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January 21, 2015, 1:28 am

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Gandalf's Gallery was founded as a non-profit making, educational website dedicated to the exhibition of art. The gallery claims no copyright over the art exhibited. Visitors may, therefore, download images for purely non-commercial purposes. If you feel that your copyright has been infringed, please contact the gallery immediately.

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Louis Grimshaw - Mansion House, London [1894]

January 22, 2015, 3:13 am

≫ Next: Joseph Mallord William Turner - Margate, from the Sea [c.1835-40]

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Louis Grimshaw - Mansion House, London [1894]

The most successful of his father’s followers, Louis H. Grimshaw was taught by John Atkinson and inherited his artistic talent. Continuing the tradition of moonlit cityscapes, this painting fondly recalls the lone, silhouetted pedestrians, the wet streets and the warm glow of shop windows characteristic of John Atkinson while demonstrating the technical mastery of his son. In 1906 Louis gave up painting to pursue a career as a cartographer at the Manchester Guardian.

Mansion House was designed in the Palladian style by the architect and Clerk of the City's Work, George Dance the Elder and built between 1739 and 1752 as a residence for the Lord Mayors of London. The magnificent building is faced with a grand temple portico boasting six Corinthian columns and supports a pediment with a sculpture of the City of London crushing her enemies by Sir Robert Taylor.

[Richard Green Fine Paintings, London - Oil on panel, 29.5 x 44.4 cm]

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Joseph Mallord William Turner - Margate, from the Sea [c.1835-40]

January 22, 2015, 3:15 am

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Joseph Mallord William Turner - Margate, from the Sea [c.1835-40]

The title is not Turner's own, but Turner knew the coast around Margate in Kent well and often painted it. In his views of Margate, its white cliffs are often prominent, and the suggestion of distant white cliffs here makes the identification of the scene as Margate likely, though not certain. Turner's main purpose was not to depict a specific place but to explore the nature of the sea under a changing sky. The painting is unfinished.

[National Gallery, London - Oil on canvas, 91.2 x 122.2 cm]

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Article 0

January 22, 2015, 3:15 am

≫ Next: Rembrandt - Mennonite Preacher Cornelis Anslo in Conversation with His Wife, Aaitje [1641]

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Rembrandt - Mennonite Preacher Cornelis Anslo in Conversation with His Wife, Aaitje [1641]

January 23, 2015, 1:43 am

≫ Next: Claude Monet - Meadows at Giverny [1888]

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Rembrandt - Mennonite Preacher Cornelis Anslo in Conversation with His Wife, Aaitje [1641]

Although there is no documentary evidence, there is reason to connect Rembrandt's tender conception of Christ during the first years of his mature period with the teachings of the Mennonite sect. According to Baldinucci, one of the artist's seventeenth-century biographers, Rembrandt was a Mennonite, and we have seen that he was in contact with Cornelis Anslo, a famous Mennonite preacher of Amsterdam.

In 1641 Rembrandt made an etching of Anslo, and in the same year he made the impressive double portrait of the preacher and his wife. In Rembrandt's day the Mennonite sect was a liberal one which discarded the sacerdotal idea, accepted no authority outside the Bible, limited baptism to believers, and held to freedom of conscience. They emphasised precepts which support the sanctity of human life and man's word and, following the Sermon on the Mount, they opposed war, military service, slavery, and such common practices as insurance and interest on loans. Compared with the severe Calvinists, the Mennonites represented a milder form of Christianity in which, according to the literal sense of the Sermon on the Mount, the leading principle was 'Love thy neighbour.’

[Gemäldegalerie, Berlin - Oil on canvas, 176 x 210 cm]

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Claude Monet - Meadows at Giverny [1888]

January 23, 2015, 1:45 am

≫ Next: John William Waterhouse - Miranda and the Tempest [1916]

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Claude Monet - Meadows at Giverny [1888]

Monet first moved to Giverny in 1883, and was to spent the whole of the second of his life in this part of central France. The landscape motifs of this area were to come up time and time again in his works. In the summer of 1888, when this painting was produced, he repeatedly turned to the meadows and plains to the south of Giverny, painting them under different weather conditions, with different lighting effects.

In this painting the artist skilfully conveys a fleeting moment in nature, a state of transition, when, just starting to pierce through the rain and the gusting wind which shakes the very crowns of the trees, comes the sun. In the clouds we see touches of pink appearing and the soaked meadows reflect warm patches of sunny light. The small, fragmentary brushstrokes, pressed close one to the other, create a solid yet vibrating paint surface and seem to reflect the very finest nuances of colouring.

[Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg - Oil on canvas, 92.5 x 81.5 cm]

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John William Waterhouse - Miranda and the Tempest [1916]

January 24, 2015, 3:07 am

≫ Next: Leo Whelan - The Mirror [1912]

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John William Waterhouse - Miranda and the Tempest [1916]

[Oil on canvas, 100,5 x 137 cm]

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Leo Whelan - The Mirror [1912]

January 24, 2015, 3:08 am

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This self-portrait, entitled The Mirror was shown at the RHA in Dublin in 1912. It shows the young smartly dressed Whelan, leg firmly planted on the easel, palette and brush in hand studying his reflection in a large mirror. The composition with the cascading curtain on the left and the use of the mirror device nods to his academic training at the Metropolitan, where, under Sir William Orpen, he was considered 'a promising youth.’ Holding the velvety fabric in place in the left foreground is a maquette depicting an Irish peasant group digging for potatoes (possibly referencing the Famine). A rare subject for sculptural treatment for this period; its inclusion suggests Whelan's interest in Irish rural social subjects, the influence of French social realists like Millet and their unromanticised, realist approach to depicting genre scenes.

[Whyte’s, Dublin - Oil on canvas, 84 x 66 cm]

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January 24, 2015, 3:09 am

≫ Next: Adrien Dauzats - Mosque of Al Azhar in Cairo [1831]

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Adrien Dauzats - Mosque of Al Azhar in Cairo [1831]

January 26, 2015, 3:21 am

≫ Next: Jean-Léon Gérôme - Le Muezzin [1865]

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Adrien Dauzats - Mosque of Al Azhar in Cairo [1831]

Adrien Dauzats (Bordeaux, 1804 - Paris, 1868) was a French landscape and genre painter. He became a pupil of Gue, and afterwards travelled in France, Spain, Egypt, and Palestine.

[Louvre Museum, Paris - Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm]

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Jean-Léon Gérôme - Le Muezzin [1865]

January 26, 2015, 3:24 am

≫ Next: Edmund Blair Leighton - New Governess [1894]

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This evocative painting captures the moment on a hot afternoon as a muezzin begins his call to prayer atop a minaret, and Cairo falls silent below him. With great mastery, Gérôme evokes the utter stillness both of the city and of the desert air, the heat made almost palpable to the viewer through the contrast between the shade cast by the minaret and the brilliant, hot light beyond. It is likely that the high dome in the background is the mosque of Sultan Hassan. A larger version of the painting, almost identical in composition, is in the Joselyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska.

A muezzin is a chosen person at the mosque who leads the call (adhan) to Friday service and the five daily prayers (salat) from one of the mosque's minarets. Though chosen to serve for his good character, voice and skills, he is not considered a cleric, but rather comparable to a Christian sexton. When calling to prayer, the muezzin faces the Qiblah (direction of the Ka'bah in Mecca) while he cries out the adhan. The institution of muezzin has existed since the time of Muhammad. The first muezzin was Bilal ibn Ribah, who walked the streets to call the believers to come to prayer. After minarets became customary, the office of muezzin in cities was sometimes given to a blind person, who could not look down into the inner courtyards of the citizens' houses and thereby violate their privacy.

[Sold for £421,250 at Sotheby’s, London - Oil on canvas, 40.5 x 29.5 cm]

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Edmund Blair Leighton - New Governess [1894]

January 27, 2015, 2:47 am

≫ Next: Adolf Senff - Night with Her Children [1822]

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Edmund Blair Leighton - New Governess [1894]

[Private Collection - Oil on canvas]

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Adolf Senff - Night with Her Children [1822]

January 27, 2015, 2:49 am

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Adolf Senff - Night with Her Children [1822]

Adolf Senff (Halle, March 17, 1785 - Ostrava, March 21, 1863) was a German painter.

[Alte und Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin - Oil on canvas, 75.7 x 75.8 cm]

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Article 0

January 27, 2015, 2:50 am

≫ Next: Paul Signac - Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles [1905-06]

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Paul Signac - Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles [1905-06]

January 28, 2015, 7:05 am

≫ Next: Paul Gauguin - Old Man with a Stick [1888]

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Paul Signac - Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles [1905-06]

Signac went even farther than Seurat in his methodical studies of the division of light into its components of pure colour, and he arranged rectangular brushstrokes like tesserae in a mosaic. In 1901 Signac had painted a smaller and less vibrant version of this view of the Marseilles, crowned by the church of Notre Dame de la Garde. The luminosity and brilliant colour of the present picture are dependent on his continued use of unmixed pigments, but also on his contact with the young Fauve painters Henri-Edmond Cross and Matisse and Saint-Tropez in summer 1904.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 88.9 x 116.2 cm]

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Paul Gauguin - Old Man with a Stick [1888]

January 28, 2015, 7:07 am

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Paul Gauguin - Old Man with a Stick [1888]

This portrait of an old man sitting down was painted during Gauguin’s short stay in Arles. From October 23 to December 26, 1888 the painter was based in a workshop in the south of France, where he had been invited by Van Gogh. The two artists lived and worked very intensively there.

[Musee des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris - Oil on canvas, 70 x 45 cm]

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