The Embarkation for Cythera ("L'Embarquement pour Cythère") is a painting by the French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. It is also known as "Voyage to Cythera" and "Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera". Watteau submitted this work to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture as his reception piece in 1717.[1] The painting is now in the Louvre inParis. A second version of the work, sometimes called Pilgrimage to Cythera to distinguish it, was painted by Watteau about 1718 or 1719[2] and is in the Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin.

What is the message of this painting?

Think especially about how these techniques contribute to that message:

Line: a path traced by a moving point, its primary function is to record borders and to convey direction and motion

Flat, horizontal lines seem placid Vertical lines may have an assertive quality as they defy gravity

Diagonal lines almost always imply action (runners, skiers, for ex.); the lines seem unstable

The Madonna with the Christ Child and Saint John the Baptist is a 1506 painting by Raphael, now held in theKunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is also known as Madonna del prato (Madonna of the Meadow) or Madonna del Belvedere (after its long residence in the imperial collection in the Vienna Belvedere).

What is the message of this text?

How do the following stylistic choices contribute to that message?

Shape is a two-dimensional form; it occupies an area with identifiable boundaries, can be created by a line (square outlined in pencil on white paper), shirt in texture (a square of unmown lawn in the middle of a mown lawn) or shift in color (blue polka dots on a red shirt

Mass is a three-dimensional form that occupies a volume of space—a mass of clay, mass of a mountain, masses of a work of architecture. We can look at mass on paper but we can’t fully understand it unless we walk around it.

Shapes and masses can be divided into two broad categories: geometric shapes approximate the shapes of geometry (squares, triangles, circles, etc.) and organic shapes evoke the forms of nature. We also talk about positive and negative shapes: what we see as figures in a painting are positive shapes; the shapes of the background are negative shapes.

We also talk about implied shapes which we often see in the way figures are grouped in a painting. Like implied lines help direct our eyes, implied shapes create a sense of order, so we see it as a unified and harmonious whole.

The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, sometimes called The Burlington House Cartoon, is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The drawing is in charcoal and black and white chalk, on eight sheets of paper glued together. Because of its large size and format the drawing is presumed to be a cartoon for a painting. No painting by Leonardo exists that is based directly on this cartoon.

What is going on in this painting?

Consider these stylistic elements:

Light and Value:

We look at light, literally, in a building—that is, where it comes in a window, or skylight. In art it’s easiest to understand in black and white photography, where we can talk about the way light models—or gives figures a three dimensional appearance. We see color then just as value, the continuum of lightest to darkest. Before photography artists used chiaroscuro, Italian for light/dark. The artists employed values—lights and darks—to record contrasts of shadows and light, which then model mass for our eyes.

Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary

Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1841-1919

1878

Oil on canvas; 174 x 101.5 cm

This formal portrait of the talented actress Jeanne Samary from the Comedie Francaise was painted for the Paris Salon of 1879. Jeanne looks natural and graceful; the artist has captured a transient state, nuances of sensation and mood manifested in a light movement, an incomplete gesture, a shadow of a smile, a vivid glance. ‘Renoir created the image of the Parisienne,' commented Renoir's friend, the painter Cezanne.

What was the artist trying to portray?

Color:

Color is dependent on light; without light there is no color. We trace our present-day color theory back to Sir Isaac Newton, who observed that a ray of sunshine broke up or refracted into different colors. If we take the colors separated out by Newton’s prism—red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet and the transitional red-violet and arrange the colors in a circle, we have a color wheel:

Primary colors: red, yellow, blue; cannot be made by any mixture of other colors

Secondary colors: orange, green and violet: each is made by combining two primary colors

Tertiary colors: product of primary color and adjacent secondary color

Complementary colors: those directly opposite each other on the color wheel; assumed to be as different as possible from one another

Color properties:

Hue: Name of color

Value: relative light or darkness

Tint: a color lighter than a color’s natural value(pink is a tint of red)

Shade: a color darker than the hue’s normal value (maroon is a shade of red)

Intensity: relative purity of a color

Color Harmonies:

Sometimes called a color scheme, a color harmony is the selective use of two or more colors in a single composition.

Monochromatic harmonies: variations on the same hue

Complementary harmonies: involve colors directly opposite one another on the color wheel (red and green, violet and yellow, blue and orange). They set up tensions, dynamic bond of opposites.

Analogous harmonies: combine colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel (red, red orange, orange). Look at Renoir’s  Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary from 1878. The painting is composed almost entirely in tints and shades of yellow-orange through red, hues that can all be found on the upper-left third of the color wheel.

In the late 19th century, the Impressionists defied academic tradition in French art with their emphasis on modern subjects, sketchlike technique, and practice of painting in the open air with pure, high-keyed color. In the wake of the Impressionist revolution, a new generation of artists pushed the basic pictorial components of color, line, and composition into new psychological

and formal territories, influencing many abstract artists of the early 20th century. Thanks to such pioneering donors as Mrs. Potter Palmer and Frederic Clay Bartlett, the Art Institute of Chicago houses one of the largest and most significant collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in the world.

What is the message of this piece?

