ArtExpertOnLine

    What a fun image for this week!   Here we have the great Dutch painter Frans Hals' oil on canvas painting of a couple obviously having a great time together.   The title of the painting is interesting.  One of my sources titles it:  Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, with another giving it the title: Young Man and Woman in an Inn.    I have also seen titles where the woman is called, Wife.  Hals painted it in 1623 and it is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.    The composition is amazing.  All of the essential components are featured inside a band extending diagonally from his hand down the format to the dog's head, with the two human faces dead center.    Notice the interesting white shape created by her long "lace" cuff.  Hals has recreated that shape with slight variations several times, I have counted 7. And I love the deep turquoise color of his sleeve being re-picked up as feathers on his hat and swinging down t

  Our latest painting is by Gustave Caillebotte titled Street in Paris, Rain.   It is an oil on canvas painted in 1877 and is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Caillebotte is considered an Impressionists, however his style was a little more realistic.   Here we see people walking a wet Paris street, umbrella's in hand.  Although not sure, I believe the building in the rear, left, could be what has become the Galeries Lafeyette on the Boulevard Haussmann.  This building was purchased in 1896 to soon become the famous department store, but the building probably existed in 1877.     Structurally this painting is very similar to others reviewed.   Here again, the painting is divided exactly in half, with the street light and its shadow as separation.  The right side is almost a portrait of the couple so realistic we could call them by name if we knew them.  But they do not realize we are watching as their attention has been drawn to something we