Art's Last Bow

  Henry John Yeend King (1855 - 1924) was a British painter. He mostly captured images of rustic genre scenes set in an idealized past.   The title of this painting is taken from the first line of the poem “ A Visit from St. Nicholas ” by Clement Clarke Moore, but it doesn’t illustrate the poem. It shows a small choir of little boys singing carols in front of a large house. There are lights in the windows, and you can see the silhouettes of two figures standing in the doorway and listening to the music.

  While nobody knows exactly when Titian was born, his active professional life started around 1506 and continued to his death in 1576 – that’s seventy years of painting. Titian may have been close to 90 years old when he died of the plague. He studied art in Venice under Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and his style was heavily influenced by Giorgione.   Titian became the undisputed master of Venetian painting, receiving orders from the Dukes of Ferrara, Gonzaga, and Urbino, and later from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V himself. He became the principal painter at the court of Charles V, and later his son, Philip II of Spain. What made Venetian painting stand out even among the other masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance was the Venetian approach of prioritizing color, above the line and drawing. The Venetians favored glowing, jewel-like tones. This was made possible by the fact that Venice was an important center of trade at the time, bringing together wares from al...

As anyone who’s ever lived in a small town will tell you – there’s no avoiding your neighbors there. Or their curiosity. The smaller the town, the more things people know about each other. As annoying as that can be, there was one German painter who saw the humorous side of this situation. Carl Spitzweg was born in 1808 in Bavaria. Although Romanticism was prevalent in the art of Germany at the beginning of the 19 th century, the characters in Spitzweg’s paintings rarely show signs of the intense internal turmoil habitual for Romanticism. Stylistically, they belong to the Biedermeier – a style often dismissed as decorative and “cozy”.   The people in Spitzweg’s world are living small, cozy lives perhaps, but they do have a bright individuality. The painter chose to show them going about their daily lives with dignity and worth, but also quite a bit of eccentric humor. The Serenade. Spitzweg The characters in his genre scenes are the comical, toned-down counterparts of th...