This is our favorite classical art

We know that classic art posters and miniposters are the favorites of many of our loyal followers. We want to tell you something more about them and in that effort, show you not so well-known classical painters , such as Odilon Redon and Delphin Enjolras.

Oscar-Claude Monet (French 1840-1926)

He was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting , considered a key precursor of modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the Impressionist philosophy of expressing one's perceptions of nature, especially applied to plein air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, exhibited in 1874 ("exhibition of rejections") initiated by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon.

His ambition to document the French countryside or more intimate sites such as its popular and beautiful water lilies , led him to a method of painting the same scene many times to capture the changing light and the passing of the seasons. Among the best-known examples are his series of haystacks (1890-1891), paintings of Rouen Cathedral (1894) and the paintings of water lilies in his garden at Giverny that occupied him continuously for the last 20 years of his life.

Raphael (Italian 1483-1520)

Raphael was enormously productive, ran an unusually large workshop and, despite his early death at the age of 37, left behind a large body of work. Many of his works are in the Vatican Palace, where the Raphael Rooms frescoes were the central and largest work of his career. The best known work is The School of Athens in the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican. After his first years in Rome, much of his work was executed by his workshop based on his drawings, with a considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential during his lifetime, although outside of Rome his work was primarily known for his collaborative printmaking.

After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo extended further into the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models. His career naturally divides into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (1504-1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last twelve frenetic and triumphant. years in Rome, working for two Popes and their closest collaborators.

Diego Velázquez (Spanish 1599-1660)

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter, the leading artist at the court of King Philip IV and of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualist artist of the contemporary baroque period. He began painting with a precise tenebrist style, later developing a freer manner characterized by a bold brushstroke. In addition to numerous depictions of scenes of historical and cultural importance, he painted dozens of portraits of the Spanish royal family and commoners, culminating in his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).

Velázquez's artwork became a model for realist and impressionist painters of the 19th century. In the 20th century, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon paid tribute to Velázquez by reinterpreting some of his most iconic images.

Sandro Boticelli (Italian 1444-1510)

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the early Renaissance. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century, when he was rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites who stimulated a reevaluation of his work. His paintings have since been seen to represent the linear grace of early Renaissance painting.

In addition to the mythological subjects for which he is best known today, Botticelli painted a wide range of religious subjects (including dozens of depictions of the Virgin and Child, many in the form of a round tondo) and also some portraits. His best-known works are The Birth of Venus and Spring, both in the Uffizi in Florence. Botticelli lived his entire life in the same neighborhood of Florence; his only significant moments elsewhere were the months he spent painting in Pisa in 1474 and the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1481-1482.

He was an independent teacher throughout the 1470s, in which his reputation soared. The 1480s were his most successful decade, the one in which his great mythological paintings were completed along with many of his most famous Virgins.

Odilon Redon (French 1840-1916)

Of our favorite classical art, this is one of the least known but it fascinates us. This is Odilon Redon, who was a French Symbolist painter, engraver, draftsman and pastelist. He is perhaps best known today for the "dream" paintings created in the first decade of the 20th century, which were heavily inspired by Japanese art. His work is considered a precursor of both Dadaism and Surrealism.

Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, into a prosperous family. Redon's father made his fortune in the Louisiana slave trade in the 1830s. Redon began drawing as a child; At the age of ten, he received a drawing prize at school. He began formal drawing studies at the age of fifteen but, at his father's insistence, he switched to architecture. At the end of the war, he moved to Paris and returned to working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. He called his visionary works, conceived in shades of black, his noirs. It was not until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters; He published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled À rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon's drawings.

Delphin Enjolras (French 1857-1945)

Enjolras painted portraits, nudes, interiors and mainly used watercolors, oils and pastels. He is best known for his intimate portraits of young women engaged in mundane activities such as reading or sewing, often illuminated by lamplight. Perhaps his most famous work is "Young Woman Reading by a Window."

He was born in Coucouron, Ardèche, son of Casimir Enjolras and Delphine Laurens. Enjolras studied with the watercolorist Gaston Gérard at the "Ecole de Dessin de la Ville de Paris", as well as with Jean-Léon Gérôme at Beaux-Arts and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret. Enjolras painted mainly landscapes early in his career; It later became evident that his love was for painting women. He switched genres, focusing primarily on the portrait of elegant young women by lamplight or black light. He would become an excellent painter of nudes, and many of his later works, such as "The Sieste", are erotic and sensual in nature.

From 1890 onwards, Enjolras exhibited his works at the Paris Salon, joining the Société des Artistes Français in 1901. Additionally, the Musée du Puy and the Musée d'Avignon have collections of his works.