Youth

It is Sunday, so time for a painting regarding dancing!  :) 

Arthur F. Mathews was an American Tonalist painter who was one of the founders of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Trained as an architect and artist, he and his wife Lucia Kleinhans Mathews had a significant effect on the evolution of Californian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He had his masters who influenced his art: he studied art in Paris at the Académie Julian from 1885 to 1889, where he was influenced by the academic classicism of his teachers Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre, the tonalism of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and the symbolism of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

In his artistic work, Mathews was a master of many media: oil painting, watercolor, pastel, gouache, and fresco. He and Lucia designed detailed interior decoration schemes in what became known as the California Decorative Style. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, they led the effort to rebuild the city’s fine public spaces. His major commissions included murals for the Oakland Public Library, the Mechanics' Institute Library, the Lane Medical Library at Stanford University's medical school campus in San Francisco, and the Supreme Court Chambers of the California Supreme Court Building in San Francisco. Here we see an Arcadic luminous landscape of California, and the planes of color and the graceful postures of the dancers show the artist is looking across the Pacific to Japan.

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P.S. Let us introduce to you the story of Mary Cassatt, an American Impressionist who found her passion and new life in Paris.