19th century British painter Edwin Longesden Long began his career as portrait painter.

He became friends with painter John Phillip, who was noted for his portrayals of life in Spain, and accompanied him on trips there, where he painted Spanish genre scenes and was introduced to the works of Velázquez and other great Spanish painters.

Long was modestly successful as a portraitist and genre painter, but it was after trips to Egypt and Syria in 1874 that he shifted his focus, and his success and recognition came as an orientalist, painting large elaborate pictures of Biblical subjects and exotic tableaux of scenes from the Middle East like The Babylonian Marriage Market (images above, top, with detail).

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the latter painting in person, and it’s easy to see why Long’s work was in demand and at high prices. He filled these beautifully painted large canvasses not only with attractive people, particularly women in exotic costume, but with richly detailed archeological objects, recreated with great accuracy.

Long was the forerunner of a style exemplified by slightly later Victorian painters like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Edward John Poynter and Frederick Lord Leighton.

A Year of Sun with Mr. Persol is a beautifully realized animated ad for Persol sunglasses, directed by illustrator Kevin Dart and Stéphane Codëdel, and designed by Dart and illustrator Chris Turnham.

At first I thought it might be intended as a web only ad as the richness and variety of the illustrations gives the impression that it’s longer than it is, but at just one minute in length, it could be intended for broadcast.

There are additional credits on Dart’s site.

As an ad, it’s very understated, but that’s evidently the intention; as an animated short, it’s very nicely done.

[Via Cartoon Brew]

Irena Roman paints bright, crisp, transparent watercolors, both as illustrations and for gallery display.

She particularly excels at the challenge of portraying the play of light across, through and around transparent or translucent objects and their often complex shadows.

You can find a selection of her work on The iSpot, though the images a bit small to appreciate her nuanced handling of the medium.

Her blog has several larger images linked to some of the images in the posts. There is also a short bio on iSpot.

Roman’s work has been featured in publications like Splash: The Best of American Watercolor, Print and Communication Arts, and on the cover of Watercolor Magic magazine.

The image above, top, was just accepted into the 2012 American Watercolor Society’s Annual International Exhibition and she has been awarded Signature Membership status.

The Monster Engine is a project by illustrator and comics artist Dave DeVries that originated in a simple concept. In looking through the drawings and doodles that his young niece had made in his sketchbooks, he wondered what it might look like if children’s drawings were finished off by an accomplished adult artist.

Since then, he has followed through with numerous renderings made from children’s drawings, primarily of monsters, which Devries, no stranger to rendering monsters in his professional work, has finished off as rendered paintings.

In DeVries’ words: “The process is simple. I project a child’s drawing with an opaque projector, faithfully tracing each line. Applying a combination of logic and instinct, I then paint the image as realistically as I can. My medium is mixed—primarily acrylic, airbrush, and colored pencil.”

The results are wonderful, and often hilarious. DeVries has collected a number of them in a book, along with photos and interviews, and also gives lectures and arranges gallery exhibitions of the drawings.

You can see samples on the Monster Engine website in the Artwork and Larger Works sections. Unfortunately not as many as you might like, but you may be able to find other examples on the web by Googling around.

You can also see DeVries’ professional work on his own website.

[Suggestion courtesy of Aaron Wilson]

Today is John Singer Sargent’s birthday.

A search for his work on the wonderful, recently redesigned website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art brings up over 600 images.

Yes, the iconic and astonishingly accomplished society portraits are well represented, and if you want to focus on those, you can limit your search to show only artworks on display, which sharply reduces it to 18 finished and beautiful works.

Part of the fascination for me, however, is exploring the less finished, less often seen works by Sargent in the museum’s collection, including watercolors, drawings and sketchbooks.

Sargent was prolific, and sketched and painted in watercolor for his own pleasure in addition to his more finished commissioned portraits.

The wonderful thing about browsing the Met’s website, aside from the amazing quantity and quality of their collection of Sargent, is that almost all of the images are viewable in large, sometimes wonderfully large, versions.

On each image’s detail page, click on the image or the “View fullscreen” link below it, and then zoom, or even better, use the download image arrow at bottom right to view the image larger.

This gets my Major Timesink Warning.

Enjoy.

English artist and writer Patrick Woodroffe is self taught as an artist, having studied languages at the University of Leeds. He is noted for his illustrations for books and record album covers, basically in a fantasy vein, but with a unique approach and artistic roots in artists like Bosch and Bruegel as well as Surrealism and Magic Realism.

Since I wrote about him in 2007, Woodroffe has added to his site images of more recent projects that borrow some of the form of fold-out Renaissance altarpieces (which I’ve described before as the Gothic and Renaissance equivalent of hypermedia). In these, wooden panels, often intricately carved or painted on themselves, open to reveal triptych panels within.

In Woodroffe’s case, he has extended the idea of revealed images even further, with interior panel portions within images that apparently open or turn around to reveal additional image variations.

Unfortunately, his website doesn’t present these in a clear or consistent enough manner for me to be certain of how they are actually constructed, but they are fascinating nonetheless.

There are also paintings in other frames and settings, both conventional and unconventional.

His paintings have moved toward visionary art, with intricate, highly textural compositions that feel as though they carry symbolism as well as presenting landscapes of the fantastic. The images on his site are tantalizing, but frustratingly small given their level of detail.

