Hudson River School
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. The paintings for which the movement is named depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill and White Mountains. Neither the originator of the term Hudson River School nor its first published use has been fixed with certainty; the term is thought to have originated with the New York Tribune art critic Clarence Cook or the landscape painter Homer Dodge Martin. As used, the term was meant disparagingly, as the work so labeled had gone out of favor after the plein-air Barbizon School had come into vogue among American patrons and collectors. Hudson River School paintings reflect three themes of America in the 19th century: discovery and settlement; the paintings depict the American landscape as a pastoral setting, where human beings and nature coexist peacefully. Hudson River School landscapes are characterized by their realistic and sometimes idealized portrayal of nature juxtaposing peaceful agriculture and the remaining wilderness, fast disappearing from the Hudson Valley just as it was coming to be appreciated for its qualities of ruggedness and sublimity.
In general, Hudson River School artists believed that nature in the form of the American landscape was an ineffable manifestation of God, though the artists varied in the depth of their religious conviction. They took as their inspiration such European masters as Claude Lorrain, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, their reverence for America's natural beauty was shared with contemporary American writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Several painters were members of the Düsseldorf school of painting, others were educated by the German Paul Weber. While the elements of the paintings were rendered realistically, many of the scenes were composed as a synthesis of multiple scenes or natural images observed by the artists. In gathering the visual data for their paintings, the artists would travel to extraordinary and extreme environments, which had conditions that would not permit extended painting at the site. During these expeditions, the artists recorded sketches and memories, returning to their studios to paint the finished works later.
A number of women artists were associated with the Hudson River School, though they tend to be less well known because they were excluded from formal training during most of the 19th century and had fewer exhibition opportunities. Notable women painters of the Hudson River School include Susie M. Barstow, an avid mountain-climber who painted the mountain scenery of the Catskills and the White Mountains; the artist Thomas Cole is acknowledged as the founder of the Hudson River School. Cole took a steamship up the Hudson in the autumn of 1825, the same year the Erie Canal opened, stopping first at West Point at Catskill landing, he hiked west high up into the eastern Catskill Mountains of New York State to paint the first landscapes of the area. The first review of his work appeared in the New York Evening Post on November 22, 1825. At that time, only the English native Cole, born in a landscape where autumnal tints were of browns and yellows, found the brilliant autumn hues of the area to be inspirational.
Cole's close friend, Asher Durand, became a prominent figure in the school as well. An important part of the popularity of the Hudson River School was its celebration of its themes of nationalism and property. However, adherents of the movement were suspicious of the economic and technological development of the age; the second generation of Hudson River school artists emerged to prominence after Cole's premature death in 1848. Works by artists of this second generation are described as examples of Luminism. In addition to pursuing their art, many of the artists, including Kensett and Church, were among the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Most of the finest works of the second generation were painted between 1855 and 1875. During that time, artists such as Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt were celebrities, they were both influenced by the Düsseldorf school of painting, Bierstadt had studied in that city for several years. When Church exhibited paintings such as Niagara or The Icebergs, thousands of people paid twenty-five cents a head to view the solitary works.
The epic size of these landscapes, unexampled in earlier American painting, reminded Americans of the vast, but magnificent wilderness areas in their country. Such works were being painted during the period of settlement of the American West, preservation of national parks, establishment of green city parks. Along with museum collections, Hudson River School art has had minor periods of resurgence in popularity. Philip Verre, director of the Hudson River Museum, described that the school gained interest after World War I due to nationalist attitudes. A decline in interest took place until the 1960s, the regrowt
Tonalism
Tonalism was an artistic style that emerged in the 1880s when American artists began to paint landscape forms with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. Between 1880 and 1915, neutral hues such as gray, brown or blue dominated compositions by artists associated with the style. During the late 1890s, American art critics began to use the term "tonal" to describe these works. Two of the leading associated painters were James McNeill Whistler. Australian Tonalism emerged as an art movement in Melbourne during the 1910s. Tonalism is sometimes used to describe American landscapes derived from the French Barbizon style, which emphasized mood and shadow. Tonalism was eclipsed by Impressionism and European modernism. American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a digitized 3 volume exhibition catalog American Tonalism - Montclair Art Museum askart.com Leon Dabo
Nicolas Poussin
Nicolas Poussin was the leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for a small group of Italian and French collectors, he returned to Paris for a brief period to serve as First Painter to the King under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but soon returned to Rome and resumed his more traditional themes. In his years he gave growing prominence to the landscapes in his pictures, his work is characterized by clarity and order, favors line over color. Until the 20th century he remained a major inspiration for such classically-oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cézanne. Details of Poussin's artistic training are somewhat obscure. Around 1612 he traveled to Paris, where he studied under minor masters and completed his earliest surviving works, his enthusiasm for the Italian works he saw in the royal collections in Paris motivated him to travel to Rome in 1624, where he studied the works of Renaissance and Baroque painters—especially Raphael, who had a powerful influence on his style.
