A Wheatfield, with Cypresses

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 732.

Jeanne Samary

The Judgment of Paris

Venus of Urbino

Venus of Urbino was painted by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) in 1538. The pose was taken from an earlier painting by Giorgione and is a recreation of the classical Greek nude. This painting embodies the rich color and tone for which Titian was famous; its pictorial composition is flawless.

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The Judgment of Paris (1635-?) was painted by Flemish baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens. The painting is based on the Greek myth in which the shepherd Paris is asked by three goddesses to decide which of them is the most beautiful. According to mythology, this is the incident that sparked the legendary Trojan War. The sense of agitated movement, dramatic light, and earthy figures in the painting characterize Rubens's work.

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This portrait of the actress Jeanne Samary was painted in 1879 by Pierre Auguste Renoir. The figure is bathed in light, and the artist's unique brushwork gives it a glowing quality. Along with French painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, Renoir was a creator of the impressionism movement in painting.

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From 1888 until his death in 1890, Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted his most important works. In these paintings, mostly landscapes such as A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889), van Gogh, like other postimpressionist artists, rejected the impressionists' aim of depicting subjects naturalistically. Instead he made his paintings subjective through the expressive use of color and line.

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