2 artists were my inspiration for "The Whitérose Tree", both hailing from the 2 styles mentioned above respectively.
Alfons Maria Mucha
Born in the town of Ivančice, Moravia, drawing had been his first love since childhood. He worked at decorative painting jobs in Moravia, mostly painting theatrical scenery, then in 1879 moved to Vienna to work for a leading Viennese theatrical design company, while informally furthering his artistic education. When a fire destroyed his employer's business in 1881 he returned to Moravia, doing freelance decorative and portrait painting. Count Karl Khuen of Mikulov hired Mucha to decorate Hrušovany Emmahof Castle with murals, and was impressed enough that he agreed to sponsor Mucha's formal training at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.
Alfons Mucha, a Czechoslovakian painter was famous for his Art Nouveau designs in paintings, posters, advertisements, book illustrations, as well as designs for jewelry, carpets, wallpaper, and theatre sets. His work frequently featured beautiful healthy young women often surrounded by lush flowers, which sometimes formed haloes behind the women's heads. He believed that art existed only to communicate a spiritual message, and nothing more.
Franz Xaver Winterhalter
He was a German painter who frequently painted portraits of royalty during the Victorian Era. He was appointed court painter of Louis-Philippe, the king of the French, who commissioned him to paint individual portraits of his large family. Winterhalter would execute more than thirty commissions for him. This success earned the painter the reputation of a specialist in dynastic and aristocratic portraiture, skilled in combining likeness with flattery and enlivening official pomp with modern fashion. But he was a victim of his own success and for the rest of his life he would work almost exclusively as a portrait painter.
He was skilled at posing his sitters to create almost theatrical compositions. His works was very detailed and hence created a subtle intimacy within his work. He was able to convey texture of fabrics, furs and jewelry very well. He painted very rapidly and very fluently, designing most of his compositions directly in the canvas, which were elegant, refined life-like and pleasantly idealised.
Why Alfons and Franz?
While both artists’ styles had influenced me somewhat, I was interested in exploring the Victorian style and mostly took after Franz, and his style to be detailed and his way of composition.
However, it was Alfons’ believe and vision that art is to represent spirituality that inspired me to draw something deeper and inclined to spirituality. From this I had the idea to merge the 2 schools of ideas together to come up with a Victorian Lady turning into a tree.
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