Paul Sérusier sojourned in Pont-Aven during the summer of 1888, as Paul Gauguin, whose advice he followed. On his returning to Paris, he showed his young fellow painters, the future "Nabis" ("prophets" in Hebrew), what was to become their "Talisman". A close observation of the painting allows one to recognise certain elements of the landscape represented : the wood, at the top on the left, the transversal path, the row of beech trees on the river bank, and the mill, at the back, on the right. Each of these elements is a stain of colour. According to Maurice Denis, Gauguin had told Séruzier : "How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion". Although they were determined that visual sensation should prevail over the intellectual perception of the world, the impressionists had not given up a conception of painting implying the representation of what they observed. Here the mimetic conception is thoroughly replaced by the search for a coloured equivalent. Maurice Denis explained that in front of this landscape, he and his friends felt "liberated from all the yokes that the idea of copying brought to [our] painters' instincts". Posterity was to see - in retrospect – in this painting the manifesto of a pure painting, autonomous and abstract, related to Maurice Denis's famous statement: "Remember that a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude woman or any anecdote, is essentially a plane surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.", that was not published before... 1914, in Theories...

https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/le-talisman-paysage-au-bois-damour-8028

Jan Toorop, born in Java in 1858 when it was still a Dutch colony, soon came to Europe and studied at the Amsterdam Academy from 1881 before continuing his studies in Brussels, Paris and London. Receptive to the many aesthetic currents then running through Europe, he soon gave up Naturalism for Neo-Impressionism, before devoting a few short years to Symbolism. 1893, the year of this astonishing pastel, which was designed as a project for a stained-glass window, was the peak of his participation in the Symbolist movement. The iconography, which originally continued over the frame, is highly complex: the female face with wide-open eyes represents Desire, who is praying that the still closed lily might receive the white dew of the rain falling from the clouds above her. Behind the cross, seen from the back, which leaves only a part of Christ's crown of thorns visible, another face seen from the side with half-closed eyes is that of Satisfaction. The figure is holding a half-open lily into which the fertilising spiritual dew has already fallen, releasing its perfume. The linear environment is made up of a band of parallel lines winding through the composition; they represent sounds coming from the bell on the right which travel through the world supporting faith, a reminder, as Toroop said, of "the pure mystical periods of yesteryear". In 1911, the artist gave this echo of complex mysticism, highly critical of contemporary society, to Maurice Denis, a painter and poet with a clear, direct faith, in exchange for a Mother and Child now in the Kröller-Müller museum, Otterlo, in the Netherlands.

https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/le-desir-et-lassouvissement-18468

After staying in the south of France, in Arles, and then at the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy de Provence, Vincent Van Gogh settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village in the outskirts of Paris. His brother Théo, concerned with his health, incited him to see the Doctor Gachet, himself a painter and a friend of numerous artists, who accepted to treat him. During the two months separating his arrival, on May 21, 1890 and his death on July 29, the artist made about seventy paintings, over one per day, not to mention a large number of drawings. This is the only painting representing in full the church in Auvers that may sometimes be distinguished in the background of views of the whole village. This church, built in the 13th century in the early Gothic style, flanked by two Romanesque chapels, became under the painter's brush a flamboyant monument on the verge of dislocating itself from the ground and from the two paths that seem to be clasping it like torrents of lava or mud. If one compares this painting with Claude Monet's paintings of the cathedral in Rouen, painted shortly afterwards, one can measure how different Van Gogh's approach was from that of the impressionists. Unlike Monet, he did not try to render the impression of the play of light on the monument. Even though the church remains recognisable, the painting does not so much offer the spectator a faithful image of reality than a form of "expression" of a church. The artistic means used by Van Gogh anticipate the work of the fauvists and expressionist painters.

https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/leglise-dauvers-sur-oise-vue-du-chevet-755

