Works by many of the most compelling American landscape painters feature during a hypnotic group exhibition that seeks to explore a number of engaging historical and contemporary concepts. Who’s included and where?

On view now through October 9 at the Heritage Museums & Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts, “Painted Landscapes” is an incredibly diverse group exhibition showcasing works by nearly 50 world-class artists. The aim of the robust show is to illuminate the compelling new ways in which contemporary artists both employ and interpret the traditional genre of landscape painting. Among the themes are artists who “address contemporary issues of land use, nature appreciation, and ecology through their paintings of the American environment,” the museum reports. “The exhibit examines landscape paintings in terms of their historical inspiration, their formal elements of structure and form, and their theoretical underpinnings in which a landscape could be read as a specific location or as a place of human experience.

“The exhibit features key aspects of what defines landscape paintings, including History & Inspiration (documenting change in America from a rural, agrarian society to the urban, populous place it has become, capturing the countryside, the seaside, and all the places artists live and work), Place (whether natural or man-made, urban or rural, real or imagined), Structure & Landscape (either imposed upon the natural landscape through man-made structures or in naturally occurring formal features of the landscape itself), The Tree (depiction of the common and familiar tree), and The Act of Painting (where the subject of ‘landscape’ and the place depicted are almost secondary to the process and stylist choices of the artists).” The exhibition was curated by Lauren P. Della Monica.

To learn more, visit the Heritage Museums & Gardens.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Conveying color, texture, and a dynamic energy, the paintings of Peter Fiore are magnetic representations of the artist’s search to find something eternal and more meaningful. He also extends the same invitation to you, the viewer, during his latest solo show in New York.

On view June 30 through July 29 at Alliance Gallery in Narrowsburg, New York, “Pine Variations” is a display of painter Peter Fiore’s latest body of work exploring tree “portraits.” In his pursuit of what he calls “a universal moment in our commonplace world,” Fiore has repeatedly represented a white pine tree located close to his home studio. “This work exemplifies my ongoing visual investigation,” he says. “I like to visit a motif repeatedly to learn its faceted nature throughout the year.

“I’m looking for something eternal and more meaningful. My tree portraits continue the pursuit of communicating a complexity of feelings within the works, while also seeking to display the unique character within a single tree. Featured is a closely cropped tree, its branches dancing from edge to edge, anchored by a steady central trunk — this bifurcating vertical is the dominant element. Such a design has the potential to divide the composition in a way that depletes it of energy, but that is the challenge — a command to depart from the norm. A square is stability and, as such, has no innate force.

“I paint almost exclusively in a square format, embracing the absolute symmetry and universality of the shape. Therefore, I’m tasked with infusing energy into the piece by extracting it from within the subject matter. One needs to work intelligently to make a successful composition. I relish this challenge, which forces me to rely on hand and heart to bring movement to an otherwise static shape.

“I revel in the questions, not the answers. I continue my visual journey, eager to discover the next direction. The physicality of process remains paramount to my work, as it has from the beginning. Painting is cultural. Painting is thinking. Painting is passion. Painting is education. Painting is intellectual. I am creating a poetry that goes beyond the surface, and I have questions.”

To learn more, visit Alliance Gallery.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

A little known, but incredibly moving exhibition is currently on view this summer featuring a privately owned Rembrandt painting shown to the public only a handful of times. Generously loaned to this institution, the painting has sparked an exhibition.

The Frick Collection in New York City was the recent recipient of a remarkable loan from a private collection. Currently on view now through August 20 is Rembrandt van Rijn’s captivating and luminous “Abraham Entertaining the Angels” of 1646. Only shown a handful of times to the public, the generous loan sparked the Frick to mount “Divine Encounter” — a “tightly focused exhibition in which the painting appears alongside other depictions by Rembrandt of the Old Testament figure Abraham — a spectacular selection of prints and drawings from American and international collections,” the museum writes.

The show offers viewers a chance to understand Rembrandt’s approach to history painting and the artist’s shift towards religious subject matter from the late 1630s to the late 1650s. “In them,” the Frick continues, “the artist took a progressively deeper interest in the psychological content of the Abraham story, specifically the emotional experience of a father confronting the most magnificent of blessings and the most heartbreaking of losses. At the same time, Rembrandt also began to move away from the physicality and instantaneity of his earlier narrative work in favor of imagery characterized instead by an overwhelming sense of stillness and calm. These are the defining qualities of his 1646 ‘Abraham Entertaining the Angels,’ in which the momentous nature of the event depicted is conveyed solely through light and a single, gently raised hand.”

To learn more, visit The Frick Collection.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

In celebration and commemoration of the centennial of Andrew Wyeth’s birth on July 12, 1917, the United States Postal Service will release a series of stamps embellished with some of the artist’s most iconic works. We have a preview here!

The great American realist Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) will soon be honored by the United States Postal Service with a series of 12 stamps featuring iconic works from throughout his career. Released on July 12, the stamps are a celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth.

A dedication ceremony for the Andrew Wyeth Forever stamps will be hosted at the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, on July 12. The ceremony will be attended by the artist’s son, Jamie Wyeth, U.S. Postal Service Senior Director and Chief of Staff to the Postmaster General Patrick Mendonca, and Frolic Weymouth Executive Director and CEO Virginia A. Logan.

Via the USPS announcement: “This pane of 12 Forever stamps celebrates the centennial of the birth of Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917-Jan. 16, 2009), one of the most prominent American artists of the 20th century. Working in a realistic style that defied artistic trends, Wyeth created haunting and enigmatic paintings based largely on people and places in his life, a body of work that continues to resist easy or comfortable interpretation.

