Léonard Defrance

One of the perks with being rather uneducated about The Arts is that you constantly stumble upon artists you'd never heard of. This happened today, to me. And it was awesome.

Defrance (1735-1805) was a Belgian painter and according to what I could find through an Google image search, he was very fond of painting ordinary people in ordinary and sometimes less than graceful situations. Things that I love!

These paintings seem to be the more known of his work, since I got many versions of them in my search results. The resolution is not always great, but here we go:

Men Fighting. Hermitage Museum

Women fighting.  Hermitage Museum   

Fish market. Some oil painting on demand site. Totally copyrighted.

Interior of a forge. Artnet

Recruting officer in a public house. Artnet

The breakfast. Hermitage Museum

Visiting the printers. Musée de Grenoble




And my absolute favourite...

The rope dancer The Met

Follow the link and zoom in! Look at her little outfit! Who's going to make it? It won't be me, I'm afraid - don't have the legs for it.

Pehr Hilleström

Self portrait

Today I went to a small art exhibition in central Stockholm (the one Johanna Öst wrote about here!) and it was lovely. Several Swedish 18th century artists were featured (among some Roslin and Wertmüller) but what I had anticipated most were some ten works of my favourite Pehr Hilleström! I wasn't disappointed!

This particular painting wasn't featured

It was so great to see paintings I only had seen in books or online and so close you could make out every little detail. Candy for the soul!

You can find quite a few of Hilleström's paintings by a Google image search which is great. What would be even greater was if someone made an up-to-date book on the artist and his career because the last time that happened was in 1929!

Although a treasure to me, the book (Pehr Hilleström som kulturskildrare vol. 1-2, Gerda Cederblom, Nordiska Museet) features mostly black and white images and not always of superb quality.

Nevertheless, I have a long-term plan to scan every one of those paintings for fun and for reference. I have not come very far...

But above you have seen a few; the rest can be found in this set on Flickr. The images may not be of great quality, but enjoy anyway!

Looking at pictures

Well hallo there! Remember me?

No, not quite dead but I have been feeling more than a little bit low lately. Nothing serious, but it doesn't make for very interesting posts either.

So let's just look at some very nice paintings and portraits, 'k? I always forget that the auction houses put up such great and HUGE images of their goodies online - in fact, better than many digitized museum collections!

Let's start with Bukowskis (and clicky, clicky for HUGE!):

Duke Karl of Sudermannia

(yup, that's a Roslin!)

From Stockholms Auktionsverk

Pehr Hilleström was Boucher's pupil, if you wonder why this painting looks so familiar...

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