English Romantic landscape painter J.M.W. Turner reflected the elegant glamorous ruins of Tintern Abbey more than once in his paintings. William Wordsworth and Lord Tennyson left beautiful lines inspired by the mysterious beauty of its ruins. Memories of the feelings and people “that are no more”. “Tears, Idle Tears” by Tennyson are full of sadness, regret, thoughts of death and friends already gone into the underworld.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!”

The mysterious Tintern Abbey is not a mythological place but a Cistercian monastery in Monmouthshire founded in 1131. Its ruins are still standing and attract tourists, poets and artists.

Surprisingly people of today, who have never heard of it know more than they realize about it by facts and associations. Who does not know unhappy king Henry VIII who is famous for his numerous marriages and the legend that he killed all of his wives? Bookstores and libraries are full of tragic novels of his passion for Ann Boleyn who he married and executed a few years later. The popular TV series The Tudors dedicated an entire season to this love story that changed the history of England. Trying to justify his divorce with his Catholic wife Catherine of Aragon, the king turned to Protestantism and ordered the so-called Dissolution of the Monasteries in England and Wales. One of the episodes of the TV series shows Henry’s army crushing and robbing the monasteries, killing all the monks and putting the buildings on fire.

It seems that Tintern Abbey surrendered more peacefully and the building was granted to Henry Somerset, Earl of Worchester. The earl was not interested in living in it and started selling it piece by piece from the roof down. That is how its decay started in 1536.

The magnificence of its architecture became even more apparent during its slow demise, and it became a symbol of dying beauty. Fans of Jane Austen may recall that it is mentioned in Mansfield Park.

Turner’s image of Gothic arches covered in growing vines, broken stained glass windows, and sharp diagonal shadows on crumbling walls creates a ghostly atmosphere of decaying splendor.

If the Earl of Worchester was not interested in living in Tintern Abbey, the intentions of many other noble recipients of royal gifts of dissolute monasteries were quite different. How else did the family of Downton Abbey’s Lord Grantham end up in Downton Abbey?

The sitter for the famous Da Vinci portrait, Lady with Ermine, is a beautiful and talented lady – Cecilia Galerani. On the portrait she is about sixteen, already a woman, whose life took a few dramatic turns in the hands of her ambitious father. Not of noble birth, he tried to arrange the marriage of his ten-year old daughter into a noble family. What is known next is that the marriage never took place and a few years later she became the mistress of her father’s patron, the Milanese duke Ludovico Sforza, known as Ludovico el Moro. His unattractive appearance and the suspicious death of his nephew under his regency created a monstrous aura around his personality, which is reflected in the recent TV series The Borgias.

In reality he was a wise ruler and a patron of the arts and his court was one of the major cultural centers of the time. His beautiful, well-educated fifteen-year old bride, Beatrice d’Este, became the center of Milan’s numerous festivities and the heart of poetic, philosophical, and artistic circles for the next six years of her married life.

The image presented in The Borgias – an ugly monster sitting in his dark cave-like castle and feeding bones to his caged nephew – does not exactly correspond with the extravagant balls and celebrations the Milanese court was known for. As far as it is known, the largest disappointment Cecilia must have experienced at Sforza’s court was his marriage to the noble Beatrice d’Este in the same year when Cecilia gave him a son. Otherwise, she was well provided for by Ludovico who even arranged a prestigious marriage for her.

Leonardo da Vinci spent many years of his life serving Ludovico Sforza in different capacities, including painting a portrait of his favorite mistress. Cecilia is shown in an elegant turn, as graceful as the charming white ermine she is holding, the symbol of purity and the personal emblem of Ludovico.

The original of this painting is not easy to see as its home is the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, Poland. Fortunately it is among the best-preserved creations of Leonardo.

