Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1708-1787 He was born in Lucca, the son of a goldsmith, Paolino Batoni. He moved to Rome in 1727, and apprenticed with Agostino Masucci, Sebastiano Conca and/or Francesco Imperiale (1679-1740). By the early 1740s, however, he started to receive independent commissions. In 1741, he was inducted into the Accademia di San Luca. His celebrated painting, The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena (1743) illustrates his academic refinement of the late-Baroque style. Another masterpiece, his Fall of Simon Magus was painted initially for the St Peter's Basilica. Batoni became a highly-fashionable painter in Rome, particularly after his rival, the proto-neoclassicist Anton Raphael Mengs, departed for Spain in 1761. Batoni befriended Winckelmann and, like him, aimed in his painting to the restrained classicism of painters from earlier centuries, such as Raphael and Poussin, rather than to the work of the Venetian artists then in vogue. He was greatly in demand for portraits, particularly by the British traveling through Rome , who took pleasure in commissioning standing portraits set in the milieu of antiquities, ruins, and works of art. There are records of over 200 portraits by Batoni of visiting British patrons . Such "Grand Tour" portraits by Batoni came to proliferate in the British private collections, thus ensuring the genre's popularity in the United Kingdom, where Sir Joshua Reynolds would become its leading practitioner. In 1760, the painter Benjamin West, while visiting Rome would complain that Italian artists "talked of nothing, looked at nothing but the works of Pompeo Batoni". In 1769, the double portrait of Joseph II and Leopold II won an Austrian nobility for Batoni. He also portrayed Pope Pius VI. According to a rumor, he bequeathed his palette and brushes to Jacques-Louis David.  Related Paintings of BATONI, Pompeo :. | Gleichnis vom verlorenen Sohn | Susanna and the Elders gmg | The Ecstasy of St Catherine of Siena | Sir Gregory Page-Turner dfhf | Achilles at the Court of Lycomedes |
Related Artists:
Ivana Kobilca
Ivana Kobilca (20 December 1861 - 4 December 1926) was a Slovene realist painter who lived, worked and studied in various European cities including Vienna, Sarajevo, Berlin, Paris and Munich. She was a member of Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris. Many of her paintings are still lifes, portraits or country settings. She later tended toward impressionism. Her best known paintings are Kofetarica (Coffeemadam), 1888; Citrarica (The Zitherist), Likarice (Women Ironers), 1891; Holandsko dekle (A Dutch Girl), Portret sestre Fani (Portrait of Sister Fani), 1889; and Poletje (Summer), 1889.
Adolph Friedrich Vollmer
(17 December 1806 - 12 February 1875) was a German landscape and marine painter and graphic artist. He and his contemporary, the painter Christian Morgenstern, were pioneers in Hamburg of early Realism in painting. As son of a bookkeeper to a Hamburg merchant, Vollmer grew up in humble circumstances.[3] Determined to become a painter against the wishes of his father,[4] he became an apprentice to the brothers Suhr who owned a graphic workshop producing panorama prints. For one and a half years Vollmer travelled throughout Germany with one of the brothers, Cornelius Suhr, as had been Morgenstern before him. In 1826 he was introduced by the Hamburg art-dealer Ernst Harzen to the wealthy aristocrat and supporter of the arts, Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, who was patron to many young Hamburg artists among them Morgenstern and Otto Speckter. Probably on Rumohr advice Vollmer completed his studies under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He then moved to Munich from where he undertook journeys to Lake Konstanz, to the Austrian and Swiss Alps, to Venice, to Le Havre and to the Netherlands. In 1839 Vollmer returned to Hamburg and settled there. One of his sons, Johannes Vollmer, became a prominent architect of protestant churches; a grand-son was the art historian and encyclopaedist Hans Vollmer who, for many years, edited the Thieme-Becker Kenstler Lexikon. Vollmer became blind in 1866.
Jakob Alt
1789-1872 Austrian Jakob Wassermann was born on March 10, 1873, in Furth, the son of a Jewish merchant. After a childhood with many restrictions, he began his career as an office clerk, in Munich and then in Freiburg. In 1898 he moved to Vienna and eventually established himself as a writer. Derivative and imitative, Wassermanns novels showed from the outset a strong dependence upon Fyodor Dostoevsky - particularly in his fondness for the psychological probing of criminals and social outcasts - as well as the influence of the master of the romantic horror and detective story, E. T. A. Hoffmann. Wassermanns first significant work is Die Juden von Zirndorf (1897, The Jews of Zirndorf), in which his deep knowledge of his own community in F??rth and Nuremberg stands him in good stead. As in many of his other works, Wassermanns preoccupation with innocence and redemption is here interleaved with a somewhat crass depiction of depravity and superstition. Der Moloch (1902) pays tribute to the contemporary literary cult of the great city (here Vienna), seen as an all-devouring monster of sin and perversion. Caspar Hauser (1908) is probably the authors best novel; the book, based on fact, deals with the case of the mute youth who appeared one day in 1828 on the streets of Nuremberg. Resemblances to Dostoevskys The Idiot may also be noted in this tale of the rejection and contamination of innate purity by corrupt society. After Caspar Hauser Wassermanns novels and short stories become increasingly preoccupied with bizarre and perverse anecdotes and intrigue, often initially drawn from biography or the newspapers. Das Gansemannchen (1915; The Goose Man) illuminates the problem involved in simultaneous cohabitation with two wives. Christian Wahnschaffe (1919) exploits the theme of the rich mans son who rejects the world to turn toward Buddhism. Der Fall Maurizius (1928, The Mauritius Case) is a type of detective novel made colorful by excursions into hypnosis but also weighed down by a tedious mass of psychological dissection. Like Honor?? de Balzac, whom he imitated, Wassermann introduces the same characters into different novels; thus Etzel Andergast (1931) is a sequel to The Mauritius Case, and its hero, Joseph Kerkhoven, reappears in Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz (1934, Joseph Kerkhovens Third Existence). Wassermann is a somewhat uneven and labored writer, and he cannot in any sense be considered a stylist. His novels are often marred by diffuseness and miasmic obscurity. At the same time his extensive output is of considerable historical interest and illuminates rather well the consequences of marriage between the new depth psychology and the popular novel of sensation and crime. He died on Jan. 1, 1934, in Alt-Aussee.