Art's Last Bow

It’s always intriguing to see what attributes people chose to be painted with in old portraits. After all, portraits were a big deal. Unlike modern photographs, even well-to-do people often had a single portrait of them painted throughout their lifetime. Some famous painters, like Rembrandt, produced a whole bunch of self-portraits, documenting their own face in all kinds of images, ranging from the solemn to the comical. But in normal cases, a portrait was a formal, important affair, and the way you were portrayed mattered. Astronomer Who Painted a Self-Portrait There aren’t many authenticated lifetime portraits of Nicolaus Copernicus. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) was a mathematician, astronomer, and physician, famous for coming up with a mathematical model showing that the Sun was stationary, while the Earth revolved around it. While today he’s best known for his heliocentric model of the solar system, Copernicus was mainly active as a church canon and a physician durin...

There are many reasons to love spring. The returning flowers and leaves revive after the long dullness of winter, bringing new life and fresh possibilities.   Most painters have painted spring some time during their careers. Here’s how some of them expressed the hopefulness of this season!  Scottish Snowdrops   The Coming of Spring. 1899. Hornel Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864 – 1933) w as a Scottish painter, who was part of a group of Scottish painters called the Glasgow Boys. "The Coming of Spring" captures the thrill of several girls finding the first snowdrops. Note that there is no horizon in the painting; the forest glade seems to be an enclosed world of its own, uniting the girls, the white flowers, the bark, and the leftover dry leaves on the trees. Each is an integral part of the composition. Spring Childhood Idyll Carl Larsson (1853-1919) was a Swedish painter. He was known for his paintings of his family and their home. His wife was an artist in her own...