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Showing posts with the label Gustave Courbet

Very Rich Hours in Chantilly

It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the  Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of  Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months. "Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly.  It's su...
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The Cliffs, the Clouds and the Waves

What motif could be more Impressionist than a view of the cliffs or beaches of the Normandy coastline? And with this year marking the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, we've been to Normandy to take in a show focusing on that very subject.     Impressionism and the Sea  at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny sets the scene as you enter, with the cries of screeching seagulls and the sound of waves lapping on the beach. The curators bring you Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro and other names you'll be expecting, but there are some lesser-known artists to conjure with too.  Partly, we assume, because there are so many other exhibitions about Impressionism going on this year, most of the pictures in Giverny have an unfamiliar feel. The stand-out Monet doesn't show the beach at Etretat , with its striking cliff formations, but the strand and cliffs at Les Petites Dalles, further east, beyond Fécamp.  Nevertheless, it's ver...
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Brilliant White

Frans Hals had 27 blacks in his paintbox, according to Vincent van Gogh. How many whites did James McNeill Whistler have in his? You can make your own judgement in  Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan  at the Royal Academy in London. Jo, the red-headed Irishwoman who modelled for the paintings at the heart of this excellent exhibition, was also Whistler's lover (and distinctly different from  Whistler's Mother ), and she was central to his early development as an artist.  As you enter this show, this is the picture of Jo you can see in the distance through the doorway to your right:  Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl . Whistler started the painting in Paris late in 1861, posing Hiffernan for exhausting all-day sessions, and he submitted it to the Royal Academy's annual exhibition in London the following year.  "Some stupid painters don't understand it at all," Hiffernan wrote, adding that Whistler thought that "praps the old duffers may...
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The Walker as Romantic Hero: Wanderlust in Berlin

It's one of the most iconic of all German paintings, and it's one of the star attractions of a show in Berlin that's steeped in the Romanticism of the early 19th century. The picture is Caspar David Friedrich's  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. A curly-haired man in a dark green suit is seen from behind, standing atop a rocky outcrop with his walking stick and gazing down into an eerie landscape in which mists swirl around mountain tops. The exhibition is Wanderlust: From Caspar David Friedrich to Auguste Renoir in Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie, looking at the wanderer as a central theme in 19th-century art across Europe. The museum has a fine Friedrich collection itself, but the curators have pulled in some splendid paintings from across the continent. The  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog has made the short trip from Hamburg. The story starts with the discovery of nature, even at its wildest, as a phenomenon to be explored close up in the 18th century. In Jako...
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