Jules Breton, whose full name is Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton (what, no hyphens?), was one of the most famous and in demand academic painters of the 19th Century.

He fell into disregard and semi-obscurity in the 20th Century, suffering particularly at the pens of Modernist critics who deemed him one of the terrible academic painters from which Modernism was here to “save” the spirit of pure art.

Though he started as a history painter, for the majority of his career Breton largely devoted himself to images of peasant field workers, seasonal laborers at the bottom of the social ladder, toiling in the fields.

His subjects are represented with sympathy, but his fields are idealized, glowing seas of grain bathed in late day sun. He also portrayed other elements of village life, as in The Commuincants (above, top).

He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, and later in Paris at the atelier of Michel Drolling.

Breton focused in later years on compositions of single female workers, posed in sunlit fields, a genre that proved highly popular with buyers in the U.S. He became highly regarded and his work in demand in the UK and the U.S. as well as his native France.

His later paintings moved from realism to a poetic vision more in keeping with Symbolism. His painting The Song of the Lark (above, bottom left) was the source of the title for Willa Cather’s famous novel.

Reportedly, Van Gogh at one point walked 85 miles to try to meet him, but was put off by Breton’s high wall and never contacted the elder artist.

Gwenn Seemel is an Oregon based portrait artist with an unusual technique. her colorful portrait images are built up from a series of cross hatch strokes in acrylic, a process she developed from an interest in printmaking.

As you can see from the demo on this page, she starts with areas of color shapes, often with a modernist, geometric feel that often carries through to the final piece, and works up the surface gradually with several passes of hatching and shape delineation.

The end result is often a very graphic surface of multiple marks, a textural array of colors that blend to form the portrait image, as in the detail image above, bottom.

Seemel works from digital photos taken during an hour long interview process in which she asks the subject to talk about themselves.

The image above, top right is a self-portrait.

[Suggestion courtesy of Karin Jurick]

Since I last wrote about painter Karen Hollingsworth in 2006, she has continued exploring her luminous room interiors, which have evolved into “windowscapes”.

Many painters will work to fill rooms with light, but Hollingsworth’s rooms are volumetrically filled with the palpable presence of light and air. Sea air lifts gossamer curtains, through which sunlight slides, scatters and bounces, playing across polished wooden floors and chairs, cascades of linen bedsheets or tablecloths arrayed with colorful fruit.

Light and air almost seem like competing forces, light filling a space like water in a jar, and air stirring it around, moving your eye through the space across the diagonals of swept up curtains.

In the galleries on her site you can browse through her recent archives of windowscapes, along with “roomscapes” with somewhat weightier contents, as well as portraits, still life and commissioned work.

Karen Hollingsworth is married to painter Neil Hollingsworth, who I profiled here and here.

I’ve mentioned before (also here) that the attribution of works to artists from the past is often an inexact science, perhaps more of an art in itself.

Attributions change, and works once identified with one artist are subsequently assigned to another, or often, to pupils of the artist. Sometimes the reverse happens, and works once assigned to another hand are recognized as coming from that of the master.

The Getty Museum is currently exploring this concept with an exhibit titled Drawings by Rembrandt & His Pupils: Telling the Difference.

In the web site material for the exhibit is an interactive that compares drawings by Rembrandt side by side with similar drawings by his students and contemporaries; many of the latter drawings having once been attributed to Rembrandt.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about the exhibit that also has an interactive. In this case they present the compared sets of drawings without initially identifying the artist, letting you play detective in determining which is by Rembrandt. (It’s hard to predict if this article may disappear behind a pay-wall at some point.)

The interactive on the Getty’s site allows you to zoom in on the images, affording a detailed view of the drawings.

Drawings by Rembrandt & His Pupils: Telling the Difference runs to February 28th at the Getty Center. There is a concurrent exhibit, Drawing Life: The Dutch Visual Tradition, that should provide a rich context for the Rembrandt show.

There is also a virtual exhibit called Rembrandt in Southern California, that features images of 14 Rembrandts on view in five Southern California Museums.

For more background, and lots more Rembrandt drawings, see Rembrandt’s Drawings on Jonathan Janson’s Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work, and my posts on that site (formerly called Rembrandt: life, paintings, etchings, drawings and self portraits), and Jonathan Janson.

There is a book published to accompany the exhibit: Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference; and there is also a nice book of Rembrandt drawings that came out in 2007: Rembrandt Drawings: 116 Masterpieces in Original Color.

American artist Fred Tomaselli creates intricately detailed and highly colorful works that are both representational and decorative.

Tomaselli utilizes both painting and and collage techniques; the latter including unorthodox (and sometimes even illegal) materials like flowers, herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants. He will also use photographic elements and direct painting in gouache; and adheres the collage components to the panel with resin.

His subjects are often birds, plants and other natural themes, as well as less directly representational images. He states that his intention is to be hallucinatory and transportive.

