Gustave Jacquet | Portrait / Genre painter

During the 19th century, particularly in France, people developed a vivid fascination with the past and paintings of the bygone eras were in demand.

Jacquet specialised in painting figures, portraits and genre subjects in which he evoked the elegance of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. These works were exquisitely painted with every attention paid to detail; his use of colour is rich and vibrant and his rendition of luxurious cloth is outstanding.

Alfred Eberling (1872-1951)

Alfred Rudolfovich Eberling, was a successful painter and photographer in the early 20th century.

A pupil of Ilya Repin, he never deviated from realism (in the broad sense of the word) and left a number of striking works executed in the painterly two-dimensional manner typical of that time.

Eberling’s portraits, entirely in the spirit of salon art in terms of imagery and not devoid of a chocolate-box prettiness, were always marked by refined, often unexpected combinations of colors.

Alfred Eberling | Portrait of Ballerina Tamara Karsavina, 1911

Charles William Wyllie (1853-1923)

Charles William Wyllie was a British painter of landscape and marinescape.

Born in London he was the son of William Morison Wyllie and brother of William Lionel Wyllie (1851-1931).

While his brother William established a strong reputation as a marine painter and etcher, Charles moved away from straightforward representations of the British coastline and developed an interest in painting allegorical and mythological subjects beside the sea.

Edgar Allan Poe | To Helen / Ad Elena, 1848

Ti vidi una volta, una sola volta - anni fa:

non voglio dir quanti – non molti, tuttavia.

Era notte, di Luglio; e dalla grande luna piena

che, come la tua anima, ricercava, elevandosi,

un suo erto sentiero per l'arco del cielo,

piovve un serico argenteo velo di luce,

con sé recando requie, grave afa e sopore,

sui sollevati visi d'almeno mille rose

che s'affollavano in un incantato giardino,

che nessun vento – se non in punta di piedi - osava agitare.

Charles William Wyllie, RBA (British, 1859-1923) The Backwater

Titian | The Venus of Urbino, 1538 | Uffizi Gallery

Toward the beginning of his career Titian had brought to completion Giorgione's unfinished canvas of Venus asleep in a landscape; some twenty-five years later he adapted the central motif of the recumbent figure to a new setting and transformed its meaning by domesticating that pastoral deity. Giorgione's Venus - withdrawn in a private dream of love that we can share, to a degree, only by an effort of the imagination - has been brought indoors; fully awake now and aware of her audience, she displays her charms in a deliberately public proclamation of love.