Through the European colour palette

Stanislas Lépine (1835-1892) had in the artist Corot an important influence in his artistic formation, whom he met in Normandy in 1859, becoming his student the following year. An artist close to the Impressionists, Lépine was essentially a painter from Paris and the Seine River. He exhibited in the Salon of 1859 and at the beginning of his career benefited from the support of the collector Hazard and his friend Count Doria. His way of working, particularly the use of light, is very consistent throughout the active journey, which makes it difficult to date his works.

He was a respected artist among his peers and participated with three paintings in the first exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874. The influence of Johann’s painter Barthold Jongkind also manifests very strong, especially in the choice of themes and luminosity.

With a lighter palette than the painters of the Barbizon School, this author is considered, like Boudin and Jongkind, as one of the pioneers of the Impressionist universe, linking the poetic realism of Corot with Monet's impressionism.

Eugène Louis Boudin (1824 -1898) was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores.

Around 1865, he met the still young Claude Monet, maintaining this connection throughout his life, in spite of Boudin belonged to a previous generation, he invited him to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 at Nadar's house, for all that Boudin had taught him in observing the changes of light in nature.

His works were raging in the Salon, in Paris; Baudelaire, the first time he saw his works in 1895, devoted a laudatory page to the magazine of the annual exhibition, and Corot dubbed him "master of the skies".

This painting presents a quick brushstroke, the impressionist sensibility, the taste for the unfinished and the valorization of the plasticity are present in this beach of Honfleur.

Jan Brueghel the Elder, son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, is one of the personalities of greater originality in the Flemish artistic scene. Within the landscape, Brueghel renews the traditional motifs and colors to lean towards a genre painting with an admirable luminosity that transfigures them in an extraordinary way.

The Allegories of the four elements were already part of the Flemish pictorial practice, popularized at the end of the 16th century through series of prints circulating throughout Europe.

Jan Brueghel transformed the symbolic vocabulary of these scenes into delightfully luxuriant and abundant landscapes, describing their elements as if it were a curiosity cabinet. Brueghel represented the type of the "pictor doctus", the erudite painter whose works are informed by the religious motifs and aspirations of the Catholic Counter-Reformation as well as the scientific revolution with its interest in accurate description and classification.

The painting from the collection of the Anastácio Gonçalves House-Museum presents to the center of the composition, in the middle of a landscape that exhibits an ultra-imaginary flora impossible in Flemish territory, four allegorical figures that bear the symbols of the Four Elements of Nature: the vessel that spills water; the armillary sphere (air); the torch (fire) and the cornucopia from which the fruits of the earth sprout.

Birds and birds can be seen in the air and in the treetops, and once again the exotic element is described in the meticulous elaboration of parrots, animals brought from Brazil by the Portuguese, who exhibit colorful plumages.

In the water co-inhabit real fauna and flora along with aquatic allegories.

To the left, one observes an arm of water where is represented, in background, with miniatures characteristics, a Court of Neptune, very common to these subjects of the Four Elements, as symbolic figure of the Water.

Fish, mollusks, crustaceans and seabirds are also shown in detail alongside their element.

In the foreground, on the ground, are represented animals, some exotic like the monkey, and many fruits, flowers and vegetables meticulously described, with the scientific rigor own of a manual of natural history.
The abondance of the earth is reinforced by the pair of hares.

Gustave Courbet (1819 -1877) expresses himself through the realism of social and political commitment, but also through a more "naturalistic" painting by direct observation of nature. His main concern was to represent the truth of Nature.

In 1844, he exhibited for the first time in the Paris Salon a series of self-portraits. In 1855, the works presented by the painter for the Universal Exhibition of Paris, were mostly rejected. In order to present his paintings, Courbet organized his own exhibition and distributed the Manifesto of realism.

In 2009, this painting was subject of laboratory research, in an approach to the study of materials and techniques, with the performance of exams such as digital radiography, IV photography, UV light photography and macro photography. These analyzes allowed to realize that this piece had already been intervened, suffering a lining. The work also underwent repainting operations, mainly at the ends of the canvas.

Through the examinations carried out it was possible to know that the painting was executed in oil and that the pigments used are mostly ocher. Other pigments have also been used, such as Prussian blue and chrome green (the latter a pigment of the new pallets due to advances in science and discovery of new minerals). Layers of paint with colors that are not visible to the surface of the chromatic layer were also found. These layers are closer to the canvas, which suggests the existence of an earlier painting under it and that the author could have reused it for a new work, which was frequent in Courbet.

The oil called Closed forest, signed by the artist, presents a reduced color palette but characteristic of a naturalistic painting, composed of a range of ocher pigments and various shades of green. This piece, also gets expression by the type of stroke that gives it enough texture to the surface. The subject of the painting covers a naturalistic view, probably of a landscape of the forest of Fontainebleau, given the similarities with the landscape presented by the photograph of Eugène Cuvelier (1837-1900), taken in 1860, whose work inspired several paintings of Courbet.

Jacob Jordaens (Antwerp, 1593 - Rome, 1678) was one of the painters who, like Rubens and Van Dyck, marked the Flemish pictorial production of the seventeenth century. He began learning in the workshop of Adam van Noort, by whom he was deeply influenced, mainly dealing with popular and mythological themes, such as this Pan playing the flute.

Another characteristic that will mark the almost totality of its works is the use of the bright in light-dark.