Russian Painter, 1830-1897 was a Russian landscape painter and creator of the lyrical landscape style. Savrasov was born into the family of a merchant. He began to draw early and in 1838 he enrolled as a student of professor Rabus at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (graduated in 1850), and immediately began to specialize in landscape painting. In 1852, he traveled to Ukraine. Then, in 1854 by the invitation of the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna, President of the Imperial Academy of Arts, he moved to the neighborhood of St. Petersburg. In 1857, Savrasov became a teacher at the Moscow School of painting, sculpturing and architecture. His best disciples, Isaac Levitan and Konstantin Korovin, remembered their teacher with admiration and gratitude. The Rooks Have Come Back was painted by Savrasov near Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma.In 1857, he married Sophia Karlovna Hertz, sister of art historian K. Hertz. In their home they entertained artistic people and collectors including Pavel Tretyakov. Savrasov became especially close with Vasily Perov. Perov helped him paint the figures of the boat trackers in Savrasov's Volga near Yuryevets, Savrasov painted landscapes for Perov's Bird catcher and Hunters on Bivouac. In the 1860s, he traveled to England to see the International Exhibition, and to Switzerland. In one of his letters he wrote that no academies in the world could so advance an artist as the present world exhibition. The painters who influenced him most were British painter John Constable and Swiss painter Alexandre Calame. The Rooks Have Come Back (1871) is considered by many critics to be the high point in Savrasoves artistic career. Using a common, even trivial, episode of birds returning home, and an extremely simple landscape, Savrasov emotionally showed the transition of nature from winter to spring. It was a new type of lyrical landscape painting, called later by critics the mood landscape. The painting brought him fame. In 1870, he became a member of the Peredvizhniki group, breaking with government-sponsored academic art. In 1871,  Related Paintings of Alexei Savrasov :. | Rustic View | Monastery of Caves near Nizhny Novgorod | Sundown over a marsh, | Spring. Kitchen Gardens | Early Spring. Thaw. |
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Owen, William
English, 1769-1825 English painter. The son of a bookseller, he was educated at the grammar school in Ludlow and was sent to London in 1786 to study under Charles Catton the elder (1728-98), coach painter to George III and founder-member of the Royal Academy. Owen's copy of a work by Reynolds, made soon after his arrival, attracted the latter's attention. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1791 and exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year. From then on he exhibited there every year, apart from 1823 and 1825, and was elected ARA in 1804 and RA in 1806. He painted a number of rural scenes but specialized in portrait painting. Although his reputation was eclipsed by that of Thomas Lawrence, he was sought after by many of the eminent figures of the day, producing portraits of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr William Howley (1813), and of the politician and essayist John Wilson Croker (exh. 1812; both London, N.P.G.); other of his sitters were William Pitt the younger and John Soane. In 1810 he was appointed portrait painter to the Prince of Wales (later George IV) and in 1813 principal portrait painter to the Prince when the latter became Prince Regent. The Prince Regent does not seem to have sat to him but nonetheless he offered Owen a knighthood, which the painter refused. From c. 1820 Owen's health deteriorated until a disease of the spine confined him to his room and finally rendered him incapable of painting. He died after accidentally taking a bottle of opium that had been wrongly labelled.
Marie Caire Tonoir
Naturalist artist France 1860-1934
Francken, Frans II
b. 1581, Antwerpen, d. 1642, Antwerpen Painter, son of Frans Francken I. Of all the members of the Francken family, Frans II is the most important and still the most widely known. There are paintings by him in all large public collections in Europe. Besides altarpieces and painted furniture panels, he produced mainly small cabinet pictures with historical, mythological or allegorical themes. Frans II's rank as an artist is not so much derived from his extensive output as from his innovative subject-matter: his depictions of luxuriously decorated Kunstkammern and art galleries