Showing posts with label Art appreciation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art appreciation. Show all posts

Vintage Art Appreciation: The Ferry by Emanuel Phillips Fox

The Ferry, c1910
by Emanuel Phillips Fox (1865–1915)

About the artist: Emanuel Phillips Fox was an Australian impressionist painter. He was born on 12 March 1865 to the photographer Alexander Fox and Rosetta Phillips at 12 Victoria Parade in Fitzroy, Melbourne, into a family of lawyers whose firm, DLA Piper New Zealand still exists. He studied art at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne from 1878 until 1886 under G. F. Folingsby; his fellow students included John Longstaff, Frederick McCubbin, David Davies and Rupert Bunny.

In 1886, he travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he gained first prize in his year for design, and École des Beaux-Arts (1887–1890), where his masters included William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Léon Gérôme, both among the most famous artists of the time. While at the Beaux Arts, he was awarded a first prize for painting. He was greatly influenced by the fashionable school of en plein air Impressionism.

About the painting:The Ferry is the artist’s masterpiece. It was developed from rapid sketches that Fox painted outdoors at Trouville, a favourite beach resort in the north of France, and was completed in his Paris studio the following winter. Fox positions the viewer as if peering down to the elegant boating party and immerses us in a sumptuous, genteel world of vibrant colours, luscious fabric textures and warm summer atmosphere.

Originally exhibited in Paris and London, The Ferry also influenced a younger generation of Australian modernist artists when it was exhibited in Sydney in 1913.

Sources:
[1] Original image from Google Art Project
[2] Artist description
[3] Painting description

Vintage Art Appreciation: Paris - The Flower Market on the Île de la Cité by Louis Marie de Schryver

The Flower Market on the Île de la Cité
by Louis Marie de Schryver (1862–1942)

About the artist: Louis Marie de Schryver was born in Paris on October 12, 1862. The son of a well-respected journalist, he was raised in the privileged upper class of French society.As a member of the upper class himself, de Schryver was no doubt innately familiar with the leisure activities of the fashionable women of Paris that would become his subject matter. Among the many changes to daily life in the waning years of the 19th century was the increasing visibility of women outside the home.

About the painting: Both the chic women strolling the boulevards to show off their modish new dresses and hats and the young women selling flowers and staffing the cafés and boutiques in the fashionable areas of town were taking advantage of new freedoms that would not have been available to them even a generation before.

The profusion of different flowers on offer is complimented by the artist’s skillful rendering of the backlit pink parasol of the woman in the background and the play of light on the layered light-yellow ribbons on the hat of the woman in the foreground, as these elements echo the shape and color palette of the flowers themselves. The horse-drawn carriage passing in the background gives the painting a charmingly anecdotal, observed quality which is a hallmark of the artist’s best work.

Source of image and description: Christie's