Vincent van Gogh, Painted in Arles, November 1888
Original Painting 12.8 x 15.9, Oil on canvas.
"Van Gogh had a special interest in sowers throughout his artistic career. All in all, he made more than 30 drawings and paintings on this theme. He painted this sower in the autumn of 1888. At the time, Van Gogh was working together with Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Gauguin believed that in his work Van Gogh should draw less on reality and more on his imagination.
Here, Van Gogh used colours meant to express emotion and passion. He assigned the leading roles to the greenish-yellow of the sky and the purple of the field. The bright yellow sun looks like a halo, turning the sower into a saint." (The Van Gogh Museum).
Credits: The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). This painting is on display in the exhibition Van Gogh’s Home: The Van Gogh Museum.
Linus Murphy Copy on Acrylic on 16 x 20 Gesso Canvas.
This is a very difficult piece of art to paint. The thickness of the paint, and the force with which it was applied to the canvas make it especially difficult.
This is one of the most satisfying paintings to work on as it pulls me into, in a very small way, the mind of a brilliant artist.
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Room Image Credit: Room designed by FreePik at www.freepik.com
Claude Monet, painted en plein air, 1867 - 1868.,
Original painting 25.5 x 31.9, Oil on canvas. Credit: Artchive Art Archives. “Ice floes on the Seine at Bougival”, a canvas painted during the winter of 1867-1868, confirms the presence of Monet who came to paint on the spot about 15 kilometres from Paris. Already in 1865 and 1866, Monet had painted snow scenes around Honfleur and in Normandy where Boudin and Jongkind had encouraged him to paint in the open air ("pleine air"). In this context, an article in the Journal du Havre of 9 October 1868 recorded “we caught a glimpse of him [Monet], it was winter, during a few days of snow… It was bitterly cold. We noticed a small foot-warmer, then an easel, then a man wrapped up in three cardigans, wearing gloves, his face half frozen: it was Mr Monet, studying an effect of snow."
Credit: Office du Tourisme de Bougival
Oil on 24 x 30 stretched gessoed canvas.
The original painting by Claude Monet is a study in mood and the never ending need for hard labour of the late 19th century. It is an exceptionally challenging piece as Monet has captured the morning's start of what would be a long, cold winter day of work.
The complimentary palette pushes the boundaries of its colours, connecting the muddy dirty snow to the darker greys of the Seine River.
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Room Image Credit: Jay Wilde
Camille Pissarro, Painted in Pontoise in 1867.
Original Painting 34 1/4 x 45 1/4 in, oil on canvas
'This view of Pontoise, just northwest of Paris, helped establish Pissarro’s reputation as an innovative painter of the rural French landscape. The critic Émile Zola praised the picture enthusiastically when it was shown along with another rustic scene at the Salon of 1868, writing, "This is the modern countryside. One feels that man has passed by, turning and cutting the earth. . . . And this little valley and hills have a heroic simplicity and forthrightness. Nothing would be more banal were it not so grand. From ordinary reality the painter's temperament has drawn a rare poem of life and strength."'
Credit: The Met Museum Collection, New York
Acrylic on 24 x 30 gessoed stretched canvas.
This painting is a treat to paint. It has a very interesting and flowing composition which floats the viewer's eye from one interest to another. The colours are very subtle yet capture the true feeling of a warm summer afternoon.
Pissarro was at the edge of the French Impressionism capturing the everyday of French rural life in this painting. The work is a celebration of the stoicism and beauty of rural life. Copying this artwork is truly a joy, it celebrates a time when hard physical work was the reality of life yet it created a beauty of reality.
Our Copy Cat Gallery's copy perhaps creates a warmer image than that which Pissarro originally created, but it seems to fit the bucolic landscape of the rolling hills, rural farmstead, and calm meandering footpaths.
