Alma-TademaSir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was a Dutch ex-patriate who lived most of his life in England. His name had been Lorens Tadema and Alma had been his middle name in Holland. His life followed a path similar to that of Victorian England. He was born a year before Victoria in 1836 and was knighted on her 80th birthday. Tadema was arguably the most successful painter of the Victorian era. For over sixty years he gave his audience exactly what it wanted; distinctive, elaborate paintings of beautiful people in classical settings. His incredibly detailed reconstructions of ancient Rome, with languid men and women posed against white marble in dazzling sunlight provided his audience with a glimpse of a world of the kind they might one day construct for themselves at least in attitude if not in detail. During his sixty productive years Tadema produced over 400 known paintings and had some success designing musical instruments as well. In 1980 a piano he designed for Henry Marquand of New York made 177,273 pounds at auction, making it to date not only the most expensive such musical instrument ever sold, but also the most costly example of 19th-century applied art).
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BotticelliItalian painter, Botticelli was Florentine and extremely successful at the peak of his career, with a highly individual and graceful style founded on the rhythmic capabilities of outline. With the emergence of the High Renaissance style at the turn of the 16th century, he fell out of fashion, died in obscurity and was only returned to his position as one of the best-loved quattrocento painters through the interest of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites.
His nickname "Botticelli" means "little barrel" and was originally bestowed on his older brother. For some reason the name was passed on to, and adopted by, the younger painter brother.
"Botticelli's early years are obscure, but he seems to have been trained in the studio of Filippo Lippi whose style informs his earliest dated work, the Fortitude panel (1470, Florence, Uffizi). This was commissioned to be one of a series of seven, the others having been executed by Piero Pollaiuolo.
A stylistic affinity here also with Pollaiuolo is perhaps due to the patrons' requirements for unity within the series (certainly it is never evident again). Many of Botticelli's paintings are undated, but an Adoration of the Magi (Florence, Uffizi) has been dated by modern scholarship to c1475. This is important because it provides evidence of Botticelli having already secured the patronage of the Medici whose portraits (according to Vasari) appear in the picture.
So well did this work establish Botticelli's reputation that in 1481-82 he was commissioned to join Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Rosselli (the most celebrated painters of the day) to paint frescoes for the Sistine Chapel. Botticelli's two most famous paintings were painted around this time, possibly for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. They are the Primavera (c1478) and the Birth of Venus (c1483), both in the Uffizi. |
BouguereauWilliam Bouguereau is unquestionably one of history's greatest artistic geniuses. Yet in the past century, his reputation and unparalleled accomplishments have undergone a libelous, dishonest, relentless and systematic assault of immense proportions. His name was stricken from most history texts and when included it was only to blindly, degrade and disparage him and his work. Yet, as we shall see, it was he who single handedly opened the French academies to women, and it was he who was arguably the greatest painter of the human figure in all of art history. His figures come to life like no previous artist has ever before or ever since achieved. He wasn’t just the best ever at painting human anatomy, more importantly he captured the tender and subtlest nuances of personality and mood. Bouguereau caught the very souls and spirits of his subjects much like Rembrandt. Rembrandt is said to have captured the soul of age. Bouguereau captured the soul of youth.
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CézannePaul Cézanne was a French painter, often called the father of modern art, who strove to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract pictorial order.
Cézanne was born in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839, the son of a wealthy banker. His boyhood companion was émile Zola, who later gained fame as a novelist and man of letters. As did Zola, Cézanne developed artistic interests at an early age, much to the dismay of his father. In 1862, after a number of bitter family disputes, the aspiring artist was given a small allowance and sent to study art in Paris, where Zola had already gone. From the start he was drawn to the more radical elements of the Parisian art world. He especially admired the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and, among the younger masters, Gustave Courbet and the notorious Edouard Manet, who exhibited realist paintings that were shocking in both style and subject matter to most of their contemporaries.
