Printable Vintage Art: Snow by Gustave Courbet

“What?” she asked again.
He pointed ahead of them. “See that?”
“What, the snow?”
“Beyond that.”
“More snow?”
“Stop looking at the snow.”
― Derek Landy, Kingdom of the Wicked

I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep — great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth's magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.
― Edward M. Purcell

The snow was too light to stay, the ground too warm to keep it. And the strange spring snow fell only in that golden moment of dawn, the turning of the page between night and day.
― Shannon Hale, Palace of Stone

Vintage landscape artwork by Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), simply entitled “Snow,” oiginally painted c1875. Digitally enhanced version can be downloaded as a printable 12” x 13” @ 300 ppi JPEG here.


Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain fine art are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Printable Vintage Art: Rain Over Meadow by Fyodor Vasilyev

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.

Whenever it rains you will think of her.
― Neil Gaiman

Vintage landscape artwork by Fyodor Vasilyev (1850–1873) entitled “Rain over Meadow,” oiginally painted in 1872. Digitally enhanced version can be downloaded as a printable 13” x 8” @ 300 ppi JPEG here.


Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain fine art are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Printable Vintage Art: The Brushwood Collector by Adolf Kaufmann

We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers. And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.
― James Salter, Light Years

A vintage landscape painting by Adolf Kaufmann (1848–1916) entitled “The Brushwood Collector”; oiginally found on Wikimedia here. Digitally enhanced version can be downloaded as a 5” x 7” @ 300 ppi JPEG here.


Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain fine art are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Printable Vintage Art: Swans by Bruno Liljefors

Swans, 1918
by Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939)

There was something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life.
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

He thought that she looked like Winter; meaning both the girl he had once known and the season. He had always believed that winter's beauty deepened further into the season, when the memory of fall and the promise of spring were stripped away and there was nothing to do but accept the day-in, day-out reality of what winter entailed. This was what he thought when he looked at her: that the embattled woman before him was a wonder to behold, and, as much as he wished he might have spared her the pain of the last eleven years, it contributed to her spellbinding presence.
― Ben Spencer, Many Savage Moons

Painting originally found on Wikimedia. Digitally enhanced version of the painting as a 10" x 8" @ 300 ppi JPEG here.


Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain fine art are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Vintage Art Appreciation: God's Care by Mihael Stroj

God's Care, 1842
by Mihael Stroj (1803–1871)

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you,
and to give thanks continuously.
And because all things have contributed to your advancement,
you should include all things in your gratitude.
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think big. Pray bigger. Grace is at work for you in ways you're too human to understand.
― Andrena Sawyer

Even when you don't see Him working, He's busy working on your behalf.
Forever grateful for God's grace!
― Yvonne Pierre, The Day My Soul Cried: A Memoir
Painting originally found on Wikimedia. Digitally enhanced version of the painting as a 7" x 5" @ 300 ppi JPEG here.


Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain fine art are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Free Vintage Nature Poem: The Birds by Pierre-Jean de Béranger

The Bird Charmer, 1873
by Léon Bazille Perrault (1832 – 1908)

Happy who for a season may
Absent themselves on buoyant wing!
The birds that Winter drives away
Will surely come again with Spring.
They of our ills will mindful be,
And when at length the storm has passed,
They will return to this same tree
Which has so often felt the blast.
Then to our fertile vale will they
A more auspicious presage bring!
The birds that Winter drives away
Will surely come again with Spring.
― Pierre-Jean de Béranger, The Birds (translated from the French by Percy Reeve)