He befriended a number of artists who shared his classicizing tendencies, met important patrons, such as Cardinal Francesco Barberini and the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo. The commissions Poussin received for modestly scaled paintings of religious and historical subjects allowed him to develop his individual style in works such as The Death of Germanicus, The Massacre of the Innocents, the first of his two series of the Seven Sacraments, he was persuaded to return to France in 1640 to be First Painter to the King but, dissatisfied with the overwhelming workload and the court intrigues, returned permanently to Rome after a little more than a year. Among the important works from his years are Orion Blinded Searching for the Sun, Landscape with Hercules and Cacus, The Seasons. Nicolas Poussin's early biographer was his friend Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who relates that Poussin was born near Les Andelys in Normandy and that he received an education that included some Latin, which would stand him in good stead.
Another early friend and biographer, André Félibien, reported that "He was busy without cease filling his sketchbooks with an infinite number of different figures which only his imagination could produce." His early sketches attracted the notice of Quentin Varin, who passed some time in Andelys, but there is no mention by his biographers that he had a formal training in Varin's studio, though his works showed the influence of Varin by their storytelling, accuracy of facial expression, finely painted drapery and rich colors. His parents opposed a painting career for him, In or around 1612, at the age of eighteen, he ran away to Paris, he arrived in Paris during the regency of Marie de Medici, when art was flourishing as a result of the royal commissions given by Marie de Medici for the decoration of her palace, by the rise of wealthy Paris merchants who bought art. There was a substantial market for paintings in the redecoration of churches outside Paris destroyed during the French Wars of Religion, which had ended, for the numerous convents in Paris and other cities.
However, Poussin was not a member of the powerful guild of master painters and sculptors, which had a monopoly on most art commissions and brought lawsuits against outsiders like Poussin who tried to break into the profession. His early sketches gained him a place in the studios of established painters, he worked for three months in the studio of the Flemish painter Ferdinand Elle, who painted exclusively portraits, a genre, of little interest to Poussin. He moved next to the studio of Georges Lallemand, but Lallemand's inattention to precise drawing and the articulation of his figures displeased Poussin. Moreover, Poussin did not fit well into the studio system, in which several painters worked on the same painting. Thereafter he preferred to work slowly and alone. Little is known of his life in Paris at this time. Court records show, he studied anatomy and perspective, but the most important event of his first residence in Paris was his discovery of the royal art collections, thanks to his friendship with Alexandre Courtois, the valet de chambre of Marie de Medicis.
There he saw for the first time engravings of the works of Giulio Romano and of Raphael, whose work had an enormous influence on his future style. He first tried to travel to Rome in 1617 or 1618, but made it only as far as Florence, where, as his biographer Bellori reported, "as a result of some sort of accident, he returned to France." On his return, he began making paintings for Paris convents. In 1622 made another attempt to go to Rome, but went only as far as Lyon before returning. In the summer of the same year, he received his first important commission: the Order of Jesuits requested a series of six large paintings to honor the canonization of their founder, Saint Francis Xavier; the originality and energy of these paintings brought him a series of important commissions. Giambattista Marino, the court poet to Marie de Medici, employed him to make a series of fifteen drawings, eleven illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses and four illustrating battle scenes from Roman history; the "Marino drawings", now at Windsor Castle, are among the earliest identifiable works of Poussin.
