Charles Mahoney Research point

Exploring coloured media. Research point. I cannot even understand the question. I do not know what they mean when they ask me: find out about two artists with extremel mastery of detailed drawing and make notes about their work; choose a modern artist and one working in the ninetenth century or earlier.
What do they mean by the word "modern"? Do they mean modern or contemporary?
Modern art refers to artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era.^[1] The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.^[2] Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called Contemporary art or Postmodern art.
Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Henri Matisse's two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting.^[3] It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.
Initially influenced by Toulouse Lautrec, Gauguin and other late 19th century innovators Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907, Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions. Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and several other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter.
The notion of modern art is closely related to Modernism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art
I got more clue from the name mentioned of Charles Mahoney. So now I can look at this era for an artist who worked in this way.

So if I am going to the words "modern artist"; I would like to choose Lucian Freud. He is modern and I really like his paintings.
Lucien Freud, in his early paintings, put inappropriate objects together and it makes all his compositions more interesting and fresh.
Another modern artist I would like add is Vincent van Gogh.

He is one of my favorite artists. I love him for the movement and life in all of his drawings and paintings. His detailed work makes all the composition look realistic without the dryness of a photograph.

For early artists good example is

Juan Sánchez Cotán (June 25, 1560 – September 8, 1627) was a Spanish baroque painter, a pioneer of realism in Spain. His still life, also called bodegones were painted in a strikingly austere style.

Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, 1602, San Diego Museum of Art

 

Still Life with Game Fowl, Vegetables and Fruits, 1602, Museo del Prado Madrid

What I like about this artist is that all of his compositions are very analytic and very unemotional. I sometimes like to do something in the same spirit: when you run out of emotions and put into paintings pure aestheticism.
Another interesting artist - I like his fine drawings for his charming, enigmatic, haunting atmosphere:
Jacopo de' Barbari (c. 1440 – before 1516), was an Italian painter with a highly individual style.

Artist	Jacopo de' Barbari
Year	1504
Type	oil on wood
Dimensions	52 cm × 42.5 cm (20.5 in × 16.7 in)
Location	Alte Pinakothek, Munich

This question about artists in detailed work was more tricky than I thought.  I looked at more work of Charles Mahoney and discovered that he was a neo-romantic.  So I returned back and re-did all the research using a different approach.  I chose illustrators, not painters, because botanicals illustration require accuracy .

