Art Posters: The Cotton Pickers, 1876

Via Maggie's Farm, Steve Sailor has posted some cool information on the most popular art posters: "Painters: Scholarly eminence vs. 'Will this go with my couch?' popularity":

The ten top painters who do best among the poster-buying public relative to their more moderate historical prominence (i.e., their influence on subsequent artists) are:

Claude Monet
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Vincent Van Gogh
Salvador Dali
Camille Pissarro
Edgar Degas
Henri Rousseau
Fra Angelico
Marc Chagall

These are definitely not unimportant figures in the history of art - they're just even more popular now than they were influential then.

Basically, to sell a lot of posters in the 21st Century, you will have wanted to have been in Paris in the late 19th Century.

All of this is even more interesting in my case, as I've been talking (e-mailing) with Rusty Walker about my favorite artists. As I was telling Rusty, I just love Winslow Homer, and especially the painting above, The Cotton Pickers, 1876.

The piece is in the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of art. I first say the painting in about 1988, on my first visit to LACMA. Then, a couple of years back when I visited the museum for the temporary exhibit of "Gustav Klimt's 1907 masterpiece 'Adele Bloch-Bauer I'"(see Wikipedia's entry for the painting's image and background drama).

I picked up the poster for it after my second visit to the showing. My other favorite painting at LACMA - and one of the most breathtaking pieces of art I've ever seen upon my first viewing in person - is Julius L. Stewart's, The Baptism, 1892. I post a photo image of the Stewart masterpiece soon.