Alice Neel – The Spanish Family (1943)

“Every person is a new universe unique with its own laws emphasizing some belief or phase of life immersed in time and rapidly passing by,” American artist Alice Neel said in her autobiography. Looking at her career spanning over six decades and consisting of hundreds of portraits of people from all walks of life – […]

Suzanne Valadon – Family Portrait (1912)

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, is how Leo Tolstoy starts his 1878 novel Anna Karenina about a married Russian countess who is shunned by society after she falls in love with another man. In his masterpiece, Tolstoy poignantly shows the hypocrisy and discrepancy between how unfaithful […]

Frédéric Bazille – Family Reunion (1867)

He could have been one of the most famous painters in history, his name drawing crowds of visitors to his exhibitions, his paintings selling for millions of dollars. Today French artist Frédéric Bazille is mostly forgotten. But he was there, in the right place, at the right time, on the cusp of making history with […]