DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ

The flesh of Christ is so alive, so exquisitely rendered in oil such that we can almost see the pores of his skin, as to cause devotion and reverence at the sheer sight of it. This was the intended effect. Velazquez was painting at the time of the Catholic Reformation where an enormous emphasis was placed on Transubstantiation and thus the body of Christ was seen as a symbol of rebellious Catholicism in the face of the rising Protestantism. Hired as a court painter of the Spanish King Phillip IV, who tolerated a slow pace of work because he saw that he was a once-in-a-generation genius, Velazquez moved more towards religious imagery and away from the historical work and portraiture that had made his name. The paintings made under this patronage are amongst his most famous and significant, using his immense technical skill and a deep understanding of the transformational power of art to create stirring works of holy ordinance that elevate history and allegory into something tangible.

HENRI BURKHARD

Like so many American artists at the turn of the century, Henri Burkhrad had to leave his native land for Paris in order to find his painterly voice. Paris was the centre of the avant-garde, a melting pot of radical ideas, experimentation, and wild characters who encouraged each other to push the  envelope further in a single minded journey towards subjective truth. Burkhard had a by-the-numbers artistic education, attending three of the great Académies in the city and honing the traditional skills he had learnt as a young man in New York to novel effect. He returned home shortly before this work was painted, bringing with him the new way of thinking he had learnt overseas, and was quickly celebrated as a leading figure in the American modernist movement, exhibiting extensively at major galleries and museums across the country. Burkhard fell into relative obscurity later in life, and his contribution to a uniquely American painterly style is rarely discussed, but his cubist inspired still lives still retain a sense of potency today.

JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD

Derided for its frivolity, ‘The Swing’ came to represent the best and worst aspects of 18th Century French High Society. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw the painting, a masterpiece of Rococo, as emblematic of the rotten core of the whole era - extravagant wealth concerning itself with eroticism and playfulness, existing in a fantasy world removed from reason, rationality and truth. Yet ‘The Swing’ has persisted as a great work for these reasons and more. An aristocratic woman is pushed on a swing, her shoe flying off her feet in exuberant ecstasy, as her lover hides in the bushes below, glimpsing up her dress with each swing. It is lewd and risqué, the two figures playing an illicit sexual game as a statue of Cupid keeps their secret. The lush garden unfolds behind them into impossibility, and the world is soaked in soft erotic light. It is as close to “let them eat cake” as a painting has ever come.