Study from the human Body

Francis Bacon - Study from the human body (1949) - Oil on Canvas

Retrato

Júlio Pomar - Retrato de José Cardoso Pires (1954)

Lamentation d'Orphée

Alexandre Séon (1855-1917) - Lamentation d'Orphée (Vers 1896)
Huile sur bois / H. 73 ; L. 116 cm

Orpheus, the poet and musician of Greek legends, could charm gods, humans and animals with his singing. Inconsolable after the death of his wife Eurydice, he persuaded the gods of the Underworld to give her up, but they set one condition: he must not look at her before they left the Underworld. Orpheus could not resist Eurydice's appeal and turned round, only to see her disappear forever. The huge rock behind him no doubt hides the way to the Underworld.

By evoking the myth of the poet, whom his art led into mysteries usually forbidden to humans, Séon reduced the elements of his composition to a minimum, privileging idea over form. His landscape is desolate, bare of all vegetation, far removed from the colourful countryside of the island of Bréhat which inspired him. Whereas the pink-tinged setting is painted in flat areas of colour, the prostrate figure of the hero is the only part of the composition rendered with modelling, particularly the numerous folds of the blue cloth draped over Orpheus' legs. 

Støvkornenes Dans I Solstrålerne

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Støvkornenes Dans I Solstrålerne (Dust Motes Dancing In Sunbeams), 1900.

The color gray is no one’s color. It is the color of cubicles and winter camouflage, of sullage, of inscrutable complexity, of compromise. It is the perfect intermediate, an emissary for both black and white. It lingers, incognito, in this saturated world.

Arnout van Albada

Arnout Van Albada: ‘You should not want to interpret my paintings too much. The simplicity and the monumental character of my compositions are, to me, their most vital quality.’

The Black Brook

John Singer Sargent - The Black Brook (c.1908)

The girl seated in the foreground of this painting is the artist's niece, Rose Marie Ormond (1893–1918), daughter of Mrs Francis Ormond and later wife of Robert Michel. She appears with her sister, Reine Ormond (Mrs Hugo Pitman), in another painting ‘The Brook’ in the possession of Mrs Francis Ormond's second son Mr F. Guillaume Ormond in July 1961 (information from Mr Hugo Pitman, 18 July 1961), where they are dressed in Oriental costume. The site in both pictures is almost identical, a mountain stream at the Chalets de Purtud, near Courmayeur, Val d'Aosta, just south-west of Mont Blanc and almost 5,000 ft. above sea-level.

The Tate painting has also been known as ‘The Brook’, but there is ample evidence to show it was the work exhibited at the N.E.A.C. in 1909 as ‘The Black Brook’, and it was purchased with that title in 1935. An old label on the stretcher reads: ‘J. S [torn] The black brook, a girl seated by a stream Bought New English Art Club Exhibⁿ 1909 Cleaned 1924 [rest torn].’ Descriptions of this painting which appear in the press-cuttings of the N.E.A.C. exhibition make it clear that the Tate picture is the one referred to. Its date is most likely to be 1908, not 1909, since it was the artist's custom to travel abroad in the late summer or early autumn, and the 1909 summer exhibition of the N.E.A.C. opened (according to an annotated catalogue in the Gallery archives) on the 22 May.

Sem Título (1969)

Maria Teresa Marques Magalhães (Lisboa, 1944) é uma pintora portuguesa.

Completou o curso Complementar de Pintura da Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa em 1970. Foi bolseira da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian de 1976 a 1979, e fez parte do grupo "5 + 1" conjuntamente com o escultor Virgílio Domingues e os pintores João Hogan, Júlio Pereira, Guilherme Parente, e Sérgio Pombo, com o qual esteve casada. Em 1990 foi Comissária da Exposição "Pintoras Portuguesas do Séc.XX", no Leal Senado de Macau e, no ano de 1996, foi artista convidada pelo Metropolitano de Lisboa para realizar dois painéis de azulejos na estação de Martin Place do City Rail de Sydney, na Austrália. Expõe com regularidade desde 1974 em Portugal e no estrangeiro.

Tintin Reading

Roy Lichtenstein - Tintin Reading: Lichtenstein includes a few art jokes like the reference to the famous Matisse painting of the dancing figures, which in turn is an arrangement borrowed from an even earlier painting by William Blake. Exhibition poster done for a Lichtenstein retrospective in Brussels, Belgium in 1994-1995.

Foujita

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (藤田 嗣治 Fujita Tsuguharu, November 27, 1886 – January 29, 1968) was a Japanese–French painter and printmaker born in Tokyo, Japan, who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western style paintings. He has been called "the most important Japanese artist working in the West during the 20th century". His Book of Cats, published in New York by Covici Friede, 1930, with 20 etched plate drawings by Foujita, is one of the top 500 (in price) rare books ever sold, and is ranked by rare book dealers as "the most popular and desirable book on cats ever published".

San Girolamo di Caravaggio

Saint Jerome in Meditation (c. 1605) is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, now in the Museum of Montserrat, next to the Monastery of Santa Maria, Montserrat (Museu del Monestir de Santa Maria).

Saint Jerome Writing, also called Saint Jerome in His Study or simply Saint Jerome, is an oil painting by Italian painter Caravaggio. Generally dated to 1605-1606, the painting is located in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

From Michael Ondaatje's 'The English Patient':

The Villa San Girolamo, built to protect inhabitants from the flesh of the devil, had the look of a besieged fortress, the limbs of most of the statues blown off during the first days of shelling. There seemed little demarcation between house and landscape, between damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth. To Hana the wild gardens were further rooms… In spite of the burned earth, in spite of the lack of water. Someday there would be a bower of limes, rooms of green light.