinpa style and was responsible for modernising and re-popularising the old school craft. Rinpa design focussed on design values and historical or natural motifs rather than detailed illustration of contemporary life. In Momoyogusa...
The Victoria Regia; or the Great Water Lily of America, a gigantic water lily, was first discovered along the Amazon River and taken to Britain for cultivation. This so-called “vegetable wonder” was a spectacular flower. Nineteenth century commentators described with amazement the vast dimensions of its floating leaves, which could exceed...
American, 1824 – 1900 William Holbrook Beard (1824 – 1900) came from Plainsville, Ohio to New York via a period studying abroad. In the 1860s he established his own own artist’s studio on Tenth Street in New York City in a building known as the Studio Building. He then began a...
Whilst these woodcut prints (below) by Watanabe Seitei for the art magazine, Bijutsu Sekai (The World of Art) seem surprisingly simple and contemporary, the artist’s background is complex and ancient. In 1851 when the artist now known as Watanabe Shōtei (AKA Watanabe Seitei) was born he was named Yoshikawa Yoshimata and Tokyo didn’t...
Information is sketchy on the German goldsmith, silversmith and engraver, Esaias von Hulsen (1520-1625) who created and published designs in blackwork at the beginning of the 17th century. He was born in Middleburg, a Dutch city located on Walcheren Island and he died in Stuttgart, Germany at 55 years old. The blackwork...
FŐFOTÓ photographic studios of Budapest did all kinds of work in the late 1960s-early 1970s, mostly they shot products, fashion and advertising scenarios. They also photographed something that is now special which at the time was probably a simple chore. FŐFOTÓ had the Budapest Cinema Company (FŐMO) contract to photograph all...
Munich satirical magazine, Der Affenspiegel – “The Monkey Mirror“, launched in 1901, published 20 weekly issues and disappeared the same year. It was always printed in 2 colours which the artists maximised to great effect....
The first issue of the German satirical magazine, Lachen Links (Laughter Left) was published on January 11, 1924. “Ridiculousness kills” was its’s motto. The name, Laughter Left refers to German parliamentary parlance – the laughing at an opponent on the other side of the political spectrum was referred to as to “laugh...
Aleksandr Rodchenko. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Anonymous. Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg. Anonymous....
The ginger hair, blue eyes and pale skin make it very obvious. An European woman in Mughal costume and jewellery. She (unlike the women in the other portraits here) is bare-headed with nothing to cover her hair. Her fingertips are dipped in henna, she wears elaborate jewellery and holds something to...
Peyton Boswell, the art critic and founder of The Art Digest (“America’s news magazine of”) art was asked to write a preface to a program for an exhibition in May 1923, at the Ainslie Galleries at 677, Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. Entitled “American Indians of Canada”, the exhibition was the...
A very rare glimpse at Budapest as seen through the lens of the Hungarian concert pianist and writer, György Sándor (1912 – 2005). In the classical world, Sándor was up there. He recorded piano works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov and Schumann amongst others; he toured the world, playing at New...
Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty (1716–1785) was a French anatomist, painter and printmaker who, as part of his practice, had his own personal human dissectionist. His imagery makes the goriest of today’s horror movies look like Disney. The Marseille born Gautier-d’Agoty, began his career as apprentice to a painter and engraver from Frankfurt...
An anonymous sculptor is working in a Budapest studio in the early 1970s. The studio is bright and airy and the natural light within it makes it an inspirational place to create. He or she takes photographs, or has someone take phorographs, of their works when they are finished. The freshly...
Joseph Schillinger (1895-1945), was a man way ahead of his time. In the 1930’s he wrote that in the not to distant future, old school orchestra instruments will be all but forgotten museum peices. The author of The Schillinger System of Musical Composition and The Mathematical Basis of the Arts maintained...
