The Locations That Inspired Famous Oil Paintings THEN & NOW. See the painting, see the location.

Edward Hopper's East Wind Over Weehawken Then & Now Photo and Oil Painting.

Edward Hopper's East Wind Over Weehawken was painted in 1934. It is a street scene depicting the gabled house at 1001 Boulevard East at the corner of 49th Street in Weehawken, New Jersey. It is considered one of Hopper's most significant works. A lot of things have changed in the over 80 years since this work of art was completed. The house is still there, but the empty lot at the bottom right is still an empty lot, now made into a small park. This painting was recently sold for $40.5 million at Christie's in New York in 2013, which is a record price for his work.

Edward Hopper's East Wind Over Weehawken Oil Painting & Tilt-Shift Photo.

The Edward Hopper East Wind over Weehawken oil painting is a relatively flat painting where everything is in focus, with a very shallow depth of field. The obvious choice would be to selectively focus on the main house in the painting on the corner, but that did little in producing any desired effect. Therefore, the focus was changed to the lamp posts and the middle house.

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Photo and oil painting of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks from the past and present.

People say the scene was inspired by a diner since demolished in Greenwich Village, Hopper's neighborhood in Manhattan. Hopper himself said the painting "was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." Additionally, he noted that "I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger." This has led Hopper aficionados to look for the original location in vain.

The location of the Edward Hopper Nighthawks Oil Painting Then & Now has been discovered.

The spot usually associated with the former location is a now-vacant lot known as Mulry Square at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue, and West 11th Street, about seven blocks North West of Hopper's studio on Washington Square. But, according to an article by Jeremiah Moss in The New York Times, this cannot be the location of the diner that inspired the painting, as a gas station occupied that lot from the 1930s to the 1970s. Moss located a land-use map in a 1950s municipal atlas showing that "Sometime between the late '30s and early '50s, a new diner appeared near Mulry Square." The restaurant was located immediately to the right of the gas station, "not in the empty northern lot, but on the southwest side, where Perry Street slants." Either way, the supposed location is not the location.

So in 1942, when it was sold, no one took a photo of the possible location of the painting? No one made a sketch? No one made any notes about the location? Is everything left to speculation?

Well, I think we have been led on a wild goose chase and the true location is Greenwich St. and Christopher St. Since there is a Greenwich Ave. and a Greenwich St., it could have been easily confused or Hopper changed the street to throw people off from finding it.

The NYC location of the Edward Hopper Nighthawks Oil Painting.

So why these streets, Greenwich St and Christopher Ave? Look at the painting and the then and now photo comparison. You see that the corner of the building has curved glass. Also, the window in the background is shorter in length overall than the window in the foreground. Now, look at the photo. The left-side window is shorter than the right-side window in length. But most importantly, the corner of the building itself is rounded, therefore able to accommodate a rounded curved glass window as in the painting. This type of glass would not work or be put in a flat right-angle corner building. Yet, everyone has been looking for the location without regard to the architectural style of the building, which is one of the most important factors.

Adaptation of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks Oil Painting.

It is Hopper's most renowned and is a standout among the most unmistakable compositions in American art. Within months of its completion, it was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3,000 and has stayed there from that point forward.

In the background, through the darkened windows of an anonymous storefront, one can just make out a cash register, a silent but meaningful symbol of money's dominant and indispensable role in modern society. The mysterious character seen from behind seems to be staring into the glass in his hand, lost in thought. He resembles the classic Hollywood stereotype of the "stranger." The customers on the far right side of the counter recall images from American cinema of that period; the woman checking her nail polish, the man with the cigarette staring into space. The hands of the two figures are almost touching, but Hopper gives no clue whether or not this contact is intentional. The barman is the only character who shows any vitality at all; rather, he is doing his job, not interacting with the customers.

Subtle but very important detail is the series of round stools at the counter. These empty stools wait for other customers, other stories, and other secrets to emerge from the night. They also embody what is perhaps the most bitter aspect of Hopper's urban scenes: the chance encounters, the fleeting contacts, and the hidden recesses of private lives, all set in anonymous, monotonous, soulless contexts. The wide deserted sidewalk makes the scene strange, with all the figures pushed to the right of the composition, in the shelter of the night diner, while the ample stretch of empty street conveys a sense of loneliness and uneasiness.