Leonardo da Vinci was a true Renaissance Man with numerous extraordinary talents and skills. His genius revealed itself in an incredible range of fields. Although we know him as one of the greatest painters in history, he considered himself rather an excellent architect and military engineer who could also paint. His interest in science was such a huge part of his nature that he could not stop himself from experimenting and taking risks with all of his various projects. As a result some of his creations were lost and many require lots of care to survive. “Lady with an Ermine” has survived almost unaltered. His signature techniques and fingerprints, found on the surface, prove that it was created entirely by his hands.

What’s the sound of one hand clapping? When there is no one around you, how do you know if you have talent? Paul Cezanne never thought he was a true artist. He often destroyed his paintings after finishing them, because he didn’t like the result. Cezanne wanted to take part in the French Salon exhibitions, but never got accepted. Paul was so dissatisfied with the results of his work, that he even showed some sympathy with the jury of the Salon:

I understand very well that it could not be accepted, because of my point of departure, which was too far away from the objective to be achieved, namely the reproduction of nature.”

However, as mistrustful as he was in his own talent, he did have the courage to stand with his point of view in concerning how to paint nature. This reproduction of nature took place in two stages in Cezanne’s work. Before he had actually begun painting, he would sit down and just admire the view. He would spend a lot of time just looking at the subject, in order to understand its essence. Then he would realize the structure of the painting based on the forms and colors, which he saw. He always said that a painter should not only reproduce reality, but what he sees. However, the forms must retain a similarity with nature. “The re-forming process which a painter carries out as a result of his own personal way of seeing things gives a new interest to the depiction of nature. As a painter, he is revealing something which no-one has ever seen before and translating it into absolute concepts of painting. That is, into something other than reality.” Since Cezanne, “the absolute concepts of painting” are colors and forms. These are bent together in a spatial relationship. In this way, he sought to create a new harmony, which he called “harmony in parallel with nature”.

Even if he had a clear idea of how to paint, Cezanne still didn’t like the result. He would work on the same painting for long periods of time, sometimes even months. “Nature causes me the greatest of difficulties”, wrote Paul to his friend Emile Zola in 1897. His goal was to give the image permanence. This meant that the subject had to be placed in a balance, which was the result of numerous calculations, reflections and logic. However, the result was sometimes disastrous for Cezanne. It was like he had a picture in his mind but could never put it down on canvas.

As if he didn’t have enough mistrust in his talent, the press started to attack his paintings. An art critic wrote: “There is no outrageous epithet that has not been attached to his name. For my part, I do not know of any painting less laughable than his.” With these words, there is no wonder that Cezanne destroyed his paintings very often and didn’t trust his vision as an artist. However, he had the luck of having good friends who believed in his talent, such as Emile Zola and Camille Pissarro. The last one, older than him by nine years, had become his teacher. Most of the techniques he used later in his life when painting nature, he “borrowed” from Pissarro. “Pissarro was like a father to me… almost like the good God”, said Cezanne. As I heard once, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”. This was the break for Cezanne to begin to paint like a maestro.

The first thing Pissarro did was to encourage him to banish dark colors from his palette. He advised Cezanne to paint only with the primary colors. Then he showed him how to build up a picture of light-dark contrasts and encouraged him to observe nature, transferring onto canvas only what he saw. He shouldn’t interpret or add anything from his own imagination. Another advice Cezanne got from Pissarro was to build objects up by gradation of tonal value, rather than using lines to outline the forms. “Do not work bit by bit,” he said to Cezanne. This meant to apply color everywhere and observing the tonal values closely in relation to the surroundings. From this point on, Paul began to paint with small brush strokes, rather than big ones. He worked at the same time on the sky, the trees, the houses, rather than painting bit by bit. “Do not be afraid of applying strong color; gradually refine your work. Do not follow rules and principles, but paint what you see and feel,” advised Pissarro.

The two friends often chose the same subjects, painting side by side. This was a friendship that lasted a lifetime. Such friendship that one needs in critical moments in their lives, when they are shattered in mind. A friendship that gave Cezanne the courage he needed to stand up for what he believed a painting should look like, without the constraints of the Salon.