Sometimes his themes carry over into the collage elements, as in an image of a woodpecker whose bill is composed of photographic collage of hundreds of other birds beaks.

His use of illegal substances, even though locked in resin, has caused exhibits to be confiscated and locked up at customs, leaving gallery walls for a scheduled exhibit in Paris blank.

David Levine was one of the great caricaturists of the 20th Century. He is best known for his drawings of notable figures published in The New York Review of Books over the course of more than 40 years.

The NYRB web site has a gallery of over 2,500 of his drawings that can be browsed by year or category.

Unlike caricaturists whose subjects are largely drawn from one or two sections of public life, Levine’s position called on him to portray a wide variety of figures from history as well as the present.

I’ve always been particularly fond of his caricatures of artistic figures, both historic and contemporary. The images above show Levine’s interpretation of Rembrandt, Rubens, Valázquez, Titian, Andrew Wyeth and John Singer Sargent (links to Lines and Colors articles on those artists).

Levine took the “large head small body” style of caricature and made it his own, giving emphasis to the faces. His pen and ink approach could be intricately detailed, wonderfully loose, or both simultaneously.

He studied painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and at Tyler School of Art here in Philadelphia. His work as a painter is less well known than his illustrations, but you can find galleries of his paintings on his web site and a few examples elsewhere on the web.

His caricatures were often searingly on target, focusing on the foibles and flaws of politicians and other public figures; sometimes definitively so, as in the case of his famous portrayal of Lyndon Johnson lifting his shirt to show his Vietnam-shaped operation scar.

There have been several collections of his work published, like his collection of American Presidents.

David Levine died today at the age of 83.

[Via Art Knowledge News]

This beautiful drawing in pen and brown ink, wash and brown, black and white chalks, Adoration of the Shepherds, by François Boucher, is currently on display at the Morgan Library and Museum in new York.

It is part of an exhibit called Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings, that runs until January 3, 2010.

There is a selection of drawings from the show highlighted on the Morgan’s web site, which are linked to zoomable versions. Though I’m not always a fan of the constraints of zooming images, they still offer the ability to see details normally not available in smaller images on the web. This is also something that is rarely applied to drawings.

Zooming in on this drawing we can see Boucher’s fluid Rembrandt-like pen lines. Look at the way he has used the reddish brown tones and judicious applications of white chalk to give the scene a luminous quality more often seen in paintings than drawings.

I love the wonderfully economic notation of the animals and the wooden structures, bales and baskets at the lower right portion of the drawing.

Impressionism – Painting Light is the title of an exhibition at The Albertina in Vienna, Austria, on view through 14 February, 2010.

The exhibit draws from the collections of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Foundation in Cologne, as well as the Albertina and the Batliner Collection, with additions from private collections and other museums.

Those of us not in the neighborhood can enjoy the Albertina’s online tour of some Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that are rarely seen outside of the region.

The exhibition includes work by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters like Monet, Cezanne, degas, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Morisot, Seurat, Renoir, Caillebotte and Sisley, as well as less well known painters like Albert Besnard, Maximilien Luce and Maxime Maufra.

(Images above: Gustav Caillebotte, Maxime Maufra, Alfred Sisley)

[Via Art Knowledge News]

After spending much of her career in the animation industry, working for companies like Walt Disney Feature Animation and Hanna Barbara, Allison Proulx turned her attention to gallery painting.

She studied at Rhode Island School of Design and Art Center College of Design and worked briefly as a freelance illustrator before entering the animation field.

Her web site featured galleries of work from both sides of her career, including figurative work.

Her simply and clearly stated landscapes come from direct observation, and are a marked contrast to the stylized animation background art that is also featured on her site.

I always find it fascinating when an artist does both real and fanciful landscapes, as the comparison speaks volumes about the intent and techniques employed in the creation of each.

Nancy Friese is a painter and printmaker who studied at the Yale University School of Art, the graduate painting program at the University of California, Berkeley and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She divides her time between Rhode Island and North Dakota and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.

Her landscape paintings have a bright, almost effervescent feeling of splashes of color, with radiant high-chroma passages contrasted with more subtle hues.

At times her oil paintings have a bit of a feeling of gouache, in areas of color that are perceived as shapes, rather than blended passages or impressionistic dabs.

Her skies are frequently filled with roiling cumulous clouds, glowing with violets and reds. There is often a feeling of motion in her canvasses, not in the sense of depicting objects in motion, but a feeling that the colors themselves are in motion.

The color feels like it is straining against its bounds, as if trying to burst from the canvas, but is securely held in place by her firmly balanced compositions.

One might think from looking at her work that they are studio paintings, but my understanding is that most, if not all, of her canvasses are painted on location; and many of them are large scale.

Her web site has a gallery of oils, as well as a selection of prints and watercolors.

There is a good article about the artist on Painting Perceptions, which is where I encountered her work.