Old Masters Academy

Old Masters

A French symbolist painter in the Studio

A French symbolist painter in the Studio

A French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist. Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, to a prosperous family. He started drawing as a child, and at the age of ten he was awarded a drawing prize at school. Aged fifteen, he began the formal study of drawing, but on the insistence of his father he changed to architecture. His failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he briefly studied painting there under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864. (His younger brother Gaston Redon would become a noted architect.) Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography….

Read More

French Portrait Artist in his studio: Henri Fantin-Latour

French Portrait Artist in his studio: Henri Fantin-Latour

Henri Fantin-Latour (14 January 1836 – 25 August 1904) was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers. As a youth, he received drawing lessons from his father, who was an artist. In 1850 he entered the Ecole de Dessin, where he studied with Lecoq de Boisbaudran. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1854, he devoted much time to copying the works of the old masters in the Louvre. Although he befriended several of the young artists who would later be associated with Impressionism, including Whistler and Manet, Fantin’s own work remained conservative and classical  in style. Whistler brought attention to Fantin in England, where his still-lifes sold so well that they were “practically unknown in France during his lifetime”. In addition to his realistic paintings, Fantin-Latour created imaginative lithographs inspired by…

Read More

Oil Painting Technique – Learn from the OLD MASTERS

Oil Painting Technique – Learn from the OLD MASTERS

Learn from the OLD MASTERS The Pietà (pl. same; Italian for pity) is a subject in Christian art depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, most often found in sculpture. As such, it is a particular form of the Lamentation of Christ, a scene from the Passion of Christ found in cycles of the Life of Christ. When Christ and the Virgin are surrounded by other figures from the New Testament, the subject is strictly called a Lamentation in English, although Pietà is often used for this as well, and is the normal term in Italian

Read More

Learn from the OLD MASTERS

Learn from the OLD MASTERS The Ambassadors (1533) is a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger in the National Gallery, London. As well as being a double portrait, the painting contains a still life of several meticulously rendered objects, the meaning of which is the cause of much debate. It is also a much-cited example of anamorphosis in painting. The most notable and famous of Holbein’s symbols in the work, is the skewed skull which is placed in the bottom centre of the composition. The skull, rendered in anamorphic perspective, another invention of the Early Renaissance, is meant to be a visual puzzle as the viewer must approach the painting nearly from the side to see the form morph into…

Read More

What they learned from the OLD MASTERS: Raphael.

What they learned from the OLD MASTERS? From Raphael. The Portrait of a Young Woman (also known as La fornarina) is a painting by the Italian High Renaissance master Raphael It is probable that the picture was in the painter’s studio at his death in 1520, and that it was modified and then sold by his assistant Giulio Romano. The woman is traditionally identified with the fornarina (bakeress) Margherita Luti, Raphael’s Roman mistress, though this has been questioned. The woman is pictured with an oriental style hat and bare breasts. She is making the gesture to cover her left breast, or to turn it with her hand, and is illuminated by a strong artificial light coming from the external. Her…

Read More

What Édouard Manet learned from the OLD MASTERS?

What Édouard Manet learned from the OLD MASTERS? Manet’s composition reveals his study of the old masters, as the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving The Judgement of Paris (c. 1515) after a drawing by Raphael. Scholars also cite two works as important precedents for Manet’s painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, The Pastoral Concert, 1508, by Giorgione or possibly Titian (in the Louvre) and Giorgione’s The Tempest, both of which are famous Renaissance paintings. The Tempest also features a fully dressed man and a nude woman in a rural setting, as an important precedent for Manet’s painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. The painting Pastoral Concert, even more closely resembles Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, featuring two…

Read More