News

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December 1, 2010

Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca, an Italian artist, one of the greatest artists of the Early Renaissance. His painting art is characterized by its serene humanism and its use of geometric forms, particularly in relation to perspective. He wrote books on solid geometry and on perspective, and his works reflect these interests. Francesca's solid, rounded figures are derived from Masaccio, while from Domenico he absorbed a predilection for delicate colors and scenes bathed in cool, clear daylight. To these influences he added an innate sense of order and clarity. He conceived of the human figure as a volume in space, and the outlines of his subjects have the grace, abstraction, and precision of geometric drawings. Almost all of Piero's works are religious in nature - primarily altarpieces and church frescoes in which he presents scenes of astonishing beauty, with silent, stately figures fixed in clear, crystalline space. There are always large areas of white or near-white in his works, the skies are big, light and sunny. The monumental quality of his figures, the perspectival construction of the pictorial space and the spiritual calm of his compositions led, throughout Italy, to the final surmounting of the Gothic style and prepared the way for the artistic achievements of High Renaissance in Italy.

• Piero della Francesca Art, $19 (95 pictures)
• Piero della Francesca. Evaluation of art.
• Piero della Francesca. Life and art.

October 15, 2010

Our philosophy

You are the artist

"Without an audience, without the presence of spectators, these works would not fulfill the function for which they came into being. The viewer, then, is the ultimate artist." (Dali, 1959)

We regard you, the viewer, as the ultimate artist because without the viewer, art would not fully fulfill the function for which it was made, just as a book without the reader becomes just words on a page. And so, it is the level of interaction between the art and you that we deem to be one of our highest priorities. Art is subjective; your response to each piece is what matters most.

Whether you are a seasoned art lover or an amateur, we are here to provide knowledge and expertise on the vast works of humanity. With over five years of experience in the business of fine art, we offer our clients an unparalleled service in the art business; one that focuses on keeping the highest level of integrity, as well as providing clients with detailed information on each and every work of art.

We believe that art is a window into the soul and it has long reflected the soul of humanity; through triumphs, revolutions, through war, through the forming of nations, art has never left us, expressing and reflecting ourselves, guiding us, enlightening us, pointing the way. Crystallizing the ages of man in one profound work, and kept, to be experienced by the observer as long as that work exists.

We think it an honor and a gift to begin new art collections or add to those which may already exist. And so we are here to help you in presenting of such art to be experienced and enjoyed for many years to come.

August 2, 2009

Albrecht Durer

Albrecht Durer, a German painter and printmaker. Durer is generally regarded as the greatest Northern Renaissance artist. His famous paintings have been the subject of extensive analysis and interpretation. His watercolours mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his ambitious woodcuts revolutionized the potential of that medium. Durer's introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, have secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical works which involve principles of mathematics, perspective and ideal proportions. The quality and wide range of his works and themes, both in terms of content and formal aspects, are astonishing. Though his paintings were normally produced as the result of a commission - his two main areas of focus were portrait painting and the creation of altar pieces and devotional pictures - Durer enriched them with unusual pictorial solutions and adapted them to new functions. After his death, Durer remained one of the most highly regarded of artists for centuries, representing the process of transition from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance in Germany.

• Albrecht Durer Art, $25 (120 pictures)
• Albrecht Durer. Altar paintings.
• Albrecht Durer. Portraits.
• Albrecht Durer. Life and work.

July 10, 2009

Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter, pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Suprematism movement. Malevich developed his own abstract style based strictly on geometric elements, squares and rectangles. This style became known as Suprematism, referring to supremacy of "pure artistic feeling". In his first paintings he presented geometric forms in a limited range of colors, sometimes in black alone, against a white background. Later he introduced a broader range of colors as well as triangles, circles, and curved shapes. From the simplest geometric shapes, Malevich built an entire Suprematist universe. Kazimir Malevich's art and his Suprematist manifesto are amongst the most vital artistic developments of the 20th century. He claimed to have reached the summit of abstract art by denying objective representation. Infinity, eternity, God, zero of form, the void, blissful sense of liberating non-objectivity, pure art, supremacy of pure feeling, spirit of sensation which pervades everything...

• Kazimir Malevich Art, $25 (105 pictures)
• Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism. Manifesto.
• Kazimir Malevich. Black Square.

