1728-1779 Dutch Anton Raphael Mengs Gallery Mengs was born in 1728 at Usti nad Labem (German: Aussig) in Bohemia on 12 March 1728; he died in Rome 29 June 1779. His father, Ismael Mengs, a Danish painter, established himself finally at Dresden, whence in 1741 he took his son to Rome. In Rome, his fresco painting of Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter. The appointment of Mengs in 1749 as first painter to Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony did not prevent his spending much time in Rome, where he had married Margarita Quazzi who had sat for him as a model in 1748, and abjured the Protestant faith, and where he became in 1754 director of the Vatican school of painting, nor did this hinder him on two occasions from obeying the call of Charles III of Spain to Madrid. There Mengs produced some of his best work, and specially the ceiling of the banqueting-hall of the Royal Palace of Madrid, the subject of which was the Triumph of Trajan and the Temple of Glory. Among his pupils there was Agust??n Esteve. After the completion of this work in 1777, Mengs returned to Rome, and there he died, two years later, in poor circumstances, leaving twenty children, seven of whom were pensioned by the king of Spain. His portraits and autoportraits recall an attention to detail and insight, often lost from the grand manner paintings. Besides numerous paintings in the Madrid gallery, the Ascension and St Joseph at Dresden, Perseus and Andromeda at Saint Petersburg, and the ceiling of the Villa Albani must be mentioned among his chief works. In 1911, Henry George Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland, possessed a Holy Family, and the colleges of All Souls and Magdalen, at Oxford, possessed altar-pieces by Mengs's hand. In his writings, in Spanish, Italian and German, Mengs has put forth his eclectic theory of art, which treats of perfection as attainable by a well-schemed combination of diverse excellences Greek design, with the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colour of Titian. He would have fancied himself the first neoclassicist, while in fact he may be the last flicker of Baroque art. Or in the words of Wittkower, In the last analysis, he is as much an end as a beginning. His intimacy with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who constantly wrote at his dictation, has enhanced his historical importance, for he formed no scholars, and the critic must now concur in Goethe's judgment of Mengs in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert; he must deplore that so much learning should have been allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism. Mengs was famous for his rivalry with the contemporary Italian painter Pompeo Batoni.  Related Paintings of Anton Raphael Mengs :. | Portrait du cardinal Archinto | Self Portrait ddd | Self portrait | Self-portrait | Das Urteil des Paris |
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Branwell Bronte
26 June 1817 - 24 September 1848) was a painter and poet, the only son of the Brontë family, and the brother of the writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Branwell Brontë was the fourth of six children and the only son of Patrick Brontë and his wife, Maria Branwell Brontë. He was born in Thornton, near Bradford, Yorkshire, and moved with his family to Haworth when his father was appointed to the perpetual curacy in 1821. Of the four Brontë siblings who survived into adulthood, Branwell Brontë seems to have been regarded within the family as the most talented, at least during his childhood and youth. While four of his five sisters were sent to Cowan Bridge boarding school (resulting in the death of his two oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, from tuberculosis), Branwell was kept at home to be privately educated by his father, who gave him a classical education suitable for admission to Oxford or Cambridge. Elizabeth Gaskell, biographer of his sister, Charlotte Bronte, says this of Branwell's schooling:
william holman hunt,o.m.,r.w.s
1827-1910 English painter. He worked as an office clerk in London from 1839 to 1843, attending drawing classes at a mechanics' institute in the evenings and taking weekly lessons from the portrait painter Henry Rogers. Holman Hunt overcame parental opposition to his choice of career in 1843, and this determined attitude and dedication to art could be seen throughout his working life. In July 1844, at the third attempt, he entered the Royal Academy Schools. His earliest exhibited works, such as Little Nell and her Grandfather (exh. British Institution, 1846; Sheffield, Graves A.G.), reveal few traces of originality, but the reading of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in 1847 was of crucial importance to Holman Hunt's artistic development. It led him to abandon the ambitious Christ and the Two Marys (Adelaide, A.G. S. Australia) in early 1848, when he realized its traditional iconography would leave his contemporaries unmoved. His next major work, the Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry (1848; London, Guildhall A.G.), from John Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes', though displaced into a medieval setting, dramatized an issue dear to contemporary poets and central to Holman Hunt's art: love and youthful idealism versus loyalty to one's family. His first mature painting, it focuses on a moment of psychological crisis in a cramped and shallow picture space.
William Glackens
1870-1938 William Glackens Galleries William James Glackens (March 13, 1870?CMay 22, 1938) was a U.S. realist painter. Glackens studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later moved to New York City, where he co-founded what came to be called the Ashcan School art movement. This group of artists, dubbed by the press "the Eight Independent Painters" or The Eight, chose to exhibit their works without pre-approval by the juries of the existing art establishment. He became known for his dark-hued paintings of street scenes and daily life in the city's neighborhoods. His later work was brighter in tone, and showed the influence of Renoir. During much of his career as a painter, Glackens also worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and New York City.