Born in 1972, Aron Wiesenfeld had his first solo exhibition at the Timmons Gallery in San Diego in 2007. He paints enigmatic, lonely people in empty spaces, making the viewer imagine an unseen backstory. He writes, “If something is going on behind the surface, people are drawn to it but don’t know why. They’ve connected…
Three months after Tsar Nicholas II fell in the February Revolution of 1917, Alexander Yakovlev left Petrograd for Peking. The Academy of Arts funded his two-year stay in China, Mongolia, and Japan. He returned with “Opera of Peking,” one of his greatest works. Having already painted Michael Fokine and Anna Pavlova, he wrote, “In Peking,…
Napoleon had jeweler Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier (circa 1808-1884) make this piece c. 1850. In the Louis XVI style, a filigree silver-gilt mount is over crusted with 1998 small diamonds. They surround much larger pearls, and give them absolute priority. The largest drop-shaped pearl in the top-most position is believed to be the “Perle Napoleon” Here is…
William Bouguereau, 1825-1905, loved to paint portaits of young French peasant girls, in the hope that he could raise their humble status to become icons. When he painted this at the turn of the century, industry was threatening the agrarian way of life. In this picture a young girl brushes her long wind-blown brown hair…