There are also sections on his site for his “Tomographs” a phrase he coined separately before being aware of its use in medical imaging, meaning painted objects that are often photographed against the context of real scenes.

There is an additional section devoted to his earlier work, with even smaller images, but these are accompanied by detail crops that give you at least a glimpse of the nature of the full image.

There are also other sections on books, ideas and past projects that bear looking through, as well as a selection of works available for purchase.

Because of his astonishing skill and the unfortunately small number of his known works, the enigmatic Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer probably has one of the highest masterpiece/oeuvre ratios in the history of art.

Among Vermeer’s (and the art world’s) most notable masterpieces is a small jewel of a painting called The Lacemaker.

It has on occasion been called the second most important painting in the collection of the Louvre, after Leonardo’s portrait of a noblewoman who may or may not be smiling.

The painting has fascinated other artists; Van Gogh wrote of the beauty of its colors in a letter to Émile Bernard, and Renoir considered it the most beautiful painting in the world.

Even among Vermeer’s often small works, The Lacemaker is a small painting, 9 5/8 x 8 1/4 in (24.5 x 21 cm), and both its size and subject invite intimacy. As we observe the young woman, who is absorbed in her craft, we get to observe Vermeer working at his; the weave of the canvas is visible through his thin layers of paint; the delicate application with which he has modeled her hands and face and the extraordinarily deft suggestion of her materials fall together in a harmonious, seemingly perfect composition.

The woman’s hands, in particular, are exquisitely painted, simultaneously naturalistic and surprisingly abstracted, the planes of the fingers almost geometric shapes. The entire painting, in fact, is remarkable for its open, spare composition and intense focus.

Vermeer deliberately played with focus here, sharply defining the hands and the workpad (as sharp as Vermeer ever allows his soft edges to get) while reducing focus on the surrounding objects, even in the foreground.

And for those who point to Vermeer’s (and other artists’) use of the camera obscura as though it were a crutch that somehow diminished his artistry, I offer my challenge that no modern artist, armed with not only a camera obscura, but all manner of photography, projectors and computer assistance, is going to match the artistry of Vermeer in similar paintings.

As a case in point, one of the artists particularly fascinated with this painting was Salvador Dalí, whose father had a copy of The Lacemaker in his study as he was growing up.

In addition to doing his Dalífied Paranoiac-Critical Study of Vermeer’s Lacemaker, in which the image explodes into a shower of rhinoceros horns, in 1955 Dali acquired permission to take his paints into the Louvre and paint a direct copy from the original (which used to be a much more common practice among artists in centuries past).

Whatever you may think of Dalís art, few who have seen his work in person can deny that he was one of the most accomplished painters of the 20th century, with a keen eye and firm grasp of old master techniques. Yet Dalí, with all his skill, produces a copy that, while a nice little painting and well painted (I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the original), still falls well short of Vermeer’s mastery, and seems forced in comparison (image below, larger version here).

As for the original, there is a feature on the Louvre’s new website that allows you to zoom way in on a selection of highlights from the collection, one of which is The Lacemaker. Unfortunately, it requires Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in, which is not as widely installed as Flash. Those who have, or install, the plug-in can scroll to the right to find the painting, and zoom way in, a view that is particularly effective in fullscreen mode.

I’ve listed other resources below.

I’m late in mentioning this, but not too late — until this Sunday, 15 January, 2012, The Lacemaker will still be on view in the UK as part of an extraordinary exhibition in which the Louvre has allowed it to be loaned to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The exhibition is titled Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence, and features three other Vermeers as well as a number of other Dutch Golden Age masterpieces. There is an article about the exhibition on The Guardian. There is a catalog of the exhibition, Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence.

Vermeer is one of my personal favorites in all of art, and in his finest works, of which The Lacemaker is surely one, seems to transcend painting into the realm of magic — presenting us with a frozen sheet of time, distilled by his genius into the essence of seeing. But for all his apparent sorcery, he was still a painter, applying paint to canvas with brushes, seeking to express the ineffable with physical materials.

The Lacemaker has a quiet intensity and focused perfection that makes me think Vermeer found in his subject a reflection on his own absorption in, and dedication to, his craft.

For anyone, artist or otherwise, who has experienced the Zen-like state in which work or action seems to flow through you, instead of being created by effort, I think The Lacemaker should resonate with that exquisite suspension of time and thought.

Kevin Melrose, writing on the excellent comics blog Robot 6, part of the Comic Book Resources site, at the end of the year presents his list of the 50 best comic book covers of the year.

Comic book covers occupy a particularly fascinating niche in publishing, inheriting some of the lurid, lure you in with promised excitement approach from the old pulp detective and science fiction magazines of the mid-20th century, but moving into the 21st century with more sophisticated graphics and a wide range of design and illustration approaches.

Melrose’s list is always interesting, as is his commentary on the covers. The images in his column are linked to larger versions so you can get a good look at them.

For most, you can appreciate them simply for the illustration and/or design. For some, however, it helps to have a little background. In the case of Paolo Rivera’s wonderful cover for Daredevil #1 (images above, top) it helps to understand that Daredevil is a blind superhero who perceives the world through his other, heightened senses.

For more of my thoughts on the interesting role comic book covers have in modern illustration, see my post from last year on The 50 best comic covers of 2010 on Robot 6.

For artist credits on the other covers above, please see the original post on Robot 6.