Marino's influence led to a commission for some decoration of Marie de Medici's residence, the Luxembourg Palace a commission from the first Archbishop of Paris, Jean-François de Gondi, for a painting of the death of the Virgin for
Claude Lorrain
Claude Lorrain was a French painter and etcher of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in Italy, is one of the earliest important artists, apart from his contemporaries in Dutch Golden Age painting, to concentrate on landscape painting, his landscapes are turned into the more prestigious genre of history paintings by the addition of a few small figures representing a scene from the Bible or classical mythology. By the end of the 1630s he was established as the leading landscapist in Italy, enjoyed large fees for his work; these became larger, but with fewer figures, more painted, produced at a lower rate. He was not an innovator in landscape painting, except in introducing the Sun into many paintings, rare before, he is now thought of as a French painter, but was born in the independent Duchy of Lorraine, all his painting was done in Italy. His patrons were mostly Italian, but after his death he became popular with English collectors, the UK retains a high proportion of his works, he was a prolific creator of drawings in pen and often monochrome watercolour "wash" brown but sometimes grey.
Chalk is sometimes used for under-drawing, white highlighting in various media may be employed, much less other colours such as pink. These fall into three distinct groups. Firstly there are large numbers of sketches of landscapes, very done at the scene. There are studies for paintings, of various degrees of finish, many done before or during the process of painting, but others after, complete; this was the case for the last group, the 195 drawings recording finished paintings collected in his Liber Veritatis. He produced over 40 etchings simplified versions of paintings before 1642; these served various purposes for him, but are now regarded as much less important than his drawings. He painted frescoes in his early career, which played an important part in making his reputation, but are now nearly all lost; the earliest biographies of Claude are in Joachim von Sandrart's Teutsche Academie and Filippo Baldinucci's Notizie de' professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua. Both Sandrart and Baldinucci knew the painter but at periods some 50 years apart at the start of his career and shortly before his death.
Sandrart knew him well and lived with him for a while, while Baldinucci was not intimate with him, derived much of his information from Claude's nephew, who lived with the artist. Claude's tombstone gives 1600 as his year of birth, but contemporary sources indicate a date, circa 1604 or 1605, he was born in the small village of Chamagne, Vosges part of the Duchy of Lorraine. He was the third of five sons of Anne Padose. According to Baldinucci, Claude's parents both died when he was twelve years old, he lived at Freiburg with an elder brother. Jean taught Claude the rudiments of drawing. Claude travelled to Italy, first working for Goffredo Wals in Naples joining the workshop of Agostino Tassi in Rome. Sandrart's account of Claude's early years, however, is quite different, modern scholars prefer this, or attempt to combine the two. According to Sandrart, Claude did not do well at the village school and was apprenticed to a pastry baker. With a company of fellow cooks and bakers, Claude travelled to Rome and was employed as servant and cook by Tassi, who at some point converted him into an apprentice and taught him drawing and painting.
Both Wals and Tassi were landscapists, the former obscure and producing small works, while Tassi had a large workshop specializing in fresco schemes in palaces. While the details of Claude's pre-1620s life remain unclear, most modern scholars agree that he was apprenticed to Wals around 1620–22, to Tassi from circa 1622/23 to 1625. Baldinucci reports that in 1625 Claude undertook a voyage back to Lorraine to train with Claude Deruet, working on the backgrounds of a lost fresco scheme, but left his studio comparatively soon, in 1626 or 1627, he returned to Rome and settled in a house in the Via Margutta, near the Spanish Steps and Trinita dei Monti, remaining in that neighbourhood for the rest of his life. On his travels, Claude stayed in Marseilles and Venice, had the opportunity to study nature in France and Bavaria. Sandrart met Claude in the late 1620s and reported that by the artist had a habit of sketching outdoors at dawn and at dusk, making oil studies on the spot; the first dated painting by Claude, Landscape with Cattle and Peasants from 1629 shows well-developed style and technique.
