'Don Quixote and Sancho Panza' by Honoré Victorin Daumier, 1870

Quixote and Sancho Panza

Honoré Victorin Daumier

Feriha, Sharon and Champagne

After visiting the Courtauld Gallery, we decided to choose Daumier’s painting for two reasons. Firstly, because the painting looked rough and unfinished, which appealed to us. Secondly, after reading about the painting we found the story very humorous and thought through our animation we could emphasise the humour of the story.

The painting is an illustration of a famous book by Miguel de Cervantes, ‘Don Quixote’, published in 1614. In nineteenth century France, the book was a very popular subject amongst artists such as Fragonard who greatly influenced Daumier in both style and subject. However, instead of depicting a dramatic scene from the novel, Daumier preferred to simply present the relationship between the two key characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The image is painted in a very lose manner, giving the effect of an unfinished painting, with the figures silhouetted against the background. The loose way of painting also gives an idea of Don Quixote’s unsteady mind. The colours used by Daumier are very earthy, neutral colours, which at first did not appear to be a correct representation of the imaginary world Don Quixote created for himself and lived in. However after further researching the novel we realised that the earthy realism was a representation of Sancho Panza’s view of both the real world and Don Quixote’s world.

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'Te Rerioa (The Dream)', Paul Gauguin, 1897

Te Rerioa (The Dream)

Paul Gauguin, 1897
 
Jahkeeta and Kristian

We chose this painting because it is mysterious. The whole idea of the painting being a dream appealed to us because the subjects of the painting are uncertain - the artist didn’t tell us what the dream is so it leaves us with a feeling of curiosity. He presents us with the possibilities and that’s what we have chosen to animate.
 
The artist, Paul Gauguin had a very interesting and adventurous life style, painting not only in France but also in many other places, such as Tahiti, where Te Rerioa is set. The main element of the painting that we liked most was that it really makes the viewer think deeply about what is happening in the scene.

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Peter Lely, The Concert, late 1640s

The Concert

Peter Lely, late 1640s

Amalea and Shoeb
 
We chose this image after being attracted to its fine and rich outstanding colours, specifically the drapes. The most interesting aspects are based on the historical context, which we found only after studying and researching the piece further.
 
Firstly, in the period of time this piece was painted, men were known to play wind instruments, and women on the strings. However, this painting shows the opposite of the historical stereotype. Secondly, the woman in the centre in the blue drapes, and the woman to the back right in the red drapes, don’t seem to fit into the image. The reason being that the woman in the centre does not match the period of time as the rest of the figures, based on her drapes as clothing. She also has her back to the other figures, and shows no connection to them. The woman in the red  drapes also seems distant, as her body fades into the drapes, where the chair is.
 
We wanted to communicate these interesting aspects into our animation. For our first aspect, we have swapped the sounds of the musical instruments as they start to play. Connecting this to the second aspect as the women fade in with the music, showing the music bringing the image, and the distant, ghostly figures to life.
 
The techniques we used were the rostrum camera, taking pictures of the hand drawings and playing them together. As well as photoshop and after effects for the second half of the animation, to edit and animate from the original photo of the painting.

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'View from Somerset Gardens looking towards London Bridge' by Canaletto, 18th century.

A View of Somerset House

by Canaletto

Adam and Arabella

We choose this drawing, as there were many different elements in the image, which had the potential to animate. It also interested us due to its location and the change we had noticed to Somerset House over time. Our aim was to bring colour and life to Canaletto ’s drawing.

From researching the history of both Canaletto and the history of the time we discovered how the artist’s Italian nationality influenced this drawing. For example, the composition of this image was very similar to his drawings of Venice. We decided to use colour gradually in our animation to portray the Italian use of colour in artwork during this period. This drawing shows how Canaletto was an influence to many other artists in Britain and beyond.

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'Christ crowned with thorns' by Follower of Dieric Bouts, 18th century.

Christ Crowned with Thorn

Follower of Dieric Bouts the Elder
 
Alex, Luke and David

We wanted to emphasize the suffering that Jesus Christ went through, and also make a transition from pain to joy. Usually people see depictions of Christ always completely painful with the attention being on his death on the cross, for example in the passion of Christ there was more focus on Jesus’ character being nailed and tortured to death. In our animation, we wanted to leave the audience with the sense of relief. We know that paintings of this subject were often related to illustrations of the weeping Virgin Mary and so the artist could be thinking of the whole story of the Passion whilst painting an image that relates only to the beginning of it.  Our artist was known for depicting the whole Easter story, and other examples of his work  can be seen in the National Gallery, London.
 
