German
1480-1538
Albrecht Altdorfer Galleries
He most often painted religious scenes, but is mainly famous as the first frequent painter of pure landscape, and also compositions dominated by their landscape. Taking and developing the landscape style of Lucas Cranach the Elder, he shows the hilly landscape of the Danube valley with thick forests of drooping and crumbling firs and larches hung with moss, and often dramatic colouring from a rising or setting sun. His Landscape with footbridge (National Gallery, London) of 1518-20 is claimed to be the first pure landscape in oil. He also made many fine finished drawings, mostly landscapes, in pen and watercolour. His best religious scenes are intense, sometimes verging on the expressionistic, and often depict moments of intimacy between Christ and his mother, or others. His most famous religious artwork is the The Legend of St. Sebastian and the Passion of Christ that decorated the altar in the St. Florian monastery in Linz, Austria. He often distorts perspective to subtle effect. His donor figures are often painted completely out of scale with the main scene, as in paintings of the previous centuries. He also painted some portraits; overall his painted oeuvre was not large. Related Paintings of Albrecht Altdorfer :. | The Battle at the Issus | Loth and his Daughters | Allegory | Bussender Hl Hieronymus | Landschaft mit Satyrfamilie | Related Artists:
John Quidor1801-1888
Quidor was born in Gloucester Co., N. J., and in 1826 moved to New York City where he studied painting under John Wesley Jarvis and Henry Inman. Afterward he lived on a farm near Quincy, Illinois, but returned to New York City in 1851. He was obliged to support himself by painting the panels of stage coaches and fire engines and died in abject poverty.
Although Quidor was little appreciated in his own time, after his death he was accorded a place among the best early American artists. His paintings establish a mysterious romantic setting for scenes in which he mingled macabre elements with an earthy humor. Many of his works, such as Ichabod Crane Pursued by the Headless Horseman, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, were inspired by the writings of Washington Irving, who was a personal friend. Irving's A History of New York gave Quidor the subjects for the four paintings in the Brooklyn (N. Y.) Institute: Dancing on the Battery (c. 1860), Peter Stuyvesant's Wall Street Gate (1864), Voyage of the Good Oloff up the Hudson (1866), and The Voyage from Communipaw to Hell Gate (1866). These show Quidor's characteristic mellow and harmonious color, poetic imagination, and naïve humor.
He is represented in the Brooklyn Museum by three paintings: Dorothea, Money Diggers, and Wolfert's Will. He also painted religious subjects such as Jesus Blessing the Sick.
Thomas UwinsEnglish Painter, 1782-1857
English painter and illustrator. He was apprenticed to the line-engraver Benjamin Smith (d 1833) in 1797, but his greater interest in portrait painting led him to take life classes at the Royal Academy, London; he exhibited portraits there from 1799. Versatile and industrious, he painted miniature likenesses, taught drawing, designed and engraved illustrations for books in French, Portuguese and English, and wrote for and illustrated Rudolph Ackermann's Repository. His half-a-crown watercolours, known as 'pretty faces', were particularly popular, and he found employment as an assiduous copyist. In 1809 he was elected to the Society of Painters in Water-Colours and for the next nine years exhibited careful and colourful images of the countryside that provided views of the year's harvest. In 1817 Uwins travelled to France to record the Burgundian grape harvest, identifying the labour force more obviously as peasants than their English counterparts. In debt, he moved in 1820 to Edinburgh, where he illustrated books by Walter Scott and painted portraits. In 1824, his debt paid, he left for Italy, where he spent seven years; he sent highly valued copies of Italian works back to England (to Thomas Lawrence among others) and made studies of life in and around Rome and Naples, from which his later successes at the Royal Academy derived. An immodest Protestant, Uwins deplored but revelled in the 'polluted streams' of Catholic Italy, and provided London with oils renowned for their clarity and colour. A Neapolitan Saint Manufactory (exh. RA 1832; Leicester, Mus. & A.G.) shows monks haggling, women gazing and children playing amid carved and painted icons.
Morton SchambergAmerican Painter and Architect ,
b.1881-d.1918
American painter and photographer. After training as an architect at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (A.B., 1903), he studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also in Philadelphia, from 1903 to 1906 under William Merritt Chase, with whom he travelled to Europe. From 1907 to 1909 he lived mostly in Paris, where he saw the work of major avant-garde artists, including C?zanne, Picasso and Matisse, and benefited from contact with Leo Stein, an important collector and writer. By 1909 Schamberg had responded to the example of C?zanne's paintings, including simplified and more solid forms in his own work. Following his participation in the Armory Show in 1913, Cubism became the dominant element of his art, modified in such works as Figure B, Geometric Patterns