Kitagawa Utamaro was an 18th century Japanese artist known for his portraits of women and nature prints. His work influenced European Impressionists with its use of light, shade, and cropped perspectives. Paul Delvaux was a 20th century Surrealist painter whose works featured uncanny images and references to hidden parts of human experience. Edward Hopper was an American painter from the 1930s known for his lonely, chilling scenes depicting alienation and isolation in modern urban and rural life.

1. Ekphrastic Poetry: poetry inspired by the visual arts

2. Kitagawa Utamaro (Japanese: 喜多川 歌麿 ) (ca. 1753 - 1806) (the name has occasionally been rendered as Outamaro, but that usage is archaic) was a Japanese printmaker and painter, and is considered one of the greatest artists of ukiyo-e . He is known especially for his masterfully composed studies of women, known as bijin-ga , although he also produced nature studies, particularly illustrated books of insects. His work reached Europe in the mid 19th century, where it was very popular, enjoying particular acclaim in France. He influenced the European Impressionists, particularly with his use of partial views, with an emphasis on light and shade.

3. … he influenced the European Impressionists late 1860’s – 1890’s

5. Girl Powdering her Neck

7. Surrealism: The Village of the Mermaids

8. Paul Delvaux (1942) Surrealism In Delvaux's paintings, the word or fragment of text brings with it a feeling of the uncanny that signals the return of an obsession or a repressed memory. In pictorial terms, Delvaux's concern with the return of hidden or buried elements of human experience is shown in the evocation of images revealing the deeper structure either of the human body or of visible reality. This deconstructive tendency also extends to the conventions of visual representation. So, Delvaux's pictures show a deep concern for perspective, for pictorial verisimilitude and the accurate presentation of details, an obsession also apparent in the play of mirror reflections, framing and optical devices. This paper shows how these preoccupations expressing the artist's anxiety in the face of reality, and its pictorial representation, are also revealed by the insertion of words into his paintings. Great online magazine: Image & Narrative

10. Edward Hopper: American Scene Painting Edward Hopper painted American landscapes and cityscapes with a disturbing truth, expressing the world around him as a chilling, alienating, and often vacuous place. Everybody in a Hopper picture appears terribly alone. Hopper soon gained a widespread reputation as the artist who gave visual form to the loneliness and boredom of life in the big city. This was something new in art, perhaps an expression of the sense of human hopelessness that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s. Edward Hopper has something of the lonely gravity peculiar to Thomas Eakins , a courageous fidelity to life as he feels it to be. He also shares Winslow Homer's power to recall the feel of things. For Hopper, this feel is insistently low-key and ruminative. He shows the modern world unflinchingly; even its gaieties are gently mournful, echoing the disillusionment that swept across the country after the start of the Great Depression in 1929. Cape Cod Evening (1939; 77 x 102 cm (30 1/4 x 40 in)) should be idyllic, and in a way it is. The couple enjoy the evening sunshine outside their home, yet they are a couple only technically and the enjoyment is wholly passive as both are isolated and introspective in their reveries. Their house is closed to intimacy, the door firmly shut and the windows covered. The dog is the only alert creature, but even it turns away from the house. The thick, sinister trees tap on the window panes, but there will be no answer.

11. Railroad Analysis