Dutch 1599-1641 Anthony Van Dyck Locations Flemish painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and England. He was the leading Flemish painter after Rubens in the first half of the 17th century and in the 18th century was often considered no less than his match. A number of van Dyck studies in oil of characterful heads were included in Rubens estate inventory in 1640, where they were distinguished neither in quality nor in purpose from those stocked by the older master. Although frustrated as a designer of tapestry and, with an almost solitary exception, as a deviser of palatial decoration, van Dyck succeeded brilliantly as an etcher. He was also skilled at organizing reproductive engravers in Antwerp to publish his works, in particular The Iconography (c. 1632-44), comprising scores of contemporary etched and engraved portraits, eventually numbering 100, by which election he revived the Renaissance tradition of promoting images of uomini illustri. His fame as a portrait painter in the cities of the southern Netherlands, as well as in London, Genoa, Rome and Palermo, has never been outshone; and from at least the early 18th century his full-length portraits were especially prized in Genoese, British and Flemish houses, where they were appreciated as much for their own sake as for the identities and families of the sitters.  Related Paintings of Anthony Van Dyck :. | Samson and Delilah, | Christ supported by angels | Emperor Charles V | James Hay, 2nd Earl of Carlisle | Queen Henrietta Maria, London 1632 |
Related Artists:
Amadeo Preziosi
Italian Painter, 1816-1882
BACKER, Jacob Adriaensz.
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1608-1651 Backer was born in Harlingen, but his family moved soon (in 1611) to Amsterdam. Between 1627 and 1633 he and Govert Flinck were pupils of Lambert Jacobsz in Leeuwarden. In 1633 he returned to Amsterdam, where he remained until his death. His extreme quickness in painting portraits has been particularly noticed, and it is said by his Amsterdam colleague Joachim von Sandrart that he completely finished, in one day, the half length portrait of a lady in full dress, even so early, that she was able to return the same day to Haarlem. Besides being an important portrait painter - some 70 portraits can be attributed to him with certainty, among them the 1642 Company of Cornelis de Graeff voor de Nieuwe Doelen in Amsterdam, on the same wall as Rembrandt's Night Watch - Backer was an excellent painter of religious and mythological paintings. He was especially interested in pastoral subjects, themes from contemporary history, like the huge Crowning of Mirtillo from 1641 in the Brukenthal collection in Sibiu (250 x 250 cm.). In fact, Backer was a leading artist in Amsterdam until his premature death in 1651.
John Steuart Curry
American Regionalist Painter, b.1897 d.1946 American painter and illustrator. As one of the 'Regionalist triumvirate', with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, he has been most often characterized as a faithful chronicler of rural life in Kansas. From 1916 to 1918 he was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1919 he began study in the studio of Harvey Dunn (1884-1952) in Tenafly, NJ. After seven years as an illustrator in and around New York, he went to Paris in 1926 to study with the Russian Academician Vasily Shukhayev. Ironically, it was on Curry's return to the East Coast the following year that he began to earn his reputation as a Regionalist by painting memories of Kansas from his studio in the fashionable art colony of Westport, CT. Baptism in Kansas