Van Gogh found inspiration for this portrait in the bold complementary colors and contrasting patterns of the Japanese woodblock prints he collected. He fantasized about Japan as a utopia of bright light and color different from the dark, crowded western capitals he lived in.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1997: 115-117, repro. 1999 Welsh-Ovcharov,
Angeles Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, March–May 2024 Paul Thek and the Italian
Woman Holding a Balance is a superb example of Johannes Vermeer’s exquisite sense of stability and rhythm. A woman dressed in a blue jacket with fur trim stands serenely at a table in a corner of a room.
Records, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; copies from digitized records in
The creation of works of art during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance was often a collaborative process. This triptych was painted by two artists:
Brothers Records, accession number 960015, Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los
It is impossible to guess what 16-year-old Ginevra de’ Benci was thinking as she sat for this portrait to commemorate her upcoming marriage. The young Florentine woman has a distant gaze.
Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) wears the red biretta and cape of a cardinal. At the time Titian painted this portrait, Bembo had recently been elevated to that status in honor of his service to the Church and his scholarly career, although the writer’s literary output was almost entirely secular.
Records, accession number 2012.M.54, Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los
Edward Hopper’s lifelong enthusiasm for the sea developed when he was a boy in Nyack, New York, then a prosperous Hudson River port with an active shipyard. Years later, in 1934, he and his wife built a house and studio in South Truro, Massachusetts, where he produced a number of oil paintings and watercolors manifesting his avid interest in nautical subjects.
Speed Art Museum, Louisville; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Denver Art Museum; Los
[fig1] © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, private collection, Los Angeles [4] Margaret
How do portraits influence the way we see historic figures? David shows Napoleon Bonaparte working tirelessly for the people of France.
Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
Lured to Tahiti in 1891 by reports of its unspoiled culture, Gauguin was disappointed by its civilized capital and moved to the countryside, where he found an approximation of the tropical paradise he had expected. The Tahiti of his depictions was derived from native folklore supplemented by material culled from books written by earlier European visitors and overlaid with allusions to western culture.
Edge of the Forest 1941 Aspects of French Painting from Cezanne to Picasso, Los