The sunflower paintings of Vincent van Gogh could be called “Variations on the yellow theme”. Struck by many dark obsessions caused by depression, yellow was meant to illuminate van Gogh’s days. The psychologists could say that the painter clinched to this color in order to find the light that will draw him back from the darkness in his desperate moments.

The sunflower has a psychological affect that gives an impression of perpetual happiness. Therefore, these paintings seem timeless. Yellow and blue are the colors which, it seems bring the artists childhood and Dutch memories. It is a classic contrast of colors. This contrast gives profound emotions to the art: “The dome of the sky has an extraordinary blue; the color of the sunlight is that of pale sulfur, sweet and enchanting, as the combination between the heavenly blue and the yellow in Vermeer or Delft’s paintings. I fail to resume so beautiful,” writes Vincent to his brother Theo. In another letter, he claims to have found in Provence “a different kind of yellow.” Van Gogh was influenced by the Impressionists with his warm tones and “plain air” paintings.

The sunflowers series has beginnings in the Paris Period, in 1887. The specifics of these paintings is given by the arrangement of the flowers. They are lying on the ground, while the second set executed a year later in Arles shows bouquets of sunflowers in a vase. The predominant color in the arlesian palette acquires a distinctive brightness and freeing itself from the subject. In the artist’s mind, both sets were linked by the name of his friend Paul Gauguin, who acquired two of the Paris versions. Paul Gauguin, who was Vincent’s guest for two months in 1888, talks about the love Van Gogh had for yellow, in the “Essay about free art,” published in 1894: “The yellow-chrome Sun burst forth from the canvas, flooding houses and flowers. Oh yes, the good Vincent, that Dutch painter, a fondness for yellow; the sun baths bathed his soul. He was a man who feared darkness. He needed heat.” Gauguin also liked Vincent’s sunflower subjects, van Gogh recalls, and remembers that, in a picture, now stored in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, he makes the portrait of his friend trying to paint the yellow corollas.

On the other hand, symbolism was quite a fashion in the young generation of artists in those days. Therefore, Vincent tried to portray the essence of the chosen object and in so, avoiding mere photographic imitation. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings capture the pastoral application of color and the confused arrangement of outstretched leaves. The light-blue background in some pictures comes to emphasize the flowers. Two clearly-marked styles are seen in these paintings: a continuous composition of wavy curves and complicated short and sharp dashes. The Sunflowers series made in Arles are painted on size 30 canvas. The artist made the paintings between August 1888 and January 1889. The paintings show sunflowers in all stages of life, from full bloom to withering. Some of the versions are no longer in their original state, for example, the Tokyo version. The paining was enlarged on all sides with strips of canvas, which were added at a later time. It is said the changes were made by the first owner, Emile Schuffenecker.

“Van Gogh’s Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers” held the record for the most expensive painting in art history in 1987. On March 31, the Japanese magnate Yasuo Goto paid for the painting $39,921,750 at Christie’s London auction. The record was broken a few months later by Alan Bond, who bought Van Gogh’s “Irises”, for $53.9 million.

Amedo Modigliani’s sex-appeal attracted women from the first moment he began to paint. The whole artistic process was impregnated with seduction. Beautiful and sensual, gentle and gallant, these are the characterizations of the women who fell in love with the lover, Modigliani.

When Modigliani arrived at Paris for the first time, he was a shy, young student. After only two years of living in the artistic capital of France, the boy turned into a man, sort of a suburb Prince. The “distinction” brought him numerous “love conquests.” He attracted women with a remarkable ease. Many of these ladies became famous, by immortalizing them on canvas. He sought for the features that defined those women, and through a single brush stroke he made their portraits, that through their simplicity, they became unique. Modi treated his lovers with a sense of dignity, even at extreme poverty and deteriorating health.

Modigliani’s life is punctuated by many stories, about his adventures escapades with women. Gilberte, Maud, Elvire, Margherita, Marie, Lucienne and Gaby are names who appear frequently in the Biographical texts about the artist. Furthermore, even Modi keeps them alive by immortalizing them on canvas, by dedicating them portraits and nudes.

