Camille Pissarro | Hoarfrost, young peasant girl making fire, 1888

"Gelée blanche, jeune Paysanne faisant du feu" is one of Pissarro’s great masterpieces.

Painted in 1888 at the peak of the artist’s engagement with Neo-Impressionism and conceived on a grand scale, it is a brilliant rendering of light and atmosphere.

The subject is a cold winter’s morning, the low sun casts shadows across the meadow and in these shadows the night’s frost lingers; against this backdrop a young woman and a child build a fire, the smoke rising with a heat that shimmers and eddies across the frozen landscape.

Camille Pissarro | Hoarfrost, young peasant girl making fire / Gelée blanche, jeune Paysanne faisant du feu, 1888 | Museum Barberini

Gabriele d’Annunzio | Aprile

Socchiusa è la finestra, sul giardino.

Un'ora passa lenta, sonnolenta,

ed ella, ch'era attenta, s'addormenta

a quella voce che già si lamenta,

che si lamenta in fondo a quel giardino.

William Brymner | In the Orchard Spring, 1892

Luigi Cima | Verist painter

Luigi Cima (1860-1944) was an Italian painter, considered one of the most fortunate and appreciated representatives of the “verism” of the late nineteenth century, and in any case an absolute protagonist of the artistic world of Belluno.

Luigi Cima was born in Villa di Villa, current municipality of Mel (Belluno) on January 5, 1860.

After completing his technical studies in Feltre, he moved to Venice to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he attended the courses of Eugenio De Blaas.

Arturo Moradei | Genre painter

Arturo Moradei (1840-1901) was an Italian 19th Century genre artist.

Arturo Moradei was born in Florence in 1840 and after extensive study, he became a very popular painter of romantic figures indulging in everyday life.

His ability to catch expressions and to tell stories in his paintings ensured the popularity of his work during his lifetime.

He died in Italy in 1901.

The Hagia Sophia of the Fossati brothers

Gaspare Fossati (1809-1883) and his brother Giuseppe Fossati (1822-1891), were born in Switzerland to a family of architects.

They studied in Venice and Milan.

Until 1833 Gaspare had studied several specimens of Romanic and Renaissance architecture.

He participated in the excavations in Pompey, and subsequently travelled to Russia, where he was soon appointed official architect to the Czar's court in Saint Petersburg, and was entrusted with designing the Russian embassy in Istanbul.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Dance at Bougival, 1883

The open-air cafés of suburban Bougival, a town on the river Seine west of Paris, were popular recreation spots for city dwellers, including the Impressionists.

Here, at one such café - its floor littered with cigarettes, burnt matches, and a small bouquet of flowers-an amateur boatman in a straw hat sweeps his stylish partner along in a waltz.

The touch of their gloveless hands, their flushed cheeks and intimate proximity, suggest a sensuous subtext to this scene.

The son of a dressmaker and a tailor, Renoir delighted in capturing intricate details of contemporary fashions, such as the woman’s red bonnet trimmed with purple fruits. | Source: © Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Dance at Bougival, 1883 | Museum of Fine Arts Boston

6 artworks to look out for at Tate Britain

Tate è un gruppo di gallerie d'arte con sede a Londra, Liverpool e Cornovaglia, note come Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate St Ives e Tate Liverpool + RIBA North.

Quando la Tate aprì per la prima volta le sue porte al pubblico nel 1897, aveva una sola sede, che esponeva una piccola collezione di opere d'arte britanniche.

Oggi dispone di quattro sedi principali e della collezione nazionale di arte britannica dal 1500 ad oggi e di arte moderna e contemporanea internazionale, che comprende circa 70.000 opere d'arte.

Sir John Everett Millais | Mariana, 1851 | Tate Collection

This painting by British painter John Everett Millais (1829-1896) is of Mariana, a character from Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure.

The story goes that Mariana’s fiancé Angelo leaves after her family’s money is lost in a shipwreck.

Still in love with him, she hopes they will be reunited.

Millais shows Mariana pausing to stretch her back after working at some embroidery, with the autumn leaves scattered on the ground marking the passage of time.

The stained-glass windows in front of her show the Annunciation, contrasting the Virgin's fulfilment with Mariana's frustration and longing.

Sir John Everett Millais | Mariana, 1851 | Tate Collection

Emily Dickinson | Morii per la Bellezza / I Died for Beauty, 1862

Morii per la bellezza, ma ero appena

composta nella tomba

che un altro, morto per la verità,

fu disteso nello spazio accanto.

Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) | Ophelia, 1865

Nikolai Sverchkov | Equine painter

Nikolai Yegorovich Sverchkov / Николай Егорович Сверчков (1817-1898) was a Russian painter who specialized in genre and hunting scenes with horses.

He was also a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

His father was an Imperial groom and coachman. As a child, he worked with his father and began drawing animals.

Impressed with his work, his parents arranged for him to take lessons at the Imperial Academy of Arts with the battle painter, Alexander Sauerweid, from 1827 to 1829.

