Ivan Aivazovsky: Seascapes

Ivan Aivazovsky - The Ninth Wave - 1850 - Oil on canvas, 221 x 332 cm - State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (click photo for larger image)Russian-born Armenian Academic painter Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 - 1900) was most famous for his seascapes. Although born to a poor Armenian family, he nevertheless graduated with the gold medal from the St. Petersburg Academy of Art. HIs parents worked incredibly hard to provide him with his education.

Towards the 1850s the romantic features in Aivazovsky’s work became increasingly pronounced. This can be seen quite clearly in one of his best and most famous paintings The Ninth Wave, featured here.

Aivazovsky traveled to Istanbul eight times between 1845-1890, where he completed a number of royal commissions. His house in Feodosia (a town in Cremea on the Black Sea coast) became a place for artistic pilgrimage. Armenian artists were invited there and actors and musicians performed there. It was there that a number of artists started their creative lives. Aivazovsky's dream was to create a union of Armenian artists from all over the world.

“A younger generation of Russian artists, who engaged more creatively with a changing world, quickly eclipsed Aivazovsky in importance, but the market for his work remains buoyant to this day and his best seascapes still communicate a raw energy.” Ivan Aivazovsky’s paintings are noted for their magnificent use of light against waves and sea foam, which still causes art critics to marvel at his eye, skills and temporal insights.

Goya: A Man of His Time

Francisco Goya - Francisca Sabasa y Garcia - 1804-08 - Oil on canvas, 71 x 58 cm - National Gallery of Art, Washington (click photo for larger image)Spanish painter Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was the most powerful and original European artist of his time. But his genius was slow in maturing and he was well into his thirties before he began producing work that set him apart from his contemporaries. His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. His work continues to be studied in the 21st century.

Women occupy a central place within Goya's oeuvre, and his images of majas (the stylish and outlandish members of Spain's lower classes in the 18th and 19th centuries), witches, and queens are some of his most daring and modern interpretations, depicting women in possession of their own powers, whether political or sexual.

In the work featured here, the sitter is about 20 years old and is profiting from the emancipation of women cautiously proceeding in Goya's day. Her face is no longer concealed by a veil, and she looks self-confidently out at the viewer.

“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.” — Goya

William Morris Hunt: A Poetic Mood

William Morris Hunt - La Marguerite - 1853 - Oil on canvas - 46 x 35.5 in. - Museum of Fine Arts - Boston, MAAmerican artist William Morris Hunt (1824-1879) ( After leaving Paris, Hunt painted and used his family connections to establish art schools ) was born in Brattleboro, Vermont into a wealthy, well-positioned family. After three years at Harvard College, he left to join the wave of American artists who traveled to Europe during the nineteenth century. Cities like Munich, Düsseldorf, and Paris offered young artists superior teachers and examples of classical art as well as the latest trends. In Paris, Hunt studied with the influential Thomas Couture, who stressed the importance of sketching and preserving the freshness of one's first impressions. However, Hunt's most important encounter in Europe was with the French painter Jean-François Millet. Living near the village of Barbizon, Millet and several other artists painted rural landscapes infused with a poetic mood. These artists came to be known as the Barbizon School. In his painting and teaching, Hunt brought the Barbizon style back to America when he returned in 1856. His own work included portraits, murals, and scenes of everyday life.

The companionship of Millet had a lasting influence on Hunt's character and style, and his work grew in strength, in beauty and in seriousness. He was among the biggest proponents of the Barbizon school in America, and he more than any other turned the rising generation of American painters towards Paris. After leaving Paris, Hunt painted and used his family connections to establish several art schools.

Arthur Bowen Davis: Artist of an Era in Change

Arthur B. Davies - A Greater Morning - ca. 1900-1905 - Oil on canvas - Smithsonian American Art Museum (click photo for larger image)American artist Arthur Bowen Davies (1862-1928) trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York City. Davies was active at a time when late nineteenth century Romanticism was giving way to more modernist approaches. He created his most characteristic works after 1900—graceful, idyllic scenes of elegant nude figures and mythological creatures—and is often associated with the Symbolists.

In 1908 Davies organized an exhibit of artists who came to be known as the Ashcan School. As president of the Society of Independent Artists, Davies was also a major figure in the organization of the game-changing Armory Show of 1913, which brought the works of European and American modernists to the attention of the U.S. public. 

Like many other turn-of-the-century artists, Davies’ work responded to the country's increasing urbanization by showing idealized images of people relating to nature. In the work featured here he presents “two figures softly lit by the light of an early dawn. They evoke Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, unaware of their own nudity and waking to a new beginning in an untouched world.”

Friedrich: the Spiritual Eye

Caspar David Friedrich - Dolmen in the Snow - 1807 - Oil on canvas, 61,5 x 80 cm - Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (click photo for larger image)Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) is considered the greatest German Romantic painter and one of the most original geniuses in the history of landscape painting. He was born on the Baltic coast, and after studying at the Copenhagen Academy from 1794 to 1798, he settled permanently in Dresden. Friedrich pursued a rare and instinctive single-mindedness into the spiritual significance of landscape. He mentally summoned up the images he put on canvas. “Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye”, he wrote, “then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react on others from the outside inwards.”

A dolmen is a Neolithic stone formation, consisting of a horizontal stone supported by several vertical stones, and thought to be a tomb. The one portrayed in the work featured here is probably stood near Gützkow (a town in the District of Vorpommern-Greifswald in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany). It was removed between 1825 and 1829. Friedrich made several excursions to prehistoric burial sites.

Search right here on What About Art? to read more about Caspar David Friedrich.