Don’t you love illustrator Sanna Paananen’s retro shapes and colors?

More at Pekka Illustration Agency.

This is one of my favorite paintings, Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games. Click and zoom for a closer look.

See the little girls twirling their skirts in the left background?

Pekka Halonen was a part of the blossoming of the Finnish arts at the end of the 19th century. Halonen’s paintings focus almost exclusively on nature, and people interacting with the natural world.

I love the sinuous lines of his paintings.

The Library of Congress has extensive online digital collections, including a comprehensive collection of Works Progress Administration posters from the 1930s and 40s. Here are a few examples (click for a closer look):

The Seattle Asian Art Museum is showing a marvelous exhibit of Indian watercolor paintings from the 17th through the 19th century, titled Garden and Cosmos. The paintings were Rajasthani royal commissions, and were only recently discovered in Marwar / Jodhpur. They span a period of many decades and range from playful domestic scenes of palace life to metaphysical maps of the cosmos. Many of the paintings are giant miniatures. That is to say, they are 4 or 5 feet long and filled with amazingly intricate and colorful detail.

Here is a painting from the exhibition, Sage Makandeya’s Ashram , attributed to the “Darga Master”. Click and zoom to see a very high resolution image.

There’s a nice interactive guide to the exhibition at Seattle Art Museum and another at the Smithsonian’s Freer-Sackler Galleries, where they were exhibited previously. Neither site includes the paintings that I found the most delightful, unfortunately – but it’s best to see them in person anyway, and pore over their every charming detail.

Here are some more paintings and some detail excerpts.

The show is at Seattle Asian Art Museum until April 26th, 2009, then it will move to the British Museum and the National Museum of India. Highly recommended.

Brought to you by The Chawed Rosin.

Jan van Eyck was one of the great artists of the Northern Renaissance. Among his masterpieces is the Ghent Altarpiece, created in collaboration with his brother Hubert for the Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium in 1432. The altarpiece is made up of twenty-four paintings on hinged panels that can be opened or closed to display different scenes. The closed position displays an annunciation scene, based on the biblical story of an angel visiting Mary to announce that she will give birth to Christ.

Here is a detail of the announcing angel.

Opening the panels reveals images of the Virgin Mary, God, and John the Baptist, and a mystic scene of the adoration of the lamb, flanked by worshipers and images of Adam and Eve from the bibilical creation story.

Below are higher resolution detail images. Click and zoom for a closer look.

More art of the Northern Renaissance

Brought to you by The Chawed Rosin.

Albert Edelfelt was one of the leading painters of what is known as the Golden Age of Finnish art, in the late 19th and early 20th century. His paintings were more polished and traditional in style than many of his Finnish contemporaries. They used many of the techniques of the impressionists, including the use of pure colors and painting done in the open air. His best paintings have the same luminosity of impressionism, but also a more penetrating precision and psychological realism that captures the beauty of everyday life.

Luxembourg Gardens

In the Nursery

Old Women Outside the Church at Ruokolahti (The Gossips)

Child’s Funeral

Boys Playing at the Beach

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Many months ago I posted Dorothy Lathrop’s illustrations for The Light Princess and Marjorie Flack’s illustrations for Taktuk, an Arctic Boy, from the Junior Classics children’s literature collection that my family had on the shelf when I was growing up.

Here are Walter Crane’s prints for the volume of fairy tales.

The Frog Prince

Cat and Mouse in Partnership

The Fisherman and His Wife

The Bremen Town Musicians

The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats

The Goose Girl

Rapunzel

Pictures are roughly actual size, but you can click and zoom for a closer look.

More illustration.

I studied a little art history in college, but I had never heard of prolific Flemish painter Frans Snyders before I came across his gigantic still life paintings in museums on my first trip to Europe.

Snyders painted life-sized images of an huge spreads of fruit, vegetables, and game, filled with color and detail. For some reason, he often included a thief in his compositions, whether a pickpocket or an animal stealing some of the food on display. His paintings make me think about my place in the food chain

Images courtesy of Art Renewal Center and the Web Gallery of Art, and the Hermitage, Louvre, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The portraits of the Northern Renaissance are fascinating, and Hans Holbein’s are some of the coolest. They have such a stark objectivity and faithfulness to reality. I especially like the intricate details in the elaborate clothing of his subjects.

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