Consider:Color:

Color is dependent on light; without light there is no color. We trace our present-day color theory back to Sir Isaac Newton, who observed that a ray of sunshine broke up or refracted into different colors. If we take the colors separated out by Newton’s prism—red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet and the transitional red-violet and arrange the colors in a circle, we have a color wheel:

Primary colors: red, yellow, blue; cannot be made by any mixture of other colors

Secondary colors: orange, green and violet: each is made by combining two primary colors

Tertiary colors: product of primary color and adjacent secondary color

Complementary colors: those directly opposite each other on the color wheel; assumed to be as different as possible from one another

Color properties:

Hue: Name of colorValue: relative light or darknessTint: a color lighter than a color’s natural value(pink is a tint of red)Shade: a color darker than the hue’s normal value (maroon is a shade of red)Intensity: relative purity of a color

Color Harmonies:

Sometimes called a color scheme, a color harmony is the selective use of two or more colors in a single composition.

Monochromatic harmonies: variations on the same hue

Complementary harmonies: involve colors directly opposite one another on the color wheel (red and green, violet and yellow, blue and orange). They set up tensions, dynamic bond of opposites.

The French painter Georges Seurat was fascinated by optical color mixture and developed a style called pointillism. He laid down his paints by placing many thousands of tiny dots—or points—of pure color next to each other. From a few inches away a Seurat painting looks like a jumble of color dots, but as the viewer moves back, the dots merge to from a texture of subtly varied tones. Look at his painting A Sunday on the Grand Jatte.

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Emotional Effects of Color

Look at James Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold (Old Battersea Bridge) from the early 1870s.

Except for the distant spangle of fireworks and the reflection of a few lights in the water, the painting is entirely monochromatic. Blue contributes significantly to the subdued emotional mood of the painting, although it has help from the strong, stable vertical lines of the pier, the reassuring horizontals of the bridge and its lone boatman silhouetted on the prow of his ship.

Title Regatta at Cowes

Artist Raoul Dufy (1877-1953)

Year 1934

Try Talking with Text with this Painting

Texture and Pattern

Texture refers to surface quality—a perception of smooth or rough, flat or bumpy, fine or coarse. It makes us want to touch things.

Actual texture is literally tactile—we experience it in sculpture or architecture.

Visual texture is less literal; it is texture conveyed by markings our eyes associate with texture; in Raoul Dufy’s Regatta at Cowes (1934) the brushstrokes and closely placed forms create “rough patches” that you wouldn’t feel if you touched the painting. They convey an idea of roughness or choppiness.

Pattern

Pattern is any decorative motif or design. Patterns can create visual texture, but sometimes they have the effect of flattening our perception of mass and space. The boats in the Dufy painting are definitely a motif, but they repeat with so many variations in

size and shape that we don’t see them as a pattern. Look at the ducks and flowers spread over the water surface in this painting by Manley Ragamala, c. 1610). Because their size is consistent they don’t recede in space; the pavilion looks as if it were set in

front of a backdrop of fabric.

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The Last Supper (Italian: Il Cenacolo or L'Ultima Cena) is a late 15th-century mural painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. It is one of the world's most famous paintings, and one of the most studied, scrutinized, and satirized. [1]

Consider these techniques when analyzing “The Last Supper”

SpaceThe space in and around a work of art is a dynamic visual element that interacts with the lines and shapes and colors and textures of a work to give them definition. Consider it this way: how could there be a line if there were not space on either side to mark its edges? How could there be a shape without the space around it to set it off?

We are pretty clear about three-dimensional space when we look at a sculpture or a building. The artworks take their character from the ways in which they carve out volumes of space within and around them. Painting is a two-dimensional art form; the actual space is the flat surface of the work, which we see all at once. But on this literal surface, which is called the picture plane, other quantities and dimensions of space can be implied.We perceive depth from several visual cues:

Overlap: we know that when two figures overlap, the one we perceive as complete is in front of the one we perceive as partial.

Position: we look down to see objects closer to us and up to see objects that are further away.

Linear Perspective: based on systematic application of two observations:

Forms seem to diminish is size as they recede from us

Parallel lines receding into the distance seem to converge, until they meet at a point on the horizon line where they disappear. This point is known as the vanishing point.

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Foreshortening: the logic of perspective must apply to every form that recedes into the distance, including objects and humans and animal forms.

Look at Hans Baldung Grien’s woodcut The Groom and the Witch (1540) above. Imagine if the two forms were parallel to the picture frame; they would both be considerably larger.

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak is an 1863 landscape oil painting by the German-American painter Albert Bierstadt. It is based on sketches made during Bierstadt's travels with Frederick W. Lander's Honey Road Survey Party in 1859. The painting shows Lander's Peak in the Wyoming Range of

the Rocky Mountains, with an encampment of Native Americans in the foreground. It has been compared to, and exhibited with, The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church. Lander's Peakimmediately became a critical and popular success and sold in 1865 for $25,000.

Consider this when analyzing the painting:

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak is an 1863 landscape oil painting by the German-American painter Albert Bierstadt. It is based on sketches made during Bierstadt's travels with Frederick W. Lander's Honey Road Survey Party in 1859. The painting shows Lander's Peak in the Wyoming Range of

the Rocky Mountains, with an encampment of Native Americans in the foreground. It has been compared to, and exhibited with, The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church. Lander's Peakimmediately became a critical and popular success and sold in 1865 for $25,000.