Botanical Illustration is one of the oldest watercolor genres, associated throughout its history with the importance of plants to human health, recreation, and appreciation of beauty. Today it is one of the few art genres that unites watercolorists around the world in a shared love of nature and a common set of painting methods and pictorial conventions.
	Botanical painting grows from the natural pleasure we derive from looking at flowers and plants, with the advantage that the patient and motionless plant allows a careful rendering of its form and colors. Watercolor early became the medium of choice: they were originally used as a form of drawing (often in combination with pen and ink), and there is a similarity between the translucent colors of flowers and leaves and of watercolors on the vellum page. One of the earliest modern watercolors is a botanical work: Albrecht Dürer’s The Large Piece of Turf (1503, 21x13cm), made with watercolor and gouache, traces each blade with the precision of renaissance silverwork or embroidery, yet lets the life of the grass shine through. We want to run our fingers through it, and can almost smell the timeless summer of it. And for all its delicacy and naturalism, this is clearly a demonstration of technical achievement: Dürer has put his highly marketable patience, precision and dexterity on display for potential patrons to appreciate.
	To succeed as a botanical illustration, a watercolor must combine accurate observation, graceful drawing, meticulous brushwork, and canny color mixing. These attributes first come together in works of science and healing. The anonymously painted Blackcurrant Tree (c.1580, 31x23cm) is one of a large collection of watercolors used as teaching materials at a Dutch medical college. Because doctors of the time relied on medicinals such as blackcurrant tea, medical schools often supervised gardens where the most useful trees, herbs and flowers were grown. Doctors were taught to harvest and process the plants, and to learn the distinguishing features of each species. Intended primarily as teaching aids, the early botanical paintings often present the specimen in idealized form (disease or damage is edited out), and cleverly combine views of the plant at different seasons — the flowering blackcurrant stem in the center, and the fruiting bough around it. Many other pictorial conventions were innovated by these early botanical artists, as ways to show the roots and flowers of tubers, the pods and seeds of legumes, the buds, bark and leaves of trees, and the cohabiting insects or snails, all within a single elegant image.
	As botanical illustration developed, it followed the temperamental kinship between the amateur gardener and amateur watercolorist. Both must be observant, patient, and in love with the colors and forms of nature. Throughout England and Scotland (especially during the eighteenth century), gardening and watercoloring were the complementary diversions of cultured ladies and girls. A long history of fashion contributed to this popularity. By the time of the infamous tulip bulb crisis in 1637, new and rare flowers, like new and rare artworks, had become the status symbols of affluence and refinement. And this in turn created a market for high quality botanical illustrations. In the eighteenth century the illustration of plants attained remarkable polish (and wide circulation) in the works of Johann Jakob Walther (c.1604-1677), Georg Dionysus Ehret (1708-1770), and Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840). In the next century, William Henry Hunt (1790-1864) became famous for his tiny landscapes of bird’s nests and blossoms. Redouté’s major collections include the three volume Les Roses (1817-24) — 170 handcolored portrait plates of flowers in the Empress Josephine’s gardens at Malmaison (Versailles). His Opium Poppy (1827, 30x22cm), actually a printed figure, shows the accurate detailing and graceful composition that made Redouté’s watercolors famous. Idealization is apparent in the graceful design and fluttery rendering of leaves and petals, but these stylizations were made for decorative rather than scientific reasons. Aristocratic patronage was essential to the production of these lavishly illustrated and costly works. But Ehret, Redouté, and other botanical masters were also innovators of the printing and engraving techniques that made it possible to mass produce vibrantly colored botanical images. These found a growing market of middle class readers eager to own these symbols of affluence.
	The best botanical illustrations add symbolism to the image: implying taste through dew drops, touch through textural details such as thorns or bark, smell through vivid and succulent color. Birds and insects (whose lives are as brief as the flowers and trees they live in) often stray into the composition, reminders of ecology, climate and season. The tension between the actual plant used as a model and the idealized distortions that appear in the finished image is foregrounded in the many cultural variations in botanical art — which by the 19th century had become a global art form useful in science, commerce, and recreation. This Unidentified Plant (Leguminosae family) (c.1810, 22x17cm) was painted by an anonymous Chinese watercolorist who likely learned botanical illustration from Western plant traders and naturalists eager to find and export exotic Asian flora. The rendering is somewhat solid and flat, and dominated by two or three colors, all Asian art conventions accepted by the painter. Traces of decay or insect damage have been included as tokens of realism, but in fact the plant has been so much altered by the artist’s culturally shaped imagination that scientific identification of the species is not possible. The artist correctly grasped the fact that a botanical image is idealized, but did not know the conventions that make an image scientifically useful. Instead, knowing he would be rewarded for how much his image stimulated desire, he made the plant as lovely as possible using Chinese esthetic assumptions.