The London Houses of Parliament crop up regularly in Monet's work in 1900. At first the artist observed them from the terrace of St Thomas Hospital, on the opposite bank, near Westminster Bridge. Monet's London production, which includes views of Charing Cross bridge and Waterloo bridge, is in fact dominated by variations in the light and atmosphere due to the famous London fog, which enveloped the city, especially in autumn and winter. The unreal ghostly outline of Parliament buildings looms up like an apparition. The stone architecture seems to have lost its substance. Sky and water are painted in the same tones, dominated by mauve and orange. The brushstrokes are systematically broken into thousands of coloured patches to render the density of the atmosphere and the mist. Paradoxically, these impalpable elements become more tangible than the evanescent building which seems to dissolve in the shadow.

https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/londres-le-parlement-trouee-de-soleil-dans-le-brouillard-1177

A realist painter who often depicted his native NYC, Dinnerstein was a precursor to Bo Bartlett's heavy-handed symbolism in the American Realist Movement.

This painting depicts a scene from central park. The view is from under the Bethesda Terrace looking at the Bethesda Fountain.

You can read more about the statue here: https://www.centralpark.com/things-to-do/attractions/bethesda-fountain/

It was named after a passage from the Bible (John:2-5)

Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called... Bethesda... whoever then first after the troubling of the waters stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

Dinnerstein's work often depicted spiritual subjects based on the Jewish faith. Perhaps there is some spiritual significance here, or perhaps Dinnerstein is exposing a side of NYC that is only seen by natives.

This is a view of the terrace from behind the statue:

This is a close-up of the statue:

Aside

Consider listening to Chopan's Funeral March (you've heard it before, especially if you've played Castlevania). It is part of the inspiration for this work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZY5DBmgC_A&ab_channel=HDClassicalMusic

Syncretism

A fashionable way to make art at the turn of the 19th century was to combine different arts together. Here, Podkowinski mixes art, music and poetry to paint this Nocturne. Chopan's Funeral March and a poem inspired by it (not great translated to English) were the driving force behind this painting.

Nocturnes

Tone is supposed to take precidence over narrative in these works, popular at the time. The pallette, with restrictions to darker colors, takes mastery to get right.

Podkowinski

This was the artist's last piece and is mentioned alongside Munch's Scream because of its tension and carrying signals of the demise of the painter. Before it was finished Podkowinski died from Tuberculosis.

One of the 200 Japanese wood carvings Manet collected in his lifetime. The introduction of Japanese art to the west had a huge impact, it is said to be the influence of the impressionist movement in france.

Openly mocked by the audience at the first Salon des Refuses in 1863, Whistler's vision of "art for art's sake" did not go over well at that time.

You can see influences of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (emo kids of the 19th century art world) in this painting, and it is a great example of the transition from pre-raphaelite to impressionism. In it, Whistler paints a woman standing on some sort of ferocious animal rug.

The pre-raphaelites sought honesty, drama, and dedication beyond the main characters: a woman dressed in a simple white gown (depicting innocence perhaps), contrasting with the animal baring its teeth, so low in the picture, it's often overlooked. There are also flowers on the ground - real ones at her feet, and part of the carpet under the wolf rug. These are classic hallmarks of the brotherhood, who Whistler had become friendly with in London.

Pictured below is an example of pre-raphaelite ideals, similar to Whistler's painting: Dedication to details such as the flowers and the character holding a flower in her hand (Ophelia - Millais, 1851).

You can also see the definition fading. At certain parts of the picture - towards the bottom, you can see visible brush strokes almost as if the rug and wolf skin were moving.

However, impressionism is breaking away from pre-raphaelite ideals in the character: she is not doing anything special. The impressionists sought to show life as it is. The industrialization of Europe brought many changes, and the impressionists were dedicated to displaying these for all to see. This however, is a far cry from something like the pictured work below (Les Raboteurs de parquet - Caillebotte, 1875):

Where common people are depicted doing common tasks (unheardof in paintings at the time).