June 30, 2008

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse, French artist, known for his use of color to convey emotional expression, and his fluid, direct and original painting style. As a printmaker, but principally as a painter, Matisse is one of the best-known artists of the 20th century. His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art. Early in his career, he was the leader of the Fauvist movement, a painting style which focused on pure colors used in an aggressive and direct manner. Matisse believed the arrangement of colors was as important as a painting's subject matter to communicate meaning. He avoided detail, instead using bright color and strong lines to create a sense of movement. Although intellectually sophisticated, Matisse always emphasized the importance of instinct and intuition in the production of a work of art. He argued that an artist did not have complete control over color and form; instead, colors, shapes, and lines would come to dictate to the sensitive artist how they might be employed in relation to one another. He often emphasized his joy in abandoning himself to the play of the forces of color and design, and he explained the rhythmic, but distorted, forms of many of his figures in terms of the working out of a total artistic harmony.

• Henri Matisse Art, $29 (180 pictures)
• Henri Matisse. Life and work.
• Henri Matisse. The Music. The Dance.
• Henri Matisse. Simply painting and color.
• Henri Matisse. Paper cutouts.

June 2, 2008

Paul Klee

Paul Klee, Swiss German painter, one of the most original masters of modern art. Klee created images known for their fantastic dream-like qualities, wit, and imagination. He was influenced by many different art styles, including Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was also a master draftsman, and many of his works are elaborated line drawings with subject matter that grew out of fantasy or dream imagery. Throughout his career, Paul Klee used color in a variety of unique and diverse means, in a relationship that has progressed and evolved in a variety of ways. Klee was highly spiritual. Klee tended to see the world as a model, a kind of illusion run up by the cosmic clockmaker - God. This helps account for the toy-like character of his fantasies; if the world had no final reality, it could be represented in the freest, most schematic way. Klee's career was a search for the symbols and metaphors. Many of his paintings are a form of writing: they pullulate with signs, arrows, floating letters, misplaced directions, and commas; their code for any object makes no attempt at sensuous description, but instead declares itself to be a purely mental image, a hieroglyph existing in emblematic space. Now Klee has become a classic whose pictures are reproduced in their thousands. They have established themselves firmly in the collective memory of mankind.

• Paul Klee Art, $25 (150 pictures)
• Paul Klee. Life and work.
• Paul Klee. The freedom of creativity and artistic expression.

May 15, 2008

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall, Russian-born French painter and designer, distinguished for his surrealistic inventiveness. He is recognized as one of the most significant painters and graphic artists of the 20th century. His work treats subjects in a vein of humor and fantasy that draws deeply on the resources of the unconscious. Chagall composed his images based on emotional and poetic associations, rather than on rules of pictorial logic. Predating Surrealism, his early works were among the first expressions of psychic reality in modern art. Chagall's personal and unique imagery is often suffused with exquisite poetic inspiration. Chagall's distinctive use of color and form is derived partly from Russian Expressionism and influenced by French Cubism.

• Marc Chagall Art, $35 (175 pictures)
• Marc Chagall. Art, life, and symbolic expression.
• Marc Chagall. Biography.
• Marc Chagall. About my art.

May 1, 2008

Titian art updated

Titian art pack has been updated with 80+ new, museum quality images:

Titian Art, $29 (175 pictures)

March 1, 2008

MoodBook Art Deluxe™ Package

A luxury collector's item

You can buy the entire art collection with all of the packs for only $229! You save $399. Your computer desktop can look like an art gallery. You will have thousands of desktop backgrounds, and you will need at least ten years to view all of the pictures at a moderate pace of one picture a day. Or you can spend one week viewing one picture a minute. An authentic MoodBook art collection will be shipped to you as a digital download, packaged in a jewel digital box, decorated with genuine cover art graphics. A luxury package for real art lovers, those who appreciate the value of art: 34 art collections, 4700+ art pictures in 3900+ megabytes (MB). Limited time offer.

 $229

January 2, 2008

There's always something happening in the MoodBook world! Over the past few weeks, MoodBook web-site has gone through quite a few changes - some big, some small, all designed to make the web-site that much better for our readers. We've implemented major structural improvements across the entire set of pages. The underlying XML structure of the entire MoodBook web-site, along with the primary XSLT transformation, have been significantly revamped and improved. More things now operate fully automatically. The encyclopedia of art now features new sections explaining major art movements, such as Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, and several new art articles. More articles to follow in the near future. Enjoy the new look and feel of the encyclopedia and the art pages!

• http://www.moodbook.com/history/
• http://www.moodbook.com/art/

October 15, 2007

Ivan Aivazovsky

Ivan Aivazovsky, a Russian Armenian painter, most famous for his seascapes, which constitute more than half of his paintings. Aivazovskiy had a vivid and emotional understanding of reality. He always remained a romantic at heart even through his art could never separate itself from his academic background. The artist's expressive language was in complete harmony with the techniques that he used. As a young boy Aivazovskiy had known the sea, had loved it passionately and had known the secrets of its movements. It was this memory, together with his imagination, that was responsible for his best works. Rather than merely "reproduce" the sea, Aivazovskiy tells us its fables and thus makes a symbolic statement.