It began in the early 1860s and as a student in Berlin when German botanist, Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny (1841-1916), started collecting algae samples from southern Europe for his studies. His biological tastes changed over time and he moved on. His specialist subject, and the one he would become famous for, was...
These images are University instructional posters. They come from a series entitled Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911) by Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny (1841-1916). Consisting of 120 lithographs and an accompanying textbook, Botanische Wandtafeln (botanical blackboards), is an epic work of both research and mushroom/fern art that took 37 years of Kny’s life to creatre....
Feted by the hyper rich and influential of the time, Pillement was avidly collected by the famous English actor, David Garrick, and his Austrian wife Eva Maria Weigel and Marie Antoinette employed him to decorate the Petit Trianon, her Neo Classical château on the Versailles Palace grounds. Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728-1808), was...
Arnold Lang (1855 – 1914) was a Swiss naturalist, a comparative anatomist and student of the German biologist, Ernst Haeckel. From 1878 to 1885 he was stationed at the Zoological Station in Naples, where he conducted research on marine wildlife native to the Gulf of Naples. The illustrations are from the book...
Adolphe Menzel was different to other people. Or rather, everyone was different to him. He was very small man, he stood just four feet and six inches tall, and had an unusually over-large head. Menzel was different to everyone else in another way too. He was a genius. Adolphe Menzel, or...
It’s thought that Philipp was born around 1664, in Brussels, and that his father, the Scottish painter James de Hamilton, taught he and his Munich-born older brother, Johann Georg, to paint. De Hamilton Sr. did a stellar job with both brothers becoming painters to the court in Vienna. Both Philipp &...
Sometime in 1903, a man of Swedish descent named Augustus Jansson began a 7-year stint working as a designer for Queen City Publishing of Cincinatti. His brief weas to showcase the company’s range of coloured inks, their typography and printing prowess. He produced a wildly imaginative and totally original series called...
The brothers Horácio (1910-1988) and Mário Novais (1899-1967) were born into a Portuguese photography family. The brothers spent their lives based in Lisbon. The Novais brothers were two of the most prolific national photographers of the 20th century They both spent over 50 years as photographers leaving us with images of great...
The Metal Book raises problems. It is beautiful, and it is tainted. A seminal work, crucial in the development of the Italian Futurist art movement, it was co-authored by the Italian artist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a fascist-sympathiser. The Futurist movement launched on 20 February 1909, with a manifesto printed on the...
Resembling a kind of mid-1930s Google Earth painting, these landscaping surveys of expansive gardens within large American estates are by various designers and artists. They are held in the Index of American Design archives at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC....
We have this. Anna Berent was born in 1871 in Kaiserslautern and died sometime after 1944. Perhaps in Zagreb. In the 1890s, she was studying in Munich, at the Stanisław Grocholski school and at the school of Anton Azbe. In 1899 She met, became engaged and then married Stanisław Berent, the couple moved to...
Physiognomy is the practice of assessing someone’s character and personality based solely on their appearance, especially the face. In other words judging a book by its cover. In his Gallerie Physionomique of 1836, the prolific caricaturist, Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers (known as C.J. Traviès), practiced this shamelessly un-PC exercise on the...
The world was his plaything. Whether camera or canvas, whatever media he used, László Moholy-Nagy was able to bend the world at will, to make it fit his strong sense of composition. Circles, lines and order. László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), was a proto-conceptualist, a restless and prolific innovator, artist, educator and writer,...
Martin Johnson Heade was an American painter known for his salt marsh landscapes, seascapes, and depictions of tropical birds (such as hummingbirds), as well as lotus blossoms and other still lifes. His painting style and subject matter, while derived from the romanticism of the time, are regarded by art historians as...
He was an untiring, left handed, worker who was known for making seemingly endless preliminary studies and trial compositions before he’d even think about a final painting in oils. His paintings manage to pull the spontaneous boldness of a master painter and a draughtsman’s considered intricacy at once. Dean Cornwell (1892-1960),...
Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic or megalithic ruins. His primary interest as...
It’s 1871, the year long French/Prussian war has just ended leaving massive loss of life on both French and German sides. In France, there’s a huge craving for revenge amongst the population who now have to pay a costly war tribute and give up land to the Germans. The power, strength...
Amaldus Clarin Nielsen (1838 – 1932), was born in Halse, Norway, the son of a shipmaster and merchant, grew up in Mandal in Vest-Agder county, Norway. For most of his childhood and adolescence the boy Amaldus was without a father and, after tuition at the hands of a traveling drawing teacher...
Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936) was a leading figure in Poland’s modernist movement who dabbled in history painting, the Polish Realism movement, Impressioniam (after visiting Paris, of course), Orientalism and even Symbolism. This was all held together by a unique richness of form and complex technical means. He painted landscapes full of drama,...
Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929), is regarded as the father of Polish Symbolism. His creative output took in the predominant style of his times; historical motifs of Polish martyrdom, the romantic ideals of independence, mythology, folk tales and an evident love of the natural world. Born under the under the Russian Empire’s occapation,...
One day in September 1890, in Ornavasso, a small Italian village in the Piedmont region of Italy, Enrico Bianchetti (1834-1894) received news of something that would possess him totally until his death. 56 year old Bianchetti was born into an affluent family, studied science, wrote poetry and became a meteorologist. His house was...
Gottfried Lindauer (1839-1926), was amongst the most prolific and best-known painter of Māoris in the late 19th & early 20th centuries. He was born far, far away form New Zealand in Pilsen, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although his surname sounds German, he was ethnically Czech and was initially...
Fedor Grigoryevich Solntsev was a Russian painter and historian of art who played a major role in recording and preserving medieval Russian culture. He was the principle author of the epic Antiquities of the Russian State, an exhaustive, exquisitely illustrated encyclopedia detailing contents of Moscow’s Grand Kremlin. He discovered and restored...
Viktor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov (May 15, 1848, Lopyal, Vyatka Governorate – July 23, 1926, Moscow) was a Russian artist who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. He is considered the co-founder of Russian folklorist and romantic nationalistic painting (see also neo-romanticism), and a key figure in the Russian revivalist movement. Viktor Mikhaylovich...
Allan Douglas Davidson was born in London on 14 May 1873. He was an English painter who predominantly worked in oils. His father was the historical painter Thomas Davidson. Allan Douglas Davidson studied art at the Royal Academy London, where he won a medal and the Armitage prize, he also studied at Julian’s in Paris. He...
Gerald Leslie Brockhurst (Oct. 31, 1890 – May 4, 1978) was an English painter and etcher. During the 30s and 40s he was celebrated as a portraitist, painting society figures such as Marlene Dietrich and the Duchess of Windsor. Today he is best known for his small etched prints of beautiful,...
The Caged Bird (1907), is an allegory. The caged bird is being released to fly where it wants, whilst the poor girl herself will never be free to follow her heart. As the youngest daughter, her duties lie with her ageing parents. The clarity and gaiety of the colours set in...
A son of a Northamptonshire shoe factory owner, the English painter and book illustrator Thomas Cooper Gotch or “T.C.” Gotch (1854–1931) operated on the margins of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and is perhaps the movement’s most unsung exponent. With his father’s help Gotch studied at all the very best schools. He studied art at Heatherley’s...
The two pencil sketches of the tragic twin artist brothers Maurice and Edward Detmold are perhaps two of the most haunted and poigniant drawings from the Victorian era. Probably drawn of each other at the same sitting in 1899, they are the only likenesses we have of the mercurially touched but...
Władysław Teodor “W.T.” Benda (1873–1948) was a Polish painter, illustrator, designer and mask-maker. The son of musician Jan Szymon Benda, and a nephew of the actress Helena Modrzejewska (known in the United States as Helena Modjeska), W.T. Benda studied art at the Kraków College of Technology and Art in his native...