The project was simple. We wanted to tell the story of the  emotion of Jesus Christ during his death on the cross. To do this we decided to animate his eyes with drops of blood, staining his cheeks, and his bleeding head from the thorns. We used the rostrum camera to make the movement of his tears.  In the background we used after effects and final cut pro to make the background shift from texture to a glowing halo to highlight and emphasize the mood.

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'Cain slaying Abel' by Peter Paul Rubens, 1608-1609.

Cain and Abel

by Peter Paul Rubens

Haya and Jordan
 
We chose this painting because there is a good story to animate, and the artist depicted a lot of movement.  Based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel, we felt this painting explores a timeless and universal theme. We focused on this story, and the anger expressed by the brother’s jealous rage. Technically, we were drawn to Rubens’ painting style, which makes the movement very dramatic by the use of diagonals and over exaggerated muscles of the figures.
 
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'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère' by Edouard Manet, 1882

A Bar at the Folies Bergère

Edouard Manet

Shanika and Cham

The painting we have chosen is called A Bar at the Folies Bergère painted by Eduard Manet in 1882. We chose this particular painting because of the scene and the experiments with perspective and reflection. Paintings of café scenes are like snap shots of social life in Paris at the time and Manet’s paintings were based on sketches made on the spot. He would often visit different places and get an impression of the style to capture the mood and feeling of Parisian nightlife.

We wanted to express the barmaid's thoughts and feelings in an imaginative way and were most interested in the trapeze artist in the painting. When you look at the painting you don’t realize there's a trapeze artist at the top left corner. We decided to do an animation based on her being bored and imagining the trapeze artist doing acrobatics on the table top of the bar.  

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'Cupid and Psyche' by Joshua Reynolds, Circa 1789.

Cupid and Psyche

Joshua Reynolds, Circa 1789

Irena and Zoe

We chose this image, Cupid and Psyche because we were drawn to its experimentation with light and shadow. We later read that the painter Joshua Reynolds had purposely experimented with light at nightime. We were also very interested in the sky in the background as it looks very effective. We decided to make our animation follow the story behind the image of Cupid and Psyche. We named our image ‘The Trials of Love’ as Cupid and Psyche is a love story, the idea behind this name is that love is so up and down and over the years love never changes.

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'Landscape by Moonlight' by Peter Paul Rubens, 1635-40

Landscape by Moonlight

by Peter Paul Rubens

Asean Williams and Carl Wright

We particularly liked this painting because of the beautiful way Rubens has painted the landscape at night; it is so mysterious because of the way he has used the contrast of light and dark to show the shining moonlight.  We noticed how the light filters in from the left, leaving the woods on the right in darkness. The woods appear more focussed and detailed in comparison with the soft light on the landscape. The painting shows the isolation of the moon and the mystery of the woods at night.

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'Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery' by Giovanni Battista Benvenuti Ortolano, 16th Century

Christ and the Woman taken in adultery

by Giovanni Battista Benvenuti (Known as L’Ortolano)

Kelsey O'Connor and Gurpreet Rattan

Benvenuti is an under researched artist, who was born and worked in Ferrara, northern Italy.  His alternative name Ortolano was derived from his father, who was a gardener.  His painting depicting a scene from the bible, inspired our animation due to its lively range of contrasting colours.  Benvenuti’s way of portraying a biblical story in renaissance architectural setting also stood out to us upon viewing the painting, provoking us to question the contrast between the modern architecture and the time of the subject; i.e its relation to history.

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'Young Woman Powdering Herself' by Georges Seurat, 1888-90

The Young Woman Powdering Herself

by Georges Seurat

Ruben Pires and Roxi Ventel

Seurat uses a luminous mix of colours to portray the image of his mistress Madeline Knobloch, and is one of the very few images to reveal anything of his personal life. The painting uses the pointillist style, which Seurat invented with his fellow neo-impressionists. Seurat expressed through one of his letters that he found luminous hues to be gay, where as the dark dull hues he saw as sad.  The pointillist technique is a precise method of painting in which the hues are not mixed on the canvas but rather by the eyes. Seurat developed this technique having read the recent colour theory of Scientific Aesthetics by the academic Charles Henry of how hues worked best together on the canvas.  We used this inspiration to animate the techniques of pointillism.