Benjamin Carbonne was born in 1970 in Saint-Martin d'Hères in the Isère. A self-taught artist, he starts making art at the age of 20 and gets to express the things that bother him, sometimes his own violence, that of the others or of the world and finally to make place in himself for something else.

The artist often represents tormented beings, he focuses on the faces that are sometimes soft and sensitive, but also tortured or distorted by pain, screaming, the need for expression. In 2004 he created with poet and painter Antonio Rodriguez Yuste the contemporary art studio "Interférences", later joined by Stéphane Carbonne (sculptor, painter, singer).

Some particular works are at the origin of the Carbonne's evolution: in 2007, the completion of a 50-meter long mural at the Rivesaltes camp gives new meaning to his approach and drives him to assert his "place" as an artist in history; in 2009 he gets a commission for a "Pieta" which will push him to experiment a different treatment of the body.

After having reached with great intensity the expression of what could be most alive and raw in himself and in humanity, Benjamin makes a shift that comes naturally, working on other bodies or faces, revealing all their power in a contrast of depths and lightness, of pictorial clarification and spaces of fantasy.

Saint-Martin d'Hères:

Pieta:

https://www.artsper.com/us/contemporary-artworks/painting/1354800/madone

MANY PROGRESSIVE mid-nineteenth-century artists, including Gustave Courbet, felt it was dishonest to paint things that could not be observed at first hand: for example, angels with wings. In fact, "Religious painting has disappeared," pronounced one critic of the Salon of 1857. Not surprisingly, Manet's The Dead Christ, with Angels provoked both surprise and anger when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1864.

In the passage from the Gospel of John referred to in an inscription on a rock in Manet's painting, Christ's disciples entered his tomb and found no trace of his body there, but instead two angels at the head and feet of the shroud. Recently scholars have suggested that Manet included the dead body of Christ in his picture because he had been impressed by Ernest Renan's best-selling book La Vie de Jésus (1863), in which the author claimed that Christ was a man, not a supernatural being.

There are other anomalies in the painting: for example, Christ's wound is in his left side, and, though Baudelaire pointed out the mistake prior to the Salon, Manet did not correct it.

Nevertheless, criticism was not all adverse. Manet's advocates in the press compared his ability to paint the human figure to the skill of the Renaissance masters upon whose compositions The Dead Christ, with Angels is closely based.

Manet's previously exhibited works had frequently been found lacking in psychological characterization, but this Christ conveys both suffering and majesty, and the pity and sorrow of the angels are equally moving.

According to Antonin Proust, his lifelong friend, Manet always wanted to depict the Crucifixion. Although that project was never realized, The Dead Christ, with Angels and The Mocking of Christ (1865, Art Institute of Chicago) indicate what enormous expressive powers the painter could bring to religious subjects.

The Mocking of Christ - Manet (1865)

Citation: Impressionist and post impressionist masterpieces from the national gallery of art p.32

Here's a summary I found online:

https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2003/19th-century-european-paintings-including-spanish-paintings-1850-1930-l03103/lot.221.html?locale=en

Charged with both exquisite grace and enormous power, La hora del baño combines some of Sorolla’s most potent images into a composition of epic proportions. The work ranks as one of his most complete and consummate compositions and is arguably the finest painting by the artist ever to be offered at auction.

Set on the beach at Valencia, the tender gesture of the young adolescent girl in the foreground and the innocence of the young boys frolicking in the surf, contrast with the tough masculinity of the oxen and riders beyond. The fresh breeze of the summer’s day is captured in the brilliant white sheet held up by the young girl and fills the sail of the ketch in the background. Shimmering on the water and glancing off the bodies of young and old, man and beast alike, light suffuses the whole. Yet La hora del baño is more than a contemporary depiction of the working men and innocent youth of Valencia in harmony with the elements. Sorolla’s spiralling composition of the young boys at play, the attentive pose of the adolescent girl and the fishermen at work beyond evokes the passing of generations and the rhythms of a timeless age that transcends the commonplace and imbues the painting with universal appeal.

