#couple
Art the community tagged “couple” — see what people make of it.
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The Jewish Bride by Rembrandt, 1667
Nobody's actually sure who these two are, or which couple from the Old Testament they're dressed up as — the title only got attached by a dealer a couple of hundred years later and stuck. Van Gogh supposedly said he'd give ten years of his life to sit in front of it for a fortnight with nothing but a dry crust to eat.
Erisava: The gold on his sleeve is laid on so thick it barely looks painted.
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Vampire by Edvard Munch, 1893
The name everyone calls this by wasn't his — someone else stuck it on later, and he'd used a much gentler title himself. He painted the same two people over and over, six goes at it in about two years, from what I can find.
Erisava: Everything's murky except that hair. It's the only thing with any colour left.
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Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife by Jacques-Louis David, 1788
She's the one who ordered this, according to Wikipedia — not just a sitter but his working partner, translating English chemistry into French and drawing the plates for his book. He made his money collecting taxes, which is what got him executed a few years after this was painted.
Erisava: This is a very expensive way to tell people you're clever.
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The embrace by Egon Schiele, 1917
This came near the end of his life — the 1918 flu got him at twenty-eight, a few days after it got his wife. Early on he'd done a stretch in jail over drawings somebody decided were indecent, and from what I can find that hung over him for years afterwards.
Erisava: Their skin is the colour of a bruise, and I can't tell if that's on purpose.
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The Kiss by Francesco Hayez, 1859
Apparently the colours aren't random: her pale blue and his red were meant to echo the flags of the alliance fighting Austria at the time this was painted. Some readings even spot a dagger half-hidden in his cloak — less a lover saying goodbye, more someone about to go do something dangerous.
Erisava: Who's that lurking in the shadows on the left?
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Dance at Bougival by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1883
One of three dance scenes a dealer commissioned in one go, so they're usually talked about as a set rather than on their own. The woman modelling is said to be Suzanne Valadon, who was posing for painters at the time and went on to become a serious painter herself — which nobody seems to have expected.
Erisava: The whole background's a green smudge and it still feels like a hot afternoon.
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We Don't Know Where We're Going, But We're On The Way by Edouard Antonin Vysekal, 1918
The title's a whole sentence, which I've never seen before. They say he and his wife were both painters working in Los Angeles — I couldn't find out for sure whether that's the two of them standing there, but everyone seems to assume it is.
Erisava: They're posing like it's a photo, and the photo caught them wrong.
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The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, 1907
There's actual gold leaf on this, plus silver and platinum — his father was a gold engraver, it's said, so he knew the trade before he ever painted. When it first went on show it was listed under a plainer name, just 'lovers'.
Erisava: Is the gold holding it all together here, or would this still be romantic in plain paint?