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Rousseau’s Jungles a Paris

Rousseau’s Jungles a Paris

There are around 20 ‘jungle’ paintings that Rousseau produced, which are among his most popular works. These jungles are entirely imaginary: Rousseau never left France, despite his claim that he had served with the French army in Mexico. The foliage is a mix of domestic house plants and tropical varieties, which he had seen at the Botanical Gardens in Paris.

Duration : 6m
Maturity Level : all

Kiss in Art

Kiss in Art

In this movie there is a set of different painting with the subject of The Kiss: The Kiss by Francesco Hayez located in the Pinacoteca di Brera; Gianciotto discovers Paolo and Francesca and also Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta by Dominique Ingres; The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel by William Dyce; The Kiss of the Muse by Paul Cézanne and Randevous in the Forest by Henri Rousseau.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Paul Gauguin and Egyptian Art

Paul Gauguin and Egyptian Art

When Gauguin went to Tahiti in 1891 to escape from urban modernity he took with him an eclectic collection of source material including Japanese erotica as well as photographs of ancient Egyptian paintings from the tomb of the scribe Nebamun that he had seen in the British Museum on a visit to London in 1885. In this movie, the Banquet Scene from Thebes is now in the British Museum in London and Ta Matete (We Shall Not Go To Market Today) located now in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Portraits from the Sabanci Collection, Istanbul

Portraits from the Sabanci Collection, Istanbul

In this movie, a catalog by various artists from the Sabanci Collection in Istanbul, Turkey: Naile Hanim Portrait by Osman Hamdi Bey, Hanzade Sultan Portrait by Halife Abdülmecid Efendi and Madame X by Halil Pasa.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Friedrich: A Walk at Dusk

Friedrich: A Walk at Dusk

Caspar David Friedrich was a German landscape painter. His work shows allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against morning or night skies or Gothic ruins. A Walk at Dusk is an oli on canvas painting. In the painting a man walks alone in the silvery, cold moonlit night while contemplating a megalithic tomb and its implicit message of death. It is winter, and all around him nature is dying. Leafless trees loom behind like specters, but a grove of verdant oaks rises through the mist in the background with the promise of life. The waxing moon, high in the sky, also acts as a counterbalance to death, symbolizing Christ and the promise of rebirth for the artist itself.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Friedrich: Polar Landscapes

Friedrich: Polar Landscapes

Caspar David Friedrich was a German landscape painter. His work shows allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against morning or night skies or Gothic ruins.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Highlights from the National Gallery of Art

Highlights from the National Gallery of Art

Located on the National Mall, at Constitution Avenue, the National Gallery of Art of Washington D.C. is one of the biggest galleries in the world. This movie shows the highlights of the Renaissance, Renoir, da Vinci, Cézanne etc.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Renoir: Dancing

Renoir: Dancing

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French painter known for being a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality. In 1883 he made a series of paintings about dancing. Dance in the City, Dance at Bougival and Dance in the Country. This movie shows the beauty of all these artworks.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Zhukovsky: In the Old House

Zhukovsky: In the Old House

Stanislav Yulianovich Zhukovsky was a Polish-Russian painter. He became a celebrated landscapist working in a unique style with impressionistic methods. He also took a lot of inspiration from the tradition of the Russian realist school. This masterpiece, In the Old House was painted around 1912 and reflects a kind of nostalgic note, looking into the past of the artist. It is now located in the Radishchev Museum in Saratov, Russia.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

James Whistler and Chinese Porcelain

James Whistler and Chinese Porcelain

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American artist. He was averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting. Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks is an oil on canvas painting and it is showed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This work was designed to suggest the curious conflation of a life-sized oil portrait with the decorative design on a Chinese porcelain vase. The painting represents the figure of Christina Spartali dressed in a kimono, her pale face and black hair set against the oddly vaporous gray paint in the upper section of the image, where the artist signed his canvas in large letters. In contrast to the mistiness of the gray paint in this upper band, the rest of the painting below presents to the viewer a variety of decorative surfaces rendered as flatly brushed patches, spots, dashes, and streaks of pigment.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Chardin: The Silver Goblet

Chardin: The Silver Goblet

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was a French painter and he is considered the master of still life. The Silver Goblet, finished around 1728 is a still life composed of ordinary objects. The silver goblet and the glass carafe, instead of vessels made of clay, reflect an elevate social status. Probably, the objects belonged to the artist himself. This artwork is located in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Hiroshige - The Animal Kingdom: Air and Water

Hiroshige - The Animal Kingdom: Air and Water

Utagawa Hiroshige was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist. For scholars and collectors, Hiroshige’s death marked the beginning of a rapid decline in the ukiyo-e genre. Hiroshige’s work came to have a marked influence on western European painting towards the close of the 19th century.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Rembrandt: The Night Watch

Rembrandt: The Night Watch

Rembrandt’s largest, most famous canvas was made for the Arquebusiers guild hall. Rembrandt was the first to paint figures in a group portrait actually doing something. The captain, dressed in black, is telling his lieutenant to start the company marching. The guardsmen are getting into formation. Rembrandt used the light to focus on particular details, like the captain’s gesturing hand and the young girl in the foreground. She was the company mascot. This masterpiece is now located in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all

