Jesús Helguera (1910-1971)

Mexican painter Jesús Enrique Emilio de la Helguera Espinoza, was born to spanish economist Alvaro Garcia Helguera and Maria Espinoza Escarzarga in Chihuahua, Mexico.

He lived his childhood in Mexico City and later moved to Córdoba in the state of Veracruz.

His family fled from the Mexican Revolution to Ciudad Real, Castilla la Nueva, Spain and thereafter moved to Madrid.

Jesús first gained interest in the arts during primary school and would often be found wandering the halls of the Del Prado Museum.

At the age of 14, he was admitted to the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes and later studied at the Academia de San Fernando.

Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939)

Frederick Carl Frieseke was born in Owosso, Michigan. After studying for a short while at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, Frieseke left for France in 1898, and almost all of his career was spent as an expatriate, with ties to the United States maintained through his New York dealer, William MacBeth, and by occasional visits to America.

Following the pattern of innumerable young Americans, he enrolled at the Academie Julian where he studied with Benjamin Constant (1845-1902) and Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921).

He appears to have had at least brief contact with and to have been influenced by James McNeill Whistler, who had recently opened his Academie Carmen in Paris.

He married Eva Graham and in 1871 their daughter Edith was born. Their son, Frederick Carl, was born in Owosso in 1874.

Edvard Munch | The dance of life, 1900

The Dance of Life or Life's Dance is an 1899–1900 expressionist painting by Edvard Munch, now in the National Museum of Art in Norway.

The Dance of Life was a key work in Munch's project "The Frieze of Life".

Munch’s painting shows several couples dancing in a luminous summer night. The central element of the composition is a couple, of whom the woman is wearing a bright red dress that wraps itself around the feet of her dancing partner.

Her loose hair swirling about him, they seem to become a single entity. This couple is flanked by two other women, one of them young and radiant in a white dress, the other pale, with sunken cheeks and dressed in black. It is as if a story were being told about various stages in a woman’s life.

Edvard Munch | The dance of life, 1899-1900 | National Museum of Art Oslo, Norway

Henri Matisse | Canal du Midi, 1898

Canal du Midi belongs to a series of pictures painted by Henri Matisse near Toulouse during the winter of 1898-1899. Matisse, who left Moreau's studio in the autumn of 1897, married Amélie Parayre in January of the following year. After a brief honeymoon in London, the couple sojourned for six months in Ajaccio, Corsica.

Then, in August 1898, Matisse and his wife travelled to Toulouse, and stayed for six months with Amélie's parents.

This was the first time Matisse visited the South and he always remembered it as his first encounter with light and colour. Many of the landscapes he painted during that period, including the one we are commenting on, were probably executed outdoors, directly from the model. Yet the colour in them is not naturalistic.

Wislawa Szymborska | Love at First Sight / Amore a prima vista

They’re both convinced

that a sudden passion joined them.

Such certainty is beautiful,

but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Since they’d never met before, they’re sure

that there’d been nothing between them.

But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways -

perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?

Ron Hicks | Tell me more