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'Bridge at Courbevoire' by Geroges Seurat, 1886-7

Bridge at Courbevoire

by Georges Seurat

Megan White and Aygul Yilmaz

We got our inspiration for our animation, using Seurat’s invention of Pointillism. We decided to use the Rostrum camera so that we could apply actual paint to the image instead of digitalising it.

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Moses and the Brazen Serpent by Peter Paul Rubens, 1609-1610

Moses and the Brazen Serpent

by Peter Paul Rubens

Kelvin Dimeji and Shaun Lindo

We chose Moses and the Brazen Serpent by Rubens because it’s really powerful painting and tells a whole story from the Bible in one image. The painting is strong and violent; we like the way it’s divided in half with the writhing bodies and darkness on one side and Moses holding up the Brazen Serpent on the other which has more colour and a lighter sky.

We found out in our research that brazen is a word for bronze and that Moses was told by God that if he made the bronze snake the people would be saved from the storms and the plague of serpents. We wanted to make an animated story of the painting and decided to make it a bit fun to help school kids relate to it better. We had a technical problem with the sound when we moved the animation from PC to MAC so, sorry but you’ll have to make up your own words when you listen to it!

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'Dejeuner sur l'herbe' by Edouard Manet

Dejeuner sur l'herbe

by Edouard Manet

Claudia Garnder-Pickett and Shazad Khalid

The Painting in possession of The Courtauld Gallery is a less refined version of the original and said to have been painted for a friend. The original Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe was painted in 1863 and was submitted alongside three other paintings to the Paris Salon, which were rejected from the exhibition. Manet later exhibited his work himself with the title Le Bain at the Salon Des Refusés.

Through intensive research we managed to find many possible influences for Manet’s work and narrowed it down to a select few to incorporate in to our animated piece. One of the paintings we believe Manet was influenced by is called ‘The Judgement of Paris’ by Marcantonio Raimondi, after a drawing by Raffaello Sanzio. After having studied this piece it’s easy to see what influence Manet took from it in the positioning of his subjects.

Another piece to have influenced Manet is called ‘The Tempest’ by Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco. ‘The Tempest’ is a Renaissance painting, which like Manet’s piece, features a nude woman and a fully dressed man.

But unlike most other paintings with this content, Manet was criticised for it. Whilst the woman’s body was seen as ugly and the image was regarded as indecent, the Renaissance examples were justified because their allegorical or religious subject matter distanced this nudity from daily life. The figures in Manet’s painting, however, are contemporary.

Last but not least we believe Manet also took inspiriration from ‘The Creation of Adam’ by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni by using a similar  pose as Adam in the Michelangelo painting. After researching this theory we found that the subjects in Manet’s painting are actually people who share strong bonds with him. He had both his future wife Suzanne Leenhoff and his favourite model Victorine Meurent pose for the naked lady using his wife’s body and the face of Victorine. The two men in the painting are in fact his brother Eugene Manet and his future bother in law Ferdinand Leenhoff.

It is possible that Manet wanted to celebrate his brother by giving him the pose of Michelangelo’s Adam. Alternatively, we wonder what claim Manet might be making about his own creativity. 

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'Young Woman Powdering Herself' by Georges Seurat, 1888-90

Female nude

by Amedeo Modigliani

Laurence Leonard and Duane Uba

From our research we realised that Modigliani’s nude art had a unique sense of tone, a unique brush technique, and individual faces.

Also we considered the controversy of how Modigliani’s nudes were received when they  were painted, in 1917. His only exhibition at the Berthe Weill galley caused a sensation because of the amount of flesh on display.

We took notice of his own inspirations, sculptures from the Africans, Egyptians and Oceanic peoples. We also looked at the X ray of his female nude on the art and architecture website and realised that his brush strokes were very rigid, as if he kept jabbing the paper with paint.

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'Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear' by Vincent van Gogh, 1889

Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear

by Vincent van Gogh

Masum Ahmed

I chose this painting because there seems to be a mystery about why Van Gogh chopped off his ear and then painted a portrait of himself and I wanted to know if he was proud of it or sorry that he had done it. When I started my research I found an article by an art historian in Germany who thinks that he didn’t cut his own ear off but that his best friend Paul Gauguin accidentally cut it off with a sword during an argument. Paul Gauguin was an artist too so I wanted to show them together before the fight in my animation.

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