• Ivan Aivazovsky Art, $29 (145 pictures)
• Ivan Aivazovsky. Life and biography.

June 25, 2007

Caravaggio

Caravaggio is an Italian painter whose revolutionary technique of tenebrism, or dramatic, selective illumination of form out of deep shadow, became a hallmark of Baroque painting. Scorning the traditional idealized interpretation of religious subjects, he took his models from the streets and painted them realistically. His use of models from the lower classes of society in his early secular works and later religious compositions appealed to the taste for realism, simplicity, and piety in art. Equally important is his introduction of dramatic light-and-dark effects - termed chiaroscuro - into his works. Many Caravaggio's religious works feature violent struggles, grotesque decapitations, torture and death. Caravaggio was a "wild" and violent painter - screams of terror assume a prominent place in many of Caravaggio's works. The wildness of his personality exploded into his art.

• Caravaggio Art, $25 (100 pictures)
• Caravaggio. Art and life. Biography.
• Caravaggio. Early paintings by Caravaggio.
• Caravaggio. Late paintings by Caravaggio.

May 15, 2007

Francisco de Goya

Francisco de Goya is an innovative Spanish Romanticism painter, one of the great Spanish masters. As an artist, Goya was by temperament far removed from the classicals. In a few works he approached Classical style, but in the greater part of his work the Romantic triumphed. Straightforward candor and honesty are present in all Goya's works. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists. For the bold technique of his paintings, the haunting satire of his etchings, and his belief that the artist's vision is more important than tradition, Goya is often called "the grandfather of modern art". Francisco de Goya became one of the most influential figures in Spanish art of all time. He was also extremely important in the development of modern aesthetic sensibility, a forerunner of Romanticism, both in the content of his paintings, with their in-depth exploration of reality and references to the dream world, and in his very original technique.

• Francisco de Goya Art, $25 (115 pictures)
• Francisco de Goya. Life and biography.
• Francisco de Goya. Art of Goya.
• Francisco de Goya. Early paintings by Goya.
• Francisco de Goya. Intermediate paintings by Goya.
• Francisco de Goya. Late paintings by Goya.

May 1, 2007

Raphael

Raphael or Raffaello Sanzio is an Italian High Renaissance painter and architect of the Florentine school, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his art, his mastery of dynamic composition and movement. Raphael, like Michelangelo and Da Vinci, is one of the most famous artists of Italy's High Renaissance and one of the greatest influences in the history of Western art. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. By his artistic means Raphael has achieved constant movement throughout his paintings, without letting it become restless or unbalanced. Raphael was seen to have accomplished what the older generation had striven so hard to achieve: the perfect and harmonious composition of freely moving figures.

• Raphael Art, $25 (125 pictures)
• Raphael. Art, life and biography.
• Raphael. Frescoes in rooms of Vatican.
• Raphael. Religious paintings.
• Raphael. Madonnas.
• Raphael. Portraits.

April 5, 2007

Peter Paul Rubens

The Flemish and European Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens was the most renowned northern European artist of his day, and is now widely recognized as one of the foremost painters in Western art history. He was the proponent of the Baroque style which emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. By completing the fusion of the realistic tradition of Flemish painting with the imaginative freedom and classical themes of Italian Renaissance painting, he fundamentally revitalized and redirected northern European painting. Rubens was one of the most methodically assimilative and most prodigiously productive of Western artists. His abundant energy fired him to study and emulate the masters both of antiquity and of the 16th century in Rome, Venice, and Parma. His warmth of nature made him responsive to the artistic revolutions being worked by living artists, and robust powers of comprehension nourished his limitless resource in invention. He was able to infuse his own astounding vitality equally into religious and mythological paintings, portraits, and landscapes. He organized his complex compositions in vivid, dynamic designs in which limitations of form and contour are discounted in favour of a constant flow of movement.

• Peter Paul Rubens Art, $29 (200 pictures)
• Peter Paul Rubens. Art and life. Biography.
• Peter Paul Rubens. Early mythological paintings.
• Peter Paul Rubens. Late mythological paintings.
• Peter Paul Rubens. Early religious paintings.
• Peter Paul Rubens. Late religious paintings.
• Peter Paul Rubens. Portraits.
• Peter Paul Rubens. Landscapes.

February 1, 2007

Michelangelo

Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one of the greatest artists of all times. A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. Michelangelo is one of the greatest artists of all time, a man whose name has become synonymous with the word "masterpiece". As an artist he was unmatched, the creator of works of sublime beauty that express the full breadth of the human condition. Giorgio Vasari proposed that Michelangelo was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to be influential in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino (the divine one), an appropriate name given his intense spirituality. One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance, Mannerism.