Modi was adored by all the women legend has it, even by the house mistresses, who protected him. Among these is the famous Rosalie, the patron of Montparnasse Chez Rosalie. She tells the story:

“Poor Amedeo! Here, he was at home. When he was asleep under a tree or in a rut, they would bring him to me. Then they put him on a mattress in the back of the house, and he sit there until he woke up of drunkenness. And, God, how beautiful he was! All the women chased around after him!”

However, only the names of a few remained linked to the legend of the painter. Among these was Elvira, who was called Quique, the daughter of a prostitute from Marseille and an unknown father. She met Modi in a cafe in Montmartre. Amedeo immediately fell in love with her, saying that she was “made for love.” Between them grew a strong sexual and free love, such as in most of Modi’s relationships. Legend has it that one day the two were caught dancing naked in the garden of Amedeo’s workshop.

Modi’s heart was for a time dedicated to the eccentric English artist Nina Hamnett, who the painter met in 1914. The two had a romantic relationship kept away from his friend’s eyes, just like the story with Zabrowsky’s friend, Lunia Czechowska.

Another love story, however, tragic, is with the French singer, Simone Thiroux. She excessively protected Modi, had a total love, full of adoration. This suffocated Amedeo so much that became annoying for him. Simone gave Amedeo a son, but Modi did not want to recognize him. In desperation, Thiroux begged for his love in a farewell letter. Simone dies of tuberculosis, and the unrecognized child, Serge Gerard, will be given up for adoption.

So far, none of the women remained in Modi’s heart. The only lovers who have become his muses and to whom he dedicated countless portraits were English woman Beatrice Hastings, a writer with whom he spent two years, and the shy Jeanne Hebuterne. The rendezvous with Beatrice is confrontational, between two strong personalities, odd and difficult. The portraits in which we recognize her as a model are not sensual, tender or full of love, but rather harsh, with a slight comic tint. In one of the paintings with Beatrice, Modi makes refers to the character of Madame Pompadour, the famous mistress of Louis XV.

In the years, he spent with Beatrice, Amedeo had developed his techniques in painting portraits. Through several simplifications and accents, he could compose a simple, personal and unique work of art. The bodies and the faces become elongated features, elegant. The eyes are represented only by some black holes, affording them a timeless status. His portraits are presented in a frontal manner with an anonymous setting and remind us of the Byzantine icons.

If the relationship with Beatrice was tumultuous, inflammatory, his last and greatest love, Jeanne Hebuterne had provided him stability and tenderness. To her he dedicated most of his portraits, but never nudes.

It was with a historical painting that Edgar Degas made his Salon debut in 1865, with “The Suffering of the City of New Orleans.” The art work symbolized the suffering of the American city, which was occupied by Union troops in 1862 during the Civil War. However, the painting had not garnered any attention. This happened because, in the same exhibit, Manet’s “Olimpia” had monopolized the critics’s conversation. “The suffering of the City of New Orleans” turned out to be also his last historical work of art.

Degas’s point of view, his approach in making historical events was very theatrical. The history of the events was more as a spectacle than presenting what had really happened. However, in the mid-19th century interest in historical artworks began to diminish noticeably, because private collectors who commissioned paintings had changed their preferences.

Before giving up this art genre, Degas painted a big number of historical events between 1855 to 1865, some of them in large-format. His approach came from the painters who caught his attention, such as Dominique Ingres, Eugene Delacroix and Puvis de Chavannes. Many of his projects never left the planning stage. The most important work of this period in Degas’s life wasn’t “The Suffering of the City of New Orleans,” but rather the “Spartan Girls Challenging Boys,” painted in 1860. The artist made sixteen drawings and two oil sketches representing this historical event, before settling to one approach. Furthermore, the historical paintings betray the doubts of the artist in concerning the conflict between genre requirements and his interests. This is why Degas exhibited the painting as late as the fifth Impressionist show in 1887, and kept it in his studio throughout his life.

