Osias Beert Still life of porcelain vessels containing sweets, pewter plates bearing sweets and chestnuts, three pieces of glassware and a bread roll on a table draped with a mauve cloth, 1600-1619. Private collection Strange things in old Dutch paintings In the first decades of the 17th century, a selection of painters in Holland and […]
Rembrandt van Rijn, Saskia van Uylenburgh As Flora, 1641 Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden – Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister inv./cat. no. 1562; Image credit: The Rembrandt Database. Old pigments painting blog: Vandyke Brown (Cassel Earth, Cologne Earth) I exclusively use pigments that were available to the 17th century Dutch painter – something that fascinates me and also keeps […]
Old Masters: painting tricks Rembrandt van Rijn Portrait of a Woman, Possibly Maria Trip (1639) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam I often paint dark backgrounds. Learning about old techniques, I aspire to approximate those incredible backgrounds of 17th C Dutch painters, using certain pigment mixes and optical tricks. Lately I have been thinking a bit more about […]
European tricks to help you through a pandemic, 14th century style Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1562), The Triump of Death. Museo Nacional del Prado Pandemic tips. Now we have experienced and are hopefully recovering from this truly awful COVID-19 pandemic, it is interesting to look back at how medieval and early modern Europe coped […]
Hidden delights: small animals in 17th C Dutch paintings Elias van den broek, detail of Still Life with Roses (1670 – 1708) Rijksmuseum (click to zoom right in on the museum’s website) The 17th century saw a keen interest in science and naturalism and empirical research of the natural sciences became hugely popular. One of […]
Doe je schaatsen aan! (Put your skates on!) Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters (circa 1608) Hendrick Avercamp Rijksmuseum Amsterdam Skating in Holland – Hendrick Avercamp was one of many to paint the Dutch winter and the young Dutch Republic’s obsession with skating on so-called ‘natuurijs’: frozen lakes, canals and rivers. We still love skating […]
Portrait of a Man (assumed to be a self portrait), 1433. National Gallery London Jan van Eyck was born in Maaseik, a town in east Belgium, around 1390. He painted for John III the Pitiless, then-ruler of Holland and Hainaut in The Hague, and moved to Lille to work at the court of Philip the […]
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Lapis Lazuli Throughout history, lapis lazuli and the blue pigment that is extracted from it have have occupied a special place in the fine and decorative arts: an expensive, semi-precious stone that for centuries was exclusively sourced fron the rather inaccessible mountains of Badakhshan (today’s Afghanistan). Brought to Europe through the main trading port of […]