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Johannes Vermeer And Albert Bierstadt

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Two painters in history are known for their abilities to depict scenes in such realistic manners that you would never know they are actually producing paintings. These painters are named Johannes Vermeer and Albert Bierstadt. Both men came from different times and ethnic backgrounds. Dutchman, Johannes Vermeer was born in the year 1632 and passed away in 1675. Over his lifetime Vermeer used a style of painting that causing modern day historians and art lovers to struggle to figure out how he painted such realistic scenes that mimicked photographs. His style combined many pictorial depth cues while maintaining a strong sense of realism throughout the relatively few paintings he produced. Next is Prussian artist Albert Bierstadt, who was born in the year 1830 and passed away in 1903. Bierstadt is widely known for his highly realistic paintings of the American West landscape. Combining pictorial depth cues and visual realism were his specialties, while raising a large degree of ‘illusionism’ in his paintings. In his lifetime Bierstadt produced over 500 paintings, most of which pertained to the places he visited on his journey across the United States. While Bierstadt and Vermeer were two very different men, their works shared common elements. Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and The Concert and Bierstadt’s Yosemite Valley share many of the same pictorial depth cues, realism, and even a sense of illusionism. In order to analyze how these works of art are alike, three questions must be

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