• Michelangelo Art, $29 (180 pictures)
• Michelangelo. Art, life and biography.
• Michelangelo. Michelangelo's David.
• Michelangelo. Michelangelo's Pieta.
• Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. High Renaissance Masterpiece.
• Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Book of Genesis.
• Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. The Ignudi.
• Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Seven Prophets.
• Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Five Sibyls.
• Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Lunettes.
• Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Pendentives.
• Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. The Ancestors of Christ.
• Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. The Last Judgement.

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo's greatest glory, the Sistine Chapel, was started in 1508, and completed in 1512. The Sistine Chapel is considered to be the greatest artistic creation in the history of mankind. Michelangelo could possibly be the greatest artist who has ever lived. His paintings in Sistine Chapel, the triumph of the Renaissance humanist ideal, have changed the meaning of art forever.

January 15, 2007

The music catalog is now 250+ GB in size:

• 250+ gigabytes (GB) of music.
• Total play time: 56+ days round the clock.
• 310+ artists, 1300+ albums, 15500+ songs, average bitrate: 380 Kbps.

It now includes FLAC lossless audio files for hi-end music listening, and a lot of biographies and pictures of artists and groups. Enjoy the updated catalog!

January 1, 2007

"Life shakes the hand of death at the moment of conception..."

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch is a Norwegian Symbolist/Expressionism painter, whose intense, evocative treatment of psychological and emotional themes was a major influence on the development of Expressionism in the early 20th century. Munch is acclaimed to be the greatest artist of Norway and a father of Expressionism. Munch's art is now considered a significant force in modern art. His art is simple, direct, and vigorous in style, yet powerful in essence and in subject matter. Munch's art works penetrate beyond external appearances to the inner conditions of the subjects he painted. Munch's subject matter is symbolist in content, depicting a state of mind rather than an external reality. The purpose of Expressionism and Symbolism is to show emotions that the artist feels in hopes that the viewer will be stirred and feel them as well. The artist is not concerned with reality as it appears but with its inner nature and with the emotions aroused by the subject. To achieve these ends, the subject is frequently exaggerated, distorted, or otherwise altered in order to stress the emotional experience in its most intense and concentrated form. Interested in portraying not a random slice of reality, but situations with emotional content and expressive energy, Munch carefully calculated his compositions to create a tense atmosphere.

• Edvard Munch Art, $19 (75 pictures)
• Edvard Munch. Art, life, and world of symbolic expression.
• Edvard Munch. Art, paintings, and works.
• Edvard Munch. The Scream.

November 15, 2006

175 high-quality paintings by William Bouguereau

"One has to seek beauty and truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian..."

William Bouguereau

William Bouguereau, a French academic painter. His polished, refined technique and his sophisticated style represented the height of achievement in the French academic art tradition. His work was characterized by a highly finished, technically impeccable realism and a sentimental interpretation of his subject matter. Bouguereau paintings look professional, very skilful, and almost real. He masterfully brought together the elements of exquisite drawing, incredible coloration and perspective, and brilliant modeling and compositions. There can be little doubt that Bouguereau was one of the most talented painters of his time. Bouguereau received many honours in the 1860s and '70s as his career progressed; he exhibited regularly at the Salon for several decades and became for a time the most famous French painter of his day. As a proponent of official orthodoxy in painting, he played a major role in the exclusion of the works of the Impressionists and other experimental painters from the Salon. He exerted a wide influence, not only in France but in other countries, particularly the United States.

• William Bouguereau Art, $25 (175 pictures)
• William Bouguereau. Art and life. Biography.

October 2, 2006

Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt van Rijn is generally considered one of the greatest painters in European art history and the most important painter in Dutch history. Rembrandt is known as a painter of light and shade and as an artist who favoured an uncompromising realism. Rembrandt possessed an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises. No artist ever combined more delicate skill with more energy and power. In all, Rembrandt produced over 600 paintings, 300 etchings, and 2,000 drawings. He was a prolific painter of self-portraits, producing almost a hundred of them throughout his long career. Together they give a remarkably clear picture of the man, his appearance, and - more importantly - his deeper being, as revealed by his face. His immediate family, his wife Saskia, his son Titus, and his common-law wife Hendrickje, often figured prominently in his paintings. The core of Rembrandt's creative work, however, consists of biblical and - to a lesser extent - historical, mythological, and allegorical paintings.

• Rembrandt van Rijn Art, $25 (160 pictures)
• Rembrandt van Rijn. Art and life. Biography.
• Rembrandt van Rijn. Self-portraits.
• Rembrandt van Rijn. Greatest works.