In the next few years his reputation was growing as evidenced by commissions from the French ambassador in Rome and the King of Spain. Baldinucci reported that a important commission came from Cardinal Bentivoglio, impressed by the two landscapes Claude painted for him, recommended the artist to Pope Urban VIII. Four paintings were made for the Pope in two small on copper. From this point, Claude's reputation was secured, he went on to fulfill many important commissions, both Italian and internation
Emanuel Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish Lutheran theologian, scientist and mystic. He is best known for his book on the afterlife and Hell. Swedenborg had a prolific career as an scientist. In 1741, at 53, he entered into a spiritual phase in which he began to experience dreams and visions, beginning on Easter Weekend, on 6 April 1744, it culminated in a'spiritual awakening' in which he received a revelation that he was appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ to write The Heavenly Doctrine to reform Christianity. According to The Heavenly Doctrine, the Lord had opened Swedenborg's spiritual eyes so that from on, he could visit heaven and hell to converse with angels and other spirits and the Last Judgment had occurred the year before, in 1757. For the last 28 years of his life, Swedenborg wrote 18 published theological works—and several more that were unpublished, he termed himself a "Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ" in True Christian Religion, which he published himself. Some followers of The Heavenly Doctrine believe that of his theological works, only those that were published by Swedenborg himself are divinely inspired.
Others have regarded all Swedenborg's theological works as inspired, saying for example that the fact that some works were "not written out in a final edited form for publication does not make a single statement less trustworthy than the statements in any of the other works". The New Church, a new religious movement comprising several historically-related Christian denominations, reveres Swedenborg's writings as revelation. Swedenborg's father, Jesper Swedberg, descended from a wealthy mining family; the first known paternal ancestor was Otte Persson from Sundborn parish, mentioned 1571. He travelled abroad and studied theology, on returning home, he was eloquent enough to impress the Swedish king, Charles XI, with his sermons in Stockholm. Through the king's influence, he would become professor of theology at Uppsala University and Bishop of Skara. Jesper took an interest in the beliefs of the dissenting Lutheran Pietist movement, which emphasised the virtues of communion with God rather than relying on sheer faith.
Sola fide is a tenet of the Lutheran Church, Jesper was charged with being a pietist heretic. While controversial, the beliefs were to have a major impact on his son Emanuel's spirituality. Jesper furthermore held the unconventional belief that angels and spirits were present in everyday life; this came to have a strong impact on Emanuel. In 1703–1709, Swedenborg lived in Erik Benzelius the Younger's house. Swedenborg completed his university course at Uppsala in 1709, in 1710, he made his grand tour through the Netherlands and Germany before reaching London, where he would spend the next four years, it was a flourishing center of scientific ideas and discoveries. Swedenborg studied physics and philosophy and read and wrote poetry. According to the preface of a book by the Swedish critic Olof Lagercrantz, Swedenborg wrote to his benefactor and brother-in-law Benzelius that he believed that Swedenborg might be destined to be a great scientist. In 1715 Swedenborg returned to Sweden, where he devoted himself to natural science and engineering projects for the next two decades.
A first step was his meeting with King Charles XII of Sweden in the city of Lund, in 1716. The Swedish inventor Christopher Polhem, who became a close friend of Swedenborg, was present. Swedenborg's purpose was to persuade the king to fund an observatory in northern Sweden. However, the warlike king did not consider this project important enough, but did appoint Swedenborg to be assessor-extraordinary on the Swedish Board of Mines in Stockholm. From 1716 to 1718, Swedenborg published a scientific periodical entitled Daedalus Hyperboreus, a record of mechanical and mathematical inventions and discoveries. One notable description was that of a flying machine, the same he had been sketching a few years earlier. In 1718, Swedenborg published an article that attempted to explain spiritual and mental events in terms of minute vibrations, or "tremulations". Upon the death of Charles XII, Queen Ulrika Eleonora ennobled his siblings, it was common in Sweden during the 17th and 18th centuries for the children of bishops to receive that honour, as a recognition of the services of their father.
The family name was changed from Swedberg to Swedenborg. In 1724, he was offered the chair of mathematics at Uppsala University, but he declined and said that he had dealt with geometry and metallurgy during his career, he said that he did not have the gift of eloquent speech because of a stutter, as recognized by many of his acquaintances. The Swedish critic Olof Lagerkrantz proposed that Swedenborg compensated for his impediment by extensive argumentation in writing. During the 1730s, Swedenborg undertook many studies of physiology, he had the first known anticipation of the neuron concept. It was not until a century that science recognized the full significance of the nerve cell, he had prescient ideas about the cerebral cortex, the hierarchical organization of the nervous system, the localization of the cerebrospinal fluid, the functions of the pituitary gland, the perivascular spaces, the foramen of Magendie, the idea of somatotopic organization, the association of frontal brain regions with the intellect.
