•  La chambre de Van Gogh à Arles (Van Gogh's Room at Arles)
     1889 (200 Kb); Oil on canvas, 57 x 74 cm (22 1/2 x 29 1/3 in); Musee d'Orsay, Paris


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    THE GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING (Meisje met de parel)
    c.1665-1667  oil on canvas
    18 1/4 x 15 3/4 in. (46.5 x 40 cm.)

    Mauritshuis, The Hague

    "It is always the beauty of this portrait head, its purity, freshness, radiance, sensuality that is singled out for comment.  Vermeer himself, as Gowing notes, provides the metaphor: she is like a pearl. Yet there is a sense in which this  response, no matter how inevitable, begs the question of the. painting, and evades the claims it makes on the viewer.  For to look at it is to be implicated in a relationship so urgent that to take an instinctive step backward into aesthetic  appreciation would seem in this case a defensive , an act of betrayal and bad faith. It is me at whom she gazes, with  real, unguarded human emotions, and with an erotic intensity that demands something just as real and human in  return. The relationship may be only with an image, yet it involves all that art is supposed to keep at bay."

    "Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 1979"



  • By name WRIGHT OF DERBY (b. Sept. 3, 1734, Derby, Derbyshire, Eng.--d. Aug. 29, 1797, Derby), English painter who was a pioneer in the artistic treatment of industrial subjects. He was also the best European painter of artificial light of his day.

    Wright was trained as a portrait painter by Thomas Hudson in the 1750s. Wright's home was Derby, one of the great  centres of the birth of the Industrial Revolution, and his depictions of scenes lit by moonlight or candlelight combine the  realism of the new machinery with the romanticism involved in its application to industry and science. His pictures of  technological subjects, partly inspired by the Dutch followers of Caravaggio, date from 1763 to 1773; the most famous  are The Air Pump (1768) and The Orrery (c. 1763-65). Wright was also noted for his portraits of English Midlands  industrialists and intellectuals.



  • Abstract art Any form of artistic expression which bears no apparent relationship to tangible reality is commonly referred to as 'abstract'. Other terms
    employed include 'non-figurative' or 'non-representational'. The word 'abstract' stems from the Latin verb 'abstrahere': to withdraw or withhold. In other
    words, abstract art is 'withdrawn' from nature. Its lines, shapes and colours serve an autonomous purpose and do not refer to any object not in the actual
    painting. A number of European artists, working independently, began creating abstract art around 1910. Among them were Kandinsky (Germany), Kupka
    and Delaunay (France), Malevich (Russia) and - soon thereafter - the Dutch artists Mondriaan, Van Doesburg and Van der Lek.





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