Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1610-1685 Painter, draughtsman and etcher. According to Houbraken's rather unreliable biography, he was a pupil concurrently with Adriaen Brouwer of Frans Hals in Haarlem. Hals influenced him very little, whereas Brouwer, who was described as 'known far and wide' as early as 1627, had a decisive influence on the evolution of Adriaen van Ostade's always idiosyncratic portrayal of peasant life. The first documentary mention of Adriaen van Ostade as a painter is in 1632 (Schnackenburg, 1970). Most of his paintings are signed and dated, the earliest firmly dated example being the Peasants Playing Cards  Related Paintings of Adriaen van ostade :. | Peasant Family in a Cottage Interior | The Schoolmaster. | Carousing peasants in a tavern. | Peasant Family in a Cottage Interior | An alchemist |
Related Artists:
Kate Greenaway,RWS,RI
1846-1901 English painter, illustrator and writer. The daughter of a Fleet Street wood-engraver, John Greenaway (1818-90), she trained at Islington School of Art, Heatherleys Academy and the Slade School of Fine Art, all in London. In 1868 she did her first commercial work, producing Christmas and Valentine cards for Marcus Ward, Belfast.
Henri Gervex
French Academic Painter, 1852-1929.French painter. His artistic education began with the Prix de Rome winner Pierre Brisset (1810-90). He then studied under Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where his fellow pupils included Henri Regnault, Bastien-Lepage, Forain, Humbert (1842-1934) and Cormon; and also informally with Fromentin. Gervexs first Salon picture was a Sleeping Bather (untraced) in 1873: the nude, both in modern and mythological settings, was to remain one of his central artistic preoccupations. In 1876 he painted Autopsy in the H?tel-Dieu (ex-Limoges; untraced), the sort of medical group portrait he repeated in 1887 with his Dr Pean Demonstrating at the Saint-Louis Hospital his Discovery of the Hemostatic Clamp (Paris, Mus. Assist. Pub.), which celebrated the progress of medical science with a sober, quasi-photographic realism. Gervexs most controversial picture was Rolla (1878; Bordeaux, Mus. B.-A.), refused by the Salon of 1878 on grounds of indecency, partly because of the cast-off corset Degas had insisted he include. The painting shows the central character in a de Musset poem, Jacques Rolla, who, having dissipated his family inheritance, casts a final glance at the lovely sleeping form of the prostitute Marion before hurling himself out of the window. As his friend, Manet, had done the year before with his rejected Nana (1877; Hamburg, Ksthalle), Gervex exhibited his work in a commercial gallery, with great success.
Jan Preisler
Czechoslovakian, 1872-1918 Bohemian painter. He studied at the School of Applied Arts in Prague (1887-95). In 1906 he visited Belgium, the Netherlands and Paris. He taught at the Academy of Arts in Prague from 1913. He was a pioneer in modern Bohemian art, and his work developed from pure Art Nouveau and Symbolism towards Expressionism, in three phases. The period 1887-1900 is represented by the triptych Spring (1900; Prague, Trade Fair Pal.): with its lack of scales of tonal value or Impressionist instantaneousness, it is a skilful use of colour and composition. The figure of the boy with autobiographical features is symbolic of a whole generation. The period 1901-7 culminated in Painting from a Bigger Cycle (1901-2; Prague, Trade Fair Pal.), which balances vertical and horizontal lines and employs bright colour combinations. In Black Lake (1904; Prague, Trade Fair Pal.), which deals with the misery and excitement of first love, the contrast of black and white and the figure of the boy with a horse and a girl evoke the transitive moment between reality and dream. Spring (1906; Prague, Trade Fair Pal.), a testament to Preisler admiration for the work of Gauguin, develops the resonant contrast of green, yellow and white. In 1908-18 Preisler returned to monumental decoration: of the Palacky Room in the Municipal House in Prague, 1910-12, in the style of Puvis de Chavannes. At this time he was approaching the Expressionism of the younger generation from the Eight (ii), especially in the three versions of the painting Good Samaritan (1910-13; all priv. col., see Kotalok, pl. 41), which shows the influence of Daumier and Munch.