Francisco Pons Arnau was a Spanish Academic painter active in the mid 19th Century [Correction: late 19th, early 20th Centuries]. He became a follower of Joaquín Sorolla (see my recent post on Sorolla), and was influenced by Art Nouveau.

He painted portraits, figures, landscapes and what might be called intimate landscapes — garden scenes with detailed depictions of shrubs or trellised vines.

Beyond that, I’ve been able to find little information. Fortunately, there are several examples of his richly colored, light-filled paintings on the web.

The best selection I’ve come across is on The Athenaeum, and there is a nice, easy to access selection on Art Inconnu. There is a video slideshow overview of his work posted to YouTube by mariayutub.

[Initial idea via Francis Vallejo on Twitpic]

Benjamin Mauro is a concept artist and designer for the gaming and feature film industries, whose credits include work for WETA Workshop, Design Studio Press, LucasFilm, Sony Pictures Animation and others.

His work has been featured in books like Expose 5, Expose 7 and D’Artiste Concept Art from Ballistic Publishing, and Alien Race and Cosmic Motors from Design Studio Press.

Mauro studied at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Arts and the Art Center College of Design.

His brightly imaginative take on monsters, mecha, alien worlds and other fantastic environments is marked by an affinity for texture, solidity of form and a nicely offbeat feeling for the concept of “alien” lifeforms.

His environments can be moody and atmospheric as well as future tech, and are often punctuated with glowing lights and highlights that give them an added dimension of visual interest.

There is a gallery of work on his website, with additional work and alternate or preliminary versions on his blog. There is also an archive of older work here, and a gallery on CGHub.

The “Cobbe” portrait of Shakespeare, named for the family estate where the painting was found, not for the artist (who remains unknown), stands on good evidence to be the only portrait of the Bard actually painted from life.

The painting has crossed the Atlantic and is currently on display in New Amsterdam, er… I mean New York, at the Morgan Library and Museum.

Accompanied by a few other Shakespeare portraits (like all other known portraits, created posthumously), the Morgan’s first folio 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s plays and other related artifacts, the painting will be on display through May 1, 2011.

Unfortunately, the Morgan hasn’t seen fit to put more than a small image on their site.

I found large images of the painting here, accompanying a post on Doobybrain, and here accompanying a post on Fragments. The latter image, though smaller, looks to have truer color.

For more on this portrait and a comparison to other key portraits of Shakespeare, see my post: Shakespeare’s Portrait? from March, 2009.

Similar to my opinion of John Singer Sargent, I think that the place of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida in the canon of great painters in art history is vastly understated.

Sorolla has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the last 20 years or so. His popularity is continuing to rise, and resources for his images on the net are growing.

Iain Vellacott, who maintains a nice resource site on Sorolla called Sorolla Paintings pointed out this morning on his Twitter feed a surprisingly extensive selection of Sorolla paintings posted to a site called Art might.

On the downside, many are in desperate need, if not beyond the help of color correction; some are repeats (occasionally with better color), and a number of them are obviously scanned from books or magazines without benefit of de-screening.

On the upside, most of them have pretty good color, and it’s a cache of perhaps 200 images of Sorolla paintings, many of which I haven’t seen reproduced on the web before. Some are familiar, but quite a few are of the kind of work that doesn’t often get reproduced in books, quick studies and sketches, often with a wonderfully gestural quality.

There are older, more academic set pieces and portraits, as well as quick landscape studies and rare still life subjects.

There are as of this writing 11 pages of thumbnails, each with 20 images. Clicking on the thumbnail leads to an intermediate sized image; clicking on that leads to the largest version of the image.

(Interestingly, each intermediate image is accompanied by a palette of colors extracted from the image. Clicking on the color circle at the bottom of that leads to other paintings by various artists with a similar color scheme. Clicking on an individual color in the palette leads to other paintings by other artists in which that color is predominant.)

The images, though not as large as I might like (they rarely are) at least are of a size to get a good feeling for the work. The variety alone, and the impression it gives of the scope of Sorolla’s work, is worth the visit.

Vellacott’s own Sorolla Paintings site also has a small gallery of Sorolla’s paintings; the color reproduction in these is much more reliable.

You can find some additional resources on my previous posts about Sorolla, listed below.

In my post on resources for Learning to Draw back in October, one of the books I mentioned for those on a dedicated path was Harold Speed’s The Practice and Science of Drawing.

Though illustrated, this book, like Speed’s well regarded book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials, is less “look and follow” instruction, and more “read and understand and then go practice”.

Speed, whose career spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries, carried forward the traditions of academic teaching, tempered with an understanding of the new paths then being blazed by the Impressionists and others.

The knowledge Speed offers is supplemented by the illustrations, some by artists like Da Vinci, Rubens, Holbein, Degas and others, and many by Speed himself, a skilled academic draftsman with a loose rendering style that foreshadows the work of noted 20th Century teacher/draftsmen like Andrew Loomis, Walt Reed and Willy Pogany.

Unlike Oil Painting Techniques and Materials, which is available largely as a single edition, The Practice and Science of Drawing, which is also in the public domain, is available in a confusing array of editions, some good, some not so good, some minus the illustrations altogether.

The Dover edition is reliably inexpensive, and contains the illustrations, even if reproduction isn’t superb.

I have not personally seen this edition from General Books, released in January of 2010, or this one from Nabu Press that came out in July of 2010 and is described as a “facsimile edition”, so I can’t recommend either, but I would be interested in hearing from any readers who have seen them. (If I were to take a guess, I might try the General Books edition, but that’s just a guess.)