Sorolla’s search for a visual vocabulary that he could make his own had occupied him since he had finished his formal training at the Spanish Academy in Rome in the late 1880s. During the 1890s he drew his inspiration from painting outdoors, in particular returning summer after summer to paint on the beach at Valencia where he had spent his childhood. His interest in local Valencian subjects had been reawakened during his first trip to Paris in the summer of 1885. There he visited the major retrospective of the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage who had died prematurely the preceding year at the age of 37. An advocate of Realism, Bastien-Lepage had led the call for painters to look again at rural themes for their subjects. The Frenchman's belief in the essential goodness of the humble worker and the importance of expressing a sense of place had much in common with Sorolla’s own belief in the intrinsic beauty to be found in everyday life (fig. 1). His first notable success in portraying the lives of the Valencian fishermen was La vuelta de la pesca (The Return from Fishing) of 1894 (fig. 2).

Sorolla’s pursuit of this ideal in the motif of fishermen at work, arguably reached its apogee in his monumental composition Sol de la tarde (Afternoon Sun), painted in 1903 (fig. 3) Thereafter, the oxen and fishermen, although still present, gradually became secondary to the main focus in his depiction of life on the beaches of Valencia. As a result, by the time Sorolla included the fishermen and oxen in La hora del baño a year later, their presence had been relegated to that of backdrop to the action of the children in the foreground. Describing his arrival at this point Sorolla recalled: ‘How long it has taken me to define this art. Twenty years! Up to the time I painted the picture which hangs in the Luxembourg [now Musée d’Orsay] the ideal I was pursuing was not revealed to me in its entirety. It was a laborious process, but a methodical and rational one. Gradually the hesitations were ironed out; but not all of a sudden.’ (quoted by Carmen Gracia in The Painter Joaquín Sorolla, exh. cat., London, 1989, p. 38).

Sorolla’s consummate skill in capturing the lively spontaneity of children in his compositions was first revealed to great effect in his major painting of 1899 Triste herencia (Sad Inheritance; Collection of Caja de Ahorros de Valencia, Castellón & Alicante). It was the immediacy of the oil sketches for this work, however, rather than the finished canvas itself, which truly indicated the direction that Sorolla’s painting would take (fig. 4). Sorolla’s ability to catch the fleeting moment with such dexterity was especially suited to the painting of children. His interest in this theme stemmed in part his own family situation. Having been orphaned when still an infant, Sorolla attached immense importance to the safety and happiness of his wife Clotilde and their children María, Joaquín and Elena. His three off-spring were the inspiration behind many of the compositions of children at play on the beach that Sorolla executed during the first decade of the twentieth century. In La hora del baño their presence is suggested in the three foreground children.

Certainly it was Valencian beach scenes which combined fishermen, boats and oxen with the lively antics of children playing in the sea that proved to be particularly sought after by collectors. Sorolla addressed this synthesis of young and old, work and play in his work in the first few years of the new century, around the time of the painting of the present work. Blanca Pons-Sorolla comments: ‘During the latter part of the summer of 1904 and well into the autumn Sorolla stayed in Valencia with his family where he painted on Malvarosa beach. There he began work on some of his most important beach scenes including Verano (Summer) (fig. 5) ...as well as the present work. It was the large format compositions that included the widest possible range of Sorolla's Valencian motifs for which there was the greatest demand, compositions that included children, fishermen, oxen, boats, billowing sails, the surge of the sea, a towel blowing in the breeze.’

Discussing the origin of the central motif of the young girl with towel out-stretched in La hora del baño, Blanca Pons-Sorolla continues: ‘The focal point of the present work is the young girl in the foreground who lovingly holds out a white towel for her younger brother as he emerges from the sea. Sorolla first introduced the motif of the proffered towel in El baño (The Bath) painted in 1899 (fig. 6). In so doing Sorolla incorporated the maternal gesture of a woman approaching a baby to enfold it in a towel as it is taken from the water. The second work that contained the image of a flowing towel was Despues del Baño painted in Asturias, immediately prior to Sorolla's arrival in Valencia in 1904 and his execution of the present work. Thereafter, following the inclusion of the young girl with the fluttering towel held out in La hora del baño, it was not until his work of 1907 and 1908 that this motif returns, notably in such compositions as Saliendo del baño (After Bathing), of 1908 (fig. 7).’ (Blanca Pons Sorolla, September 2003, unpublished notes).

