Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Mary Stevenson Cassatt è stata una pittrice Statunitense. Visse molto tempo in Francia dove diventò amica ed allieva di Degas, esponendo poi le proprie opere insieme a quelle degli artisti del movimento impressionista.

Cassatt realizzò molti dipinti che ritraggono la vita sociale e privata delle donne della sua epoca, ponendo una particolare attenzione all'intimo legame che si realizza tra le madri ed i loro bambini.

Charles Courtney Curran | Lady with a Bouquet (Snowballs) 1890

The genre painter Charles Courtney Curran is best known for his canvases depicting beautiful ladies in pleasant settings.

Here, a young woman–the artist’s wife Grace Wickham Curran - arranges a bouquet of snowballs, pausing to take in their sweet fragrance.

The small scale of the painting matches the intimacy of the moment.

Her delicate features, light green shawl and blossom-like hat equate her to a flower, suggesting that she is as lovely and dainty as the blooms she savors. Curran’s choice of flower is likely a deliberate one.

At the time this work was painted, bouquets were used to convey messages, with each flower having a specific symbolic meaning.

According to the Victorian "language of flowers", the snowball symbolized thoughts of heaven, adding an air of Christian piety to this work. | © Birmingham Museum of Art

Charles Courtney Curran | Lady with a Bouquet, 1890 | Birmingham Museum of Art

Raymond Thibésart (1874-1968) | Impressionist painter

Raymond Thibésart was born into an affluent family in the town of Troyes (France), the historical capital of the Champagne region. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to Enghiens-les-Bains, an attractive spa town to the North of Paris.

It was here that they met the Boggios, a charismatic family who had just emigrated from Venezuala; Emilio Boggio, a talented Impressionist painter, became Thibésart's long-standing mentor and friend, encouraging his early promise and providing him with his first art lessons.

Peter Brown (Pete the Street), 1967

Peter Edward Mackenzie Brown is a British Impressionist painter popularly known as "Pete the Street" from his practice of working on location in all weathers.

He is best known for his depictions of street scenes and landscapes. He loves working 'in the thick of it' painting the streets of Varanasi to Toronto and closer to home in Barcelona, Paris, London and his adopted home city of Bath.

He insists on working directly from the subject refusing to use photographic reference.

Abbott Fuller Graves (1859-1936)

Nato a Weymouth, nel Massachusetts, Abbott Fuller Graves è stato un influente pittore di Boston noto per le sue scene di giardini floreali e nature morte.

Sebbene gran parte del suo lavoro, in linea con lo stile della Boston School, descriva gli argomenti in modo realistico, le sue pennellate spesse ed impastate i dipinti luminosi e colorati illuminati dal sole mostravano la sua accettazione dell'impressionismo.

Nel 1884 andò a Parigi e in Italia e si concentrò sulla pittura di nature morte, lavorando spesso con il suo buon amico Edmund Tarbell, anche lui artista di Boston. Graves e Tarbell abitarono insieme in Europa, dove entrambi studiarono pittura di nature morte.

Claude Monet | Lo stile

Claude Monet è stato il sostenitore più convinto ed instancabile del «metodo impressionista» che vide già riassunto nelle opere dell'amico Manet. Per comprendere appieno la carica rivoluzionaria della figura di Monet, tuttavia, è necessario calarla con precisione nell'ambiente storico ed artistico francese della seconda metà dell'Ottocento.

La Francia della seconda metà del XIX secolo era una nazione viva, moderna, ricca di magnificenze e di contraddizioni, che in seguito all'offensiva prussiana del 1870 aveva conosciuto un impetuoso sviluppo economico e sociale che, tuttavia, aveva inizialmente mancato di investire le arti figurative.

Alfred Sisley | Boat in the Flood at Port Marly, 1876

In 1874, Alfred Sisley (French Impressionist painter, 1839-1899) moved to Marly-le-Roi and became the chronicler of this village situated a few kilometres to the west of Paris.

His most beautiful motif was when the Seine burst its banks and flooded the neighbouring village of Port-Marly in the spring of 1876.

The artist produced six paintings of this event.

He captured the great expanse of water with moving reflections that transformed the peaceful house of a wine merchant into something mysterious and poetic.

Two of these paintings are in the Musée d'Orsay.

Claude Monet | Snow Scene at Argenteuil, 1875

Snow at Argenteuil / Rue sous la neige, Argenteuil - is an oil-on-canvas landscape painting from the Impressionist artist Claude Monet.

It is the largest of no fewer than eighteen works Monet painted of his home commune of Argenteuil while it was under a blanket of snow during the winter of 1874-1875.

This painting - number 352 in Wildenstein's catalogue of the works of Monet - is the largest of the eighteen.

The attention to detail evident in the smaller paintings is less evident in this larger picture. Instead, Monet has rendered large areas of the canvas in closely like tones and colours of blue and grey.