German-born American Hudson River School Painter, 1830-1902 Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany. His family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1833. He studied painting with the members of the D??sseldorf School in D??sseldorf, Germany from 1853 to 1857. He taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself to painting. Bierstadt began making paintings in New England and upstate New York. In 1859, he traveled westward in the company of a Land Surveyor for the U.S. government, returning with sketches that would result in numerous finished paintings. In 1863 he returned west again, in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he would later marry. He continued to visit the American West throughout his career. Though his paintings sold for princely sums, Bierstadt was not held in particularly high esteem by critics of his day. His use of uncommonly large canvases was thought to be an egotistical indulgence, as his paintings would invariably dwarf those of his contemporaries when they were displayed together. The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light was felt to be excessive by contemporary critics. His paintings emphasized atmospheric elements like fog, clouds and mist to accentuate and complement the feel of his work. Bierstadt sometimes changed details of the landscape to inspire awe. The colors he used are also not always true. He painted what he believed is the way things should be: water is ultramarine, vegetation is lush and green, etc. The shift from foreground to background was very dramatic and there was almost no middle distance Nonetheless, his paintings remain popular. He was a prolific artist, having completed over 500 (possibly as many as 4000) paintings during his lifetime, most of which have survived. Many are scattered through museums around the United States. Prints are available commercially for many. Original paintings themselves do occasionally come up for sale, at ever increasing prices.  Related Paintings of Albert Bierstadt :. | Autumn Landscape: The Catskills | High in the Mountains | Mount Hood, Oregon | The_Sierra_Nevadas | Fishing Boats at Capri |
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TESTA, Pietro
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1611-1650
Joseph Crawhall
1861-1913 English painter, active in Scotland. He was brought up in Newcastle upon Tyne and was encouraged by his father and by Charles Keene, the cartoonist for Punch, studying at King's College School in London under P. H. Delamotte. There he met E. A. Walton, with whom, joined by James Guthrie, he painted at Roseneath, near Glasgow, in 1879. Crawhall also collaborated with Walton and Guthrie on illustration. His association with the Glasgow Boys was consolidated during the early 1880s on further painting trips in the Trossachs, Berwicks, and Crowland, Lincs. A keen huntsman and rider, Crawhall specialized in bird, animal and humorous subjects, and his work, with that of Arthur Melville, exemplifies the achievement of the Glasgow Boys in watercolour. After studying in Paris in 1882 under Aim? Morot (1850-1913), Crawhall exhibited for the first and only time at the Royal Academy, probably showing A Lincolnshire Meadow (1883; Glasgow, A.G. & Mus.). He then virtually abandoned oil painting and the plein-air technique, working instead from memory and using line and watercolour.
James Joseph Jacques Tissot
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (15 October 1836 - 8 August 1902) was a French painter, who spent much of his career in Britain. Tissot was born in Nantes, France. In about 1856, he began study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Hippolyte Flandrin and Lamothe, and became friendly with Edgar Degas and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Tissot exhibited in the Paris Salon for the first time in 1859, two portraits of women and three scenes in medieval dress from Faust. The latter show the influence of the Belgian painter Henri Leys (Jan August Hendrik Leys), whom he had met in Antwerp in 1859. In the mid-1860s, however, Tissot began to concentrate on depicting women, often although not always shown in modern dress. Like contemporaries such as Alfred Stevens and Claude Monet, Tissot also explored japonisme, including Japanese objects and costumes in his pictures. A portrait of Tissot by Degas from these years (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) shows him with a Japanese screen hanging on the wall.