Painting of Nana on a book

« Completed in 1880, Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author Émile Zola. Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series.

The novel tells the story of Nana Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class cocotte during the last three years of the French Second Empire.»

wikipedia/Nana/novel


I found these paintings of Nana, here on the web. And I tried to identify each painter. But, as you can see, I need help! Feel free to propose artist names.

The alphabetical order usually leads me to present the artworks on my blog, ie by the title. Today it's impossible though. Because the paintings of Nana have no real title. But I've more than one trick up my sleeve and I gave them a number: the number is their weight in pixels. The first one is the lightest (small and sometimes pixelated, sorry); the last, the heaviest.

Paintings only.

 # 156 –– Paintings only? Oops, not here. By the way, door means by in Dutch

 # 160 –– Titian (Tiziano Vecellio). Thank you, "Search Google with an image instead of text." (A nice useful place, but not 100% sure the link will work.)

 # 164 –– Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

 # 168 ––  Alexander Dobkin, we can read it.

 # 180 –– ? [It looks like something from von Stuck. Thank you, Roger!]

 # 188 –– Dance at Bougival by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

 # 201 –– 35¢...

 # 205 –– Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

 # 221 –– Hubert-Denis Etcheverry. Thank you again, SGwaIIoT.

 # 233 –– La Loge by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

 # 238 –– ? [My friend Luce sent me an email: Nana no 238 est une peinture de Tamara de Limpika.] Nope, Luce, it's Vargas (Alberto Varga), Peruvian painter of pin-up girls.

 # 242 –– ?

 # 246 –– Nana by Manet.

 # 258 –– ?

 # 303 –– Woman in a Corset by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

 # 307 –– I would say Toulouse-Lautrec again.

 

# 315 –– The Umbrellas (detail) by Renoir.

 # 319 –– ?

 # 340 –– "Completed unexpurgated translation"!

 # 389 –– ?

# 397 –– ?

 # 602 –– Amedeo Modigliani.

 # 610 –– ?

 The last one (a Turkish translation) is so very soft!


Two women inspired the author Emile Zola for his famous courtisane Nana: Blanche d'Antigny & Valtesse de la Bigne.

 La Madeleine pénitente (modèle: Blanche d'Antigny) painting by Paul Baudry 

Valtesse de la Bigne painting by Henri Gervex

Half-remembered songs

Matt Adrian, The Mincing Mockingbird, paints birds with acrylic on birch panels.

A Cage Called Sodom

 

A Financially Unstable Mess, But at the Liquor Store They Call Me Ma'am

A Plain Story Simply Told, Sprinkled Here and There with Magnificent Blasphemy

A Strong Determination to Get the Best out of Life Is Directly Responsible for This Waking Nightmare

Another Drink Wouldn't Hurt - I Only Live Two Years

Dancing in the Acacias, and Time Looked the Other Way

Daytime Napping Is for Amateurs

Dubstepping to Dad-Rock

Finding the Courage to Endure by Posting Banal Responses to the Banal Posts of Online Friends

Fireside Cowboy Ballads About Those Cool New Slot Machines at the Indian Casino

Had I But Hands to Put About Your Throat

I Cannot Believe I Was Brought back from the Brink of Extinction for THIS

It Had Seemed Such Innocent Pleasure

It Was a Bitter Blow, Delivered with Panache and a Bit More Emotional Violence Than I Am Used to

Overdressed and Underappreciated

Should the Opportunity Arise, I've Made up Some Titillating Tales

The Reluctant Omnivore

The Unsung Magnificence of Half-Remembered Songs

There Are Some That Believe Adultery Is Grounds for Being Unfriended on Facebook

There Is Always Room Within the Tabernacle of Extinction

Twenty-Five Sure-Fire Conversation Killers for Hitchhikers

Unsatisfied with Any Reaction Short of Breathless Amazement

 Wintering in Terra Incognita

« Matt Adrian's lush acrylic paintings of birds range from the delightfully cute to the decidedly sinister. His uniquely soulful, minimalist avian portraits seem to gaze out at the world with the unknowable gaze of wildness.