September 6, 2006

A notable addition to our site is a new page that features a selection of free, ready-made wallpaper images available for free download! It is designed for those of you who want to first become accustomed to the way MoodBook desktop looks and feels prior to actually installing MoodBook on your computer. This is a nice demonstration of the original MoodBook look and feel:

• http://www.moodbook.com/wallpapers/

There are a lot of famous artists featured there. All images are hand-picked to create the most definitive collection. Just download and install wallpapers on your desktop as a desktop background. That's it. Make your desktop artsy! Enjoy this free collection!

June 20, 2006

Titian

Tiziano Vecellio, better known as Titian, the leader of the 16th-century Venetian school of the Italian High/Late Renaissance, and the greatest Venetian artist of the 16th century, the shaper of the Venetian coloristic and painterly tradition. Titian contributed to all of the major areas of Renaissance art, painting altarpieces, portraits, mythologies, and pastoral landscapes. He is one of the key figures in the history of Western art. His work, which permanently affected the course of European painting, provided an alternative, of equal power and attractiveness, to the linear and sculptural Florentine tradition championed by Michelangelo and Raphael; this alternative, eagerly taken up by Rubens, Diego Velazquez, Rembrandt, Eugene Delacroix, and the Impressionists, is still vital today. In its own right Titian's work often attains the very highest reach of human achievement in the visual arts.

• Titian Art, $29 (175 pictures)
• Titian. Art and life.
• Titian. Early art works by Titian.
• Titian. Late art works by Titian.

June 1, 2006

We are proud to announce a new major section on our web-site:

• http://www.moodbook.com/history/

This new section currently provides a brief explanation of history of arts starting from Renaissance period. The overview will improve over time with new content additions. This section will serve as a central index and common repository for all art articles on the MoodBook site and will be ever expanding with new articles over time, to create a complete story of art from the beginnings to our days.

Enjoy!

April 12, 2006

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas, French painter and sculptor, known especially for his paintings of ballet dancers. Other subjects that he frequently returned to include horse races, women bathing, and portraits of friends and relatives. Degas combined a modern focus on the creation of unusual compositions and the rendering of movement with a traditional emphasis on skillful drawing. Degas is usually classed with the Impressionism, but he stood somewhat apart from the other artists in this group. He did not share the Impressionists' fascination with natural light and its effects, and he disliked painting directly from nature, preferring instead to work in the studio. Moreover, Degas had little interest in landscape - the primary subject matter of the Impressionists - and concentrated instead on the human figure. Also unlike the Impressionists, Degas was interested in drawing and emphasized line in his work.

• Edgar Degas Art, $25 (170 pictures)
• Edgar Degas. Life and work.

March 20, 2006

Fantasy Art

Probably the best collection of fantasy and surreal art images by classic artists of '70s, '80s, and '90s. Psychedelic, visionary and fantasy art of both fantasy and surreal worlds. Fantasy art is an art of depictions of ancient myths and legends, as well as depictions of modern day fantasy in the form of divine interventions and other magical or supernatural forces. These are very common elements, and help distinguish fantasy art from other forms. Fantastic fantasy art worlds are filled with creatures, castles, dungeons, dragons, heroes and beautiful maidens, fairies, gods and monsters, all in a style inspired by classic illustrators.

• Fantasy Art, $29 (195 pictures)

February 6, 2006

Sci-Fi Art

Probably the best collection of sci-fi art images by classic artists of '70s, '80s, and '90s. Sci-fi stands for science fiction. Dreams of galaxies, planets and unknown dimensions. Cosmic scenes and planetary landscapes, futuristic realms, spaceships and alien buildings.

• Sci-Fi Art, $25 (125 pictures)

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain..."

January 6, 2006

MoodBook™ 2.5

The latest and greatest MoodBook™ 2.5 hits the streets!

1. New artistic effects for the background.
2. Ability to display pictures in full screen mode.
3. About three times faster now.
4. Ability to export your favorite pictures to JPEG files.
5. Minor tweaks, fixes, and more...

MoodBook 2.5 2.5 MB

Additionally, FAQ section is now available on the web-site.

November 1, 2005

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a French painter originally associated with the Impressionism movement. Renoir's paintings show vibrant light and color, and harmony of lines. Unlike many Impressionists who focused on landscapes, he painted not only landscapes, but people in intimate and candid compositions - sometimes applying paint with a palette knife rather than a brush. Renoir was one of the great worshippers of the female form, and he said "I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it". Recognized by critics as one of the greatest and most independent painters of his period, Renoir is noted for the intimate charm of his wide variety of subjects. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was undoubtedly one of the most prolific artists ever with about 6000 paintings completed during the 60 years he was active as an artist. Two of Renoir's paintings have sold for more than $70 million.