Edward Hopper Nighthawks Oil Painting & Tilt-Shift Photo.

The Edward Hopper Nighthawks oil painting is a flat painting where everything is in focus, with very little depth of field. So, in determining which area to focus on, it was simply a choice of which person to concentrate on.

Read the interesting biography of Edward Hopper and see all the famous oil painting reproductions by Edward Hopper. Click Nighthawk if you like the oil painting and want to purchase it.

Oscar Claude Monet Arrival of the Normandy Train Gare Saint Lazare Then & Now Photo and Oil Painting.

The Gare Saint-Lazare was then and is now the biggest and busiest train station in Paris. Early in 1877, after his return to France from London, with the assistance of his companion Gustave Caillebotte, Claude Monet leased an apartment and a studio close to the Gare St-Lazare train station.

In the nearby Rue Moncey, he painted the first of 12 paintings showing this symbol of modernity. He showed seven of them, including this one, at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in April of that year. Legend has it that he masterminded having the standing trains fed with additional coal so he could watch and paint the effects of belching steam; dull gray when caught inside the station; white and cloud-like when seen against the sky. Monet's excellent perspectives of the Gare St-Lazare look like inside scenes, with smoke from the engines making an indistinguishable effect as clouds in the sky. Quick brush strokes show the sparkling motors to one side and the horde of travelers on the platform. This painting is one of only four remaining paintings of the inside of the station. Trains and railways had been depicted in earlier Impressionist works and by J M William Turner in his 'Rain, Steam and Speed', yet they were not generally regarded as stylishly satisfactory subjects.

Claude Monet: Arrival of the Normandy Train Gare Saint Lazare Oil Painting & Tilt-Shift Photo.

Tilt-shift Oscar Claude Monet's Arrival of the Normandy Train Gare Saint Lazare oil painting is a painting where everything is out of focus except for the front of the train. The steam locomotive's engine is the obvious focal point of the painting, but the smoke it generates is even more important.

Read the interesting biography of Oscar Claude Monet and see all the famous oil painting reproductions by Claude Oscar Monet. Click Arrival of the Normandy Train Gare Saint Lazare if you like the oil painting and want to purchase it.

Edvard Munch: Photos and oil painting of The Scream Then and Now.

The location of The Scream is Valhallvein road, which is a hillside road sitting above Oslo, Norway, and its harbor. Towards the upper left corner of the first photo, it shows the harbor jutting out, thereby separating the two coves that are shown in the painting.

It is said that the scene in The Scream was based on a real-life event located on the hill of Ekeberg, Norway, on a path with a safety railing. The faint city and landscape represent the view of Oslo and the Oslo Fjord. At the bottom of the Ekeberg hill was the crazy house where Edvard Munch’s sister was kept, and adjacent was also a slaughterhouse.

Normal people, standing on a dark forested road at night by themselves, might have uneasy feelings or fears. Now, you take a person that is starting to become slightly crazy and strange in the same scenario. And it is very easy to see how his mind would start to envision these sights and start to hear noises or voices.

Edvard Munch The Scream Oil Painting & Tilt-Shift Photo.

Tilt-shift Edvard Munch: The Scream: The most obvious area to do selective focus would be on the screamer, but highlighting that would do nothing to the painting since it is already such a powerful image. Highlighting the bay and the two people walking rather than the screamer adds to the mystery of the image.

Read the interesting biography of Edvard Munch and see all the famous oil painting reproductions by Edvard Munch. Click The Scream if you like the oil painting and want to purchase it.

Sidney Richard Percy A Rest on the Roadside Then & Now Photo and Oil Painting.

Sidney Richard Percy's art interests were not restricted to painting. He was also a novice photographer in a day when photography was revolutionary and exciting, yet still a poorly comprehended medium. He habitually used his own photographs of gypsies in the Barnes or Wimbledon Commons as the basis for the figures in his oil paintings.

An illustration of this is Storm Gathering on Cader Idris, North Wales, which he exhibited in 1856 at the Royal Academy. It has the same young gypsy girls in it as one of seven of his photographs on exhibit in the Victoria and Albert Museum. These same young ladies appear in his 1861 work A Rest on the Roadside, shown above, and they show up once more, but reversed, in his 1873 version of Llyn-y-Ddinas, North Wales, demonstrating that he rehashed themes when convenient. The photo of the two gypsy girls in Barnes Common, London, is used as a part of this artwork. On the left side is the photograph used as the model for his painting; on the center photo is the full painting; the girls are in the lower center of the painting, and the right photo shows the enlarged girls in the painting.