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DegasHilaire Germain Edgar Degas was a French painter and sculptor whose innovative composition, skillful drawing, and perceptive analysis of movement made him one of the masters of modern art in the late 19th century.
Degas is usually classed with the impressionists, and he exhibited with them in seven of the eight impressionist exhibitions. However, his training in classical drafting and his dislike of painting directly from nature produced a style that represented a related alternative to impressionism.
Degas was born into a well-to-do banking family on July 19, 1834, in Paris. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under a disciple of the famous French classicist J. A. D. Ingres, where Degas developed the great drawing ability that was to be a salient characteristic of his art. After 1865, under the influence of the budding impressionist movement, he gave up academic subjects to turn to contemporary themes. But, unlike the impressionists, he preferred to work in the studio and was uninterested in the study of natural light that fascinated them. He was attracted by theatrical subjects, and most of his works depict racecourses, theaters, cafés, music halls, or boudoirs. Degas was a keen observer of humanity—particularly of women, with whom his work is preoccupied—and in his portraits as well as in his studies of dancers, milliners, and laundresses, he cultivated a complete objectivity, attempting to catch his subjects in poses as natural and spontaneous as those recorded in action photographs.
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DürerA supremely gifted and versatile German artist of the Renaissance period, Albrecht Dürer 1471-1528 was born in the Franconian city of Nuremberg, one of the strongest artistic and commercial centers in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He was a brilliant painter, draftsman, and writer, though his first and probably greatest artistic impact was in the medium of printmaking. Dürer apprenticed with his father, who was a goldsmith, and with the local painter Michael Wolgemut, whose workshop produced woodcut illustrations for major books and publications. An admirer of his compatriot Martin Schongauer, Dürer revolutionized printmaking, elevating it to the level of an independent art form. He expanded its tonal and dramatic range, and provided the imagery with a new conceptual foundation. By the age of thirty, Dürer had completed or begun three of his most famous series of woodcuts on religious subjects: The Apocalypse 1498, the Large Woodcut Passion cycle ca. 1497-1500, and the Life of the Virgin 1500. He went on to produce independent prints, such as the engraving Adam and Eve 1504 and small, self-contained groups of images, such as the so-called Master Engravings featuring Knight, Death, and the Devil 1513, Saint Jerome in His Study 1514, and Melancholia I 1514, which were intended more for connoisseurs and collectors than for popular devotion. Their technical virtuosity, intellectual scope, and psychological depth were unmatched by earlier printed work.
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Edmund LeightonHistorical genre painter. Son of Charles Blair Leighton, a portrait and historical painter (1823-1855). Edmund Blair Leighton exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1878-1920. Typical titles: The Dying Copernicus, Un Gage d'Amour, Romola etc. Lady Godiva is in the Leeds Art Gallery. His pictures of elegant ladies in landscapes or interiors have a similar kind of charm to those of Tissot. |
Edvard MunchEdvard Munch was a Norwegian artist whose brooding and anguished paintings and graphic works, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of expressionism.
Born in Løten, Norway, on December 12, 1863, Munch began painting at the age of 17 in Christiania (now Oslo). A state grant, awarded in 1885, enabled him to study briefly in Paris. For 20 years thereafter Munch worked chiefly in Paris and Berlin. At first influenced by impressionism and postimpressionism, he then turned to a highly personal style and content, increasingly concerned with images of illness and death.
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Gauguin(Eugène Henri) Paul Gauguin was a French postimpressionist painter whose lush color, flat two-dimensional forms, and subject matter helped form the basis of modern art.
Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848, into a liberal middle-class family. After an adventurous early life, including a four-year stay in Peru with his family and a stint in the French merchant marine, he became a successful Parisian stockbroker, settling into a comfortable bourgeois existence with his wife and five children.
