Painter: Emile Vernon
Colors: 90
Price: 1125 Euro
Dimensions: 25 * 30 cm

Vernon produced a number of charming portraits of women and children using the medium of oil with the ease and confidence of pastel. Vernon captured with his palette the fleeting transient, pale qualities of the female face and placed them against the silks and fine fabrics or natural settings in which he preferred to array his sitters. The artist excels rather as an academic than as a powerful painter. It would appear that the build up of his canvases never caused him the slightest trouble. He was also a talented flower painter.

Painter: François-Joseph Navez
Colors: 90
Price: 2040 Euro
Dimensions: 40 * 34 cm

The Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1824
This unusual depiction of the Massacre of the Innocents, signed and dated 1824 on the golden bowl in the foreground, is one of a series of religious paintings which Navez executed following his return from Rome in 1821. Here, the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem of two years old and under, as King Herod sought to rid himself of the Christ Child (Matthew 2:16), is depicted only in a frenzied vignette on the upper left. Rather than mayhem, Navez explored the personal, intensely emotional dimensions of the tragedy.
His use of half-length figures close to the picture plane, and of saturated colors reminiscent of 17th-century Flemish traditions, recall the history paintings that David was executing at the same time. The painting moves away from Davidian naturalism, however, towards a more austere purity of line and stylization of form which owe a debt to Ingres, as does the languid arm that the mother in the center folds across her head. The enamel paint surface that Navez achieves is also reminiscent of Ingres. Original to Navez, perhaps, is the anticlockwise pinwheel movement of the four heads on the right which comes to a halt in the confrontation of profiles on the left.

François-Joseph Navez (Charleroi, 1787 - Brussels, 1869) was a Belgian neo-classical painter. A pupil of Jacques-Louis David, he spent five years in Italy between 1817 and 1822. He was a very successful portrait painter. He also painted many mythological and historic subjects.