Gustave Moreau

Hesiod and the Muse (1891) Musee d'Orsay

I picked up a small book at the library on Gustave Moreau and realized that his paintings are gorgeous. I'd always thought they were too complicated and impressionistic, but I was confusing him with Redon. The paintings are exquisitely detailed. He worked extremely hard on his art, making many preliminary drawings and sketches. As a young man, he went to Italy and copied many famous artworks there. People wanted to buy them, but he kept them as reference materials.

Memory, 1870 by Elihu Vedder

Memory, 1870, originally uploaded by vidalia_11.

This is a small painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I have seen it a few times, and it's quite mesmerizing.

Arnold Böcklin

From site artmagick.com:

Arnold Böcklin, 1829-1901. Regarded at the end of the nineteenth century as the leading Germanic painter of his time, Böcklin was deeply influenced by ancient Italian art and painted mainly mythological compositions, filled with gods, centaurs, tritons and sirens, whose predominant themes are the cycles of nature and life, war, and death. Böcklin was also inspired by the secretive, mythological landscapes of the Nazarene painter Heinrich Franz Dreher.

Böcklin, along with Anselm Feuerbach and Hans von Marées, were categorized as the 'German Romantics' and were opposed to the popular Salon art of the day. A contemporary historian spoke of Böcklin as the founder "of a sort of strangely symbolic neo-Romanticism."

Böcklin disliked giving titles to his pictures and declared that he painted in order to make people dream:

"Just as it is poetry's task to express feelings, painting must provoke them too. A picture must give the spectator as much food for thought as a poem and must make the same kind of impression as a piece of music."

And these mermaids are nutty, so I love them.