There’s not an awful lot to say about George Spencer Watson (1869-1934), he seems to have possessed both a quiet, slightly reclusive, somehow intense presence, and yet he made sure there’s an elegant abundance for us to see and to feel. The word Arcadia came from a place, an ancient mountainous,...
In his prime, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was one of the most famous painters in the United States. He painted huge panoramic landscapes, of mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets in exquisite detail and dramatic light. Some of his major works were so popular Church was able to debut them individually, in single-painting...
Born and raised in Oakland, California in 1913, “San Francisco’s best loved artists’ model”, Florence Wysinger “Flo” Allen (1913-1997), was a legendary black Californian artist’s muse who posed for virtually every prominent West Coast painter of the past half century. There was only one motivating factor for Florence “Flo” Wysinger Allen...
Behold! Three strangely cinematic panorama/portraits found hiding in Amsterdam. In the archives of the Rjiksmusem. No one knows who created them. Or more importantly, why they made them and what they mean. And what the fuck do they mean? What was our anonymous (he/she) thinking? That is now the point. Their...
The way a Victorian stereoscope worked was to demonstrate that our perception of depth can be simulated by two flat perspectives of the same object as perceived by each of our eyes and presented in such a way that only the left eye can see the left image and the right eye the...
Herbert George Ponting (1870-1935) is best known expedition photographer and cinematographer for Robert Falcon Scott’s legendary Terra Nova Expedition to the Ross Sea and South Pole (1910–1913). In this role, he captured some of the most enduring images of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Herbert also had a lesser known role....
Isabella of Bourbon, wife of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy died, at 31 in 1465. Twelve years later, her daughter Mary built a funeral monument for her in Antwerp’s St. Michael’s Abbey. The tomb was surrounded by 24 figures of mourning family members and ancestors, known as “weepers”. Today only...
The shaffron (also spelled chaffron, champion, chamfron, chamfrein, champron, and chanfron) was designed to protect a horse’s face. Sometimes they included hinged cheek plates. A decorative feature common to many chanfrons is a rondelwith a small spike. Shaffrons date back as early as ancient Greece, but vanished from use in Europe until the twelfth century when metal plates replaced...
Selected 1950s imagery from two Chinese government (propaganda) pamphlets on Tibet, Xizang hua ji (1954) and Zhong yang dai biao tuan zai Xizang (1956). Xizang hua ji depicts the arrival and activities of the People’s Liberation Army in Lhasa as well as traditional Tibetan landscape, architecture and society. Pictorial work of...
One day in 1839, two explorers – an East Londoner, Frederick Catherwood, and an American, John Lloyd Stephens – climbed the crumbling steps of the pyramids in the Maya city of Copán. The pair were the first to do so for centuries, the pyramids, overgrown by jungle, their origins long forgotten by...
In the early nineteenth century, British consumers increasingly demanded representations of foreign areas newly opened up by British imperial expansion. The Scottish travel writer, and artist James Baillie Fraser (1783 – 1856) tapped into this demand by illustrating and writing about the. Fraser was a man possessed of many talents and great...
The extremely prolific English architect,Digby Wyatt was the younger brother of another, much less interesting architect, Thomas Henry Wyatt and related to the huge Wyatt dynasty. He was Secretary to the Executive Committee for the Great Exhibition (1851) and “orientalized” the architectural detailing of London’s Paddington Station, London (1852–4), for Brunel....
The obscure art nouveau illustrator, Emmanuel Joseph Raphaël Orazi, known as Manuel Orazi, was probably born in Rome in 1860 and definitely died in Paris in 1934. Information on Orazi is scant. Yet another “very little is known of” artist. We can however, know just a little more and get a feeling...
Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), was an enigma. He was many other things, things known mostly only to himself; a 19th century mystic for one: a man who created hundreds of extraordinary paintings behind the façade of an ordinary looking house in an ordinary Parisian street for another; a progressive and a herald;...
