About myself, and this site
Hi, my name is Paul and I'm an IT Professional, living and working in Ballarat, Victoria,
Australia. My background is in mainframe computing, rather than PC/internet applications,
which is why this is such a basic site (plain old HTML).
Art has always been something I enjoy, I even studied it for a few years after
leaving high school (you can see the remains of which here).
I'm also a bit of a collector of bits and pieces, and that's where some of the material
for this site comes from.
When I was in art school in the early 1980s, virtually no mention was made of the master classical
painters of the later part of the 19th century. I, like many others, only re-discovered these
great painters in the final decade of the 20th century.
I quite like the work from the French academy in that period. One favourite is William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who has been very well represented in art prints and on the internet. Another is the less well known Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. His painting "Chloe" is famous locally, and is on permanent display at Young and Jackson's Hotel in Melbourne.
Unlike Bouguereau very little of Lefebvre's work was available to the wider public, as most was held in private collections. Likewise, all I could find on the internet at the time was about 14 images of individual paintings. It was in response to this I started my Lefebvre virtual gallery in 2002, to bring together as many digital images of his work as I could find into one reference source. To the best of my knowledge, this is now the largest single image archive of Lefebvre's work available on-line (and it's nice to see so many of the images first posted on this site now being re-posted, shared and enjoyed on hundreds of other sites across the net).
I can't talk about favourites without mentioning one of my favourite Australian artist, Norman Lindsay.
Working a little later than his French counterparts, he was less restrained in his depictions. There
are a few postcards with samples of his work on my Art Cards page, and
I have included links to some excellent Norman Lindsay sites below.
The other galleries mostly feature scans of artworks from Fine Art Cards and Postcards that I have acquired over time.
Legal Disclaimer: This is a non-profit site for research use and personal interest only.
All artwork images on this site are displayed for educational purposes under the fair use doctrine.
Credit is given to the source of all images in the reference section on each gallery page.
Any images not in the public domain remain the property of the respective copyright owners, and no
infringement of their rights is intended.
Highly Recommended Sites: If you enjoy beautiful art images,
then the following virtual gallery sites are a must see:
Art Renewal Center
- Huge site, lots of info and many galleries of classical art.
Art Magick
- Another great site, with galleries on many artists.
Norman Lindsay
- Comprehensive information, and virtual galleries
Lindsay Gallery
- The official Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum
Thanks for stopping by. I hope you found something of interest or use at this site.
I welcome any e-mail feed back at paule24@hotmail.com.