There is something disorienting about this painting. Although its location in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp is chronologically-correct, it comes as a surprise to realize that it was painted in the mid-1400s. It seems so contemporary! Jean Fouquet (1420–1481) was perhaps the first French artist to travel…

Rosa Bonheur was perhaps the most famous artist in all of Europe and North America during her lifetime. Required to obtain a cross-dressing permit in order to venture into the world of men — for the sake of her art — she took that world by storm! My earliest art-related memory is my mother telling me that her favorite painter was the 19th-century French artist, Rosa Bonheur. She was an “animalier” — a painter of animals — and her work appealed to young sensibilities. …

Have you ever wondered how a painting comes into being? We asked guest blogger and life-long artist Stede Barber to tell us about her painting process. Here she outlines three iterations — from beginning to completion — of a recent landscape painting, titled High Summer. When I was a young…

As the world slowly, tentatively, begins to emerge from lockdown, people are wondering what the new social order will look like. A few folks are determined to hang on to their old ways, but most accept that things will be different for some time to come. …

As a young man, the great American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was almost diverted from the path of his true calling, his artistic aspirations squashed by really bad advice from a very big name in the field. After completing high school, Noguchi apprenticed to Gutzon Borglum — the well-known American…

This is the second of two articles. In the first piece we explored Ruben’s magnificent Baroque altarpiece, the Raising of the Cross (1610). Now we’ll take a close look at his Descent From the Cross (1612), which is of similar scale but quite distinct in composition and artistic sensibility. Although…

There are two art treasures in Antwerp’s Cathedral of Our Lady that stand out above all the rest, both painted by Peter Paul Rubens: The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross. While I normally focus on art sites in the US, this seems like a good…

With little in the way of health science to call upon for deliverance from devastating epidemics, the Christian faithful of old turned to Patron Saints for hope. We see these saints in Medieval and Renaissance art, but can we fully grasp the profound meaning embedded in the works? Without deep…

The First 3500 Years More often than not, the paintings that really grab my attention are landscapes, and I like to think I’m a somewhat knowledgeable about them in terms of art history. So, I was surprised to learn recently that the word “landscape” — an anglicization of the Dutch landschap — was only…