Butterflies | Van Gogh series, 1889-1890

In May 1889, Van Gogh began work on Green Peacock Moth which he self-titled Death's Head Moth.

The moth, called death's head, is a rarely seen nocturnal moth.

He described the large moth's colors "of amazing distinction, black, grey, cloudy white tinged with carmine or vaguely shading off into olive green".

Behind the moth is a background of Lords-and-Ladies.

Vincent van Gogh | Emperor moth, 1889 (detail) | Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Musée des Beaux-Arts (Lione) | 5.000 anni di storia dell'arte

Il musée des Beaux-Arts di Lione è il principale museo della città ed uno dei più grandi musei d'arte in Francia.

Aperto dal 1801 - uno dei primi dopo il Louvre, il museo presenta collezioni di pittura, scultura, arte antica (egiziana, greca, romana, etrusca e orientale), oggetti d'arte, medaglie e monete, disegni e stampe.

James Pradier | Odalisque, 1841 | Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Louis Janmot | Fleur des champs, 1845

Flower of the Fields / Fleur des champs, is an 1845 painting on wood by Lyon artist, Louis Janmot (1814-1892).

It was acquired in 1893 by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon where it has been conserved.

Depiction of a young woman

The painting shows a young woman who is sitting in a nature scene, surrounded with flowers and butterflies.

She has two flower bouquets in her hands: one laid down on her knees, composed of buttercups, daisies and cornflowers, the other one held vertically is composed of poppies.

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon | 200 years of history

Thanks to its proximity to the Lyon city hall, the abbey was not sold or destroyed during the French Revolution.

In 1792, the Municipal Council designated the building as a place to conserve medals, bronzes and other artistic monuments.

On 14 Fructidor in the year IX (1801), the Chaptal decree to establish painting collections in fifteen French cities enabled the founding of the Lyon Museum of Fine Art.

Joseph Bail | Au Jardin, 1880 | Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Dante Gabriel Rossetti | Roman Widow, 1874

Roman Widow or Dîs Manibus is an oil on canvas painting executed in 1874 by the English Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

It is in the collection of the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico.

It depicts a young Roman widow, modelled by Alexa Wilding, sitting in a sepulchre by her late husband's cinerary urn, around which is wound her bridal girdle.

She is dressed in classical mourning drapery and playing an elegy on two small harps, one with each hand.

Pink roses, the flowers of Venus and symbolic of love, wreath both the harp and the urn.

Hermann Corrodi | Night on Mount Athos, 1905

Hermann David Salomon Corrodi (1844-1905) was an Italian painter of historical and orientalist scenes.

Corrodi received commissions for history paintings from the British royal family.

He was acquainted with most of the European royalty of the time, including a friendship with Queen Victoria, and traveled widely in the Far East, including Egypt, Syria, Cyprus and Istanbul, which provided the subject matter for many of his paintings.

Camille Pissarro | Hoarfrost, young peasant girl making fire, 1888

"Gelée blanche, jeune Paysanne faisant du feu" is one of Pissarro’s great masterpieces.

Painted in 1888 at the peak of the artist’s engagement with Neo-Impressionism and conceived on a grand scale, it is a brilliant rendering of light and atmosphere.

The subject is a cold winter’s morning, the low sun casts shadows across the meadow and in these shadows the night’s frost lingers; against this backdrop a young woman and a child build a fire, the smoke rising with a heat that shimmers and eddies across the frozen landscape.

Camille Pissarro | Hoarfrost, young peasant girl making fire / Gelée blanche, jeune Paysanne faisant du feu, 1888 | Museum Barberini

Gabriele d’Annunzio | Aprile

Socchiusa è la finestra, sul giardino.

Un'ora passa lenta, sonnolenta,

ed ella, ch'era attenta, s'addormenta

a quella voce che già si lamenta,

che si lamenta in fondo a quel giardino.

Non è che voce d'acque su la pietra:

e quante volte, quante volte udita !

William Brymner | In the orchard spring, 1892

Luigi Cima | Verist painter

Luigi Cima (1860-1944) was an Italian painter, considered one of the most fortunate and appreciated representatives of the “verism” of the late nineteenth century, and in any case an absolute protagonist of the artistic world of Belluno.

Luigi Cima was born in Villa di Villa, current municipality of Mel (Belluno) on January 5, 1860.

After completing his technical studies in Feltre, he moved to Venice to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he attended the courses of Eugenio De Blaas.

Arturo Moradei | Genre painter

Arturo Moradei (1840-1901) was an Italian 19th Century genre artist.

Arturo Moradei was born in Florence in 1840 and after extensive study, he became a very popular painter of romantic figures indulging in everyday life.

His ability to catch expressions and to tell stories in his paintings ensured the popularity of his work during his lifetime.

He died in Italy in 1901.

The Hagia Sophia of the Fossati brothers

Gaspare Fossati (1809-1883) and his brother Giuseppe Fossati (1822-1891), were born in Switzerland to a family of architects.

They studied in Venice and Milan.

Until 1833 Gaspare had studied several specimens of Romanic and Renaissance architecture.

