PABLO PICASSO

In a deep depression, Picasso could paint in nothing but blue. For three years, he works became all but monochromatic; rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, they are overwhelming in their coldness and affecting in the totality of moroseness they represent. It was the suicide of a close friend that led Picasso into his aptly named ‘Blue Period’, and his art was changed not just in palette but in subject. He retreated into the darkness of society, finding solace in the outcasts: the sick, disabled, marginalised, and rejected, as he saw himself in his misery as equally apart from the world he once inhabited. The works made during this period are more than melancholy - they are entirely absent of joy, and amongst the most urgent and potent communications of sadness ever created. This work, of an older man, ailing with little food to eat, is an exemplary work of this period. There is something unsettling in his depiction, as he moves between dimensions his body seems to exist both as rounded, fully formed flesh in the face, neck and hands, and as a flat, false image in his torso and arms. The table appears to retreat back against the wall, trapping him in a purgatorial space between planes. In social position and depiction, Picasso’s unnamed subject exists as an outsider, unplaced within the physical world he is painted in and rejected by the one he inhabits.

ALBERT EDELFELT

Edelfelt took the techniques of the past to a distinctly contemporary scene. As one of the founders of the Finnish Realism movement, he painted the world as he saw it, adding no adornment and instead trying to depict the beauty in the everyday. In this, his most famous work and the most significant representation of the great scientist Louis Pasteur, Edelfelt found his perfect subject. Depicting Pasteur in his laboratory, surrounded by the cutting edge technology of the day, Edelfelt was able to depict the inherent beauty of modernity, and how the elegance of functionality and labour could be as aesthetically significant as the loftiest subjects. Though Pasteur was already revered when this portrait was painted, in fact he is depicted holding a rabbit’s spine that helped him develop the vaccine for Rabies and save untold lives across the centuries, there is a humbleness to the reality of the scene around him. The lighting, though reminiscent of the chiaroscuro of the Renaissance, is realistic, and the generosity paid is only to detail, Edelfelt is able to at once elevate the man and place him firmly within reality, depicting the simple truth that an everyday man and a genius can be one and the same.

HENRY DE WAROQUIER

Studies of architecture and mythology shifted the young de Waroquier away from a career in biology and towards one in art. From the latter, he learnt of Greek art, and its foundational idea that man existed at the centre of the universe. From the former, the ability and power to shape that universe, to respect it through the act of creation and the values that contributions to its landscape have in the right hands. As a child he had spent hours at the Natural History Museum of France, and was drawn to the minerals and fossils that seemed to speak of a unknown world hidden from public view; it was unsurprising then, that as he began to create images it was ones that spoke to a past, unknowable and often created world. His paintings combined the surreal imagery of the unconscious with the historical mediums of popular imagination, combining in a gentle cohesion that seems to transcend time.