The folds of this imposing figure’s garment sweep upward in an unbroken line to his illuminated face. His hand projects toward the viewer.
Graphic and Applied Art, and Salon of Photography, Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto
Boulevard—Paris) 1897, Calcutta (no. 209, as A Wet Day on the Boulevard) 1897, Toronto
Vlaminck is often portrayed as the most unruly painter of the fauve school, an impression that reflects both on his personality (as it is revealed in his biography and writings) and his work. A self-taught artist, Vlaminck insisted that painting should be the unmediated expression of an artist’s temperament, „emotive, tender, ferocious, as natural as life itself.“ [1] Indeed, having been an anarchist sympathizer during the prewar period, he would later link the strident colorism and bold brushwork of his work to social and political dissent, a connection that was actually made by several art critics.
York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; Art Gallery of Toronto
Minneapolis Institute of Arts; San Francisco Museum of Art; The Art Gallery of Toronto
Hostilities between North American colonists and Britain were boiling over in the 1770s when Benjamin West painted this double portrait. The British wanted to ensure the loyalty of the Mohawk people, the easternmost tribe of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), in case of war.
Johnson 1984 Georgian Canada: Conflict and Culture, 1745-1820, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
Thomas Eakins made his career portraying upper-middle class residents of his native Philadelphia. Such depictions are anything but static likenesses;
repro., as The Pathetic Song. 1961 American Painting, 1865-1905, Art Gallery of Toronto
Women at work provided inspiration for Degas. In addition to ballet dancers and cabaret singers, he also painted milliners and dressmakers, laundresses and ironers—such as the young woman here.
Impressionism in the Age of Industry: Monet, Pissarro and More, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Gauguin purposefully displayed his Père Paillard and its female companion piece, Thérèse, in front of his Polynesian home (which he named the House of Pleasure), so that islanders passing by could appreciate the two carved works. Their meaning was evident to everyone.
1981 Gauguin to Moore: Primitivism in Modern Sculpture, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
A ragtag group of people gathers around an elderly man holding a violin. He pauses, as if interrupted mid performance, and gazes directly at us.
Boston & Toronto, 1969: 168. Farwell, Beatrice.
Salomon van Ruysdael’s masterful River Landscape with Ferry has a visual force that reflects the sense of pride the Dutch felt at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Münster in 1648, which gave full autonomy to the Dutch Republic. After war of independence from Spanish rule that lasted eighty years, the Dutch set out to explore the myriad visual delights of the prosperous country that they could finally claim as their own.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art; Art Gallery of Toronto