In the meanwhile, there is a complete online facsimile edition available on the Internet Archive.

Despite being hampered by one of these unendurably stupid “page-flipping” navigation widgets (Do we really need to pretend that our digital books have pages that flip? Really?), the book is presented in a format that allows for relatively large, well presented reproductions of the original illustrations by Speed and others.

There is also a PDF downloadable from the “i” for Information button in the upper right, which may be easier for offline reading, but the illustrations in that one, despite the 20mb download, are so small and over-compressed as to be almost useless.

The digital version is worth looking through and, with a bit of fuss, you can use the enlarge and scroll buttons to view the illustrations without the page-flippy widget driving you crazy.

Perhaps it’s just as well that the interface is a bit demanding of patience, since Speed’s method of study requires dedication and persistence to be of real value.

I’ll leave you with Speed’s own opening sentence from the preface of the book:

“Permit me in the first place to anticipate the disappointment of any student who opens this book with the idea of finding “wrinkles” on how to draw faces, trees, clouds, or what not, short cuts to excellence in drawing, or any of the tricks so popular with the drawing masters of our grandmothers and still dearly loved by a large number of people. No good can come of such methods, for there are no shortcuts to excellence.”

[Link via Robh Ruppel]

There are lots of color resources on the web, for artists, designers and others, but an often overlooked one is Wikipedia, the venerable user-edited online encyclopedia.

Whatever you may say about the reliability of the information on Wikipedia (or from Britannica, or any other single resource, for that matter), I rarely consider a source like Wikipedia a place to end a search, but, like Google, a place to begin one.

Though not specifically an artist’s resource, Wikipedia’s color related articles are numerous and varied.

You might find it interesting to start with their “List of Colors“. The list includes a lot of non-artist colors, like “British Racing Green” and “Psychedelic Purple”, but the familiar artist pigments are there too. Links for those lead to articles with information about the pigment, including source materials, history, chemical composition, lightfastness, typical use, hazardous qualities, color system numbers and sometimes more.

Some are grouped; Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Orange and Cadmium Red all lead to a single entry for “Cadmium pigments“, but some have more extensive and interesting listings, like the history behind Ultramarine.

There are articles about Color Theory, Color Vision, the Color Wheel, Complimentary Color, Primary Color, Hue, Saturation and many other related topics.

Though hardly an exhaustive resource on color for artists, it does seem a valuable resource to add to your virtual palette.

Wow.

There are times I just want to hug the internet, and say “I love you Internet!“.

Google, that monolithic giant of search, advertising, maps, stats and online software, whose offerings and initiatives have ranged from the amazing (search, maps) to the not-so wonderful (privacy issues), has spun off a new initiative for which I will forgive most of their transgressions.

Google on Monday unveiled a new feature called Google Art Project that is nothing short of wonderful and amazing, and, if Google’s history is any indication, stands to become even more wonderful and amazing as time goes on.

The project is an online archive of ultra-high-resolution images of great works of art.

Google has applied their “Street View” technology, familiar for providing zoomable street-level images within the context of Google Maps, to the display of both the works and the galleries in which they reside.

Google Street View has been put to unofficial art related use before, notably with the Virtual Paintout (my post here) in which artists virtually “visit” a specified location by way of Google Street View, and use the images as reference for “on location” paintings.

Here, the technology is being put to much different use by Google, allowing some of the best views of great paintings available online.

At the moment they are working with 17 museums, each of which has contributed one or more gigapixel level images to the project; and an impressive start it is:

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin – Germany
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC – USA
The Frick Collection, NYC – USA
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin – Germany
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC – USA
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC – USA
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid – Spain
Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid – Spain
Museum Kampa, Prague – Czech Republic
National Gallery, London – UK
Palace of Versailles – France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg – Russia
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow – Russia
Tate Britain, London – UK
Uffizi Gallery, Florence – Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands

Starting from a list that appears on the project’s home page when you mouse over the initial image, you can choose a museum, then browse the museum’s corridors, or go right to an artwork.

Unlike the stingy feeling so many museums project with tiny preview images and zooming images that have to be scrolled in frustratingly small little windows, the artworks here are available in a full screen zooming interface, and when I say “zoom” I mean it really zooms, down to an astonishing level of detail.

This is like the Haltadefinizione project that I wrote about here, but with a better interface and without the annoyance of watermarking.

In the images above, I’ve chosen to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and zoom in to a nose-up-against-the-canvas view of Rembrandt’s The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq, commonly known as The Night Watch.

Though the Flash drop-down for browsing museums and works is a bit glitchy, the interface’s provision for scrolling and zooming is wonderfully fluid, and the ability to get your eyeballs right up to Rembrandt’s textural brushwork is just delicious.

I’ve left the zooming control in my images just to demonstrate it, but it and other interface elements politely melt away when not in use. In the upper right is a Visitor Guide button, which provides a general introduction to the project (there is also a short introductory video here), and an info (“i”) button which gives access to an information panel with a menu of options for information about the painting, provided by the museum in which it hangs.

Of note in that menu are links to “More Works by this Artist” and “More Works in this Museum”, which can lead to a nice browsing experience.

There are some amazing images to be seen, including The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night at the MoMA, Hans Holbein’s enigmatic The Ambassadors (my post here) in the National Gallery, London and (be still my beating heart) Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi!

Wow.

I’ll give my Major Time Sink Warning and bid you enjoy!

All art on the internet should be like this.

[Via MetaFilter]