1712-1787 English By 1728 he had left Preston, and the following year he was working in London for the Flemish topographical and sporting painter Peter Tillemans. There he specialized in landscape painting and copying various works in Tillemans studio after Marco Ricci, Giovanni Paolo Panini and Jan van Bloemen. Devis earliest known commission, Hoghton Towers from Duxon Hill, Lancashire (1735; priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., no. 3), painted for Sir Henry Hoghton during a trip to Preston in 1734-5, shows Tillemans influence in its attention to detail and the use of thin, transparent paint. Thomas Lister with his Family (c. 1738; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.) demonstrates a similar interest in landscape, featuring the family group in Gisburn Park, Lancs. Devis had returned to London by 1742 and established himself as a painter of conversation pieces, with a studio in Great Queen Street. Roger Hesketh with his Family is typical of his work at this time; it shows how Devis transformed the intimacy of a Dutch 17th-century genre scene into an elegant interior with the group of sitters connected by formal, schematic gestures. Roger Hesketh stands apart, in a tastefully contrived pose, his legs crossed and right arm thrust inside his waistcoat. His son, Fleetwood, stands with his hand resting on a dog next to his wife, who is seated with an infant on her lap. The adjacent telescope, globe and marine paintings are intended to advertise Hesketh interest in astronomy and travel.  Related Paintings of Arthur Devis :. | The Nativity | Henry Fiennes Clinton,9th Earl of Lincoln,with his wife,Catherine and his son,George,on the great terrace at Oatlands | The Knight of the Sun | The Young Poet | Nelson-s death-bed |
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Nicolas-Andre Monsiau
(1754 -- 31 May 1837) was a French history painter and a refined draughtsman who turned to book illustration to supplement his income when the French Revolution disrupted patronage. His cool Poussiniste drawing style and coloring marked his conservative art in the age of Neoclassicism. His training at the school of the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Paris, was under the direction of Jean-François-Pierre Peyron. An early patron, the marquis de Corberon, paid for a sojourn at Rome, where he studied at the French Academy in Rome from 1776. On his return to Paris, he was unable to exhibit in the annual Paris salons, which were closed to all but those who had been received by the Academie or were members, under the Ancien Regime. Instead he found an outlet in the smaller Salon de la correspondance, where in 1782 he showed a tenebrist Piquant effect of the light of a lamp. Two years later he was received at the Academie with a historical subject, Alexander taming Bucephalus and was made a member 3 October 1787, his second attempt, on the strength of The Death of Agis. The influence of Jacques-Louis David, an acquaintance from Monsiau's days in Rome, is most vividly represented by Monsiau's Ulysses, after returning to his palace and slaying Penelope's suitors, orders the women to remove the corpses (1791 Salon), where the action is played out in a shallow frieze-like space defined by a colonnade parallel to the picture plane. In his best-known painting, Zeuxis choosing among the most beautiful girls of Crotona, shown at the Salon of 1791,Monsiau illustrates an anecdote of the painter Zeuxis, recorded in Pliny's Natural History, that exemplifies an essential aspect of the Classical approach to artistic creation, in the artist's refining an ideal Art by selecting from among the lesser beauties of Nature. Monsiau's great public commission was a commemoration of the occasion on 26 January 1802, at which Napoleon delivered an authoritarian constitution to the Cisalpine Republic at a convocation of notables (the consulta) at Lyon. François Gerard had turned down the commission, preferring to continue his series of individual portraits of the Bonapartes. Monsiau received the commission in 1806; the finished painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1808 and was installed at the Tuileries the following year. Monsiau was among the first history painters to depict scenes from modern history that were not commemorations of battles. He showed Moliere reading Tartuffe at the house of Ninon de Lenclos at the Salon of 1802. It was engraved by Jean-Lous Anselin. His painting of Louis XVI giving instructions to the sea captain-explorer La Perouse before his attempted circumnavigation was exhibited at the Salon of 1817 and was purchased for the recently restored Louis XVIII. His portrayal of a sensational episode in which an escaped lion from the Grand Ducal menagerie in Florence had dropped a child it had picked up, without harming it, was exhibited at the Salon of 1801 and is conserved in the Louvre. Among his pupils was the portrait draughtsman Louis Letronne (1790--1842), whose pencil portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven is iconic.
Joseph Allen
1780 - 1860
Charles Tournemine
French 1812-1872