In 1874, after meeting the artist Camille Pissarro and viewing the first impressionist exhibition, he became a collector and amateur painter. He exhibited with the impressionists in 1876, 1880, 1881, 1882, and 1886. In 1883 he gave up his secure existence to devote himself to painting; his wife and children, without adequate subsistence, were forced to return to her family. From 1886 to 1891 Gauguin lived mainly in rural Brittany (except for a trip to Panama and Martinique from 1887 to 1888), where he was the center of a small group of experimental painters known as the school of Pont-Aven. Under the influence of the painter Émile Bernard, Gauguin turned away from impressionism and adapted a less naturalistic style, which he called synthetism.
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GodwardJohn William Godward was one of the finest exponents of what has become known as the Greco-Roman style which flourished in the mid 19th to early 20th century, the qualities of his art in several respects even rivalling that of Alma-Tadema and Leighton. Yet little is known of the private life of this reclusive, shy yet talented painter - a life which was to end so tragically - since details concerning it were protected by both himself and his family. What we do know results from recent scholarly research conducted by Vern G Swanson who summarises Godward's position in the history of art thus:
"In Godward's work we see the final summation of half a millennium of classical antique influence on Western painting ... It vanished during Godward's generation - killed, as it were, by contemporary nihilistic philosophies ... What Godward does represent is a microcosm for all classicists during a period aptly called The Twilight of the Gods or The Eclipse of Classicism."
John William Godward was born into a respectable and financially secure Victorian family living in Battersea, London. His father was an investment clerk in a life assurance office in Fleet Street. His mother, née Sarah Eboral, lived to be over a hundred years old, dying in 1935, outliving John William who was the first of five children.
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HokusaiKatsushika Hokusai was born in Edo, in 1760, apparently the son of an artisan. Hokusai is one of the great masters of Japanese woodblock print and one of the great creative and innovative genius of all time. Being the best known of Japanese artists, and having had a profound influence in western art (and in particular in the Impressionists), he is however very "unJapanese" in his character and in his work.
He worked for a very long time and, characteristically, was at his best by the end of his years. His career started when he become an apprentice as an engraver when he was fourteen. At eighteen he entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, an important artist of theatrical prints. One year after he published his first works, actor prints, under the name Shunro.
Hokusai produced good prints in the 1780s, under the influence of Shigemasa and Kiyonaga, but the first important masterpieces were designed, under the name Kako, the following decade. He first adopted the name Hokusai in 1797, at the start of the first of several important periods, this one dedicated to the production of surinomo and illustrated books.
Hokusai was drawn by diverse artistic influences, among which we must include Chinese art and Western art, that was starting to be known and discussed in Japan. These influences create a difference from the other Ukiyo-e and help to make Hokusai an universal artist.
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KlimtGustav Klimt was born as the son of a gold and silver engraver in a suburb of Vienna. He had a formal art training at the Vienna School of Decorative Arts. In 1882, Klimt opened a studio of his own with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch, a fellow student. They specialized on executing mural paintings. They were quite successful from the beginning and received commissions from theaters, museums and other public and semi-public institutions.
In 1897 Gustav Klimt founded with other artists the Vienna Secession and became its first president. By that time Klimt had developed his own and characteristic style, which should became the trademark of the movement. Like impressionism, art nouveau was an International revolt against the traditional academic art style.
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Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da Vinci was a Florentine artist, one of the great masters of the High Renaissance, who was also celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His profound love of knowledge and research was the keynote of both his artistic and scientific endeavors. His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics anticipated many of the developments of modern science.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the small Tuscan town of Vinci, near Florence. He was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid-1460s the family settled in Florence, where Leonardo was given the best education that Florence, the intellectual and artistic center of Italy, could offer. He rapidly advanced socially and intellectually. He was handsome, persuasive in conversation, and a fine musician and improviser. About 1466 he was apprenticed as a garzone (studio boy) to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. In Verrocchio's workshop Leonardo was introduced to many activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble and bronze. In 1472 he was entered in the painter's guild of Florence, and in 1476 he is still mentioned as Verrocchio's assistant. In Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (circa 1470, Uffizi, Florence), the kneeling angel at the left of the painting is by Leonardo.