As well as the captivating subject matter, it was the light that Sorolla infused into his compositions that also singled out his work for acclamation. In La hora del baño it is the end of the afternoon - the bathing hour. The unseen sun, low in the sky, is suggested by the high horizon line. Only a tiny slither of light along the top edge of the composition indicates any sky at all. Yet light floods across the water, dancing across the tops of the waves. It silhouettes the fishermen and oxen, bounces off the lithe bodies of the bathing boys, and illuminates with seraphic tender the forground children. Blanca Pons-Sorolla notes that it was on seeing El Baño at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 that Monet applauded Sorolla as 'd'un joyeux de la lumière surtout.’ Likewise, in the major international exhibitions that Sorolla mounted during the first decade of the twentieth century it was the light in his work that drew the public in and so mesmerised the critics. Henri Rochefort observed of Sorolla's art 'Never has a brush contained so much ...sun'. (quoted by Priscilla E. Muller, The Painter, Joaquín Sorolla, exh. cat., London, 1989, p. 62).

The combination of the extraordinary light quality that Sorolla achieved combined with the bucolic nature of his Valencian seashore subjects led some observers to look for classical antecedents in his work. Carmen Gracia notes that José Ramón Mélida saw in Sorolla's pictures of figures by the sea 'a reminiscence of the figures on Greek vases and Tanagra earthenware' while the loosely clad bathers reminded him of 'Hellenic friezes'. (quoted by Carmen Gracia, The Painter, Joaquín Sorolla, exh. cat., London, 1989, p. 89).

Underpinning all of Sorolla's work lay the fine art schooling that he had received as a student, (in his own words ‘his base’). Initially this had taken place in Valencia at the Escuela de San Carlos, which he entered in 1881, and continued in the Spanish Academy in Rome to which he was awarded a scholarship in 1884. In both places his studies were rigorously academic, tuition based on copying both the Antique as well as Italian Renaissance Masters. Such studies were reinforced by his visits to the Prado in 1881 and 1882 and the summer he spent in Paris in 1885. Notwithstanding the contemporaneity of La hora del baño, it is Sorolla’s recourse to this classical vocabulary that adds a timeless majesty to the foreground figures. In so doing Sorolla elevates the local harmony of a seashore community into contemporary history painting and transports the viewer into a timeless Arcadian idyll.

The stance of the young boy emerging from the water bears comparison with that of the heroic pose and subtle contraposto of the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museum, Rome, a work that Sorolla would have been familiar with from his years at the Spanish Academy there. Likewise, the young girl – as if symbolically holding ‘Apollo’s’ tunic – could also be indebted to a Grecian source. The interaction of these two figures together with the second young boy beyond, however, also suggests the influence of the Renaissance on Sorolla. The displacement and gestures of the foreground figures in La hora del baño, for example, share striking similarities with Mary with the baby Jesus and the young John the Baptist in Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks in the Musée du Louvre, a work that Sorolla would have seen when in Paris in 1885. In a similar vein, the young girl is markedly similar both in her pose and her role to the female attendant, drape in hand, in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Palace, Florence (fig. 8).

That such Renaissance imagery inspired the main figures in Sorolla’s La Hora del Baño, in part reflects Sorolla’s Catholic upbringing. Moreover, it was normal that the subjects of a number of his works would be religious. In 1887 for example, Sorolla painted both El padre Jofré protegiendo a un loco (Father Jofré Protecting a Madman) and El entierro de Cristo (The Burial of Christ), while in 1893 he completed El beso de la reliquia (Kissing the Relic). However, Sorolla’s specific use of such Renaissance sources also reflects his ever-increasing confidence both in his own painterly aspirations and in his hopes for Valencia and the cultural role it would play in the regeneration of Spain following its loss of its colonial empire at the end of the Spanish American War in 1898.

