Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant was a French Orientalist painter active in the late 19th century. Though his work was popular and in demand during his time, he is not well known today.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is currently featuring an exhibition of work by Constant and his contemporaries: Marvels and Mirages of Orientalism: From Spain to Morocco, Benjamin-Constant in His Time, that runs until May 31, 2015.

In the process of promoting the show (in a manner that should serve as an example of so many other museums that remain clueless about using their websites to advantage for that purpose), the museum has also provided the best selection of images of Constant’s work that I’ve found on the web.

In addition, the museum has published a book based on the show, which is also available from Amazon and other sources.

Constant was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel, also an Orientalist painter, and Constant worked in the style for many years. In his later career he changed his approach, and devoted himself more to society portraits and large murals.

English Victorian painter Henry John Yeend King studied painting in London and in Paris, learning both traditional academic techniques and the new plein air methods that were coming into practice.

Yeend King specialized in landscape and genre paintings of rustic scenes, often with young women going about their chores, gathering flowers, waiting for and riding in small ferries, or strolling through the countryside.

His paint application was sometimes quite direct and textural, to the point of appearing roughly applied in places. Unfortunately, it is perhaps that character that makes some of the reproductions of his work on the web appear to suffer from spotted reflections in their photographs.

The best reproductions of his work I’ve found are on BBC’s Your Paintings, and the Bonham’s auction site. Images on the latter are zoomable, but there is no thumbnail index; I’ve provided a Google Images search link

If the link I’ve given here doesn’t work for you, go to images.google.com and type in: “Henry John Yeend King site:bonhams.com”. You can try the same thing with Sotheby’s, but the results are a little less consistent.

Portrait of a Woman, Thomas Wilmer Dewing

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use the zoom or download icons under the image. Original sheet is roughly 22 x 19 in. (57 x 48 cm).

The portrait is drawn in silverpoint, the most prevalent of the variations of metalpoint drawing. The artist draws with a thin wire of the soft metal — embedded in wooden rod or metal holder — usually on paper prepared with gesso or other coating. The initial gray metal lines gradually turn to a soft brown on exposure to air over a period of months.

The result is a uncannily delicate line, ghostly and etherial in the case of Dewing’s tonal approach.

Like ink drawing, there is no easy method of correction, and the lines as they are put down will remain.

From the placement of the head on the paper, it looks as though Dewing was allowing room to draw at least the head and shoulders, if not a half-length portrait. Perhaps he was unable to finish for one reason or another, or perhaps he decided to stop at the point of achieving the exquisite beauty of the drawing in its current state.

Originally from Wisconsin and now based in Oregon, Jennifer Diehl is a painter who brings a controlled but lively palette and painterly sensibility to a range of subjects: still life, landscape, cityscape, interiors, and figurative.

Her landscapes feel fresh, unhurried and naturalistic, while still retaining the immediacy of location painting, and she often plays with interesting variations in the character of light, from brilliant sunlight to the glow of lanterns.

Her still life subjects, sometimes traditional and sometimes interestingly different, are particularly appealing in their crisp, confident rendering, and nicely tactile sense of surface and texture.

The artwork on Diehl’s website is divided into subject categories; note that most have additional archive pages.

You can also find her work on the sites of the galleries in which she is represented (linked below).

Alina Chau is a painter, illustrator and animation artist whose whimsical images are rendered in lively applications of watercolor.

Her work includes elements of children’s book illustration, concept design, naturalistic painting, stylized design elements and the influence of traditional Chinese ink painting. I particularly enjoy the way she incorporates design elements, textures and patterns into her images, often in way that suggests movement.

Since I last wrote about Chau in 2006, she has added to her online presence with a new website and a revised and expanded blog, and has engaged in several new projects.

Her website includes galleries of illustration, storyboards, gallery art and sketches. You can also find additional work, professional and personal, on her blog, Ice Cream Monster Toon Cafe, and on other online portfolios, linked below.

There are several interviews with Chau, linked from her website, some of which include tools and techniques.

St Martin in the Fields, William Logsdail

Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons, original is in the Tate Britain.

I love the atmosphere in this painting of London’s Trafalgar Square by Victorian painter William Logsdail — the wetness of the stone, the textures of fabrics, and the contrast between the muted grays and touches of higher chroma color.