Sidney Richard Percy, A Rest on the Roadside Oil Painting & Tilt-Shift Photo.

Tilt-shift Sidney Richard Percy, A Rest on the Roadside really looks like a miniature person placed on a landscape. The effect is simply achieved by highlighting a horizontal line through the figures and making the distant mountains completely out of focus.

Read the interesting biography of Sidney Richard Percy, and see all the famous oil painting reproductions by Sidney Richard Percy. Click A Rest on the Roadside if you like the oil painting and want to purchase it.

Francis Picabia Notre Dame The Effect Of Sunlight Then & Now Photo and Oil Painting.

The Dame Cathedral has been painted many times by numerous celebrated artists. Its play on light and dark shadows is outstanding. Picabia's painting, based on the perspective angle of the church, is painted from a higher location rather than from ground level.

So we assume he rented a small room across the Seine at a hotel in the nearby Place Du Petit Pont. From an upper-floor room in the hotel, he sketched and completed this oil painting. Only from a height can the perspective and angle of the cathedral be the same as in his oil painting. Most of the buildings in Paris are five or six stories tall.

Read the interesting biography of Francis Picabia, and see all the famous oil painting reproductions by Francis Picabia. Click Notre Dame The Effect Of Sunlight if you like the oil painting and want to purchase it.

Francis Picabia Port of Saint Tropez Evening Effect Then and Now Photograph and Oil Painting.

A greatly changed modern interpretation of the original location of the old port of Saint-Tropez. On the right side of the photo, you can see the Bailli de Suffren statue that is also on the right side of the painting.

Who is Saint-Tropez? Who has ever known a holy person named Tropez? In 55AD, one of Nero's centurions named Torpes refused to forsake his religion and was beheaded in Pisa. His body and head were placed in a boat, alongside a dog and a chicken. His body should be eaten by the creatures as a cover-up. However, when the boat glided into the estuary of what was then called Athenopolis, the head and body were still in place. The dog watched over it and protected it. The town's name was changed to Ecclesia Sancti Torpetis, and after the French Revolution, it became Saint-Tropez.

Francis Picabia Port of Saint Tropez Evening Effect Oil Painting & Tilt-Shift Photo.

Tilt-Shift Francis Picabia's Port of Saint Tropez Evening Effect is a rather flat oil painting with no depth of field. The alignment of the different scenes in the painting made it difficult to choose an area. Yet it was positioned on fishing boats and gave an absolutely excellent effect.

Click Port Of Saint Tropez Evening Effect by Francis Picabia if you like the oil painting and want to purchase it.

Camille Pissarro Statue of Henry IV Then & Now Photo and Oil Painting.

At the point where the Pont Neuf bridge connects and crosses the Île de la Cité, there stands a bronze equestrian statue of King Henry IV of France. This statue was initially commissioned in 1614 and raised on its pedestal by Pietro Francavilla in 1618. It was demolished in 1792 during the French Revolution but was rebuilt in 1818, following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

The bronze from a statue of Louis Charles Antoine Desaix was used to make the updated statue. This is also the bronze from the statue of Napoleon in Place Vendome, which was melted down. The new statue was cast from a mold constructed using a surviving cast of the original. Many paintings of this statue and the small square on the island have been made by many different artists.

Camille Pissarro's Statue of Henry IV, Oil Painting & Tilt-Shift photo.

Tilt-Shift The Camille Pissarro Statue of Henry IV is focused on the middle group of people while keeping a bit of the statue and base, which helps to accentuate the features of those individuals.

Read the interesting biography of Camille Pissarro, and see all the famous oil painting reproductions by Camille Pissarro. Click Pont Neuf The Statue Of Henri Iv Sunny Weather if you like the oil painting and want to purchase it.

Egon Schiele's Self-Portrait With Black Clay Pot Then and Now Photograph and Oil Painting The Origin of the Star Trek Live Long and Prosper Vulcan Hand Salute

Was Egon Schiele's girlfriend, Walburga "Wally" Neuzil, Jewish?

