Reading / Lettura | Quotes and painting

"The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book".

Édouard Manet - Woman Reading, 1880

"La macchina tecnologicamente più efficiente che l’uomo abbia mai inventato è il libro" 

- Herman Northrop Frye CC FRSC (1912-1991) - Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Theodore Earl Butler | Impressionist painter

Theodore Earl Butler (1861–1936) was an American impressionist painter. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, and moved to Paris to study art. He befriended Claude Monet in Giverny, and married his stepdaughter, Suzanne Hoschedé. After her death he married her sister, Marthe Hoschedé. Butler was a founding member of the Society of Independent Artists.

Butler's chosen subjects were domestic scenes of family and friends and the French landscape. Although his Impressionistic approach to painting sometimes reflected the influence of his father-in-law, his work also suggests Post-Impressionist tendencies.

Biography

Butler studied at Marietta College in Ohio and graduated in 1882. He studied at the Art Students League with James Carroll Beckwith, Kenyon Cox and J. Alden Weir, and under William Merritt Chase from 1884-1886. One of Butler's first paintings is a copy of Menippus by Diego Velázquez (1639–1641) Standing Bearded Man, 1885. Butler then moved to study in Paris.

In Paris, Butler enrolled at La Grande-Chaumière, Académie Colarossi and at Académie Julian. Butler studied under Emile Carolus Duran. Carolus opened an art studio in 1873 on Boulevard Montparnasse, called the "81". Carolus, who was also known to have given free private lessons to some painters, introduced his students to the work of Claude Monet.

Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重)

Hiroshige, in full Andō Hiroshige, professional names Utagawa Hiroshige and Ichiyūsai Hiroshige, original name Andō Tokutarō, (born 1797, Edo [now Tokyo], Japan - died October 12, 1858, Edo), Japanese artist, one of the last great ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") masters of the colour woodblock print.

His genius for landscape compositions was first recognized in the West by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

His print series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1833-34) is perhaps his finest achievement.

Hiroshige was the son of Andō Genemon, warden of the Edo fire brigade. Various episodes indicate that the young Hiroshige was fond of sketching and probably had the tutelage of a fireman who had studied under a master of the traditional Kanō school of painting.

In the spring of 1809, when Hiroshige was 12 years of age, his mother died.

William Kay Blacklock | Victorian genre painter

William Kay Blacklock (1872-1924) was a British artist in the mediums of watercolours and oils.

Biography

William Blacklock was born in Bishopwearmouth, Sunderland, in North East England, in 1872.

He was one of three children of John Blacklock, an engine fitter, and his wife Isabella. His father died in 1886.

According to the 1891 census, William was 18 years old and was working as a lithographer's apprentice, while living with his widowed mother. He continued to live with his mother, at least until 1901, practising the trade of lithography. It seems that he added Kay as his middle name when he became an artist.

Pablo Segarra Chias, 1945 | Genre painter

Spanish painter Pablo Segarra Chias was born in Seville, a city impoverished and devastated by the recent Spanish civil war, Pablo lived in the Macarena District in the heart of the city.

At the tender age of 7yrs Chias completed his first oil on canvas painting.

His father would let him use a chair, outside the local tavern, as an easel and it was from here he sold his first painting for 10p encouraging him to start and go on with painting as a more vocational commitment.