With its exotic flora from foreign climes, their genitalia turned provocatively, suggestively toward the viewer, Dr. Robert John Thornton’s romantic floral opus, A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus; Part III, Temple of Flora, was very sexy science. Sumptuous flower porn at the turn of the 18th century. The...
Before the Russian Revolution(s) of 1917 there was another; the First Russian Revolution of 1905. Lenin later called it “The Great Dress Rehearsal,” without which the “victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would not have been possible.” The years 1904 and 1907 saw mass movements, strikes and protests decline and...
In the late 1800s, Eduard Hallberger (1822-1880), claimed to be bringing Germany all the latest “from nature and life, science and art for entertainment and instruction for the family” in his Illustrierte Welt, (Illustrated World). Instead, the magnificently bearded publisher/editor presented readers with a bizarre smorgasbord of fighting animals, fairies, sultry...
ULK, Illustriertes Wochenblatt für Humor und Satire, (Illustrated weekly paper for humour and satire), was a German satirical magazine based in Berlin & the North German counterpart of the South German magazine Fliegende Blätter (Flying Leaves). The abbreviation “ULK” stands for the three departments “nonsense, carelessness and Kneipsinn” of the well known...
Who was Alexander Rothaug? Why isn’t he equally as famous as some of his fellow Austrian contemporaries? Information on him is scant, just the bare bones of a life. He’s as mythological as his subject matter. Rothaug (1870-1946), is yet another of those painters that was born into it. He almost...
Yle is Finland’s national public broadcasting service. Suomen Yleisradio (Finland’s General Radio) was founded in Helsinki on 29 May 1926. By 1928 Yle’s broadcasts became available to the whole country. After this the broadcasting network was developed and by the beginning of the 1930s, 100,000 households were able to listen to Yle programmes. Cut...
Not the most likely canditate for artistic photographer, Hubertus Salomon Hordijk (1862-1930) kept his passion to himself for a decade. No-one was going to argue. He was the police chief. On April 22 1903 and by Royal decree an infantry captain by the name of Hubertus Salomon Hordijk succeeded the outgoing...
Between 1805 and 1808, the Amsterdam artist Christiaan Andriessen kept a diary; a visual diary with over 700 drawings and watercolors depicting the the goings on in his life, with his friends, family and events in the city. Christiaan came from a family who encouraged his artistic pursuits; his father was...
Keizersgracht Theatre Fire of 11 May 1722. In 1664 it was decided that Amsterdam’s Van Campen was too small and out of date. It had to be replaced by a larger theater building more in tune with the customs and Baroque architecture of the time. This new theater was twice as...
The life of the Dutch photographer, Chris de Ruig (1930-2013), is sketchy and elusive. Here’s what little we have. De Ruig discovered photography as a boy in the darkroom of his father, a man who sold photo products and traded cigars as well as developing and printing for customers in the...
Abraham Hendriksz van Beijeren or Abraham van Beyeren was born in The Hague somewhere around 1620. He died in March 1690 in Overschie, Rotterdam. During his 70 years he was little known or recognised for his dark, Baroque still lifes. Van Beyeren specialised in an ornate style of still life known as Pronkstilleven,...
Léon-Henri-Marie Frédéric (1856-1940) was born too late. Centuries too late for the 16th century Flemish school and Renaissance art of the 1400s he so admired. The mythical scenes of Botticelli with their creamy nude goddesses and floating sky babies, the richly epic, stoic biblical scenes of Domenico Ghirlandaio. These two were by...
“There’s just something absolutely magical about his panoramas,” said Tom Patterson, a senior cartographer with the U.S. National Park Service. To say Heinrich Caesar Berann (1915-1999) made maps is a bit like saying Muhammed Ali could fight a bit. Berann rewrote (or rather redrew) the mapmaking rulebook. An Austrian painter/cartographer, Berann combined...