Saturday, June 14, 2014

Toulouse Lautrec Paintings And Gustave Courbet Paintings

By Darren Hartley


Beginning with the early Toulouse Lautrec paintings, Toulouse's fascination with horses endured throughout his career, as seen in his 1899 work, At the Circus : The Spanish Walk. The work was one among a group of colored chalk drawings made from memory while recovering at a sanatorium.

One of the early en plein air Toulouse Lautrec paintings was the Streetwalker. The pallid complexion and artificial hair color of his subject, a prostitute named Golden Helmet, clashed with the naturalistic setting of the drawing. Later on his career, Toulouse would devote an entire series of prints, called Elles, to life inside a brothel.

Yvette Guilbert and Jane Avril, two of Toulouse's favourite cafe concert stars were featured in one of his Toulouse Lautrec paintings, Divan Japonais. Yvette appeared at the upper left corner of the composition, with her head cropped at the top edge, her body elongated, wearing her trademark clothes.

Gustave Courbet paintings were punctuated by scandal. Young Women from the Village set in the outskirts of Omans, was reproached nearly unanimously by critics, for the ugliness of the three young women and for the disproportionately small scale of the cattle, featured in the painting.

Gustave painted himself at the center of the universe in one of his Gustave Courbet paintings done in monumental canvas, The Painter's Studio. In the artwork, he was paradoxically painting a landscape within the confines of his studio. In the accompanying catalogue was included his Realist Manifesto, proclaiming his fidelity to subjects drawn from modern life.

Leaving the Omans subjects and embracing modernity was the description for Gustave Courbet paintings during the 1850s. In 1866, Gustave submitted Woman with a Parrot to the Paris Salon, as a painting of a nude that its conservative jury could accept. Gustave's nudes was unmistakably modern as opposed to the idealized nudes by Academic artists. For this, he was lauded by his supporters for painting the real, living French woman.




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