Louise de Hem

Louise de Hem is nowadays ranked among the top of the salon art of the 1900s.
This is partly due to a book that has been translated into many languages ​​- Great women masters of art - by the Spanish art historian Jordi Vigue, where she is rightfully ranked among painters like Mary Cassat and Elizabeth Vigee Lebrun. In Ypres, where Louise de Hem lived and worked  most of her life, the Stedelijk Museum has a wonderful collection of her work. Also on show there are many social realist paintings of this Alfred Stevens student. This painting (72 x 48 cm) was on sale at Christies, South Kensington.

Italian mud puddle by Maurits Escher.

In the twenties Maurits Escher lived in Italy, and there he drew a lot from nature.
Drawings, which he would later use for his famous wood cuts. The trees that are reflected in the mud puddle - tree shaped itself -  also occur on a much earlier wood cut from Italy. This sample is on sale at Clars Gallery in USA.

Droochsloot follows Breughel

Jan Corneliszoon Droochsloot was a seventeenth-century painter from Utrecht, leader of the guild of St. Luke there, who did not follow the Utrecht fashion of those days.
That fashion was: to imitate Caraveggio with bright dark-light contrasts. As this picture shows, 
Droochsloot quietly went on to work in the Breughelian fashion. This painting (58 x 80 cm) is for sale at Stahl, Hamburg.

Early Paul Rink

The neo-impressionist works by Paul Rink are much in demand, perhaps because he was a rather rare representative of this mellifluous style in the Netherlands. 
But this work, which is for sale at Christie's London, shows him as a very traditional, almost coldly precise artist. We must take into consideration that he was only 17 years old when he made ​​it. The work (54 x 87 cm) comes from the collection of art and antiques dealer Ross Hamilton of Pimlico Road, London, to which a special auction is dedicated.

Willem Maris, calf in the dark

Hague School painter Willem Maris said: I do not paint cows, but light.
Apparently he could paint the darkness as well. Or is the photo darker than the painting (41 x 51 cm) shown here? For sale in the February auction of Van Spengen, Hilversum.