He participated in the excavations in Pompey, and subsequently travelled to Russia, where he was soon appointed official architect to the Czar's court in Saint Petersburg, and was entrusted with designing the Russian embassy in Istanbul.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Dance at Bougival, 1883

The open-air cafés of suburban Bougival, a town on the river Seine west of Paris, were popular recreation spots for city dwellers, including the Impressionists.

Here, at one such café - its floor littered with cigarettes, burnt matches, and a small bouquet of flowers-an amateur boatman in a straw hat sweeps his stylish partner along in a waltz.

The touch of their gloveless hands, their flushed cheeks and intimate proximity, suggest a sensuous subtext to this scene.

The son of a dressmaker and a tailor, Renoir delighted in capturing intricate details of contemporary fashions, such as the woman’s red bonnet trimmed with purple fruits. | Source: © Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Dance at Bougival, 1883 | Museum of Fine Arts Boston

6 artworks to look out for at Tate Britain

Tate è un gruppo di gallerie d'arte con sede a Londra, Liverpool e Cornovaglia, note come Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate St Ives e Tate Liverpool + RIBA North.

Quando la Tate aprì per la prima volta le sue porte al pubblico nel 1897, aveva una sola sede, che esponeva una piccola collezione di opere d'arte britanniche.

Oggi dispone di quattro sedi principali e della collezione nazionale di arte britannica dal 1500 ad oggi e di arte moderna e contemporanea internazionale, che comprende circa 70.000 opere d'arte.

Sir John Everett Millais | Mariana, 1851 | Tate Collection

This painting by British painter John Everett Millais (1829-1896) is of Mariana, a character from Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure.

The story goes that Mariana’s fiancé Angelo leaves after her family’s money is lost in a shipwreck.

Still in love with him, she hopes they will be reunited.

Millais shows Mariana pausing to stretch her back after working at some embroidery, with the autumn leaves scattered on the ground marking the passage of time.

The stained-glass windows in front of her show the Annunciation, contrasting the Virgin's fulfilment with Mariana's frustration and longing.

Sir John Everett Millais | Mariana, 1851 | Tate Collection

Emily Dickinson | Morii per la Bellezza / I Died for Beauty, 1862

Morii per la bellezza, ma ero appena

composta nella tomba

che un altro, morto per la verità,

fu disteso nello spazio accanto.

Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) | Ophelia, 1865

Nikolai Sverchkov | Equine painter

Nikolai Yegorovich Sverchkov / Николай Егорович Сверчков (1817-1898) was a Russian painter who specialized in genre and hunting scenes with horses.

He was also a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

His father was an Imperial groom and coachman. As a child, he worked with his father and began drawing animals.

Impressed with his work, his parents arranged for him to take lessons at the Imperial Academy of Arts with the battle painter, Alexander Sauerweid, from 1827 to 1829.

Eugène Lami | Fashion in Paris

Eugène Louis Lami (1800-1890) was a French painter and lithographer.

He was a painter of fashionable Paris during the period of the July Monarchy and the Second French Empire and also made history paintings and illustrations for books such as Gil Blas and Manon Lescaut.

He worked at the studio of Horace Vernet then studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with Camille Roqueplan and Paul Delaroche under Antoine-Jean Gros.

Anna Sahlsten | Genre painter

Anna Sofia Sahlstén (1859-1931) was a Finnish painter, primarily known for portraits and genre scenes.

Her father, Clas Vilhelm Sahlstén (1826-1897), was a Chamber Counselor who later became a writer.

Her mother was Edla Elisabeth Heinricius.

When she was eight, her family moved to Helsinki, where she attended a Swedish girls' school; receiving her certificate in 1877.

She then studied at the Finnish Society Drawing School from 1877 to 1880, then at a private school operated by Adolf von Becker, from 1880 to 1882.

"Corot painted 3.000 canvases, 10.000 of which have been sold in America"..!

The strong market for Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's (French painter, 1796-1875) works and his relatively easy-to-imitate late painting style resulted in a huge production of Corot forgeries between 1870 and 1939.

René Huyghe (French writer on the history, psychology and philosophy of art, curator at the Louvre's department of paintings (from 1930), a professor at the Collège de France director of the Musée Jacquemart-André, a member of the Académie Française, 1906-1997) famously quipped that "Corot painted three thousand canvases, ten thousand of which have been sold in America".

Walter Crane | Precursor of Art Nouveau

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was an English artist and book illustrator.

Together with William Morris, Walter Crane was a leader in the Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts artistic movements

.

Walter Crane is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the later 19th century.

Crane's work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come.

Émile Zola: "I would rather die of passion than of boredom"

• "[Johann Strauss jr] Ha mostrato come il mondo può essere bello, io invece ho scritto come il mondo può essere brutto".

• "Il talento del Signor Manet è fatto di semplicità e di esattezza. Senza dubbio, davanti alla natura incredibile di alcuni dei suoi colleghi si sarà deciso ad interrogare la realtà, solo con sé stesso: avrà rifiutato tutta la perizia acquisita, tutta l'antica esperienza, avrà voluto prendere l'arte dall'inizio, cioè dall'osservazione esatta degli oggetti. Si è dunque messo coraggiosamente di fronte a un soggetto, ha visto questo soggetto per larghe macchie, per opposizioni vigorose, e ha dipinto ogni cosa così come la vedeva".

Édouard Manet | Portrait of Émile Zola, 1868 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris