National Arts in Education Week 2021
How quickly we forget that, up until the late 1800s, going to the local museum to copy “masterpieces” of past art and training under a male relative who was a professional artist were ...
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Curator’s Corner
Women's (Art) History Month 2021 II
If anyone documented the human (women’s) condition extensively, it was artist Isabel Bishop. Her sensitive paintings and prints of working women during the Great Depression (1929–1940) and ...
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Curator’s Corner
Ancient Egypt Find
Because of the recent news about an exciting archeological find in Giza, I decided to show some stunning portraits from ancient Egypt. ...
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Curator’s Corner
An April Birthday Boy
Antoine Vollon, known primarily for his excellent still-life paintings, had a birthday on April 23rd. In the glory days of the annual academic Salon in Paris (1760s–1890s)—when the self-ap ...
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Curator’s Corner
Deceiving the Eye
I’ve written before about the long-standing interest in extreme realism in American painting. Colonial American self-taught artists (“limners”) may not have been schooled in anatomy, ...
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Curator’s Corner
Still Life and Our Culture of Abundance
I got so excited the other night while watching Antiques Roadshow. A person brought two little still-life paintings from 1865, and I said to myself, “Oh, those look like John Francis’s wor ...
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Curator’s Corner
Impressionist Armand Guillaumin
I very often come across an artist that I don’t know that much about and think “Wow! I really like this painter’s stuff!” Such was the case years ago when I first saw the gorge ...
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Curator’s Corner
The Winter Sads Call for Art
Even though the weather hasn’t been that bad this winter in New England (yet), I still have a major case of the sads for warm weather. What we do to beat the sads is travel 40 minutes into Bosto ...
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Curator’s Corner
African Realism
During the 1800s, when European invaders were exploiting the riches of the African continent, art historians were “astounded” at the richness and variety of African art. They had no knowle ...
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Curator’s Corner
Survey No. 10: Ubiquitous Real
So far we have taken a look at Classicism and Romanticism around the world in the 1800s. Now let’s look at “realism,” which—like every other style—has been a trend somewh ...
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