Eugène Lami | Fashion in Paris

Eugène Louis Lami (1800-1890) was a French painter and lithographer.

He was a painter of fashionable Paris during the period of the July Monarchy and the Second French Empire and also made history paintings and illustrations for books such as Gil Blas and Manon Lescaut.

He worked at the studio of Horace Vernet then studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with Camille Roqueplan and Paul Delaroche under Antoine-Jean Gros.

Anna Sahlsten | Genre painter

Anna Sofia Sahlstén (1859-1931) was a Finnish painter, primarily known for portraits and genre scenes.

Her father, Clas Vilhelm Sahlstén (1826-1897), was a Chamber Counselor who later became a writer.

Her mother was Edla Elisabeth Heinricius.

When she was eight, her family moved to Helsinki, where she attended a Swedish girls' school; receiving her certificate in 1877.

She then studied at the Finnish Society Drawing School from 1877 to 1880, then at a private school operated by Adolf von Becker, from 1880 to 1882.

"Corot painted 3.000 canvases, 10.000 of which have been sold in America"..!

The strong market for Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's (French painter, 1796-1875) works and his relatively easy-to-imitate late painting style resulted in a huge production of Corot forgeries between 1870 and 1939.

René Huyghe (French writer on the history, psychology and philosophy of art, curator at the Louvre's department of paintings (from 1930), a professor at the Collège de France director of the Musée Jacquemart-André, a member of the Académie Française, 1906-1997) famously quipped that "Corot painted three thousand canvases, ten thousand of which have been sold in America".

Walter Crane | Precursor of Art Nouveau

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was an English artist and book illustrator.

Together with William Morris, Walter Crane was a leader in the Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts artistic movements

.

Walter Crane is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the later 19th century.

Crane's work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come.

Émile Zola: "I would rather die of passion than of boredom"

• "[Johann Strauss jr] Ha mostrato come il mondo può essere bello, io invece ho scritto come il mondo può essere brutto".

• "Il talento del Signor Manet è fatto di semplicità e di esattezza. Senza dubbio, davanti alla natura incredibile di alcuni dei suoi colleghi si sarà deciso ad interrogare la realtà, solo con sé stesso: avrà rifiutato tutta la perizia acquisita, tutta l'antica esperienza, avrà voluto prendere l'arte dall'inizio, cioè dall'osservazione esatta degli oggetti. Si è dunque messo coraggiosamente di fronte a un soggetto, ha visto questo soggetto per larghe macchie, per opposizioni vigorose, e ha dipinto ogni cosa così come la vedeva".

Édouard Manet | Portrait of Émile Zola, 1868 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Alfonso Simonetti | Romantic painter

Alfonso Simonetti (29 December 1840 - 22 August 1892) was an Italian painter of historical scenes, portraits and landscapes; best known for his works with moonlight and sunset effects.

Simonetti was born in Naples, Italy, to the painter Giuseppe Simonetti (1840-1864) and his wife Vincenza, née Piccirillo.

In 1859, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Gabriele Smargiassi and Giuseppe Mancinelli.

Claude Monet | Alice Hoschedé au jardin, 1881

Monet's magnificent depiction of his garden at Vétheuil exemplifies the visual splendor of Impressionism at its height.

Monet painted this work in 1881 as a new chapter of his life was unfolding, and this picture expresses the exuberance and renewed passion of the artist during this important period.

Seated among the flowers is Alice Hoschedé, the artist's thirty-seven year old lover and the wife of his close friend and patron Ernst Hoschedé.

The composition is lavished with all of the hallmarks of a great Impressionist composition, with its vivid color palette, intermingling of the natural elements and interplay of light and shadow.

Claude Monet | Alice Hoschedé au jardin, 1881

Arthur Schopenhauer: "Music is the melody whose text is the world"

• "For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible".

• "A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free".

Antonio Nunziante

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Fragments and studies

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was fascinated by hats and their infinite array of trimmings.

To quote the model-turned-painter Suzanne Valadon: "Renoir particularly loved women's hats... he never ceased buying lots of hats".

The millinery trade was a thriving industry in Paris during the second half of the 19th century.

When the vogue for hats reached its peak, Paris was home to about 1,000 milliners.

Since hats represented the most variable accessory in a wardrobe, even women with moderate means owned several.

In this kaleidoscopic sketch, Renoir lavished his attention on the hats, while the heads are no more individualized than mannequins.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Study of Heads, 1890 | Barnes Foundation

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | At the Milliner's, 1878

At the Milliner's is an oil on canvas artwork by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French Impressionist painter, 1841-1919), created in 1878.

This work is a product of the Impressionism movement, measuring 32.9 x 24.8 cm and is part of the collection of the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

At the Milliner's exhibits the quintessential Impressionist technique with its loose brushwork and the interplay of light and color, rather than intricate detail.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | At the Milliner's, 1878 | Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum

Amore non è amore se muta.. | Shakespeare, Sonetto 116

Shakespeare | Let me not to the marriage of true minds | Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

Alessandro Puttinati | Paolo e Virginia, 1844