In some cases, his conclusions have been experimentally verified in modern times. In the 1730s, Swedenborg became increasing
Lake Albano
Lake Albano is a small volcanic crater lake in the Alban Hills of Lazio, at the foot of Monte Cavo, 20 km southeast of Rome. Castel Gandolfo, overlooking the lake, is the site of the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo. In Roman times it lay not far from the ancient city of Alba Longa. With a depth of about 170 m, Lake Albano is the deepest in Lazio; the lake is 3.5 km long by 2.3 km wide, was formed by the overlapping union of two volcanic craters, an origin indicated by the ridge in its center, which rises to a height of 70 m. Plutarch reports that in 406 BC the lake surged over the surrounding hills, despite there being no rain nor tributaries flowing into the lake to account for the rise in water level; the ensuing flood destroyed fields and vineyards before pouring into the sea. It is thought to have been caused by volcanic gases, trapped in sediment at the bottom of the lake and building up until releasing, causing the water to overflow. Around 395 BC, during the wars between Rome and Veii, a discharge tunnel was built crossing the crater walls.
It served as an emissary. According to Titus Livius, this feat of engineering was incited by the Oracle of Delphi: the Roman victory against Veii would be possible only when the lake waters were channeled and used for irrigation; the emissary is at 293 meters over the sea level. The tunnel ends at a spot called Le Mole, below Castel Gandolfo, it hosted the canoeing and rowing events of the 1960 Summer Olympic Games. The lane marking system developed for these events is referred to as the Albano buoy system. Britannica.com Italian Tourism – Lakes The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | Date: 2008 | The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, Columbia University Press
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world, its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The main building, on the eastern edge of Central Park along Museum Mile in Manhattan's Upper East Side is by area one of the world's largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art and artifacts from Medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum at Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side; the permanent collection consists of works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art.
The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries; the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 for the purposes of opening a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, was located at 681 Fifth Avenue; the Met's permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research. The permanent collection includes works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art; the Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, antique weapons and armor from around the world.
A great number of period rooms, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries. In addition to its permanent exhibitions, the Met organizes and hosts large traveling shows throughout the year; the current chairman of the board, Daniel Brodsky, was elected in 2011 and became chairman three years after director Philippe de Montebello retired at the end of 2008. On March 1, 2017, the BBC reported that Daniel Weiss, the Met's president and COO, would temporarily act as CEO for the museum. Following the departure of Thomas P. Campbell as the Met's director and CEO on June 30, 2017, the search for a new director of the museum was assigned to the human resources firm Phillips Oppenheim to present a new candidate for the position "by the end of the fiscal year in June" of 2018; the next director will report to Weiss as the current president of the museum. In April 2018, Max Hollein was named director. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met started acquiring ancient art and artifacts from the Near East.
From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the Met's collection of Near Eastern art has grown to more than 7,000 pieces. Representing a history of the region beginning in the Neolithic Period and encompassing the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the end of Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the Sumerian, Sasanian, Assyrian and Elamite cultures, as well as an extensive collection of unique Bronze Age objects; the highlights of the collection include a set of monumental stone lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. Though the Met first acquired a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from Africa and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman and philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Today, the Met's collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Americas and is housed in the 40,000-square-foot Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum.
The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of 15-foot-tall memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea, to a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the Nigerian Court of Benin donated by Klaus Perls. The range of materials represented in the Africa and Americas collection is undoubtedly the widest of any department at the Met, including everything from precious metals to porcupine quills; the Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art, of more than 35,000 pieces, arguably the most comprehensive in the US. The collection dates back to the founding of the museum: many of the philanthropists who made the earliest gifts to the museum included Asian art in their collections. Today, an entire wing of the museum is dedicated to the Asian collection, spans 4,000 years of Asian art; every Asian civilization is represented in the Met's Asian department, the pieces on display include every type of decorative art, from painting and printmaking to sculpture and metalworking.
The department is well known for its comprehensive collection of Chinese calligraphy and painting, as well as for its Indian sculptures and Tibetan works, the arts of Burma and Thailand. All three ancient religions of India – Hinduism and Jainism – are well represented in these s
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