Spanish, 1608-1662,Spanish painter. He had an undistinguished career in Madrid as a painter of still-lifes and flower-pieces. In 1624 Ponce was apprenticed to Juan van der Hamen y Leen, whose niece he married in 1628. The format of Ponce's compositions and some of his motifs derive from works by van der Hamen, though lacking their subtlety of composition, spatial clarity and formal conviction. In Vase of Flowers, signed and dated 1650 (Strasbourg, Mus. B.-A.), Ponce's style shows laboured imitation of van der Hamen's: his dry execution results in a paradoxically airless and petrified quality. Ponce was always a derivative artist, and some of his still-lifes with seasonal themes are similar to works by Francisco de Barrera, another modest painter with whom he was documented in the 1630s. Paintings from the 1640s and 1650s depicting baskets of fruit and bunches of grapes against light backgrounds are characterized by compositional informality, softer lighting and freer brushwork, through which Ponce attempted to convey the textures of objects and endow the subject with greater naturalness.   Related Paintings of Antonio Ponce :. | White Gerfalcons | Maria Mancini as Cleopatra | The Avenue at Middelharnis | Entombment | Cavaliers espagnols (mk40) |
Related Artists:
Gerrit Bakhuizen
c.1700-60
Ralph Blakelock
American Painter, 1847-1919 One of the most important visionary artists in late 19th-century America, he was self-taught as a painter. From 1867 he was exhibiting landscapes in the style of the Hudson River school at the National Academy of Design in New York. Rather than going abroad for advanced training, like most of his contemporaries, he spent the years 1869-72 in the western United States. Back in New York, Blakelock evolved his personal style during the 1870s and 1880s. Eschewing literal transcriptions of nature, he preferred to paint evocative moonlit landscapes such as Moonlight (Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.).
francois raguenet