Henri Matisse | Conversation under the Olive Trees, 1921

Beneath their tranquil surface, Henri Matisse's paintings often conceal a complex discourse expressing his conflicting aspirations through the relationship between subject and style.

Conversation under the Olive Trees is particularly revealing in this respect. Two elegant ladies standing on the lawn seem to be chatting.

Behind them is a path; on the far side and slightly lower, we see a grove of olive-trees, while further away appears the silhouette of a hill, and beyond it another.

Henri Matisse | Conversation under the Olive Trees, 1921 | The Carmen Thyssen Museum (Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga)

Henri Matisse | Legacy / L'eredità

The first painting of Henri Matisse🎨 (31 December 1869 - 3 November 1954) acquired by a public collection was Still Life with Geraniums (1910), exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne.

Today, a Matisse painting can fetch as much as US $17 million.

In 2002, a Matisse sculpture, Reclining Nude I (Dawn), sold for US $9.2 million, a record for a sculpture by the artist.

Matisse's daughter Marguerite often aided Matisse scholars with insights about his working methods and his works. She died in 1982 while compiling a catalog of her father's work.

Matisse's son, Pierre Matisse, (1900-1989) opened an important modern art gallery in New York City during the 1930s.

Edward Pustovoitov, 1964

Edward Pustovoitov è nato a Makeyevka, in Ucraina.

Ha conseguito la qualifica di Designer presso l'Istituto di studi teatrali e artistici di Odessa.

L'irresistibile desiderio di viaggiare una volta portò Pustovoitov a venire in Lettonia e ad iscriversi al collegio nautico di Riga; dopo la laurea ha lavorato come marinaio presso la Latvian Shipping.

Nel 1993, residente a Riga, il giovane marinaio Eduard, come racconta, arrivò accidentalmente nei Paesi Bassi e visitò il Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Amsterdam, dove per la prima volta conobbe il famoso e scandaloso surrealista spagnolo Dalì, più precisamente - con le sue opere.

Adam de Coster (1586-1643) | Card players by candlelight

In the absence of signed and documented works by Flemish painter🎨 Adam De Coster (1586-1643), all attributions have been based on Lucas Vorsterman's engraving after a lost original entitled "The Trick-trak player".

The present painting, which was also engraved by Vorsterman, shares a number of similarities with this key, lost work.

Both compositions are multi-figural and lit by candlelight, with a figure in the foreground partially shading the light source.

The artist adopts a low viewpoint in both paintings which means that the table-tops are hardly visible.

John Constable RA (1776-1837) | Clouds study

John Constable, RA was an English🎨 landscape painter in the naturalistic tradition.

Constable considered the sky of paramount importance to landscape painting, and in a letter of 1821 to his close friend John Fisher, he wrote:

‘It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment … The sky is the source of light in Nature, and governs everything’.

Clouds is one of around fifty extant paintings of the sky which Constable made in Hampstead, between 1821 and 1822, and it has been speculated that he produced more than one hundred such studies at the time.

Constable made his intense examination, which he called ‘skying’, to precisely record different weather and atmospheric conditions, in preparation for his grand landscapes. | The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Australia

Werner van den Valckert | A girl holding pancakes in a feigned stone window, 1624

Werner van den Valckert (1580/85-1627) was a Dutch🎨 Golden Age painter and engraver.

Though he was born in Amsterdam, he became a member of the Guild of St. Luke in the Hague between 1600-1605.

By 1614 he had moved to Amsterdam, because his daughter was baptized there. His earliest dated etchings are from 1612.

His surviving paintings are historical allegories and portraits.

He also made a prestigious schuttersstuk, which features the Amsterdam burgermeester Albert Burgh.

George Spencer Watson | Romantic / Portrait painter

George Spencer Watson R.O.I., R.P., A.R.A., R.A. (8 March 1869, in London - 11 April 1934, in London) was an English🎨 portrait artist of the late romantic school who sometimes worked in the style of the Italian Renaissance.

• Career

He studied at the Royal Academy Schools from 1889, and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1891.

He won Royal Academy Schools Silver Medals in 1889 and 1891, and the Landseer Scholarship in 1892.

He was elected to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI) in 1900, Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RP) in 1904, Associate of the Royal Academy in 1923, and a Member of the Royal Academy (RA) in 1932.