retnoop

Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers , 1875  Musée d'Orsay, now on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Right now the National Gallery is having an exhibition of an Impressionist whose reputation has grown over the last 25 years, Gustave Caillebotte.   Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye will be on view until October 4. It's interesting how his first masterpiece, The Floor Scrapers was rejected by the Salon in 1875, but part of the Impressionists' exhibition the next year. The masterful painting granted Caillebotte entry into the Impressionist group. He repaid his dear friends by buying up many of their works and then donating them to the French state after he died.  Many of the paintings he owned are part of Paris' great early modern museum, Musée d'Orsay. It's appropriate that the museum that houses so many Impressionist works is a former train station, since modern trains inspired viewers to observe the transient views of the world that ...

Much of our appreciation of Van Gogh can be traced to Helene Müller, whose acquisitions are the foundation of the Kröller-Müller Museum. This German-born heiress was wise in recognizing Van Gogh's genius and became the first major collector of his work. She and her Dutch husband, Anton Kröller, built a sensational collection and began showing parts of it to the public as early as 1913.  They lost their fortune in the economic downturn after World War I, but formed the Kröller-Müller Foundation to protect the art.  In 1935, they donated a house, land and a collection of 12,000 pieces to the Netherlands on the condition the country will build a place to display it. There were 90 paintings, 185 drawings by Van Gogh. S till Life with Four Sunflowers, 1887, has contrasts of blue and orange, yellow and red, a reason I find this painting in the Kröller-Müller Museum more interesting than Van Gogh's more famous yellow paintings of sunflowers in a vase. In a recent trip to the Netherla...