artporn

Work (1852–1865) is a painting by Ford Madox Brown that is generally considered to be his most important achievement. It exists in two versions. The painting attempts to portray, both literally and analytically, the totality of the Victorian social system and the transition from a rural to an urban economy. Brown began the painting in 1852 and completed it in 1865, when he set up a special exhibition to show it along with several of his other works. He wrote a detailed catalogue explaining the significance of the picture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(painting)

The other version:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Ford_Madox_Brown_-_Work_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

"I'm currently working on an oil painting of Roger from Wortham, Texas, the second place winner in the Grey Brahman Calf Division at the Fort Worth Stock Show. (I posted a watercolor sketch of him on February 1st). Right after winning his ribbon, he posed for me in the late afternoon light, with the skyline of Fort Worth in the distance behind him. I always enjoy the challenge of trying to capture the effect of sunlight late in the day -- with its warm, yellow light and its cool, blue shadows."

I love the way the light plays on the scene, and the workers taking a rest break under the shadow of a majestic peak. Such an epic scene!

A fun local legend of how it was built:

The people of Uri recruited the Devil for the difficult task of building the bridge. The Devil requested to receive the first thing to pass the bridge in exchange for his help. To trick the Devil, who expected to receive the soul of the first man to pass the bridge, the people of Uri sent across a dog by throwing a piece of bread, and the dog was promptly torn to pieces by the Devil. Enraged at having been tricked the Devil went to fetch a large rock to smash the bridge, but, carrying the rock back to the bridge, he came across a holy man who "scolded him" (der ihn bescholten) and forced him to drop the rock, which could still be seen on the path below Göschenen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6llenen_Gorge#

Fiona Rae RA (born 10 October 1963) is a Hong Kong-born British artist. She is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who rose to prominence in the 1990s. Throughout her career, she has been known for having a portfolio of work that includes elements of energy, and complexity. Her work is known for aiming at expanding the modern traditions of painting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Rae

Info on this piece: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rae-maybe-you-can-live-on-the-moon-in-the-next-century-t15083

The Siren is a painting by John William Waterhouse. The painting depicts a siren sitting at the edge of a cliff, lyre in hand, staring down at a shipwrecked sailor floating in water, who in turn is staring up at her. The picture was painted in 1900 and is now part of a private collection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siren_(Waterhouse_painting)

The Apotheosis of War is a mid 19th century painting by Russian war artist Vasily Vereshchagin. Following his completion of the painting, Vereshchagin dedicated his work "to all great conquerors, past, present and to come". Done in oil on canvas, the painting depicts a pile of skulls outside the walls of a city in Central Asia. It is considered part of Vereshchagin's Turkestan Series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apotheosis_of_War

La Grenouillère is an 1869 oil on canvas painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. It shows the "camembert", a small island planted with a single tree, linked by gangplanks to the Île de la Grenouillère (left, out of picture) and to the fashionable La Grenouillère floating restaurant and boat-hire at Croissy-sur-Seine near Bougival.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grenouill%C3%A8re

Marquis de Lafayette (or Portrait of La Fayette) was painted in 1825 by Samuel Morse. Mostly known for his invention of the electric telegraph, Morse was also an artist and a professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Lafayette_(Morse)

Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi[a] (Russian: Иван Николаевич Крамской; 8 June [O.S. 27 May] 1837 – 5 April [O.S. 24 March] 1887) was a Russian Realist painter and art critic. He was an intellectual leader of the art movement known as the Wanderers between 1860 and 1880.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Kramskoi

Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin was a Russian landscape painter closely associated with the Peredvizhniki movement.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Austrian German: [ˈfɛrdɪnand ˈɡeːɔrɡ ˈvaltmʏlɐ] ; 15 January 1793 – 23 August 1865) was an Austrian painter and writer. Waldmüller was one of the most important Austrian painters of the Biedermeier period.

Titania and Bottom is an oil painting by the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. It dates to around 1790 and is in Tate Britain, in London. It was commissioned for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery and depicts a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titania_and_Bottom

NOTE: please tap the image if viewing in app to see the much sharper image. Some browsers seem to blur the original upload :S

"There are over 450 species of shark that roam the planet's waters. Although many have a bad reputation, artist Chris Austin hopes to add a little perspective to the ocean predator in his new series of paintings.

The Toronto-based artist has a multi-faceted creative practice that spans both painting and sculpture. His diverse portfolio of work is greatly inspired by the environment of North America, specifically the Pacific Northwest. Austin explores the mutability of the landscape as well as our tenuous relationship with it."

From Artylst: "With their biomorphic shapes and Disneyesque figures, her early works show the influence of Surrealists such as Miro, along with the violent graphics of popular Portuguese comics, and feed into her ferocious sense of irony. Later, while living in London, Rego would take on Portugal’s political establishment and, in particular, its treatment of women. This reached its acme after the failure of the referendum to legalise abortion, in her searing landmark series painted between 1997-98. Here, women wracked with pain crouch on chamber pots and over plastic buckets or lie traumatised on their beds. As in most of Rego’s work, the idealised female of art history gives way to a lived, sentient reality. These are not the draped muses of the European canon offered for the male gaze but women with solid thighs and arms who bear children, cook and scrub floors, working women with their own sexual longings, vulnerabilities, subterranean angers and strengths."