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Lord LeightonEnglish painter and sculptor. He spent much of his youth traveling on the continent with his family. This cosmopolitan background was of great importance to his development as an artist. After his father, a doctor, settled in Frankfurt Am Main in 1846, Leighton enrolled at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, where he studied under the Nazarene artist Edward von Steinle between 1850 and 1852. The style and subject-matter of such early works as The Death of Brunelleschi (1852; london, leighton house a.g. & mus.) show the influence of Nazarene art and suggest the growing importance of Italy as a source of inspiration. Leighton traveled to Rome in 1852 and became friendly with Giovanni Costa and George Heming Mason, who later emerged as leading figures in the group of English and Italian artists known as The Etruscans. His first Royal Academy success, Cimabue’s celebrated Madonna is carried in procession through the streets of Florence (brit. royal col.), was painted in Rome in 1855. This huge processional work, filled with incident and detail, takes its subject from Vasari’s vite. It was bought by Queen Victoria from the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1855 and its success marked Leighton as one of the most promising artists of his generation. |
Mary CassattAmerican painter Mary Cassatt is considered a member of the French impressionists, a nineteenth-century style that emphasized impressions of scenes or objects. Best known for her series of paintings of a mother and child, she also portrayed fashionable society.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 23, 1845, the second of Robert and Katherine Johnson Cassatt's four children. As a child she lived for a time in France. The family then moved to Germany so that one son could pursue his studies in engineering, while another son could gain special medical attention. Upon returning to the United States in 1855, Mary studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1866, against her father's wishes, she began her travels in Italy, Spain, and Holland. She finally settled in Paris, France, where she shocked her parents by revealing her intentions to pursue a career as a painter.
In 1866 Cassatt began her studies in France, where she came to know other famed French painters, such as Charles Chaplin and Thomas Couture (1815 - 1879). After a pair of rejections, she exhibited at the Salon (French art galleries) and met the famed painter Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917), who later became her mentor (advisor).
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MichelangeloMichelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6, 1475 in the village of Caprese, Italy. He was one of the most important artists of the Italian Renaissance, a period when the arts and sciences flourished. Michelangelo became an apprentice to prominent Florentine painter, Domenico Ghirlandaio at the age of 12, but soon began to study sculpture instead. He attracted the attention and patronage of Lorenzo de Medici, who was ruler of Florence until 1492.
At age 23, Michelangelo completed his magnificent Pieta, a marble statue that shows the Virgin Mary grieving over the dead Jesus. He began work on the colossal figure of "David" in 1501, and by 1504 the sculpture (standing at 4.34m/14 ft 3 in tall) was in place outside the Palazzo Vecchio. The statue became a symbol for the new republic that had replaced Medici rule.
Michelangelo portrayed David partly as the ideal man, partly as an adolescent youth. Unlike predesessors by other sculptors which depict David with the grissly head of the giant under his foot, Michalangelo poses David at the moment he faces the giant, with the deed before him. He believed this was the moment of David's greatest courage.
From 1508 until 1512 Michelangelo worked on his most famous project, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. He had always considered himself a sculptor and resisted painting the Sistine with characteristic vehemence: "I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint." Only the power of the Pope Julius II forced him into the reluctant achievement of the world's greatest single fresco. He covered the ceiling with paintings done on wet plaster, showing nine scenes from the Old Testament. Michelangelo later painted "The Last Judgment" on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.
Toward the end of his life, Michelangelo became more involved in architecture and poetry. In 1546 he was made chief architect of the partly finished St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, where the Pieta is now kept.
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ModiglianiModigliani was born on July 12, 1884 to a Sephardic Jewish family living in reduced ciccumstances in Italy. He began his formal art training in 1898, and in 1902 and 1903 he studied in Florence and Venice. In 1906 he moved to Paris, with the help of a small allowance from his mother.
