—Realism is not always nice
An academic in a time of unrest'Now it is the peasant who is the judge and so it is necessary to represent his interests. That is just the thing for me, since I am myself, as you know, a peasant, the son of a retired soldier who served twenty-seven hard years in Nicholas I's army.'It was a new world in Russia in 1872, when Ilya Repin wrote those words.
The faces we see in our dreams
1840 – 1916
Painting nature from a small boat
1840 – 1926
—Georges Seurat, 1886
By turns scientist and anthropologist, Seurat painted A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in the pointellist style, designed to separate the colors presented to the eye to create a truer impression of light. The painting's subjects, it's now-famous citizen's of leisure, Seurat hoped to raise to the status of icons — as he described to the French poet Gustave Kahn, 'The Panathenaeans of Phidias formed a procession.