« Adrian's distinctive titles juxtapose the primal existence of birds with the often awkward folly of modern human existence.

« He has published two books: It Is Folly to Assume My Awesome Lies Dormant: The Paintings of the Mincing Mockingbird and The Mincing Mockingbird Guide to Troubled Birds.

« Matt Adrian [The Mincing Mockingbird] lives in California with his wife, artist Kim Bagwill [The Frantic Meerkat].»


Source: The Mincing Mockingbird web site, The Mincing Mockingbird blog

Etsy web site with his wife

 

Writing Novels Solely for the Dedication Page Drama

Darwin with the finches

HMS Beagle in the Galapagos Islands painting by John Chancellor

On the second voyage of the HMS Beagle the young naturalist Charles Darwin was on board, and his work would eventually make Beagle one of the most famous ships in history.

Charles Darwin in 1881

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) was a British scientist who laid the foundations of the theory of evolution and transformed the way we think about the natural world.

Cactus finches by Elizabeth Gould (from Charles Darwin – The Zoology of the Voyage of the HMS Beagle, 1839-43)

« Darwin's finches are the emblems of evolution. The birds he saw on the Galapagos Islands during his famous voyage in 1831-1836 changed his thinking about the origin of new species and, eventually, that of the world's biologists.

Darwin wondered about the changes in shape of bird beaks from island to island.» (William Cromie)

Darwin's drawing

Darwin studied the wildlife on the Galapagos Islands, a group of islands on the equator, almost 1,000 kilometers west of Ecuador. He noticed that the finches on the different islands there were fundamentally similar to each other, but showed wide variations in their size, beaks and claws from island to island. For example, their beaks were different depending on the local food source.

Darwin concluded that, because the islands are so distant from the mainland, the finches that had arrived there in the past had changed over time. (Source)

( R ) evolution.

 Drawing of 14 species of Galapagos finches by ornithologist David Lack

 Darwin and the finches by Kayla Skogh

 Darwin's finches by Jada Fitch

 Darwin by Jenny Parks

 Darwin's finches by Charley Harper

Darwin's finches by Diana Sudyka

Darwin with the finches by Joanna Barnum





Museum of Life - Darwin's finches

Darwin's mockingbirds by H. Douglas Pratt

Bombycilla

The waxwings are a group of passerine birds characterized by soft silky plumage. Their fluffy feathers almost look like fur.

Waxwing bird, drawing by wildlife artist Lukasz Bednarz

Waxwings are sleek, masked birds with unusual red, waxy deposits at the tips of their secondary feathers. Okay! Now that explains their name in English.

Waxwings are very vocal birds: jaseur (chattering) in French!

Bombycilla, their genus name, is a French ornithologist's attempt at Neo-Latin for silktail, from Latin bombyx (silk / silk moth) and scientific Latin cilla (tail).

The French ornithologist was Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot (1748–1831).

Vieillot described a large number of birds for the first time, especially those he encountered during the time he spent in the West Indies and North America, and 26 genera established by him are still in use.

He was one of the first ornithologists to study changes in plumage. 

He wrote and published books on birds, with illustrations by his friend Jean Baptiste Audebert. 

AUDEBERT, JB / VIEILLOT, LJP - Le Promerops Rayé. Pl. 7, published in Paris, 1800–1802

Waxwings are small fruits aficionados. Birds and berries are both very photogenic and their reunion creates a stunning color palette, especially in winter time, with the beautiful color (gray-purple-grey) of the naked tree branches.

Hope you'll enjoy these photos of waxwings picking snowy berries by Russian photographer Irina Makushina.

 © Irina Makushina

  © Irina Makushina

  © Irina Makushina

  © Irina Makushina

  © Irina Makushina

Bohemian Waxwings Eating Apples in Maine

Waxwing bird, drawing by wildlife biologist and science illustrator Kevina Vulinec