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Retired and enjoying my free time to paint. I love the French Impressionism era. Monet, Renoir, Bazille and Manet are some of my favorites.

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Friday, October 1, 2010

Van Gogh - Metropolitan Museum of Art , NYC

Sunflowers 1887
(click image to enlarge)
Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Sunflowers appear amid the variegated bouquets that were the the mainstay of Van Gogh's work in Paris in 1886-88.  Intent upon updating his lackluster Dutch palette, he repeatedly turned to "painting flowers" so as "to render intense color and not a gray harmony."  By the summer of 1887, when he adopted the sunflower as the dominant motif in four pictures, he had found his voice as an original colorist.  Apparently conceived in
sequence, this group comprises a preparatory oil sketch for the Metropolitan's canvas (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam); and a larger composition that sets forth a composite image of the two pairs of (Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo).  Paul gauguin acquired the two smaller canvases, and until the mid -1890s, when he sold his most prized possessions to finance his South Seas voyage, they held pride of place above the bed in his Paris apartment.

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