In 1911, Egon Schiele painted the oil painting Self-Portrait With Black Clay Pot, and this painting features him doing the Vulcan live long and prosper salute by Leonard Nimoy. The salute showed up in 1967 in the Star Trek second season-opening scene, "Amok Time." The Vulcan "live long and prosper" salute is based on a blessing used by the Jewish Rabbi during the worship service and was created by Nimoy, who drew on his adolescent synagogue experiences for inspiration.

The hand motion itself wasn’t the only part that was obtained from Jewish custom. The Jewish "Shalom Aleichem, peace be upon you" and the traditional response of "Aleichem Shalom, upon you, be peace" inspired "live long and prosper" and the lesser-known Vulcan response of "Peace and long life." The Vulcan salute is detailed in a mosaic in the Synagogue of Enschede, Netherlands. The building was built in 1927-1928 at the request of the Dutch-Jewish Community of Enschede. The mosaic text reads "בשמאלה עשר וכבוד" ("in her left-hand riches and honor"), which is a part of Proverbs 3:16.

Egon Schiele met the seventeen-year-old Walburga (Wally) Neuzil when he was 21 and she was only 17. She became his lover and model for quite a long time, depicted in several of Schiele's most striking compositions. She moved in with him in Vienna and modeled for him. Very little is known about her; she may have modeled for Gustav Klimt and might have been one of Klimt's mistresses. Schiele and Wally wanted to escape what they perceived as the claustrophobic Viennese milieu and went to the small town of Český Krumlov (Krumau) in southern Bohemia. Although Krumau was the birthplace of Schiele's mother, and now the site of a Schiele museum, he and his lover were driven out of the town by the residents, who objected to their way of life, which included his alleged work on the town's high school young ladies as models.

Is it conceivable that Walburga "Wally" Neuzil was Jewish? Schiele and Neuzil met in 1911; the painting Self-Portrait With Black Clay Pot was also done in 1911. No one is going to pose with this very particular and uncomfortable hand sign, without someone showing Egon how it is done with the left hand. Considering that Schiele never set foot in a Jewish temple to know about this gesture, the coincidence of him meeting Walburga and painting this hand sign both in 1911, suggests that he was shown how to do it, and incorporated it into the painting. The hand gesture is code for "riches and honor", and considering he was only 21, she did the gesture as a means of encouraging him to greater riches and success, the same way you would give a thumbs up OK sign.

Egon Schiele Self Portrait With Black Clay Pot Oil Painting & Tilt-Shift Photo.

Read the interesting biography of Egon Schiele, and see all the famous oil painting reproductions by Egon Schiele. Click Self-Portrait With Black Clay Pot if you like the oil painting and want to purchase it.

Everett Shinn Madison Square And The Dewey Arch Then & Now Photo and Oil Painting.

The arch stood at the intersection of 5th Ave. and Broadway in NYC. The painting is viewed from inside the park, looking toward the side of the Arch.

The Dewey Arch was a temporary triumphal arch that stood from 1899 to 1900 at Madison Square in Manhattan, New York. It had been raised for the parade in honor of Admiral George Dewey to commemorate his triumph in the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines in 1898.

With just around two months left, it was decided to build the arch and its colonnade in staff. This was material that had been utilized for the temporary structures of several World's Fairs. Modeled after the Arch of Titus in Rome, the Dewey Arch was decorated with the works of 28 stone carvers. It was topped by a large quadriga that showed four stallions drawing a ship. Around evening time, the arch was illuminated with electric lights.

After the parade on September 30, 1899, the arch quickly began to disintegrate. An effort to raise funds to have the arch rebuilt with more durable materials, as had been accomplished for the arch in Washington Square Park, fizzled. Therefore, the arch was demolished in 1900. The larger sculptures were sent to Charleston for an exhibit and were destroyed afterward. The left side photo shows the Dewey Arch, the middle photo is the intersection today, and on the right is the oil painting by Shinn. This is, painted from inside the park, looking toward the buildings on the left of the center photo.

Everett Shinn Tilt-Shift Photo and Oil Painting of Madison Square and the Dewey Arch.

Everett Shinn Madison Square And The Dewey Arch have a lot of details that are closely packed together. The challenge was isolating the mother and child while keeping a sense of movement.

Read the interesting biography of Everett Shinn, see all the famous oil painting reproductions by Everett Shinn. Click Madison Square And The Dewey Arch if you like the oil painting and want to purchase it.