JOURNAL ARCHIVES

SUMMER 2008

WATERSHED ART

Vertumnus: Portrait of Rudolph II (Giuseppe Arcimboldo)

Nude descending a staircase, No. 2 (Marcel Duchamp)

The kiss (Gustav Klimt)

Luncheon on the grass (Edouard Manet)

Olympia (Edouard Manet)

The scream (Edvard Munch)

Impression, Sunrise (Claude Monet)

The sleeping gypsy (Henri Rousseau)

Carnation Lily, Lily Rose (John Singer Sargeant)

The girl with the peaches: portrait of Vera Mamontova (Valentin Serov)

Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte (Georges Seurat)

The Arnolfini Marriage (Jan Van Eyck)

 

 

SUMMER 2008

THE SLEEPING GYPSY (HENRI ROUSSEAU)

The sleeping gypsy (La Bohémienne endormie). Henri Rousseau. 1897. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Those who have compared our life to a dream were right. ...We sleeping wake, and waking sleep. Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), writer The Sleeping Gypsy is a masterwork of Henri Rousseau. Both a source of inspiration and parody, this is one of the world's most widely recognized paintings. Rousseau, a French Post-impressionist in the primitive or naive manner, was first a customs officer in 19th Century Paris. He was also a self-taught artist who only began painting extensively after the age of forty. His best known works feature jungle motifs even though he never actually traveled outside of France. His lyrical artistic gift, largely unrecognized in his lifetime, influenced such painters as Picasso, Beckmann, and the Surrealists.