London History & Culture: Experience London/Britain/Europe!

Hi All,
There is a few free late art gallery evenings in Soho - so I thought to create this mellow low key event to see this.

Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age - Art Program Hosted by Robert Kelleman

You’re invited to join us for an art history livestream featuring Johannes Vermeer (The Girl with the Pearl Earring) and the Dutch Golden Age.
While our program will focus on Vermeer, we’ll also explore several of artists and the overall history and culture of the Dutch Golden Age.
This is a 2-part series on Dutch art, with a separate program featuring Rembrandt van Rijn.
During and after the program you’ll have the opportunity to discuss the art with your fellow participants via Zoom.

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Johannes Vermeer (October 1632 – 15 December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. He is considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. During his lifetime, he was a moderately successful provincial genre painter, recognized in Delft and The Hague. He produced relatively few paintings, primarily earning his living as an art dealer. He was not wealthy; at his death, his wife was left in debt.
Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, and frequently used very expensive pigments. He is particularly renowned for making masterful use of light in his work. "Almost all his paintings", Hans Koningsberger wrote, "are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women."
The modest celebrity he enjoyed during his life gave way to obscurity after his death. He was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th-century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists, published 1718) and, as a result, was omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries. In the 19th century, Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who published an essay attributing 66 works to him, although only 34 paintings are universally attributed to him today. Since that time, Vermeer's reputation has grown enormously.

The Dutch Golden Age was a period in the history of the Netherlands which roughly lasted from 1588, when the Dutch Republic was established, to 1672, when the Rampjaar occurred. During this period, Dutch trade, scientific developments, art and overseas colonisation was among the most prominent in Europe. The first half of the period spanned from the beginning of the Eighty Years' War until its conclusion in 1648, with the second half lasting until the outbreak of the Franco-Dutch War. During the period, Dutch colonialists, many of them affiliated with the East India Company and West India Company, established trading posts and colonies in the Americas, Southern Africa and Asia, protected by the powerful Dutch States Navy. The Dutch also dominated the triangular trade and Atlantic slave trade during this period.
Dutch culture flourished during this period as well. However, by the end of the 17th century, conflicts with neighbouring powers as well as declining economic influence led to the end of this period. The process by which the Dutch Republic became one of the foremost maritime and economic powers of the world during the era has been referred to as the "Dutch Miracle" by historian K. W. Swart. The term "Dutch Golden Age" has been controversial in the 21st century due to the extensive Dutch involvement in slavery and colonialism during the period, and it has been deprecated by several museums in the Netherlands, including the Amsterdam Museum.

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Caravaggio & The Italian Baroque - Art History Livestream Hosted by Robert Kelleman

You are invited to join us for an art history livestream program covering the Italian painter Caravaggio, one of the greatest artists in history, especially noted for his dramatic use of light and shadow, and his influence on the Baroque era.
During and after the program you’ll have the opportunity to discuss the art with your fellow art lovers via Zoom.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (29 September 1571 - 18 July 1610), known mononymously as Caravaggio, was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.
Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He made the technique a dominant stylistic element, transfixing subjects in bright shafts of light and darkening shadows. Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes, often featuring violent struggles, torture, and death. He worked rapidly with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and work directly onto the canvas. His inspiring effect on the new Baroque style that emerged from Mannerism was profound.
His influence can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Peter Paul Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Velázquez and Rembrandt.
Caravaggio's innovations inspired Baroque painting, but the latter incorporated the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism. The 20th-century art historian André Berne-Joffroy stated: "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting."

Baroque Painting encompasses a great range of styles, as most important and major painting during the period beginning around 1600 and continuing throughout the 17th century, and into the early 18th century is identified today as Baroque painting. In its most typical manifestations, Baroque art is characterized by great drama, rich, deep colour, and intense light and dark shadows, but the classicism of French Baroque painters like Poussin and Dutch genre painters such as Vermeer are also covered by the term, at least in English. As opposed to Renaissance art, which usually showed the moment before an event took place, Baroque artists chose the most dramatic point, the moment when the action was occurring: Michelangelo, working in the High Renaissance, shows his David composed and still before he battles Goliath; Bernini's Baroque David is caught in the act of hurling the stone at the giant. Baroque art was meant to evoke emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality that had been prized during the Renaissance.
Among the greatest painters of the Baroque period are Velázquez, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, and Vermeer.

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