After passing through his historical period, Degas started to make portraits and eventually found his own unique style, which he is so famous for today, of painting dance and movement in the Impressionist style.

The name Picasso was brought to life between 1897 and 1899. This is the period when Pablo Ruiz decided to change his name. The young painter ceased to sign his paintings with the name of his father and chose to finally adopt his mother’s name. Thus, he opted not to use any of his fourteen names: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz.

The decision to use the Picasso name was thought over a long period of time. He experimented with variations of his maternal family name, by signing his drawings with “Picaz”, “Picasa”, sometimes accompanied by the undeniable nickname “Io”. The painter claimed that his father’s name was too common in Spain, and the desire of changing it came through the impulse that the exotic sounds of his mother’s name gave to him, marked by doubling the letter S. “Even the names Matisse, Poussin and Rousseau have the letter S doubled “, Picasso confessed to his photographer Brassai.

There are other speculations, as to what motivated Picasso to adopt his mother’s surname: It was said that Pablo changed his father name out of superstition. His father, also a painter, had not been successful and had a mediocre career. Thus, the young painter wanted to drive away this bad luck, once he became aware of his unmatched talent.

Whatever the reason for his choice, the name Picasso eventually became one of the most dominant in the art world, and in particular, is attributed to Cubism. The name’s destiny was to become the most important brand for twentieth-century art.

I once knew a man who loved nature. When he was young, he used to climb mountains. Alpinism was his passion. The top of the world was the place where he could find peace, where it was quiet, away from the annoying sounds of the city. As he grew older, he got married and had children. Time passed before him and soon he felt the desire to be in the middle of the nature once more. He didn’t have time or money to climb mountains anymore. So in the middle of the city, in the little garden in front of his flat he set a tent.

Some people feel the nature so ardent in their soul that they transform the environment around them, so they could feel peace once again. Claude Monet painted nature, but at the end of his life he wanted to be inserted in it as in a dream. He brought nature to his home, by building a paradise garden at Giverny. Monet builds, this way, a live canvas made by the painter’s artistic fantasy. He managed to perfectly harmonize with his painting a real and physically place, developing the naturally topic drawn before actually settling it on canvas. This operation is directed towards the continuous search of merger with the beauty and untouched nature.

At the beginning of May 1883, Monet and his family rented a house situated near the road between the towns of Vernon and Gasny. He transformed the barn into a painting studio. The beautiful landscape gave Monet suitable motifs for his paintings. During the 1890s, Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio. A spacious building well lit with skylights. At the end of 1890 he could buy this property, when his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel had been increasing success in selling his paintings. Then in 1893 he bought a plot on the South border of the property, where, after getting the authorization, he created the famous water garden with the floating water lilies, irises, willow trees and carob tree planted around. After the garden had been accomplished, it was extended in 1901. Monet had proven a tremendous care for the flower beds and hedges, and the choice of plant species: anemones, irises, poppies and climber roses. Monet was able, by methods he only knew, to grow in the garden many exotic plants from Mexico or China. He wrote daily instructions to his gardener, precise designs and layouts for plantings, and invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books.

His live opera had become the meeting point for the artist’s friends, many of his admirers and nature passionate. With time the garden was transformed into a chromatic combination scattered on several paintings: Artist’s Garden at Giverny, Garden Path at Giverny, The Japanese Bridge, Blutentore in Giverny and the famous series of the Water Lilies.

Thus, the real and final meaning of “en plain air” painting finds full realization in the choice of doing a work, transformed into a harmonious and pictorially place. Therefore, his vision of nature was converted into reality in order to be transferred on canvas.

The art critic Arsene Alexandre wrote in “Le Figaro” newspaper that the artist included in the garden “all the colors of a palette and the tones of a fanfare.” The Giverny place is a “new and unusual show, unexpected as all major surprises.” Marcel Proust described the garden as “a really artistic implementation, more than a model for works, a painted already completed, which glows in the eyes of a great painter.”

