Marc Chagall | Le Cirque

Marc Chagall’s fascination with the circus began at a young age, when travelling acrobats, dancers and musicians visited his hometown of Vitebsk in pre-revolutionary Russia.

In his later years in Paris, the artist regularly attended the Cirque d'Hiver with the art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard.

Vollard encouraged the pastime in the hope that Chagall would be inspired to create an illustrated book on the subject.

Hjalmar Munsterhjelm | Pittore Romantico

Magnus Hjalmar Munsterhjelm (1840-1905) è stato un paesaggista Finlandese.

Biografia

Munsterhjelm è nato a Toivoniemi Manor di Tuulos, in Finlandia.

Era il figlio di Gustaf Riggert Munsterhjelm (1806-1872) e sua moglie e Mathilda Charlotta Eleonora von Essen (1818-1895).

Suo padre lo mandò per la prima volta alla scuola marittima di Turku.

Ambrosius Benson | Pittore manierista

Ambrogio Benzone (1495-1550), od Ambrosius Benson in fiammingo, è stato un pittore Italiano, di origine lombarda, attivo a Bruges.

Si ignorano la data precisa e il luogo della nascita, che si ipotizza sia avvenuta nei dintorni di Milano, per via del nome Ambrogio. Dovette trasferirsi piuttosto giovane a Bruges nelle Fiandre, proveniente dalla Lombardia.

Vincent van Gogh | Garden of the Asylum, 1889

This painting shows the garden of the clinic in Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh spent a year. He worked there regularly when his illness meant he was not allowed to venture outside.

Van Gogh wrote to his friend Bernard about this painting:

You’ll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines that define the outlines, this gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer, and which is called "seeing red".

Paul Gauguin: "Art is either plagiarism or revolution"

• "Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams".

• "Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction".

• "Art is either plagiarism or revolution".

• "Art = a mad search for individualism".

• "There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover".

Paul Gauguin: "I shut my eyes in order to see.."

• Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
• We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
• Civilization is what makes you sick.
• Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses
• It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

Anton Einsle | Portrait painter

Anton Einsle (1801-1871), an Austrian ⎆ portrait painter, was born at Vienna in 1801.
He studied at the Academy of that city, and was largely patronized by the court and nobility. He died in 1871.