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Room Image Credit: Room designed by FreePik at www.freepik.com
Claude Monet, Painted in Argenteuil, 1873
Original Painting 23 11/16 × 28 7/8 in. Oil on canvas
Monet and family lived in Argenteuil, France during the 1870's. Painted here is his (5-6 year old?) son, Jean, playing with a hoop with his wife, Camille, standing in the doorway. The pleasant weather, vine-covered house, and neatly kept garden, foreshadowing Monet's garden work at Giverny.
The painting gives a sense of tranquility and a content family life. Interestingly, this painting was also a celebration of his financial security for Monet had recent sales of his work to the Paris art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel.
Credits: The Art Institute of Chicago and Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection
Oil on Canvas 24 x 30
Monet's ability to create volume and mood through his use of light and colour is impressive. As other impressionists sought to achieve, Monet too sought to create a sensory memory of time and place in his viewers.
Here, sunlit garden and trees poke above the afternoon shadows cast by his house. His wife, many times a model in his artwork, peeks out from the house calling out to their son playing in the shade. One can easily imagine, as do I, that there is an oppressive heat in the later parts of the day so the child is catching some fun time in the shade. The child's goal would be to stay in the cool of the shade.
Monet's use of varying greens creates a sense of the sun's heat beating down on the garden. This, along with the warm sunshine against the cooler shade on the pathway, is an affect hard to replicate. Monet is a master.
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Room Image Credit: Room designed by FreePik at www.freepik.com
Vincent van Gogh, Painted in Arles, Spring of 1888
Original painting 28 1/2 x 21. Oil on canvas.
Painted in the warm spring in Arles in 1888. Van Gogh was overwhelmed by and in a state of high focus on his work. He wrote to his brother Theo about his work, "the trees are in blossom and I would like to do a Provençal orchard of tremendous gaiety." The early part of 1888 saw Van Gogh engrossed in the natural and manicured nature around Arles. He painted and drew a number of paintings of the orchards - fourteen are known to exist today. The sizes and materials changed throughout his studies but one thing was common: the overpowering sense of life and sunlight. This follows along Van Gogh’s admiration for Japanese prints and his fascination with eastern sense of composition and realty.
Van Gogh used a slightly more muted palette with a calmed brushwork approach. This was to connect the finished work more closely with the Japanese work he admired at this time in his life.
Credits: Photo by Peter Barritt, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection, Manhattan, New York City, USA.
Acrylic on The subtly of Van Gogh's original work, both colour palette and brushwork, was very hard to replicate. Knowing that this is a Van Gogh original, make one want to approach the work with a vitality and power so indicative of Van Gogh's brilliance. But he completed this work as one of the many studies he did of Arles' orchards and he picked up some of the cues from the Japanese style so prevalent at the time, making the work as much an interpretation of Van Gogh's as it was a copy.
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Room Image Credit: Room designed by FreePik at www.freepik.com
Vincent van Gogh, Painted 1887
Oil on canvas on pressboard 17 1/8 × 13 in.
"This painting dates from the winter of 1887, roughly a year after Vincent van Gogh arrived in Paris to join his brother, the art dealer Theo van Gogh. It is one of a group of landscapes featuring the Butte Montmartre, a short climb from the apartment on the rue Lepic where Vincent and Theo lived. Montmartre was dotted with reminders of its quickly receding rural past—abandoned quarries, kitchen gardens, and three surviving windmills, including the Moulin de Blute-Fin. The nonfunctional mill had become a tourist attraction, affording spectacular panoramic views over Paris from the observation tower erected beside it."
Credits: The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.
Acrylic on 18 x 16 Gesso Canvas
This painting is more a study of Van Gogh than of a copy of a Van Gogh. The brushwork is more tentative than that which Van Gogh would later become so famous. The painting uses a much more muted colour palette with less emotion and story built into the palette. It does beautifully capture a point in time of a normal day in France.
The Copy Cat painting purposefully captures a little more scale of the tourists. It achieves this by "zooming" in to Van Gogh's original, creating a very slight detail of the larger painting. This to give a little more of the people's activities while still capturing the broad feeling of a cool and cloudy day.
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Room Image Credit: Room designed by FreePik at www.freepik.com