Sorolla’s self-belief was fuelled by his burgeoning reputation and the critical acclaim he received in the wake of the success of Triste herencia in Paris in 1900. His name came to be mentioned in the same breath as other leading international artists of the period, including Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn. Friends with these last two, the work of both Sargent and Zorn shares much with Sorolla’s painterly technique and subject matter (figs. 9 & 10), and, as Blanca Pons Sorolla attests (above), Monet himself referred to Sorolla as ‘the master of light’. Indeed, Sorolla’s monumentalising of the foreground figure of the young girl in the present work bears more than a passing resemblance to some of Monet’s beloved depictions of his wife Camille (fig. 11).

In tandem with Sorolla's buoyant confidence in his own abilities at the time lay his native pride and unwavering loyalty in the future of his treasured Valencia. As Carmen Gracia explains, Sorolla hoped that both the city and the region would stimulate and direct the renaissance of the whole of Spain: ‘One of my most cherished hopes’, he declared, ‘is that in the longed-for resurgence of my country, Valencia will take the lead in the industrial and artistic movement, as befits its brilliant tradition and its inborn artistic temperament.’ Sorolla’s elevation of the subject of La hora del baño from one of local interest to a work with a much wider frame of reference lies at the very heart of his philosophy. This positive attitude of faith in the Spanish people, which Sorolla sought to express in his painting, was in clear contrast to such painters as Ignacio Zuloaga and the artists and intellectuals who formed the Generación del 98. Rejecting such traditional Spanish Realism that looked back to Goya and El Greco, Sorolla set out instead to present to the world a fresh halcyon Mediterranean image of his country, and of Valencia in particular.

Confirming the artist’s aspirations, in the same year that the present work was painted poet Juan Ramón wrote with extraordinary prescience, as if with the present work in mind, that Sorolla: ‘works with his Spanish paint-brushes and finds all he needs in the soul of an entire country. Thus there begins a series of pictures of his native land – toil, sweat, poverty and sunshine, the Greek splendour of the Mediterranean coast and the thundering of its blue sea, the Florentine grace of Valencia, all that profusion of foam and transparencies, breezes and flowers, that incomparable noisy chorus of women, children and Spanish sailors.’ (Carmen Gracia in The Painter Joaquín Sorolla, exh. cat., London, 1989, p. 44). Certainly, the present work – a veritable visual tour de force - captures Sorolla’s celebration and championing of quintessentially Spanish and especially Valencian subjects, and heralds the new international direction his work would take in the ensuing years

You can be a detective with Hammershoi. Any piece can be analyzed and speculated at ad nauseum. They are massive with widely interpretable elements.

There are three technical elements that make his work interesting, despite the lack of vibrance (which I typically love): his palette, shadowing and light.

He uses an understated palette - most of his paintings almost look black and white. Critics have taken this as the expression the banality of everyday life. Personally, I don't see it as that - or at least not the defining characteristic of his work, but it is interesting.

His shadowing is incredible. Notice the shadows of the door and easel:

Notice the light coming in through the windows. It's not golden hour, and there's no drama, just semi ambient light coming in through the windows.

But the fourth element, which is my favorite, is the mystery. Each work seems like a puzzle.

Here's some other pieces:

Interior with young man Reading (1898):

What is he reading? Again, check out the shadowing.

Interior of Courtyard:

What is she looking at? Did she drop something? Look at the light and darkness.

Here's some elements of Interior with Easel that are unsettling:

• Why is the painting on the wall so high up?
• Why is the easel turned towards the wall, away from us, with no chair or even room for a chair?
• Why is the door half open?

The mysteries really are endless with Hammershoi's works.