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Art History
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Gainsborough
Eighteenth-century England produced the sharp criticism of Addison and Steele, the caricatures of Hogarth, and the lusty novels of Smollet, Fielding, and Sterne. However, its most popular paintings were society portraits like those of Gainsborough. The apparent paradox was due to the fact that in this fluid and changing society the upper middle classes were [...]
El Greco
In sixteenth-century Spain the crisis of religious feeling, the striving for mystic oneness with God, was even more sharply felt than in Italy. The Spanish Reformation and counter-Reformation were far more agonized. In the art of El Greco these passions emerge in a startling way.Born Domenicos Theotocopoulos on the island of Crete, he was later [...]
Degas
Degas was one of the leading spirits of the Impressionist movement and organized many of its group exhibitions. Nevertheless his paintings differ from the others in a number of important respects. The basis of his training had been fine drawing in the tradition of the old masters. As a result, his approach was entirely distinct [...]
Courbet
By the middle of the nineteenth century material and industrial progress was being directly reflected in the works of writers and painters. Mechanization brought an ever growing interest in the physical nature of things and in the problem of man against the world. The great developments in science were now paralleled by a concern with [...]
Cezanne
Cezanne is the key figure of the post-Impressionist search for form. In many ways he is the ancestor of both Fauvism and Cubism, the two main streams of twentieth- century French painting. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, European painting became, increasingly experimental. As the artist's market grew smaller, he turned in upon [...]