Luis de Morales (El Divino) | Mannerist painter

Luis de Morales, byname El Divino (Spanish: “The Divine”), (born c. 1509, Badajoz, Spain - died May 9, 1586, Badajoz), painter who was the first Spanish artist🎨 of pronounced national character, considered to be the greatest native Mannerist painter🎨 of Spain.

He is remembered for his emotional religious paintings, which earned him his sobriquet and greatly appealed to the Spanish populace.

Morales may have studied with the Flemish painter🎨 Hernando Sturmio in Badajoz or with Pedro de Campaña in Seville.

He worked in Badajoz from 1546, leaving on occasional commissions but making his home there all his life. Summoned by Philip II of Spain to help in the decoration of El Escorial, he painted a Christ Carrying the Cross that did not please the king and was removed to the Church of San Jerónimo, Madrid.

Pablo Picasso | Sleeping peasants, 1919

Medium: Gouache, watercolor, and pencil on paper

Dimensions: 12 1/4 x 19 1/4" (31.1 x 48.9 cm)

Credit: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund

Current location: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Sleeping peasants, is the most potent of the small erotic paintings that is brilliantly coloured.

The restless, irregular rhythms mapped out by the contours of the tumescene limbs and ruckled drapery amount to a graph of love-making which has just occured, while the woman's thrown-back head and uncovered breast confirm her maenadic ancestry.

The ripe bodies nestled in the ripe crops implying some archaic fertility rite.

Vincent van Gogh | Vase with Poppies, 1886

Vase with Poppies is a painting made by Vincent van Gogh in Paris in 1886.

March 24, 2019

By The Associated Press | A painting at a Connecticut museum that has long been thought to be by Vincent van Gogh🎨 has been authenticated by Dutch researchers.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford announced Friday that "Vase With Poppies", a still life oil painting, has been verified by researchers at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as having been made by the Dutch artist in 1886, just after he moved to Paris. It has been in the Atheneum’s collection since 1957.

Vincent van Gogh | Wheatfield with Partridge, 1887

Amid the waving wheat, we see poppies and cornflowers.

A partridge emerges from the field and flies away.

Looking at this painting, you feel as if you're right next to the field. That's because of the low point of view.

Van Gogh painted this rural wheat field while living in the crowded city of Paris.

Before his move to the French capital, his main theme had been country life. For him, this summery painting was a brief return to that theme. | © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Vincent van Gogh | Pine Trees Against An Evening Sky, 1889

Vincent Van Gogh🎨 achieved his most beautiful effect of branches with foliage against the sky in the Pine Trees against an Evening Sky.

In reality, the scale of the overall scene is such that it cannot be taken in at one glance, and to paint the trees and the sky like that Van Gogh would have had to gaze up above his head.

The artist was of the opinion that the picture he provided here of the asylum was fairly pleasant and his aim had indeed been to 'reconstruct it as it might have been by simplifying and accentuating the proud and immutable character of the pines and the clumps of cedar against the blue'.

Henri Matisse | Conversation under the Olive Trees, 1921

Beneath their tranquil surface, Henri Matisse's paintings often conceal a complex discourse expressing his conflicting aspirations through the relationship between subject and style.

Conversation under the Olive Trees is particularly revealing in this respect. Two elegant ladies standing on the lawn seem to be chatting.

Behind them is a path; on the far side and slightly lower, we see a grove of olive-trees, while further away appears the silhouette of a hill, and beyond it another.

Henri Matisse | Conversation under the Olive Trees, 1921 | The Carmen Thyssen Museum (Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga)

Henri Matisse | Legacy / L'eredità

The first painting of Henri Matisse🎨 (31 December 1869 - 3 November 1954) acquired by a public collection was Still Life with Geraniums (1910), exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne.

Today, a Matisse painting can fetch as much as US $17 million.

In 2002, a Matisse sculpture, Reclining Nude I (Dawn), sold for US $9.2 million, a record for a sculpture by the artist.

Matisse's daughter Marguerite often aided Matisse scholars with insights about his working methods and his works. She died in 1982 while compiling a catalog of her father's work.

Matisse's son, Pierre Matisse, (1900-1989) opened an important modern art gallery in New York City during the 1930s.