The Symbol Art Gallery

@buitengebieden Our best friends ! "Fidelity" by Briton Riviere, 1869

Reception of Le Grand Condé by Louis XIV at Versailles by Jean Léon Gérôme 1878 The painting captures a real 1674 moment: the Grand Condé, a famous general who had once taken up arms against the king, climbing the Versailles staircase to bow before Louis XIV. #art

Sailing Boat off the Coast of Capri by Ivan Aivazovsky 1855 Aivazovsky painted the sea almost entirely from memory, rarely working in front of it. He believed the movement of water was too fast to capture directly, so he studied it closely and then painted in his studio. #art

Ships at Anchor by Caspar David Friedrich 1828 Friedrich grew up in Greifswald, a Baltic port, and ships appeared in his work all his life. He rarely painted the open sea as adventure. #art

Monet wrote begging letters. Renoir took commissions just to eat. One friend among them could have walked away rich, instead he spent the fortune saving them. Look who.

Odysseus and Calypso by Arnold Böcklin 1882 Böcklin sets the two figures apart by color: Calypso glows warm against her island rock while Odysseus stands as a dark silhouette facing the open sea. That gap between them says everything the story does. #art

POV: it's Saturday night in 1940 Harlem and you're chasing the night. Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957)

Samson by Elihu Vedder 1886 Vedder spent most of his life in Italy, where the art of the Renaissance shaped his taste for muscular figures and grand storytelling. #art

Dead Island by Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach 1905

What’s your favorite painting? Artwork • Artist • Year I’ll reply with its image.

Van Gogh painted this masterpiece locked in an asylum

Destiny by Henri Matisse 1947

The War by Hans Thoma 1907

The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji by Katsushika Hokusai 1831

La Belle Dame sans Merci by Frank Bernard Dicksee 1901

The Indian and the Lily by George de Forest Brush 1887

The Daily Bread by Franz Wilhelm Seiwert 1923

The Dinkey Bird by Maxfield Parrish 1904 #art

The Bat Woman by Albert Joseph Pénot 1890 #art

Working Class City by Hans Baluschek 1920 #art

In Bruegel's painting Icarus is just two little legs drowning in a corner nobody notices, while everyone keeps calmly working. The indifference was the point.

You scrolled past him too. That's the whole idea. Most disasters are not the center of the world. We live in the margins of other people's tragedies and we keep working.

A hero just fell out of the sky and crashed into the sea. But the farmer keeps plowing. Look at the corner, two tiny legs, drowning, and nobody turns to look.