Art Keeper

Atlas

The lives, circles and cities behind the paintings

Atlas: stories of connected paintings

Cover story

The Summer Colour Went Wild

Collioure, 1905. Matisse and Derain spend a summer by the sea and come back with colour nobody had seen in a gallery.

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In this issue

  1. Two Painters, One PictureParis, 1878 and 1882. Two painters whose studios were five minutes apart, and who kept turning up in each other's work.
  2. Where the American Sky Came FromHow an English painter's storms crossed the Atlantic and became the American wilderness.
  3. The Ancher FamilySkagen, on the tip of Denmark: a painter couple and their daughter, who grew up in the artists' colony and became a painter herself.
  4. Two RussiasPetrograd and Moscow, a few years apart: one country, two opposite ways to paint it.
  5. The Studio in MadridMadrid in the 1650s: the king's court painter, the assistant he freed, and what that assistant painted next.
  6. One Lake, Three WaysLake Geneva painted three times in forty years, by a Realist, a Symbolist and a modernist.
  7. Monet at the EaselMonet on the Seine in 1869, and the young American who watched him paint at Giverny sixteen years later.
  8. The Summer Colour Went WildCollioure, 1905. Matisse and Derain spend a summer by the sea and come back with colour nobody had seen in a gallery.
  9. Monet, WatchedArgenteuil, 1874. Manet spends the summer with Monet, and Monet becomes a subject as well as a painter.
  10. LettersTwo hundred years of people reading letters, from Delft to Turin to São Paulo.
  11. After MidnightArles, September 1888, and New York, 1942: two painters sitting up with the lonely hours after midnight.
  12. The New Paris, 1877Spring 1877. Caillebotte and Monet paint the same new quarter of Paris and show it in the same exhibition.
  13. Who Got There FirstKandinsky is usually called the first abstract painter. A Swedish painter had got there years before.
  14. The Blue Rider CircleMunich, 1911. Kandinsky and Marc found Der Blaue Reiter, and their friends carry its colour as far as Tunisia.
  15. Empty Rooms, Open WindowsQuiet rooms with the window open, painted in Berlin, Holland and Maine across a hundred years.
  16. Thirty-Six ViewsEdo around 1830, and Paris in 1902: an old master's mountain, and a young Parisian collector of Japanese prints who gave a new iron tower the same treatment.
  17. The Year in Six PanelsAntwerp, 1565: a merchant orders a whole year in paint for his country villa, and Bruegel delivers it season by season. Seventy years later Rubens, master of his own country estate, painted the same Flemish autumn from above.
  18. An artist’s encouragement in HawaiʻiTwo painters’ careers meet in late nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi: Jules Tavernier, arriving after years in France and California, and D. Howard Hitchcock, born and raised in the islands. Their paths show how local artistic experience and overseas training came together.
  19. The Infanta in ViennaMadrid in 1659 and Vienna in 1916: a Spanish princess's portrait sent to the emperor she was promised to, and the Viennese painter who copied Velázquez's royal portraits there as a student and later said there were only two painters, Velázquez and himself.

The New Paris, 1877

Spring 1877. Caillebotte and Monet paint the same new quarter of Paris and show it in the same exhibition.

Who Got There First

Kandinsky is usually called the first abstract painter. A Swedish painter had got there years before.

Monet, Watched

Argenteuil, 1874. Manet spends the summer with Monet, and Monet becomes a subject as well as a painter.