• Pierre-Auguste Renoir Art, $39 (300 pictures)
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Life and work.

October 12, 2005

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci, Italian High Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist and inventor. Leonardo da Vinci was an amazing painter. His paintings contained incredible detail, which made them seem almost real. This detail included things like various shadow effects and textures which gave the works lifelike appearances. Although Leonardo produced a relatively small number of paintings, many of which remained unfinished, he was nevertheless an extraordinarily innovative and influential artist. As a scientist Leonardo towered above all his contemporaries - Leonardo actually anticipated many discoveries of modern times. In anatomy he studied the circulation of the blood and the action of the eye. He made discoveries in meteorology and geology, learned the effect of the moon on the tides, foreshadowed modern conceptions of continent formation, and surmised the nature of fossil shells. He was among the originators of the science of hydraulics. He invented a large number of ingenious machines, many potentially useful.

• Leonardo da Vinci Art, $25 (80 pictures)
• Leonardo da Vinci. Life and biography.
• Leonardo da Vinci. Evaluation of art.

The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is often described as the most famous piece in art history. Guinness Book of Records lists the Mona Lisa as the highest insurance value for a painting in history.

October 1, 2005

The music catalog has been updated:

• 84+ gigabytes (GB) of music.
• Total play time: 29+ days round the clock.
• 160+ artists, 600+ albums, 8400+ songs, average bitrate: 260 Kbps.

Major structural improvements across all XSL source files which control automatic XML to HTML conversion for this online music catalog. Now this conversion is really fully automatic. This also resulted in some structural changes to the front end look and feel of the index page. Enjoy the new look and feel of the music pages!

August 2, 2005

"Everyone discusses my artwork and pretends to understand, when it is simply necessary to love... You must know I'm entirely absorbed in my work. These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed at expressing what I feel..."

Claude Monet

Claude Monet, French painter, is generally considered to be the most outstanding figure among Impressionists. The term Impressionism derives from his picture Impression: Sunrise. Monet was using the short brush strokes, which often looked rather like spots of paint, not lines. For this reason his paintings seemed to some people messy and unfinished. Often, when you looked at his painting from a short distance you couldn't see what it was, but if you stepped away you could see a beautiful scene. This was a completely new way of painting that became the mark of Impressionism. Monet was enormously prolific and many major galleries have examples of his work. Through his life Monet painted about 2500 paintings. For many years Monet's and other Impressionists' paintings were not understood and rejected by people of that time. But finally by the end of century the new way of painting became liked and popular. Impressionism enriched art, and taught people to be open and ready to welcome and enjoy the new styles. Claude Monet, as the leader of Impressionists, made this success possible in the big part. Without Claude Monet art would probably never become so interesting, and full of light, and beauty.

• Claude Monet Art, $35 (250 pictures)
• Claude Monet. Life and work.
• Claude Monet. Starting the Impressionism.
• Claude Monet. Colors in Claude Monet's paintings.
• Claude Monet. Best paintings.

July 5, 2005

New articles on the site. Art of Dali is in the spotlight, explored, revealed, and analyzed. A formal analysis of a work of art is an analysis of the form that the artist has produced. Line, shape, color, texture, mass and composition are the elements of the form of the artwork. These elements make up the expression, content and meaning of the work. Think about it like this: letters make up words, words make sentences and sentences make up paragraphs, which convey meaning to the reader. Art elements are like the letters and words. When they are used in a work of art, they translate into meaning and content for the viewer. The elements are the clues you use to begin to decode the information in the work of art. The analysis conveys how the artist uses the elements to convey meaning. Knowing how to write a formal analysis of a work of art is a fundamental skill learned in an art appreciation-level class.

June 15, 2005

To better represent the real value behind art, and to help us cover the associated production costs, we've decided to change prices to most of the art packs available on this web-site. Even with the current rates, MoodBook art is still the best value for money invested, and is still very affordable, considering the popularity of artists, the breadth of selections, and the quality and authenticity of works. Art is priceless, but thanks to MoodBook, it can actually be affordable!

April 5, 2005

World of Flowers

Discover the striking beauty of flowers with this photo collection. Flowers from all over the world. Wild nature, impressive colors, and a joy forever. Many plants produce highly visible flowers that have a distinctive size, color, or fragrance. Almost everyone is familiar with beautiful flowers such as the blossoms of roses, orchids, and tulips. Flowering plants are more widespread than any other group of plants. They bloom on every continent, from the bogs and marshes of the Arctic tundra to the barren soils of Antarctica. Deserts, grasslands, rainforests, and other biomes display distinctive flower species. Flowers are one of the most meaningful gifts a person can give or receive. Over time, the act of giving flowers developed into its own unique language, with every flower assigned its own special meaning. Flowers have been a symbol of love since ancient times. Consider a new, hi-tech, ultra-modern way of expressing your feelings!

