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The darkly fantastical environment art for Cyberpunk 2077. By Imanol Delgado, care of CD Projekt Red.
Mermaid Riding a Seahorse. 2 versions by Frederick Stuart Church (1842–1924) . Church was an American illustrator. He spent many months sketching in Central Park Zoo, NYC - "observing seahorses in an aquarium", so as "to effectively capture the character of each creature".
The frolicking nocturnal Mermaids of Konstantin Makovsky (1839-1915).
Makovsky was Russian academic painter who was literally killed by modernity when his horse-drawn carriage was hit by an electric tram.
The concept art and set designs for ALIEN (1979) by Ron Cobb (1937-2020). He also created designs for Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Conan the Barbarian, Back to the Future, The Abyss, and Total Recall.
OK, Grottos are the next big thing!
These are all paintings of mythical grottos & caves by Rombout van Troyen (1605– 1655) - a Dutch painter who was briefly famed for his "cavernous scenes."
Bizarre "Anonymous" art fact.
"Anonymous" was a prolific painter of "Grottos" in 18th century Europe. Or rather - grottos became fashionable subjects of art at this time & the names of the artists have been lost to History.
Some are remarkable.
We might think that the Surrealists and Dadaists invented photomontage - but it was a hobby from the 1860s onwards, among English aristocrats of the Victorian era.
These are images by Ladys & Viscountesses.
The epic drawings of Muirhead Bone (1876–1953). Bone was a Scottish etcher & watercolourist who became a war artist, his images of shipyards, however, inspire the kind of awe we'd normally associate with religious art.
Believe it or not this painting of #TheTerror - was actually painted by one of the crew from the first arctic expedition in 1837. This is "The Perilous Position of HMS Terror, Captain Back, in the Arctic Regions in the Summer of 1837" by naval artist William Smyth (1799–1877).
"Portrait of a Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Command" & "Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy" by Théodore Géricault. In the 1800s, the discredited science of "physiognomy", held that physical appearances could be used to diagnose mental disorders.