10 Artists you need to Know 👀 #12
Discover 10 hidden gems of the art world, including Petrus van Schendel, Linnea Strid, Odd Nerdrum & Martin Johnson Heade. Your next favorite artist is here.
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1 | Petrus van Schendel (1806 to 1870)
In 19th century Brussels they called him Monsieur Chandelle.
Petrus van Schendel was a Dutch painter. He made his name in Brussels for one very specific thing: he painted night markets better than anyone alive.
His pictures all work the same way. Pitch black background. A single candle or a single oil lamp held by a fishmonger, a fruit seller, a peddler. The face leans into the small flame. The goods glow at the center. Everything else dissolves into darkness.
He could place ten or fifteen figures in one market square and light each of them with a different small flame. Brussels collectors fought over his canvases.
He died in Brussels in 1870. The best of his night market scenes hang today at the Rijksmuseum and at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
Look at one on your phone in a dark room. The flame still works.
2 | James Proudfoot (1908 to 1971)
A Scottish painter from Perth who painted two things: French rooftops in full sunlight and British actors.
The rooftops first. Proudfoot spent his summers in Dieppe. In 1937 he painted Sun on a House, Dieppe there, which became his most widely reproduced canvas. Saturated yellow façade, hard shadow, flat blue sky. The late summer light frozen in oil.
Then the actors. Once based in London, he became one of the favorite portraitists for stage and screen. His list of sitters reads like a casting page. His portrait of Peter Ustinov earned him an honorable mention at the Paris Salon of 1956. He painted his wife, the actress Ellen Pollock, as Lady Macbeth in 1953.
When a director needed a believable portrait inside a film set, he was the one who delivered the canvas. He painted the portraits used in The Laughing Lady in 1946. On screen they look like real gallery paintings because that is what they are.
He died in London in 1971. Sun on a House, Dieppe hangs today in the Perth & Kinross Council collection.
3 | Elena Wuest (born 1977)
Kazakh by birth, Russian by training, German by adoption.
Elena Wuest grew up in Karaganda, in central Kazakhstan, in the Soviet academic tradition. At 24 she moved to Germany.
Today she paints at Filmstudio Babelsberg, the oldest large scale film studio in the world, the one that produced Metropolis a century ago.
Her work is contemporary impressionism. Large southern landscapes, loose brushwork over solid structure. The Russian academic tradition and German freedom show up on the same canvas without ever quite agreeing.
In 2023 she was nominated for the Luxembourg Art Prize.
Her work now sits in private collections in Russia and Germany. American collectors are starting to take notice.
4 | Linnea Strid (born 1983)