• World of Flowers, $15 (90 pictures)

February 5, 2005

275 high-quality paintings by Salvador Dali

"Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid... The world will admire me. Perhaps I'll be despised and misunderstood, but I'll be a great genius, I'm certain of it..."

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali, one of the greatest Spanish painters of all time, and one of the most important figures in the history of Modernism. Both Dali's extraordinary talent and odd personality helped him to rise above the rest of the Surrealists of the 20th century. His artwork and influences can be seen almost everywhere around the world. His explicit and controversial Surrealist paintings are some of the most famous, and infamous, paintings of the 1900's, and his rebellious and independent attitude towards art and politics set him aside from other painters, leaving a mark on Surrealist painting forever. Dali expressed surrealism in everything he said and did. He was not just unconventional and dramatic; he was fantastic, shocking, and outrageous. Salvador Dali remains one of the great artistic innovators of all time. Like Picasso, Matisse, Miro and Chagall, his place at the pinnacle of modern art history is assured.

• Salvador Dali Art, $35 (275 pictures)
• Salvador Dali. Art, life, and world of surreal.
• Salvador Dali. Early years. Art, paintings, and works.
• Salvador Dali. Surreal years. Art, paintings, and works.
• Salvador Dali. Classical years. Art, paintings, and works.

The internationally renowned Dali expert and biographer, Robert Descharnes, wrote in 1995: "Those who are enthralled by artistic creation: those who possess the poet's capacity for wonder and dread; those who are inhabited by dreams; those who know that love and war were fundamental to human existence - such people will forget the few miasmas that are already being dissipated by the winds of time. They will encounter the landmarks that enable one to discover and comprehend the battle which Salvador Dali waged, all obstacles notwithstanding, in order to sow the seeds of the graphic art of tomorrow."

January 1, 2005

The underlying XML structure of the entire MoodBook web-site, along with the primary XSLT transformation, has been significantly revamped. More things now operate fully automatically, for example, thumbnail generation. This resulted in some changes to the front end look and feel - in particular image previews are now smaller. Additionally, the Zip compressed copy of the web-site is no longer available, now that the web-site is rather complex with quite a few files to maintain. Enjoy the new look and feel of the art pages!

December 1, 2004

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin, one of the leading French painters of the Postimpressionism period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art. Gauguin's paintings are powerful, while the subject matter is distinctive, the scale is large, and the compositions are simplified. Gauguin implied the qualities of expressive color, denial of perspective, and thick, flat forms. "The further I go, the more I feel sure that thoughts can be expressed by something quite different from literature," Gauguin wrote. Gauguin's artistic development of a conceptual method of representation was important for the history of art as it moved into the twentieth century. Painters no longer aimed at depicting the outer world but at rendering their inner dreams by symbolic allusion and decorative form. Line and color developed their powers of expression, taking inspiration in global art.

• Paul Gauguin Art, $25 (125 pictures)
• Paul Gauguin. Life and work.

November 1, 2004

Paul Cezanne

Explore the expression and emotion of color with Paul Cezanne, the Post-Impressionist, who achieved perfection through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color. The French painter Paul Cezanne is one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20'th century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. It is the tension between actuality and illusion, description and abstraction, reality and invention, that makes Cezanne's most unassuming subjects so profoundly satisfying and exciting, and which provided a legacy for a revolution of form that led the way for modern art. By the time of his death in 1906, Cezanne's art had begun to be shown and seen across Europe, and it became a fundamental influence on the Fauves, the Cubists, and virtually all advanced art of the early 20th century.

• Paul Cezanne Art, $25 (125 pictures)
• Paul Cezanne. Life and work.
• Paul Cezanne. Starting the modern art.

October 17, 2004

The music catalog has been updated:

• 43+ gigabytes (GB) of music.
• Total play time: 15+ days.

New entries include Modern Talking, Dire Straits, Jean Michel Jarre, Yello, Kraftwerk, Space, Zodiac, Dead Can Dance, and updated albums for Enigma and Paul McCartney.

October 12, 2004

With a few minor corrections, MoodBook 2 has gone gold!

MoodBook 2.0 2.5 MB

September 7, 2004

A total of four art packs are now available for download:

1. Pablo Picasso Art, $29 (175 pictures)
2. Vincent van Gogh Art, $25 (100 pictures)
3. Clip Arts Extended Pack, $15 (75 pictures)
4. Fine Arts Extended Pack, free (50 pictures)

More packs to follow.

