The yellow drape is the painting. It catches the light like liquid gold against her skin.

She sits under the blossom just thinking. Godward filled every painting with jasmine, marble, and Mediterranean light.

The title is Italian for "sweet doing nothing." Godward understood that the ancient world had a name for what we call laziness, and they were right to celebrate it.

The word "idyll" is overused these days but here it means exactly what it should: a small, perfect, unbothered moment.

Everyone in this room is real. Hugo, Dumas, Paganini, George Sand. Liszt plays and they all listen. It's part portrait, part fantasy, part love letter to an entire era of European artistic life. The bust of Beethoven watches from the piano.

Classical landscape at its most idealized—fountains, distant mountains, people at leisure. Valenciennes built entire worlds that never existed but feel like they should have.

The ruins of a Greek city in Sicily, painted with the kind of melancholy that only someone who really thought about the passage of time could produce.

Cropsey managed to make English landscape look not just beautiful but mythological, as if Warwick Castle were built by gods rather than men.

Crane's version of spring: women draped in flowers, walking through a world that blooms because they're in it.

Cabanel dared to make the devil beautiful and vulnerable, which was a bold move in 1847. The putti in the background feel almost mocking by comparison.

The subject of the painting is the love story of Hellelil, who fell in love with her bodyguard Hildebrand. When her father hears of it, he sends her seven brothers to kill Hildebrand. The painting depicts the moment before Hildebrand goes out to meet the brothers, kissing Hellelil one last time, and parting with the injuction to "say never my name". Hildebrand subdues each brother until he comes to the youngest; than Hellelil, forgetting his request, calls to him to plead for mercy; as Hildebrand complies, the youngest brother kills him. Said brother takes Hellelil back to their house by dragging her from his horse, tortures her, and locks her up in a tower for many days, eventually selling her for a church bell.

Eros aims his arrow and she pushes him away—playful, defiant, and a little frightened. Bouguereau was making a joke about love and the trouble it brings, and doing it with perfect anatomy. Wrote a comment about this before and it's connection to another artwork of his: William-Adolphe Bouguereau has two interesting paintings: A Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros and Elegy. What's interesting is, in the former, it looks like a girl is fighting against love in a very joyful way, she is smiling and having fun in saying no, so does Eros enjoying her slight resistance of love, it's almost like he is saying I know you want love. The latter painting, I would believe, takes place in the same location, years after, the angel looks haggard, exhausted and almost depressed, the girl looks heartbroken and sad, it's like Eros had won his first battle in the former painting, and here we see how it ended.

The intimacy here is almost uncomfortable, you feel like you shouldn't be watching. Bouguereau painted motherhood more honestly than almost anyone else. No posing, no performance, just a quiet human moment.

There's nothing lazy about this figure, she's earned this pause.

You will only understand this artwork of a mother, a poor one, when you see other Bouguereau works of mothers.

Russia at its most beautiful, frozen, silent.

She waits on the marble steps, looking out at the sea. What she's waiting for doesn't matter. The painting is about the act of waiting itself. Same place as Ask Me No more, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

The title comes from Tennyson—"Ask me no more" is itself a plea to stop

Eugene Fromentin was an author and painter, I read about his sad substory with his childhood friend who went with other man and rejected his proposal. He went to Algeria and fell in love with Algerian Sahara. I've many orientalism comments on this painting, but what attracts me most is the beautiful blue sky. I've seen real beautiful night skies in my life, so to be fair, this is not really beautiful one, however, comparing it to our night sky nowadays, it's really beautiful. The increased use of light-emitting diodes causes our night sky to undergo a 10% decrease annually. People would be surprised when you tell them that skies in works like Sterrennacht were not a matter of intellectual view but in fact skies used to look like that casually. Today you would have to go very near in the desert to get such a look, and even that is not comparable to how it used to be. (talking about this remind me of this great episode that I watched as a kid, "Boys, you're going to remember this for the rest of your lives"). Check this part from رسائل الامام الغزالي about skies:

For some resaon I find this painting very interesting, but I can not explain it. I read that "the child represents our natural inclination towards the raw beauty and simplicity of the natural world." and "female figure and her classical setting symbolize the pursuit of knowledge, refinement, and the ideals of civilization" but I do not quite get those explanations. I think it's just a beautiful piece of art.

There's nothing calm about this painting. The Black Sea here is threatening, alive, and enormous.

The color of this grotto is beyond what you'd think paint could do. Aivazovsky must have seen this exact shade of blue and decided nobody would believe him unless he painted it.

Aivazovsky's moonlit seas are almost a genre unto themselves.