“My art tends toward the literary. My pictures tend toward the outskirts of painting: But why generalize? It is possible to realize one thing or another, according to the impressions gained from one point of view or another. But it is too difficult to make a general rule.”
— James Ensor
Photo James Ensor and Ernest Rousseau on the beach near Oostende (Belgium) ca. 1892
Love,through your spirit and mine what summer eve
Now glows with glory of all things possess’d,
Since this day’s sun of rapture filled the west
And the light sweetened as the fire took leave?
Awhile now softlier let your bosom heave,
As in Love’s harbour, even that loving breast,
All care takes refuge while we sink to rest,
And mutual dreams the bygone bliss retrieve.
Many the days that Winter keeps in store,
Sunless throughout, or whose brief sun-glimpses
Scarce shed the heaped snow through the naked trees,
This day at least was Summer’s paramour,
Sun-coloured to the imperishable core
With sweet well-being of love and full heart’s ease.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
painting Daydream by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Symphony in White (1865) by James Whistler
Whistler painted his lover Joanna Hiffernan. This painting shows her beautiful profile while reflected in the mirror.
The white of the dress is the dominant color in this painting.
Joanna has been Whistler’s lover for seven years, then she met his friend, the artist Courbet and became his lover.
“Just like music is the poetry of sound, painting is the poetry of sight, and this has nothing to do with a harmony of sound or color”
James Abbot Whistler
The Depths of the Sea (1887) by Sir Edward Burne-Jones
Two weighless figures are buoyed up by the water surrounding them in this unusual underwaterview. Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Burne-Jones were fascinated with drowning; this preoccupution, part of a general preference for morbid subjects, was also popular with Art Nouveau.
