Camille Corot: “I write with my heart”
The large, half a century long, creative life of the French artist Camille Corot (1796–1875) was, as it were, subject to the change of seasons. In the winter months he worked in the Paris workshop, often visiting the opera and the conservatory. But the happiness of communicating with wildlife meant for the master incomparably more than visiting museums and concert halls. Every year with the onset of spring, he set off on a journey through various regions of France to write etudes. Many of them have become pearls of plein-air painting. Continue reading
Diego Rivera – the great Mexican painter
When the Great October Socialist Revolution took place in Russia, a revolutionary struggle was going on in Mexico for seven years. Armed peasants opposed the dictatorship of the rich and the priests, the landowners who seized fertile land, against the domination of foreign capitalists. The war was unusually stubborn and fierce. The reactionary militia malice, American troops twice invaded Mexico. Continue reading
Gustave Courbet – “son of revolution”
The name Courbet means for the art of the XIX century no less than Rembrandt and Velázquez for the XVII century. After all, he openly proclaimed realism as his creative method, he was a member of the Paris Commune. The artist was always in the center of class battles, beginning with the revolution of 1848. Could he be out of it? Courbet did not lead the uprisings, but his works are inspired by those who participated in them – the people of labor. Continue reading
Hubert Robert – “Painter of Ruins”
Antique ruins, then reflected in calm waters, then almost hidden by thickets of climbing plants, shrubs. Peaceful rural nature, almost always clear sky. Through the gaps of the trees, the dying rays of the sun make their way. Soft play of close colors, remarkable skill in depicting architecture, human figures, in the transfer of the finest natural states. Such is the collective image of the painting by the French artist Hubert Robert. Continue reading
James Whistler: “I am an artist and“ born ”in Petersburg”
James Whistler, an Anglo-American artist, was born July 11, 1834 in Lowell, the industrial city of the United States. Staying in Russia largely affected the formation of his talent. Whistler arrived in Petersburg as a teenager in the fall of 1843, when his father, a railway engineer, was invited by the tsarist government to build a railway that was supposed to connect the two capitals. Continue reading