“This issuance includes stamps that each feature a detail from a different Andrew Wyeth painting. The paintings are: ‘Wind from the Sea’ (1947), ‘Big Room’ (1988), ‘Christina’s World’ (1948), ‘Alvaro and Christina’ (1968), ‘Frostbitten’ (1962), ‘Sailor’s Valentine’ (1985), ‘Soaring’ (1942–1950), ‘North Light’ (1984), ‘Spring Fed’ (1967), ‘The Carry’ (2003), ‘Young Bull’ (1960), and ‘My Studio’ (1974). The selvage, or area outside of the stamp images, shows a photograph of Wyeth from the 1930s. Art director Derry Noyes of Washington, DC, designed the pane.”

To learn more, visit the USPS.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

In this occasional series, Fine Art Today delves into the world of portraiture, highlighting historical and contemporary examples of superb quality and skill. This week: Rembrandt van Rijn, “Self-Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar.”

Last week Fine Art Today debuted our new Portrait of the Week series with a remarkable contemporary work by Elena Vladimir Baranoff. Her official portrait of the Lord Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, was a stunning example recently selected for — and on view at — the BP Portrait Awards in London.

There seemed no better way to showcase the diversity of this new series than to follow a contemporary masterpiece with a historical one. Universally considered one of the greatest — if not the greatest — portraitists who ever lived, Rembrandt van Rijn is a monumental painter and person who continues to captivate scholars to this day. It could be argued that, perhaps more than anyone else who ever lived, Rembrandt possessed a genius that allowed him to capture with amazing sensitivity an individual’s spirit and character — including his own.

Painted in 1659, about 10 years before the artist’s death, “Self-Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar” is visual evidence of a gripping process of self-exploration. Of all the artist’s self-portraits (scholars estimate Rembrandt produced nearly 100 self-portraits in various media throughout his life), the example here is frequently cited in scholarly attempts to understand the master’s state of mind and professional condition during his later years.

Detail showing the brushwork and diverse palette found within the self-portrait’s upper cheekbone.

Around the time of this self-portrait’s production, Rembrandt was embroiled in a battle to avoid bankruptcy and the sale of his home and vast collection of art and antiquities. Rembrandt displays himself seated and facing toward the viewer’s left, modestly dressed and hands clasped before him. A single source of light drapes over his face from the upper right of the canvas. Considering the face that peers longingly at the viewer, author Clifford Ackley suggested it reveals “the stresses and strains of a life compounded of creative triumphs and personal and financial reverses.” Indeed, close inspection of the artist’s face exposes the exhausted, melancholic, yet proud spirit of a man who — by this time — had witnessed the death of a son, two daughters, and his beloved wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh.

From a technical perspective, the portrait also highlights the increasing expressiveness and looseness of Rembrandt’s brush as his life and career waned. Scholars are quick to note the thickness of the paint in the artist’s face in addition to the higher diversity of pigments found within his skin.

“Self-Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar” is part of the Andrew W. Mellon Collection and has called the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., home since 1937.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

In this occasional series, Fine Art Today delves into the world of portraiture, highlighting historical and contemporary examples of superb quality and skill. This week we consider one of the most important self-portraits ever created.

Albrecht Dürer was undoubtedly one of the most spectacular and accomplished artists of the Renaissance. Indeed, his iconic “Self-Portrait” from the year 1500 is one of the most significant self-images ever produced.

It is often suggested by scholars that Durer’s 1500 self-portrait depicts the artist in the guise of Christ Pantocrator, and it has come to represent one of the first explicit visualizations of how artists viewed themselves as craftsmen inspired by God. As foremost German Renaissance scholar Joseph Leo Koerner writes, the painting is “formalized so as to display its underlying construction almost in the manner of an architectural front elevation.” He adds, “[S]et off against a neutral ground, the 1500 likeness is less a body in a setting than a principle of pictorial order consubstantial with the visual image itself.”¹

The deep symbolism, semiology, proportions, and ratios Dürer manipulated in the self-portrait were extraordinarily original and radical for the time. The picture is not just a visual representation, but something beyond appearance and status, something that gave the viewer “access to an interior self and reflected the underlying idea of painting itself: art is the image of its maker.”²

Today, the brilliant oil is located at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany. To learn more about this extraordinary portrait, visit Alte Pinakothek.

¹ Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, (Chicago UP, 1993): 63.

² Omar Calabrese, Artists’ Self-Portraits, 1st ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 2006): 18.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

The United Kingdom’s largest and most established art and antiques fair is about to kick off, June 26 at London’s iconic Kensington Olympia Exhibition Center. What could be better? How about getting two tickets for the price of one?

One hundred and sixty of the world’s finest specialist dealers will soon converge in London for the 45th Annual Art & Antiques Fair Olympia. With prices ranging from $100 to over $1 million, collectors and enthusiasts always find an eclectic range of high-quality fine art and antiques each year.

All items exhibited at the fair undergo a rigorous vetting process that involves authentication, date, and condition. Thirty-two committees composed of museum curators, auction house specialists, restorers, and dealers make sure only the highest-quality antiques are featured.

The pot is sweetened this year as attendees have an opportunity to purchase two tickets for the price of one using the promotion code FINEAC17; click the link here. The offer is available only for standard tickets purchased in advance. The box office closes at midnight on June 25, so don’t drag your feet!

To learn more, visit The Art & Antiques Fair Olympia.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.