	Perhaps more than any other genre, botanical illustration highlights this balancing act between truth and beauty, a balance that the best artists are able to turn to splendid visual effect. From the Renaissance down to the New Millennium, botanical illustration has remained one of the principal methods by which plants have been taxonomized, anatomized, and published in scientific references. Redouté’s roses documented the advances in horticulture that created modern rose varietals from medieval plant stocks. Botanical illustrators today are still called on to produce scientific renderings and naturalist field guides, even in an age of photography. Modern illustrators such as the late Margaret Mee are often known for their dogged exploration of jungles and back woods to collect, sketch, and paint rare plants. Particularly amazing is the series of watercolors of the Australian banksia by Celia Rosser, integral to a scientific tome on this unusual desert plant. Her Banksia serrata (1995, 76x51cm) is rendered with incredible detail — every seed hair, miniscule flower part and leaf blemish is captured with an unwavering eye and infallible brush. Yet the overall composition, balanced colors, rhythmic curves of the leaves, and soft tints in the background are delightful in themselves, and succeed in transforming dry science into the purest art. Gill Saunders’ Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration (University of California Press, 1995) is a wide ranging yet concise survey that includes early woodcuts, Victorian lithographs and the plant pictures on commercial seed packets, as well as lovely examples of the watercolorist’s art. Shirley Sherwood’s Contemporary Botanical Artists (Cross River Press, 1996) and A Passion for Plants (Cassell Academic, 2001) offer a wonderfully varied sampling of contemporary botanical illustrators around the world, almost all of them using watercolors. A truly unique book for gardeners and artists alike, Flora : An Illustrated History of the Garden Flower by Brent Elliott (Firefly Books, 2001) traces the history of domesticated flowering plants through several centuries of superb botanical illustrations in the collection of the Royal Horticultural Society (England). The book review section of this site recommends some how-to books on painting floral watercolors, botanical illustrations, and nature outdoors. Rose Prints by Pierre-Joseph Redouté is a selective online gallery of hand colored prints from this very famous work, at the Rosarian web site. And for lovely contemporary botanical illustrations, BotanicalArtists.com displays works by several professional botanical artists, with links to exhibitions, classes, botanical societies, artist web sites, and online art suppliers.  http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/artist01.html Charles Mahoney (b. 18 November 1903 – d. 1968) was an English painter.    Born as Cyril Mahoney in London in 1903, he studied alongside Tom Piper and Thomas Monnington at the at Royal College of Art from 1922–6. He executed an exceptional series of murals at the Assembly Halls between 1933 and 1936. He later taught at the Brockley School, Lewisham, and taught painting at the R.C.A. from 1948 until 1953. He is probably best known for the painting Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden (1936). http://www.neo-romantic.org.uk/ent-mahoney.html Presentation: Framed Signed with initials and dated; oil on canvas, 24 X 14 ins. (61 X 35.6 cms) Provenance: the artist’s estate Exhibited: Harris, Preston; Canterbury Museum & Art Gallery; FAS 2000 (109) Mahoney’s unbridled enthusiasm for plants was shared with Edward Bawden, Geoffrey Rhoades, John Nash and Evelyn Dunbar, with whom he swapped cuttings by post. Auriculas – deeply unfashionable at the time – were one of his particular passions. He loved the sumptuous colour combinations and formal arrangement of the leaves and petals. http://www.lissfineart.com/display.php?KT_artists=Charles+Mahoney Celia Rosser (b. 1930) was appointed Monash University Botanical Artist in 1974. Her magnum opus, the 3-volume The Banksias records all seventy-six species, most of which are native to Western Australia. Rosser worked closely with botanist Alex George and records that she sited many of the species in the wild during field trips to Western Australia. The folios are now regarded as one of the great achievements of botanical illustration in Australian history, prized alongside Banks’ Florilegium. Celia Rosser, Banksia paludosa R.Br. – photomechanical reproduction, in: The banksias by Celia Rosser and Alexander S. George, (London: Academic Press in association with Monash University, 1981–88). Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia.  http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/artoftheland/Thomas ALLPORT painted the Botanicals for William Roscoe’s book “Monandrian Plants” in Liverpool from 1822-1828. William Roscoe noted in the book: ‘…lastly, I have to notice Mr Thomas ALLPORT, a meritorious young artist who by his commedable dillgence has obtained a considerable degree of Excellence in botanical delineation; and furnished from the living plants a great proportion of the drawings for the work, all of which have been engraved and coloured, under the care and direction of Mr. George Graves Jnr. of Peckham.nearly all the drawings were made from plants growing in the Botanic Gardens, or in private conservatiories, near Liverpool…’ . Liverpool Academy Thomas Exhibited 5 Botanical Drawings at the Liverpool Academy: 1824 No.188 Amaryllis Jonsonia Vitata No.189 Erythrina Cristae Galli No.191 Amaryllis Jonsonia Vista No.192 Alphina Nutans No.203 Nymphaea Coerulea Source:Index of Artists exhibiting in Liverpool 1774-1867 http://www.rotherhamweb.co.uk/genealogy/allport.htm Georg Dionysius Ehret Un article de Wikipédia, l’encyclopédie libre. Aller à : Navigation, rechercher   Georg Dionysius Ehret. Georg Dionysius Ehret est un artiste, un botaniste et un entomologiste allemand, célèbre pour ses illustrations de botanique, né en 1708 à Baden et mort en 1770 en Grande-Bretagne. Il commence comme apprenti-jardinier près d’Heidelberg. Ses premières illustrations sont faites pour le compte de Carl von Linné (1707-1778) et de George Clifford (1685-1760) en 1735-1736. Ce dernier est un riche banquier et dirige la Compagnie néerlandaise des Indes orientales, il possède un très important herbier. Il s’entoure de bons botanistes, comme Linné, et d’artistes, comme Ehret sur sa propriété à De Hartecamp et fait paraître Hortus cliffortianus, un chef d’œuvre de la littérature botanique. Ehret migre plus tard en Grande-Bretagne où il illustre de nombreuses plantes. Ses œuvres sont conservées au Natural History Museum de Londres, dans les collections des Jardins botaniques royaux de Kew, à la Royal Society, à la bibliothèque Lindley de la Société royale d’horticulture, du Musée Victora et Albert et à la bibliothèque de l’université d’Erlangen. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Dionysius_Ehret Description Botanical illustration of Lilium superbum.jpg  English: Botanical illustration of Lilium superbum Date 1750(1750) Source http://www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/40728-popup.html Author Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-1770)