Thursday, June 5, 2014

Toulouse Lautrec Paintings And Gustave Courbet Paintings

By Darren Hartley


Beginning with the early Toulouse Lautrec paintings, Toulouse's fascination with horses endured throughout his career, as seen in his 1899 work, At the Circus : The Spanish Walk. The work was one among a group of colored chalk drawings made from memory while recovering at a sanatorium.

En plein air Toulouse Lautrec paintings soon began after Toulouse moved to Paris in 1882. He often posed sitters in the Montmartre garden of his neighbour, Pere Forest, a retired photographer. One of his favourite models was a prostitute nicknamed Golden Helmet. She is seen in the painting The Streetwalker.

Yvette Guilbert and Jane Avril, two of Toulouse's favourite cafe concert stars were featured in one of his Toulouse Lautrec paintings, Divan Japonais. Yvette appeared at the upper left corner of the composition, with her head cropped at the top edge, her body elongated, wearing her trademark clothes.

Gustave Courbet paintings challenged convention by rendering scenes from daily life on a large scale previously reserved for historical paintings. These works included The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Omans. Omans was Gustave's native village in the Franche-Comte in eastern France and it was where this group of paintings was set.

In one of Gustave Courbet paintings done on monumental canvas, The Painter's Studio, Gustave featured figures on the left, suggesting the various social types that appear in his canvases and figures on the right, portraying his friends and supporters. The meaning behind his unfinished painting remains enigmatic to this day.

Leaving the Omans subjects and embracing modernity was the description for Gustave Courbet paintings during the 1850s. In 1866, Gustave submitted Woman with a Parrot to the Paris Salon, as a painting of a nude that its conservative jury could accept. Gustave's nudes was unmistakably modern as opposed to the idealized nudes by Academic artists. For this, he was lauded by his supporters for painting the real, living French woman.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment