paul

Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers , 1875  Musée d'Orsay, now on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Right now the National Gallery is having an exhibition of an Impressionist whose reputation has grown over the last 25 years, Gustave Caillebotte.   Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye will be on view until October 4. It's interesting how his first masterpiece, The Floor Scrapers was rejected by the Salon in 1875, but part of the Impressionists' exhibition the next year. The masterful painting granted Caillebotte entry into the Impressionist group. He repaid his dear friends by buying up many of their works and then donating them to the French state after he died.  Many of the paintings he owned are part of Paris' great early modern museum, Musée d'Orsay. It's appropriate that the museum that houses so many Impressionist works is a former train station, since modern trains inspired viewers to observe the transient views of the world that ...

Piero di Cosimo, Giuliano da Sangallo  and Francesco Giamberti.   The two-part painting was on loan from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum recently. An exhibition of Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's recently closed at the National Gallery in Washington a few months ago, and it's taken me awhile to develop and express my understanding of him.   Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence continues a the Uffizi Gallery with a slightly different body of works in Florence, until September 27. It's an interesting look at this quirky painter, someone who was living and working at the same time as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Piero di Cosimo's Allegory,  is part of the National Gallery's own collection.  It is seen as an allegory of overcoming one's animal nature.  Many of my students who wrote reviews of the exhibition dealt entirely with his religious paintings, the subjects you expect to see most often in Renaissance art. Like most Renais...