As I’ve done for the past seven years, I’ll wish all Lines and Colors readers a Happy New Year with more Saturday Evening Post covers by J.C. Leyendecker, the great American illustrator who originated the modern tradition of representing the new year as a baby.

My your new year be filled with beautiful art!

Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.

A stunning self portrait by one of my favorite underrated painters.

Vigée Le Brun had an uncanny ability to make the fashionably pale skin of her female portrait subjects, herself included, almost luminescent.

This is apparently a copy she made of an earlier version of the same composition, itself inspired by Rubens’ portrait (possibly of Susanne Lunden) titled Le Chapeau de Paille.

This version is in the National Gallery, London. Use the fullscreen arrows and zoom controls to the right of the image to zoom way in on the portrait.

I love the way she has skillfully blended pale yellows and reds with the subtle blue-greens in the shadows, moving effortlessly from warm to cool passages, in modeling her calmly focused and strikingly beautiful face.

Eye candy indeed.

Sherrie York is a Colorado artist who works primarily in the medium of reduction linocut.

This is a relief printing method in which the run of a given print is done in stages of impressions from the same block —as the block is re-cut and reduced in printing surface to be printed in a different color with each successive pass.

On her website, York has galleries of her linocut prints, as well as woodcuts, painting and drawings.

She also has a page describing the process, and often goes into more detail on her blog, Brush and Baren.

[Via Making a Mark]

Ice Floes, Claude Monet.

A marvel of atmosphere and suggestion.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use Fullscreen and Zoom or download.

Edwin Rhemrev is a visual development artist based in the Nertherlands who works in the fields of gaming and theme park design.

His website has galleries of his work in sections for environments and characters, as well as a sketchbook. Rhemrev also maintains a blog on which you can find works in progress, news of upcoming projects, and more annotation to the images than you will find on the website.

Rhemrev’s drawings and sketches have that wonderful springy, loose kind of style you often encounter in good visual development artists, with a lot of freedom and action on top of a solid foundation of draftsmanship.

Some of his color work is bright and energetic, while much is subdued and moody, and often rendered very effectively in monochrome.

As I frequently find with concept and visual development artists, some of my favorite pieces are among Rhemrev’s personal projects, where he can let his imagination roam with out the constraints of client requirements.

These include his fun take on the thought of what a hypothetical sequel to The Incredibles might look like (images above fourth from bottom).

I also particularly enjoy his digital plein air sketches of locations in The Hague (above, bottom two).

Mariana, by Sir John Everett Millais.

In the Tate, Britain. Large version on the Google Art Project. Click in image area at lower right for zoom control.

William Trost Richards, one of America’s foremost landscape and marine painters (and father of American Impressionist Anna Richards Brewster), had a patron named George Whitney, who lived near him in Philadelphia and supported him not only by purchasing his works on a regular basis, but by helping to finance Richards’ travels.

While traveling and painting, Richards would send back to Whitney small watercolors, most roughly 3 x 5 inches (7.6 x 12.7cm), which he called “coupons”, partly as a thank you and partly as examples of compositions from which Whitney would choose selections for Richards to later develop into larger oils.

Most of Whitney’s collection of Richard’s work was split up after his death, but the majority of the “coupon” watercolors were kept together and were recently donated to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The collection is on display there in a special exhibition curated in collaboration with the Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island titled A Mine of Beauty: Landscapes by William Trost Richards. The exhibition runs until this Sunday, December 30, 2012.

The small watercolors are accompanied by larger watercolors and oils both from the Academy’s permanent collection and loans from other Philadelphia collections.

Though there is no special gallery for the exhibition on the Academy’s website, a search of their collection online will include all of the “coupon” watercolors as well as larger watercolors and oils.

The beautiful small watercolors, I’m happy to say, are actually shown in images that are a bit lager than life size.

The Adoration of the Shepherds, Andrea Mantegna.

In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click “Fullscreen” under the image and use zoom controls or download arrow.

Painted in the mid 15th century, this astonishingly sculptural Nativity scene is a marvel of details and textures, from the craggy face of a weary Joseph and the grotesque face of the foreground shepherd, to the wonderfully geometrical rocks, banks and cliffs that form the setting.

The deep and richly detailed background is filled with marvelous landscape elements; multiple scenes unfold on the roads, hills, waterway and cliffside.

Even the multitude of pebbles throughout the image are rendered with loving detail.

Wonderful.