He first settled in Montmarte; along with his closest friends Soutine and Lipchitz, who were also expatriate artists. He immersed himself in cafe and night life, developing a dissolute life-style that enchanced his reputation as a bohemian but eventually ruined his life.
Modigliani worked as wildly as he had lived. Alcohol and hashish never diminished his great desire to work. Neither did the numerous affairs with all kinds of women. It seems his whole life was a series of protests: against the bourgeois smugness of his family of businessmen, against all that his art teacher Micheli represented, and against a society that failed to recognize and reward his talent.
Desperately poor, he scavenged stone from building sites around Paris. His sculpture, like his paintings emphasized elongated, simplified forms. He lost many of his works because he could not pay his rent and had to move a lot. He also never kept a record of his works.
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MonetClaude Monet was born November 14, 1840 in Paris, France. Monet was the leader of a group of French artists called the "Impressionists," which included such painters as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro.
Monet's family moved to the port town of Le Havre in 1845. He took his early art lessons from the painter, Eugene Boudin. Boudin, who worked up sketches out-of doors, encouraged Monet to do the same. "Suddenly the veil was torn away.... My destiny as a painter opened out to me," he later said. For the next 60+ years Monet explored the effects of light on outdoor scenes. He was the first artist to let his initial impressions stand as completed works, rather than as "notes" done in preparation for work in the studio.
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PicassoTo say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe. Picasso's audience--meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work, at least in reproduction--was in the tens, possibly hundreds, of millions. He and his work were the subjects of unending analysis, gossip, dislike, adoration and rumor.
He was a superstitious, sarcastic man, sometimes rotten to his children, often beastly to his women. He had contempt for women artists. His famous remark about women being "goddesses or doormats" has rendered him odious to feminists, but women tended to walk into both roles open-eyed and eagerly, for his charm was legendary. Whole cultural industries derived from his much mythologized virility. He was the Minotaur in a canvas-and-paper labyrinth of his own construction.
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RaphaelRaphael (his full name Raffaello Sanzi or Santi), Italian painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.
Raphael was the son of Giovanni Santi and Magia di Battista Ciarla; his mother died in 1491. His father was, according to the 16th-century artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, a painter "of no great merit." He was, however, a man of culture who was in constant contact with the advanced artistic ideas current at the court of Urbino. He gave his son his first instruction in painting, and, before his death in 1494, when Raphael was 11, he had introduced the boy to humanistic philosophy at the court.
Urbino had become a centre of culture during the rule of Duke Federico da Montefeltro, who encouraged the arts and attracted the visits of men of outstanding talent, including Donato Bramante, Piero della Francesca, and Leon Battista Alberti, to his court. Although Raphael would be influenced by major artists in Florence and Rome, Urbino constituted the basis for all his subsequent learning. Furthermore, the cultural vitality of the city probably stimulated the exceptional precociousness of the young artist, who, even at the beginning of the 16th century, when he was scarcely 17 years old, already displayed an extraordinary talent
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RembrandtRembrandt Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (b. July 15, 1606, Leiden, Neth.--d. Oct. 4, 1669, Amsterdam), Dutch painter, draftsman, and etcher of the 17th century, a giant in the history of art. His paintings are characterized by luxuriant brushwork, rich colour, and a mastery of chiaroscuro. Numerous portraits and self-portraits exhibit a profound penetration of character. His drawings constitute a vivid record of contemporary Amsterdam life. The greatest artist of the Dutch school, he was a master of light and shadow whose paintings, drawings, and etchings made him a giant in the history of art.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on July 15, 1606, in Leiden, the Netherlands. His father was a miller who wanted the boy to follow a learned profession, but Rembrandt left the University of Leiden to study painting. His early work was devoted to showing the lines, light and shade, and color of the people he saw about him. He was influenced by the work of Caravaggio and was fascinated by the work of many other Italian artists. When Rembrandt became established as a painter, he began to teach and continued teaching art throughout his life.
