Fine Arts News

Phillips Collection curator Eliza Rathbone says Renoir was "at the height of his powers" when in he painted Luncheon of the Boating Party.

In 1880, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, age 41, wrote to a friend that he was in a riverside town near Paris painting oarsmen. He'd been "itching" to do it for a long time: "I'm not getting any younger," he wrote, "and didn't want to defer this little festivity." Now that painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party, is the star of a new exhibition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

The painting shows 14 young people having a wonderful time on a sunny balcony overlooking the Seine. Lunch is over — there are half-full wine bottles, golden grapes and pears on the white tablecloth — and now they're relaxing, talking and flirting.

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Phillips Collection curator Eliza Rathbone says Renoir was "at the height of his powers" when in he painted Luncheon of the Boating Party. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

In 1880, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, age 41, wrote to a friend that he was in a riverside town near Paris painting oarsmen. He'd been "itching" to do it for a long time: "I'm not getting any younger," he wrote, "and didn't want to defer this little festivity." Now that painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party, is the star of a new exhibition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

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Look at Vincent van Gogh's Olive Trees closely enough, and you'll find the subtle intricacies of his play with color, his brush strokes, perhaps even his precise layers of paint atop the canvas.
You'll also find a grasshopper. Well, parts of one, anyway.



Vincent van Gogh's Olive Trees, made with oil on canvas in 1889. See the shadow cast by that small tree on the far right side? There's a grasshopper lurking in that shade.

Conservator Mary Schafer had been examining some paintings at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., placing each one under a microscope for a detailed look — when, remarkably, she stumbled on a weird substance stuck in the thick layers of paint on van Gogh's piece. There, tucked in the shade cast by the olive tree in the painting's right foreground, a curious, fragmented object stared back at her.

"She initially thought it was just leaf matter," Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, the museum's senior curator of European art, tells NPR. Given the fact van Gogh did a lot of his painting outside, "it's not unusual to find parts of leaves or dirt or sand" in some of his works.
Then she made out its head.



This image, taken through a microscope, captures the grasshopper embedded in the paint of van Gogh's Olive Trees.

Marcereau DeGalan says this was exciting — not so much because she and Schafer were secret entomology enthusiasts, but rather because the little guy promised to offer a better sense of when, exactly, van Gogh completed Olive Trees.
You see, they've got a pretty good idea when he painted it — sometime in 1889, after the famously troubled artist had checked himself into an asylum in the south of France. Just one year from death, Van Gogh probably "realized he was struggling," Marcereau DeGalan says, "and he was doing some soul-searching, some thinking about his life, his contributions, his place within society."

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About Dre Urhahn

Dre Urhahn and his friend and partner Jeroen Koolhaas make up the art duo Haas&Hahn. From North Philly to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, they collaborate with locals in tough neighborhoods around the world to create striking public art projects.

As part of their Favela Painting Foundation, the Dutch artists crowdsourced more than $100,000 with the hope of bringing their bright, cheerful paintings to the entire hillside of Villa Cruzeiro favela in Rio — training young painters in the process.



Boy With Kite



Rio Cruzeiro



Rio Cruzeiro

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Will Barnet (1911-2012)
Early Morning 1972

An enigma that has beguiled art enthusiasts for more than eight decades has finally been solved, after Belgian researchers announced they had found the fourth and final missing piece of René Magritte's The Enchanted Pose.
Using X-ray imaging, researchers with the University of Liège and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium spotted the upper right corner of the work underneath Magritte's 1935 to 1936 painting God is not a Saint last month. The surrealist had simply painted over it.



A woman looks at Magritte's God is not a Saint, which hides under its layers the missing and final piece of another Magritte work, The Enchanted Pose, at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.

"When we realized what it was, we just looked at each other in shock," David Strivay, a professor at the University of Liège, told the BBC.

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Salvator Mundi is one of only a score of Leonardo da Vinci's works still in existence and the only one held privately.




Bidding representatives react after Salvator Mundi sold for $450 million at Christie's on Wednesday.

A portrait of Christ by Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci has shattered all previous records for artworks sold at auction or privately, fetching a whopping $450.3 million on Wednesday at Christie's in New York.

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Dan Burgess painting

Fisherman

The mystery over who paid a record-breaking $450 million for Leonardo da Vinci's painting Salvator Mundi at an auction last month appears to have been solved. It turns out it's Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
That's according to U.S. intelligence officials who keep a close eye on the kingdom's young and powerful crown prince, says the Wall Street Journal.

The winning bid in the November 15 auction at Christie's in New York was made anonymously by phone using a Christie's representative. The New York Times reported earlier that documents showed another member of the royal family, Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, placed the final bid. But intelligence officials say Bader was just a proxy for crown prince Mohammed.

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