Rembrandt/Vincent van Gogh: The Raising of Lazarus

Rembrandt/Vincent van Gogh: The Raising of Lazarus

Van Gogh based this painting on a print by Rembrandt – but only part of the print. He left out the main figure: Christ with his arm raised. Van Gogh focused on the theme of human suffering. He probably identified with Lazarus in the tomb. That would explain why he gave the figure a red beard. The two women by the grave are two acquaintances from Arles: Mrs Roulin, in the green dress, and Mrs Ginoux, in a dark dress with colorful stripes. A few of the pigments have faded considerably. This has largely done away with the original contrast between the warm colors in the background and the cold colors of Lazarus in the foreground.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Titian: Venus of Urbino

Titian: Venus of Urbino

This is one of Titian’s most famous works and it depicts the emblematic figure of a young bride about to be dressed to take part in the celebration of the ritual known in Venice as Il Toccamano. It was a ceremony held in the home and not in church, during which a young woman whose hand was requested in marriage would touch the hand of the groom to express her consent. Titian takes this as his inspiration for a seductive Venus, using an iconography that began in the early Renaissance, inspired by the ancient depiction of the Venus pudica. This masterpiece is located in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Chinese School: An Empress and an Emperor

Chinese School: An Empress and an Emperor

The painting of the Tongzhi Emperor, the tenth Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, was painted by an anonymous Qing Dynasty court painter and it is now in the Palace Museum, in Beijing. The second painting shows the Empress Jing Xian and the giclée technique allows to show a vivid image with maximum color accuracy and exceptional resolution.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Hans Holbein the Younger: Portraits of Henry VIII

Hans Holbein the Younger: Portraits of Henry VIII

Portraiture was the most popular genre in sixteenth-century England, and indeed one of the few available to artists following the schism between the Church of Rome and the Church of England, of which Henry VIII became head. This likeness of the famous Tudor king is a magnificent example of Holbein’s remarkable style, characterised by a monumental rendering of figures which are nonetheless endowed with considerable psychological depth. In this markedly linear portrait, Holbein uses the frontal pose of the regal model and the position of his hands to convey the sitter’s powerful personality and majestic bearing.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Hans Holbein the Younger: The Ambassadors

Hans Holbein the Younger: The Ambassadors

Jean de Dinteville, the man on the left, is shown on his second diplomatic mission to England on behalf of Francis I, King of France. To the right is his close friend, Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur. This portrait was painted at a time of religious upheaval in Europe. The portrait is a supreme display of Holbein’s skill in composing images and in manipulating oil paint to recreate a variety of textures. If viewed from a particular angle the elongated shape between the men’s feet becomes a skull. Equally hidden at the top left of the picture is a crucifix that hints at the hope of redemption in the resurrected Christ. This masterpiece is located in The National Gallery in London.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Jan Vermeer: A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal

Jan Vermeer: A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal

It appears to be dark outside this elegant room: a blue curtain covers the top part of the window, but the glass below it is black. The light which glints in the heavily dilated pupils of the woman seated at the keyboard comes from in front of the painting, an unusual effect for Vermeer. Significantly, the picture hanging on the wall shows a prostitute flirting with a client. Vermeer tended to hedge them with uncertainties, but here the background picture gives an unusually strong hint, which encourages us to wonder if the keyboard player has more than music on her mind. This painting is now located in The National Gallery in London.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Vuillard: Woman in Black

Vuillard: Woman in Black

In the course of his long career, Édouard Vuillard produced hundreds of paintings depicting life in Paris through impressions of people in landscapes or interiors. He considered French society the primary subject in his works, rather than the individuals. Vuillard, who was involved in experimental theater, was well known for producing large-scale works and murals. Vuillard’s own style was distinctive for its use of simplified forms, planes of color, and decorative or ornamental elements. This painting, Woman in Black, is an oil on cardboard work and it is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Paul Cézanne: The Card Players

Paul Cézanne: The Card Players

Cézanne was in his fifties when he undertook a painting campaign devoted to giving memorable form to a subject that inspired the likes of Caravaggio and Chardin. He was determined from the start—as we see in this sturdy Provençal scene—to make it his own. Cézanne carefully crafted this composition from figure studies he had made of local farmhands. Once he had puzzled-out his conception, he continued to fine-tune the poses and positions of the card players, until they—like the four pipes hanging on the wall behind them—each fell perfectly into place. Cézanne channeled the quiet authority he achieved here into a much larger variant (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) and punctuated the series with three works in which he pared away extraneous details to focus his gaze on a pair of players. This work is located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Paul Cézanne: The Bathers

Paul Cézanne: The Bathers

The Bathers is the largest of Cezanne’s pictures. This work is characterized by a marked symmetry and adaptation of the nude forms to the triangular pattern of the trees and river. There is here, a search for constraining forms, an over-determined order which has to do with Cezanne’s anxiety about women. Beautiful as it is, the composition is not the typical Renaissance pyramid; the central part, which is usually filled by a dominant object, is empty or unstressed, and the apex is intercepted by the frame. The triangle here is a form of constraint, with another expression than the older solemn design. This masterpiece is located in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Cézanne Painting Mont Sainte-Victoire - Various Artists

Cézanne Painting Mont Sainte-Victoire - Various Artists

In this movie, a comparison between various artworks: A Visit to the House of Cézanne in AIx by Maurice Denis and several versions of Montagne Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne from the Foundation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russia; the Kunsthaus in Zurich; the Kunstmuseum in Basel; the Bridgestone Museum of Art in Tokyo, Japan; the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France and the last one from a private collection.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Georges Pierre Seurat: Pastels

Georges Pierre Seurat: Pastels

Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist artist. He is best known for his techniques as chromoluminarism and pointillism. His artistic personality combined two opposed and incompatible qualities: his delicate sensibility and his passion for logical abstraction and mathematical precision of mind.

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all