August 20, 2004

The structure of the site has been updated largely. The site is now fully XML-based. Each XHTML page on the site is generated from a corresponding XML source document. Each art pack is represented with a special XML file and an index page consolidates all of the available art packs:

• http://www.moodbook.com/art/

August 8, 2004

There've been a lot of development work with respect to MoodBook for the recent few months, and we're now ready to publicly present a pre-release version of MoodBook 2. This newest release features numerous improvements along with a number of important innovations:

Pictures

• MoodBook is now able to draw JPEG images on the desktop. This prepares MoodBook for a traditional oil-painted fine art. Soon you'll be able to download the world's best works of painted art, and place it on your desktop easily. The fine art paintings in JPEG format are imaged with a surrounded black and dark gray frames to create natural look and feel of the art exposition, just as in the art gallery.
  • Additionally, MoodBook now comes with a built-in 1.2 MB fine arts basic pack which includes 25 fine art images for your desktop, ranging from Renaissance to Baroque to Impressionism to Modernism, and more. Da Vinci, Sebastiano Ricci, Nicolas Poussin, Van Gogh, Vasily Kandinsky, Picasso, Dali, and more! Unfortunately, this pack has increased the installation package of MoodBook up to 2.5 MB. Fortunately, the art in this pack looks great!

Colors

• We have changed the way backgrounds are colored. By default, they are now less saturated and less luminated, and overall less contrasting. We tried to match the default settings to as many monitors as possible. Let us know () if you like the new backgrounds and how they can further be improved. Unfortunately, different monitors may have different gamma settings, and for some monitors these new settings may look rather dark or dim, so let us know if you like the new coloring!
  • Additionally, the main image from the center is now embossed into the background to create a nice artistic effect. It visibly fills the unused blank areas of the background. Still, we tried to make it as non-intrusive as possible.

Why wait? Download now!

• MoodBook 2.0 2.5 MB

More news to follow in the near future. Stay tuned...

June 1, 2004

Major additions to the music catalog. Complete and nearly complete discographies of The Beatles, A-ha, and Michael Jackson. Pet Shop Boys' collection largely updated and is now of a higher MP3 quality. A lot of new trance albums and compilations. As from now, the primary target format is Lame's MP3 320 Kbps Stereo. The statistics now is as follows:

• 35+ gigabytes (GB) of music.
• Total play time: 13+ days.

April 2, 2004

The music catalog has been updated with a few new albums, and XHTML meta tag descriptions. The latter involved modifying the primary XSLT transformation. Additionally, an XSLT transformation that queries all of the XML music files and creates a single CSV file, has been added. This allows easier exporting of the entire catalog to Microsoft Excel for further analysis and manipulation. For example, we are now able to publish the following information at the front page of the catalog:

• 27+ gigabytes (GB) of music.
• Total play time: 11+ days.

All in a few clicks, including other possible statistical information! For example, if you want information in more detail, here it is: 3007 tracks, 27671884658 bytes, 11 days 16 hours 56 minutes 34 seconds of play time, 212 albums, 51 artists. Average MP3 bitrate is 218 Kbps. The information is actual as of April, 2004. The XSLT transformation to generate the consolidated CSV file is available in the Zip package, along with all the data files and other transformations.

February 15, 2004

Lately we have uploaded a large amount of content to this web-site, namely the XHTML version of our MP3 music catalog. It is now available at:

• http://www.moodbook.com/music/

The catalog features many popular groups and artists, such as Paul McCartney, Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, Madonna, Enigma, and more! It also includes a special section devoted to modern trance music, featuring the brightest trance and house DJ talents from all over the world! The catalog partially includes biographies, pictures, and discographies. A special article covering the technologies we use to create and publish this music catalog online, is also available. It is intended to unveil the power of music cataloging with Argentum MyFiles, a disk cataloger and file organizer, as well as, to give people some basic information on XML, XSLT and XHTML.

January 20, 2004

One more art pack has been added to the Packs section. It's a computer arts extended pack. Extend your art collection with this bonus pack for MoodBook! Bring more pictures to your desktop to excite, inspire and educate! The extended computer arts pack is a 2 MB downloadable package which includes 75 pictures with a look and feel similar to a look and feel of the MoodBook's built-in set of basic computer art. Most pictures look genuinely abstract and stylish.

January 4, 2004

Okay, the MoodBook web-site is finally up. The MoodBook installation package has been uploaded. From then on MoodBook is going to conquer the world. Ready, set, go!

December 10, 2003

MoodBook web-site along with the pre-release of MoodBook is available to a limited number of Argentum Newsletter subscribers.

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