REMBRANDT VAN RIJN

For most artists of the 17th century, the oil painting was the final form of any image. Preparatory sketches, drawings, and small paintings were all standard elements of the process, used to refining the composition and formal elements of a picture before taking oil to panel or canvas. This piece, then, is unusual in the canon of art history - an oil painting with a primary purpose of preparation for an etching, a medium at the time that was just over a century old. Rembrandt’s focus here was on the facial features of his subject and the interplay of light and dark. We can see in his rendering of Ephraim Beuno’s hands and garments, composed with loose, thick brushstrokes, that this work was not intended as a finished piece fit for display. Instead, in the delicate rendering of his facial features and the subtle changes in light, we get an insight into the artist at work, working through specific details ahead of a finer, more exacting work in a different medium. Yet, despite it’s function, the work still contains some of Rembrandt’s magic, capturing emotion, dignity, and humanity in oil.

CLAUDE MONET

For a brief moment, the beauty of domesticity was greater than that of nature. Monet mostly painted outside, bringing his canvas out for long days in the fresh air, working en plein air to capture waterlilies, sunsets, rivers, and fields. The great father of modernism, and the creator of the painting for which Impressionism took its name, wanted to capture the world not as it necessarily was, but as he saw it. Here, however, he brought his easel and brushes inside, and painted this delicate, beautiful work of his wife quietly absorbed in her embroidery loom. Light remains a focus, it ebbs through the large windows and dances off her dress and her face. There is such tenderness in every brush stroke, the whole painting seems to exude a powerful, understated romance. It is not wild with passion or energy, nor is it attempting at objectivity. Instead it is a quiet ode to love and marriage, and to the beauty of co-habitation as Monet saw it.

ISAMU NOGUCHI

Born in Los Angeles to a Japanese poet father and am American writer mother, by the age of 24 Isamu Noguchi had lived many lives across multiple continents and found himself apprenticing for the great sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi in Paris. The two could hardly communicate - Noguchi spoke almost no French and Brâncuşi little English - but for two years he learnt from this master of modernism not just how to render wood, stone, and steel, but how to appreciate the ‘value of a moment’. Noguchi would go on to become one of the most significant sculptors and furniture designers of the 20th century, combining a Japanese design aesthetic with a western modernist philosophy, but in the summer of 1927, the young man was learning how to reduce the world to it’s most elegant, pure, and beautiful forms. Brâncuşi’s mastery was in finding the platonic ideal of a given subject, discovering the fewest elements that could be combined to create a truthful likeness and it was this quality that Noguchi was learning from. His drawing here, a medium he felt he lost mastery of as he aged, shows both the influence of his teacher and omens of his career to come.