Displaying items by tag: brushwork

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center recently made a major acquisition: "Pasturing Horses," an eighteenth-century scroll painting by Japanese artist Soga Shohaku.

The painting is a key addition to the Art Center’s impressive collection. James Mundy, the Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Art Center, said, “The size, quality and expression found in this work make it among the very best available.” Shohaku is one of the three key mid-Edo period painters in Kyoto known as “The Eccentrics.”  The other two artists of this group, Ito Jakuchu and Nagasawa Rosetsu, are already represented in the Center’s collection. The acquisition of this painting is “a capstone for the Center’s Japanese collection,” Mundy added.

Felice Fischer, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s curator of Asian art, concurred. “'Pasturing Horses' is a showcase for Shohaku’s skills: his finely controlled brushwork, his wonderful sense of humor, and his ability to capture a whole world even on a relatively small-scale surface. His marvelous depiction of the horses’ movement and the individual expressions of the grooms speak volumes about Shohaku’s creativity.”

On October 27, 2013, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will present Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, the first exhibition in the U.S. to focus on the French Romantic artist in over a decade. The show will include 27 paintings and 18 works on paper as well as a previously unknown and unpublished version of Eugène Delacroix’s masterpiece, The Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, which surfaced in a Santa Barbara private collection. After several years of scholarly and technical study, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Assistant Director and Chief Curator, Eik Kahng, authenticated the painting.  

Delacroix is often referred to as the father of French Romanticism, the movement that dominated French painting in the first half of the 19^th century. However, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue by Kahng explore Delacroix’s relationship to Neoclassicism, Romanticism’s alleged antithesis, due to the artist’s allegiance to classical subjects and his admiration for the art of the past. The exhibition also suggests that Delacroix, with his fiery palette and loose brushwork, was something of a forefather to Impressionism.

Delacroix and the Matter of Finish features works from 27 international institutions including the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Musée national Eugène Delacroix in Paris and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. After it closes at the Santa Barbara Museum on April 20, 2014, the exhibition will travel to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama.

When Jane Cordery, an art teacher in Hampshire, England discovered a portrait of a white owl in her attic, she was struck by the painting’s sophisticated brushwork. Upon her unearthing, Cordery decided to email a photo of the work to Christie’s in London.

The auction house determined that the painting, titled The White Owl (1856) was the work of pre-Raphaelite artist William James Webbe (fluent 1953-1878) and valued the painting at $113,449. Further research proved that The White Owl had been exhibited at the United Kingdom’s Royal Society during the mid-nineteenth century. It was here that famed art critic, John Ruskin, viewed the work and remarked on its painstaking composition.

The Webbe painting headed to Christie’s Victorian art sale last week and sold for $951,050, exceeding its estimated price and setting the record for the artist at auction. An anonymous British dealer purchased The White Owl at the Christie’s sale. While Cordery claims she had never seen the painting before, her partner said that he received the work as a gift from his mother.