In 1631, when Rembrandt's work had become well known and his studio in Leiden was flourishing, he moved to Amsterdam. He became the leading portrait painter in Holland and received many commissions for portraits as well as for paintings of religious subjects. He lived the life of a wealthy, respected citizen and met the beautiful Saskia van Uylenburgh, whom he married in 1634. She was the model for many of his paintings and drawings. Rembrandt's works from this period are characterized by strong lighting effects. In addition to portraits, Rembrandt attained fame for his landscapes, while as an etcher he ranks among the foremost of all time. When he had no other model, he painted or sketched his own image. It is estimated that he painted between 50 and 60 self-portraits.
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RenoirPierre Auguste Renoir was a French impressionist painter noted for his radiant, intimate paintings, particularly of the female nude. Recognized by critics as one of the greatest and most independent painters of his period, Renoir is noted for the harmony of his lines, the brilliance of his color, and the intimate charm of his wide variety of subjects. Unlike other impressionists he was as much interested in painting the single human figure or family group portraits as he was in landscapes; unlike them, too, he did not subordinate composition and plasticity of form to attempts at rendering the effect of light.
Renoir was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841. As a child he worked in a porcelain factory in Paris, painting designs on china; at 17 he copied paintings on fans, lamp shades, and blinds. He studied painting formally in 1862-63 at the academy of the Swiss painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre in Paris. Renoir's early work was influenced by two French artists, Claude Monet in his treatment of light and the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix in his treatment of color.
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SeuratGeorges Seurat was born in Paris, France on December 2, 1859. Seurat's father Antoine-Chrisostome spent most his time in a cottage in Le Raincy, and his mother Ernestine Faivre raised Seurat and his siblings in Paris.
Seurat began to draw at an early age, and in 1875, he took a course with sculptor Justin Lequien. Several years later, Seurat enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studied with Henri Lehmann. Seurat remained at the school for two years, during which time he discovered a book entitled Essai sur les signes inconditionnels de l'art (Essay on the Unmistakable Signs of Art) by Humbert de Superville. This discovery of the relationship between lines and images became the inspiration for Seurat's entire career.
Seurat left the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1879 to perform his military service in Brest. While in Brest, Seurat drew scenes of the beaches and sea. He returned to Paris the following year and studied again with Lehmann. However, Seurat's style was unconventional, and he soon broke with the school. At this time, Seurat shared a studio with another painter, Edmond-Francois Aman-Jean, and in 1881, the two traveled to the island of La Grande Jatte. It was here that Seurat received the inspiration for many of his future works.
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TissotJames Joseph Jacques Tissot was born in Nantes on October 15, 1836. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris under Ingres, Flandrin and Lamothe, and exhibited in the Salon for the first time at the age of twenty-three. In 1861 he showed The Meeting of Faust and Marguerite, which was purchased by the state for the Luxembourg Gallery. His first characteristic period made him a painter of the charms of women. Demi-mondaine would be more accurate as a description of the series of studies which he called La Remme a Paris.
He fought in the Franco-German War, and, falling under suspicion as a Communist, left Paris for London. Here he studied etching with Sir Seymour Haden, drew caricatures for Vanity Fair, and painted portraits as well as genre subjects.
It was many years before he turned to the chief labor of his career - the production of a series of 700 water-color drawings to illustrate the life of Christ and the Old Testament. Some sudden shock or bereavement was said to have turned his thoughts from ideals of the cafe and the boulevard into a more serious channel. He disappeared from Paris, whither he had returned after a stay of some years in England, and went to Palestine. In 1895 the series of 350 drawings of incidents in the life of Christ was exhibited in Paris, and the following year found them on show in London. They were then published by the firm of Lemercier in Paris, who had paid him 1,100,000 francs for them. |
TitianThe greatest painter of the Venetian School. The evidence for his birthdate is contradictory, but he was certainly very old when he died. He was probably a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, and in his early work he came under the spell of Giorgione, with whom he had a close relationship. In 1508 he assisted him with the external fresco decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice, and after Giorgione's early death in 1510 it fell to Titian to complete a number of his unfinished paintings. The authorship of certain works (some of them famous) is still disputed between them.
