Dutch
1589-1662
Related Paintings of Adriaen Pietersz Vande Venne :. | Winter | Fishing for Souls | Winter | Winter | Maurice | Related Artists:
Andreas Schelfhout(February 16, 1787, The Hague - April 19, 1870, The Hague) was a Dutch painter, etcher and lithographer, known for his landscape paintings.
He belongs to the Romantic movement. His Dutch winter scenes and frozen canals with skaters were already famous during his lifetime. He became one of the most influential Dutch landscape artists of his century.
He started as a house painter in the framing business of his father. He already started painting pictures in his spare time. After a well-received first exhibition in The Hague, his father sent him to receive proper training to Joannes Breckenheimer (1772-1856), a stage designer, in The Hague. He learned not only the technical aspects of painting, but also made detailed studies of the 17th-century Dutch landscape artists Meindert Hobbema en Jacob van Ruisdael.
In 1815 he started his own workshop. Through his technical excellence and sense of composition and his use of naturalistic colours, he soon became famous also outside The Hague. In 1819 he was awarded the Gold Medal at the exhibition in Antwerp. In 1818 he became a member of the Royal Academy for Visual Arts of Amsterdam. He reputation continued to grow and in1822 he was given the rank of Fourth Class Correspondent of the Royal Dutch Institute. From then on, one exhibition followed after another.
Initially he painted mainly summer scenes, beach scenes, and animal paintings. But as his initial winter scenes even had more success, he began to include them in his exhibitions. He was mainly a studio artist, relying on his sketches done en plein air. His sketchbook Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth) shows that he made about twenty paintings a year, among them a few foreign views. This indicated that he travelled abroad around 1825. In later years he visited France in 1833, England in 1835 (especially to study the works of Constable) and Germany.
He provided training to several painters who would become famous in their own right : Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch, Johan Jongkind (one of the forerunners of the Impressionists), Charles Leickert, Jan Willem van Borselen, Nicholas Roosenboom, Willem Troost, the American Hudson River School Painter Louis Remy Mignot and his son-in-law Wijnand Nuyen.
At the end of his career he put together a series of eighty landscape drawings, mainly recordings of previous paintings and watercolours. They were drawn in chalk and lightly coloured.
His death marked the end of the Romantic period in Holland. He is considered a precursor of the Hague School
Julius AdamGerman 1826-1874
Dennis Miller Bunker1861-1890
Dennis Miller Bunker Gallery
The paintings of Bunker's early maturity in New York (ca. 1880-82) were often marine subjects, featuring a series of beached boats, painted on Long Island. In these he followed the standard academic practice of first painting loose, preparatory sketches (Beached, ca. 1881-2) prior to more conventionally finished exhibition pieces. The early portraits (Portrait of Walter Griffin, 1881, Portland Museum of Art) also evidence rigorous craftsmanship.
While studying in Paris, Bunker's summer excursions to the countryside resulted in another series, this time of scenes of Larmor, a town in Brittany. The focus of these compositions, be it church spire (Brittany Town Morning, Larmor, 1884, Terra Foundation for American Art), cemetery cross, or a lone tree (Tree, 1884-5, private collection), was invariably that of a richly painted, dark graphic shape against a bright sky. Nevertheless, the pictures are characterized by soft atmospheric effects and tonal subtlety. No less subtle are the landscapes Bunker painted after returning to America; paintings done in South Woodstock, Connecticut (Pines Beyond the Fence, 1886, private collection) still favor dramatic value contrasts, with subjects carefully painted against a light sky, but the palette has grown lighter, the color more saturated.
By 1887 Bunker completed his Portrait of Anne Page, a painting requiring much labor, but one of his most poignant works. In its restrained use of color, delicate modeling of form, and aesthetic elegance it is reminiscent of the works of Thayer and James McNeill Whistler. There soon followed the Boston commissions, portraits mostly of male sitters--still somber in tone, they are painted in a more confident manner, suggesting the influence of Sargent (Portrait of George Augustus Gardner, 1888, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Portrait Sketch of Eleanor Hardy Bunker, 1890. Private collection.That Bunker spent the summer of 1888 painting with Sargent is verified by personal correspondence, as well as through several pieces by the latter artist (Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot, 1888, Terra Foundation for American Art), but no paintings of the English sojourn by Bunker have survived; possibly he destroyed them in dissatisfaction. However, once back in Boston the experience came to fruition, for over the next two years Bunker produced a series of canvases which evidenced that he was one of the first American artists to fully understand and successfully practice impressionism. In the Greenhouse, ca. 1888, Chrysanthemums, 1888 (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), The Pool, Medfield, 1889 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and Meadow Lands, 1890 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) all feature a rich palette, vertiginous compositions, and his unique "fish hook" shaped brush strokes.
At the same time, Bunker's last figure pieces remained faithful to his academic training. Jessica, 1890 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), The Mirror, 1890 (Terra Foundation for American Art), and Eleanor Hardy Bunker, 1890 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) are characterized by a restricted color range and heightened elegance.