Baron Antoine-Jean Gros
1771-1835
French
Baron Antoine-Jean Gros Galleries
The son of a painter, Antoine Jean Gros was born in Paris on March 16, 1771. At the age of 14 he entered the studio of Jacques Louis David, the acknowledged leader of the classical revival. Although his own work became radically different from David's, he maintained a lifelong respect for his teacher and envisioned himself as the upholder of the Davidian tradition.
In 1787 Gros entered the Acad??mie de Peinture, and when the Acad??mie dissolved in 1793 (a result of the French Revolution) he went to Italy. He met Josephine Bonaparte in Genoa in 1796, and she introduced him to Napoleonic society. Gros entered Napoleon's immediate entourage and accompanied him on several north Italian campaigns. Gros also became involved with Napoleon's program of confiscating Italian art for removal to France.
Gros returned to Paris in 1800 and began to show his Napoleonic paintings in the annual Salons. The most famous of these are the Pesthouse at Jaffa (1804) and Napoleon at Eylau (1808). These works served to deify Napoleon, showing him engaged in acts of heroism and mercy. Stylistically, the paintings were revolutionary:their exotic settings, rich color, agitated space, and general penchant for showing the gruesome specifics of war and suffering differed radically from the cool generalizations of Davidian classicism that Gros had learned as a student. The presentation of contemporary historical events was also new, a harbinger of the realism that developed steadily during the first half of the 19th century in French, American, and English painting. Finally, the emphatic emotionalism of Gros's art established the foundation of romantic painting that Th??odore G??ricault and Eug??ne Delacroix developed after him.
Unlike that of some of his countrymen (David is a case in point), Gros's position did not suffer after the fall of Napoleon. Gros painted for the restored monarchy, for instance, Louis XVIII Leaving the Tuileries (1817), and he decorated the dome of the Panth??on in Paris with scenes of French history (1814-1824). For this Charles X made him a baron in 1824. But these works lack the zest and commitment of Gros's Napoleonic period, perhaps because they were not based on the immediate kinds of historical experiences that had inspired the earlier paintings.
Although marked by considerable public success, Gros's later career was in many ways acutely troubled. Basically, he could not resolve his personal esthetic theories with his own painting or with the work of his younger contemporaries. To the end Gros wished to propagate the classicism of David, and he took over David's studio when the master was exiled in 1816. By the 1820s, however, the revolutionary romanticism of G??ricault and Delacroix, among others, had clearly begun to eclipse classicism, and Gros found himself fighting a lonely and losing battle for conservatism. Ironically, he was fighting a trend that his own best work had helped to originate. As he persisted, moreover, his own painting began to show a diffident mixture of classic and romantic attitudes. Thus, while he was inherently a romantic, he tragically came to doubt himself. Gros died on June 26, 1835, apparently a suicide. Related Paintings of Baron Antoine-Jean Gros :. | Portrait de Gerard-Christophe-Michel Duroc, duc de Frioul | Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-stricken at Jaffa | Napolean on the Battlefield of Eylau on 9 February 1807 | Napoleon on the Battlefield at Eylau (mk09) | Napoleon on the Battlefield at Eylau on 9 February 1807 (mk05) | Related Artists: Jacob de Gheyn IIJacob de Gheyn II (also Jacques de Gheyn II) (c. 1565, Antwerp - March 29, 1629, The Hague) was a Dutch painter and engraver, whose work shows the transition from Northern Mannerism to Dutch realism over the course of his career.
Francesco Morandini Da PoppiItalian Painter (1544-1597) BUGIARDINI, GiulianoItalian painter, Florentine school (b. 1475, Firenze, d. 1554, Firenze)
Italian painter and draughtsman. He trained in Florence in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio. The influence of Ghirlandaio is apparent in his earliest known works, datable between c. 1495 and 1500, which include part of the altarpiece of the Nativity (Florence, Santa Croce) painted for the Castellani family. Apart from Ghirlandaio, his two most important early influences were Fra Bartolommeo and Mariotto Albertinelli. In 1503 Bugiardini joined the Compagnia di S Luca and began an association with Albertinelli that continued until 1509 when Albertinelli moved to the workshop of Fra Bartolommeo. Bugiardini's paintings of the Virgin and Child (e.g. c. 1510; Kansas City, MO, Nelson-Atkins Mus. A.) show the influence of the balanced classical compositions executed by Raphael in Florence between 1504 and 1508 (e.g. the Madonna of the Meadow, 1505, Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.; La Belle Jardini?re, 1507, Paris, Louvre). From Ghirlandaio's workshop and his study of antique sculpture in the Medici garden, Bugiardini would have known Michelangelo early in his career. Vasari mentioned Bugiardini as among the artists who went to Rome in 1508 to assist Michelangelo with the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Vatican) and who were almost immediately sent back to Florence. The influence of Franciabigio is clear in such works as the Birth of John the Baptist (1512; Stockholm U., Kstsaml.; autograph copy, Modena, Gal. & Mus. Estense) in which nature is not idealized, as compared to contemporary works in Rome. The signed and dated Madonna della palma (Virgin and Child with the Infant John the Baptist, 1520; Florence, Uffizi) suggests his familiarity with such contemporary Roman paintings by Raphael and his workshop as the Madonna of Divine Love (Naples, Capodimonte) or the Madonna of the Rose (c. 1518; Madrid, Prado).
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