Titian's first major independent commission was for three frescoes on the life of St Antony of Padua in the Scuola del Santo, Padua (1511), noble and dignified paintings suggesting an almost central Italian firmness and monumentality. When he returned to Venice, Giorgione having died and Sebastiano having gone to Rome, the aged Bellini alone stood between him and supremacy, and that only until 1516 when Bellini died and Titian became official painter to the Republic. He maintained his position as the leading painter in the city until his death sixty years later.
In the second decade of the century Titian broke free from the stylistic domination of Giorgione and developed a manner of his own. Something of a fusion between Titian's worldliness and Giorgione's poetry is seen in the enigmatic allegory known as Sacred and Profane Love (Borghese Gallery, Rome, c. 1515), but his style soon became much more dynamic. This work inaugurated a brilliant period in Titian's creative career during which he produced splendid religious, mythological, and portrait paintings, original in conception and vivid with colour and movement.
The work that more than any other established his reputation is the huge altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin (Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice, 1516-18). It is the largest picture he ever painted and one of the greatest, matching the achievements of his most illustrious contemporaries in Rome in grandeur of form and surpassing them in splendour of colour. The soaring movement of the Virgin, rising from the tempestuous group of Apostles towards the hovering figure of God the Father looks forward to the Baroque. Similar qualities are seen in his two most famous altarpieces of the 1520s: the Pesaro altarpiece (Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice, 1519-26), a bold diagonal composition of great magnificence, and The Death of St Peter Martyr (completed 1530), which he painted for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, having defeated Palma Vecchio and Pordenone in competition for the commission. The painting was destroyed by fire in 1867, but it is known through copies and engraving; trees and figures together form a violent centrifugal composition suited to the action, and Vasari described it as 'the most celebrated, the greatest work... that Titian has ever done'
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Toulouse-LautrecHenri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on Nov. 24, 1864, in Albi, France. He was an aristocrat, the son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse and last in line of a family that dated back a thousand years. Henri's father was rich, handsome, and eccentric. His mother was overly devoted to her only living child. Henri was weak and often sick. By the time he was 10 he had begun to draw and paint.
At 12 young Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg. The bones failed to heal properly, and his legs stopped growing. He reached young adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 4 1/2 feet (1.5 meters) tall.
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Van GoghVincent van Gogh was born in Zundert, near Brabant, the son of a minister. In 1869, he got a position at the art dealers, Goupil and Co. in The Hague, through his uncle, and worked with them until he was dismissed from the London office in 1873. He worked as a schoolmaster in England (1876), before training for the ministry at Amsterdam University (1877). After he failed to get a post in the Church, he went to live as an independent missionary among the Borinage miners.
Vincent Van Gogh was largely self-taught as an artist, although he received help from his cousin, Mauve. His first works were heavily painted, mud-colored and clumsy attempts to represent the life of the poor (e.g. Potato-Eaters, 1885, Amsterdam), influenced by one of his artistic heroes, Millet. |
WaterhouseJohn William Waterhouse was a painter of classical, historical, and literary subjects. John William Waterhouse was born in 1849 in Rome, where his father worked as a painter. He was referred to as "Nino" throughout his life.
In the 1850s the family returned to England. Before entering the Royal Academy schools in 1870, Waterhouse assisted his father in his studio. His early works were of classical themes in the spirit of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton, and were exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Society of British Artists and the Dudley Gallery. In the late 1870s and the 1880s, Waterhouse made several trips to Italy, where he painted genre scenes.
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