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96

Sir George Clausen (1852-1944)Head of a Peasant WomanOil on canvas188240 x 54 cm(15¾” x 21.37”)Private collection

96 notes | 2 years ago

128

Salvador Dalí
The Great Masturbator
1929
Oil on canvas
110 x 150 cm
Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid
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The painting deals with Dalí’s fear and loathing of sex. He blamed his negative feelings toward sex as partly a result of reading his father’s, extremely graphic book on venereal diseases as a young boy.
The head is painted “soft”, as if malleable to the touch; it looks fatigued, sexually spent: the eyes are closed, the cheeks flushed. Under the nose a grasshopper clings, its abdomen covered with ants that crawl onto the face where a mouth should be. From early childhood, Dalí had a phobia of grasshoppers and the appearance of one here suggests his feelings of hysterical fear and a loss of voice or control.
Emerging from the right of the head, a woman moves her mouth toward a man’s crotch. The man’s legs are cut and bleeding, implying a fear of castration. The woman’s face is cracked, as though the image that Dalí’s head produces will soon disintegrate. To reiterate the sexual theme, the stamen of a lily and tongue of a lion appear underneath the couple.
Dali-gallery.com

128 notes | 2 years ago

282

Il’ya Repin (1844-1930)Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581Oil on canvas1885The Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russian Federation)

282 notes | 2 years ago

thingsjeffreylikes asked: You have an absolutely beautiful collection of paintings in your blog. :]

Thank you! You have a good taste in paintings indeed. Hehehe :)

2 notes | 2 years ago

118

Soir Bleu, by Edward Hopper
(via andruvalentine)

118 notes | 2 years ago

66

Paul Delaroche (1797-1856)The Children of King Edward Imprisoned in the TowerOil on canvas1830

66 notes | 2 years ago

122

Khnopff, Fernand
The Caresses
1896
Oil on canvas
50 × 150 cm
Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts

122 notes | 2 years ago

155

Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)
An Abandoned City
1904
Pastel and pencil on paper
76 x 69 cm
Hearst Family Trust

155 notes | 2 years ago

188

Blindman’s Buff, 1982–83
Komar and Melamid (Vitaly Komar, Russian, born 1943; Aleksandr Melamid, Russian, born 1945)
Oil on canvas
182.9 x 119.4 cm
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Blindman’s Buff is a domestic scene depicting two people playing the traditional party game of the title: a schoolgirl is blindfolded, trying to find and catch the man in military uniform who crouches behind the table. Although the subject is ostensibly lighthearted, the drab colors and emptiness of the room, overshadowed by a portrait of Stalin prominently displayed on the wall, give the scene a somber atmosphere. The stark lighting and billowing drapery of the curtain recall the formal excesses of seventeenth-century Baroque painting, in which saints regularly received visions and witnessed miracles. Here, however, the young heroine can see neither her companion nor the light from the window. In this work, Komar and Melamid satirize an earlier era in art history, as well as the oppressiveness of daily life in the Soviet Union, where public access to information was severely restricted.
Metmuseum.org

188 notes | 2 years ago

233

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898)Oedipus and the SphinxOil on canvas1864105 x 206 cmMetropolitan Museum of Art (Manhattan, New York, United States)
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Moreau, a virtually unknown artist at the age of thirty-eight, triumphed at the Salon of 1864 with his interpretation of the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx. This painting represents the moment when Oedipus confronts the winged monster outside Thebes and must solve her riddle to save his life as well as those of the besieged Thebans.
Metmuseum.org

233 notes | 2 years ago

201

Edward John Poynter (1836-1919)A Corner of the VillaOil On Canvas1889Private collection

201 notes | 2 years ago

152

Edgar Degas (1834-1917)The Ballet ClassBetween 1871 and 1874Oil on canvasH. 85; W. 75 cm© RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
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From the 1870s until his death, Degas’s favourite subjects were ballerinas at work. Degas closely observed the most spontaneous, natural, ordinary gestures, the pauses when concentration is relaxed and the body slumps after the exhausting effort of practising and the implacable rigour of the class.
The slightly raised viewpoint looking diagonally across the studio accentuates the vanishing perspective of floor boards.
Musee-orsay.fr

152 notes | 2 years ago

53

Hans Makart (1840-1884)Faun und Nymph (Pan und Flora)Oil on canvas187295 x 158 cmPrivate collection

53 notes | 2 years ago

67

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)The Grand Canal, VeniceOil on canvas
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Venice was the inspiration of some of Turner’s finest work. Wherever he visited he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. His early training had been as a topographic draftsman. With the years, however, he developed a painting technique all his own. Instead of merely recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a light-filled expression of his own romantic feelings.
WebMuseum

67 notes | 2 years ago

40

Paul Cézanne
Portrait of the Artist’s Father
c. 1866
Oil on canvas
198.5 x 119.3 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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One of the most important works of his early years is the portrait of his formidable father. The Artist’s Father is one of Cézanne’s “palette-knife pictures”, painted in short sessions between 1865 and 1866. Their realistic content and solid style reveal Cézanne’s admiration for Gustave Courbet. Here we see a craggy, unyielding man of business, a solid mass of manhood, bodily succint from the top of his black beret to the tips of his heavy shoes. The uncompromising verticals of the massive chair are echoed by the door, and the edges of the small still life by Cézanne on the wall just behind: everything corresponds to the absolute verticals of the edges of the canvas itself, further accentuating the air of certainty about the portrait. Thick hands hold a newspaper—though Cézanne has replaced his father’s conservative newspaper with the liberalL’Evénement, which published articles by his childhood friend, Emile Zola. His father devours the paper, sitting tensely upright in the elongated armchair. Yet it is a curiously tender portrait too. Cézanne seems to see his father as somehow unfulfilled: for all his size he does not fully occupy the chair, and neither does he see the still life on the wall behind him, which we recognize as being one of his son’s. We do not see his eyes— only the ironical mouth and his great frame, partly hidden behind the paper.
WebMuseum

40 notes | 2 years ago