Stlukesguild

(I posted this entry upon the William Blake discussion. Parts of it are excerpted from an earlier entry. Here, however, I sought to focus upon Blake as a visual artist)

William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) may just be my single favorite British poet so I will need to offer fair warning as to the possibility of some bias. Blake has long been accepted as one of the “great six” of British Romanticism (Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge) and one of the ...

RIP Andrew Wyeth
July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009

(I've re-posted this with some small editing from an earlier posting on Wyeth)

In art it is often true that living long is one of the best guarantees of one achieving something of real merit. It is rare to come across artists who reach their maturity much before their late twenties at the earliest... although there are exceptions. Artists like Titian, Rembrandt, Monet, Beckmann, and many more created their greatest ...

His true name was Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken. He was born c. 1450 in s'Hertogenbosch, a blossoming Netherlandish commercial town in northern Brabant. His grandfather, father, brother, and three uncles were also painters. Sometime between 1471 and 1481 he married Aleyt van den Meervenne, daughter of a wealthy burgher. In 1486 he was registered as a member of the Lieve-Vrouwe Broederschap (Brotherhood of Our Lady) in which he became a "notable" two years later. From the Brotherhood's records ...

Three surviving panels by Bosch represent an intriguing view of impact of the passage of time upon art. One panel is the Death and the Miser in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.



In this painting a miser... perhaps once a mercenary, as suggested by the armor and weapons placed so prominently in the foreground... is seen simultaneously in in two poses. He checks upon his wealth... ...

With The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1505) we come to Bosch's "masterpiece" and the painting for which he is deservedly most well-known. With this painting, Bosch pulled together various elements and threads that he had explored throughout the whole of his career and organized them into a single, virtually flawless, complex whole.

The painting, housed in the Prado, Madrid, is a triptych. We may as well start by looking at the exterior doors:

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