Do not let thoughts to intervene in the way of creation, do not think, but simply spread on the canvas as you feel, as if your hand would hold the brush like a robot controlled from another dimension. As if the mind is turned off, you are carried away through the world of colors, and the end is seen as waking up to reality.

When you awake, you then look at your canvas and see the creation of a man who was not present, and all that is left are his feeling’s on canvas. This is a characterization of what Henri Matisse accomplished; the artist himself describes his manner of painting as, “you have to offer yourself up in all purity and innocence, almost cleared of memory, like a communicant going to communion.”

If Frida Kahlo restored feelings of anger, grief and despair on canvas, Matisse tried to create a world setting in which sufferers can be relieved from their pain, and how else than making paintings from his soul: “I am after an art of equilibrium and purity, an art that neither unsettles nor confuses. I would like people who are weary, stressed and broken to find peace and tranquility as they look at my pictures,” said Matisse in his memoirs.

His paintings are not complicated. They do not require any special knowledge of art in order to be understood. This was also the artist’s desire. He wanted to empathize with sufferers by showing them a bohemian world, free from the daily hardships, where they can find refuge. And this he certainly succeeds by minimizing the human figure.

It is all summarized in the contour of the character, which is surrounded by bright colors, pleasing to the eye. These colors give you a sense of freedom. Such an example is the famous painting “La Dance,” made in 1909, that stands now on the Museum of Modern Art’s wall, in New York. The choice of colors has its forerunner in Persian ceramics and miniatures which, until the 13th century, often used pure reds, greens and blues in creating ornamental surfaces. In fact, the oriental style will be present in his paintings throughout his life. However, the explosion of color is what highlightened Matisse as an artist. His trademark is the combination of bright colors next to the strong black outline of the characters.

Matisse clearly explains why he chose to represent such characters: “My models are human figures, not simply extras in some interior. They are the major subject of my work. Their forms may not be perfect, but they are always expressive.” Matisse explains how the simple contour of the bodies awakened in him an emotional interest. Therefore, they do not need to be very visible. The people are often seen in lines or particular values distributed on the entire canvas.

This presentation becomes a sort of orchestral or architectonic extension of the theme in the artist’s eyes. The minimalism is taken to extremes to preserve feelings, it is Matisse’s explanation: “What really concerns me above all else, is expression.” He pursuits for the expression not to be a passion we see on a face, but to be located in the entire painting. The position of the characters, the spaces that he left empty, the proportions, they all made a whole, and if you extract one of them, the painting is left without value.

The still-life is a constant part of Matisse’s art. In addition to human figures, still-life completes the big picture that the artist makes through his paintings in search of the peaceful world that alleviates the suffering. The artist explains that nature is part of human, and Man is part of Nature, and both are linked to the entire Universe.

“Still Life with Oranges” is one of Matisse’s famous paintings. Picasso himself bought it in 1944 out of a private collection. Oranges are often to be found in Matisse’s work. Therefore, Guillaume Apollinaire remarked: “If Matisse’s work can be compared to anything, then to an orange. Like the orange, Henri Matisse’s paintings are the fruit of dazzling light.” However, the artist didn’t copy the objects, because he considered that this type of painting is not art. “What counts is to express the emotion they call forth in you, the feeling they awaken, the relation they established between the objects…”

This is the proof that Matisse was looking for feelings even in still art, in order to give peace to the viewer.

Thursday, December 8th, marks the 125th anniversary of Diego Rivera’s birth, Google’s homepage “Doodle” celebrates the artist legacy with a mural rich not only in color, but also in biographical detail.

On the bottom corner of the Doodle is the image of Frida Kahlo who had her own Doodle in June of 2010.

Here is Google’s video detailing some of the biographical information depicted in the Doodle:

This is not the first time that Google celebrates a famous artist birthday. On the contrary, they have done a great job covering birthdays of great artists paying homage to the masters and their creativity. Here is a list of famous artist tribute Google Doodles: