Spanish 1618-1682 Bartolome Esteban Murillo Galleries Murillo began his art studies under Juan del Castillo in Seville. Murillo became familiar with Flemish painting; the great commercial importance of Seville at the time ensured that he was also subject to influences from other regions. His first works were influenced by Zurbaran, Jusepe de Ribera and Alonso Cano, and he shared their strongly realist approach. As his painting developed, his more important works evolved towards the polished style that suited the bourgeois and aristocratic tastes of the time, demonstrated especially in his Roman Catholic religious works. In 1642, at the age of 26 he moved to Madrid, where he most likely became familiar with the work of Velazquez, and would have seen the work of Venetian and Flemish masters in the royal collections; the rich colors and softly modeled forms of his subsequent work suggest these influences. He returned to Seville in 1645. In that year, he painted thirteen canvases for the monastery of St. Francisco el Grande in Seville which gave his reputation a well-deserved boost. Following the completion of a pair of pictures for the Seville Cathedral, he began to specialise in the themes that brought him his greatest successes, the Virgin and Child, and the Immaculate Conception. After another period in Madrid, from 1658 to 1660, he returned to Seville. Here he was one of the founders of the Academia de Bellas Artes (Academy of Art), sharing its direction, in 1660, with the architect, Francisco Herrera the Younger. This was his period of greatest activity, and he received numerous important commissions, among them the altarpieces for the Augustinian monastery, the paintings for Santa Mar??a la Blanca (completed in 1665), and others.  Related Paintings of Bartolome Esteban Murillo :. | Saint Catherine of Alexandria | Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melon | The Little Fruit Seller (mk08) | Christ Healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda | Omelette woman |
Related Artists:
PITTONI, Giambattista
Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1687-1767 Italian painter and draughtsman. With Giambattista Tiepolo and Piazzetta, he was the most representative history painter of the Venetian Rococo. Besides altarpieces for Venetian and other churches as well as devotional images for private clients on both sides of the Alps, he painted subjects from mythology and Classical literature for collectors and connoisseurs in a Rococo idiom all his own; it is these secular pictures for which he is best known. Zava Boccazzi's catalogue raisonn of Pittoni's paintings (1979) includes 247 extant autograph works and 117 paintings now lost, destroyed or untraced. Binion's catalogue raisonn? of the artist's drawings (1983) lists 304 sheets. Pittoni's total output must have been far larger, as is evident from the drawings, many of which are studies for unknown works. For instance, Pittoni must occasionally have painted decorations for secular buildings and palazzi, probably in fresco, though none has yet come to light, with the notable exception of the few frescoes with scenes from the Life of Diana, painted in 1727 in the palazzetto Widman in Bagnoli di Sopra near Padua.
Charles Napier Hemy
English Painter, 1841-1917, British painter, He was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, of a musical family. He was trained in the Government School if Design, Newcastle, in the Antwerp academy and in the studio of Baron Leys. He returned to London in the 1870s. In 1881, he moved to Falmouth, Cornwall. He produced some figure subjects and landscapes, but is best known by his marine paintings. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1898 and an Academician in 1910, Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1890 and member in 1897. Two of his paintings, "Pilchards" (1897) and "London River" (1904), are in the Tate collections. He had two brothers who were also artists, Thomas Hemy and Bernard Hemy. He died in Falmouth on September 30, 1917.
Thomas Danby
(c. 1818 - 25 March 1886) was an English landscape painter. Danby was born, it is thought, in Bristol in south-west England, the younger son of Francis Danby (1793-1861). He had an elder brother, James Francis Danby (1816-75) who also became a landscape painter. Thomas went with his father to Europe in 1829, living for a time in Paris where he was able to earn a living by copying pictures at the Louvre in Paris. He thus became an earnest admireer and "student" of Claude Lorrain, whose aerial effects he sought to imitate. Returning to England about the same time as his father, he first exhibited at the British Institution in 1841, and afterwards frequently at the Royal Academy from 1843. He was a friend of Paul Falconer Poole, with whom he shared a house in Hampstead in 1843, and imbibed not a little of his romantic feeling for nature. From 1855 to his death, Danby resided in or near Hampstead in north London.. The subjects of his landscapes were usually taken from Welsh scenery, especially the old county of Merioneth; his pictures for the most part were not ideal compositions (unlike his father's work) but actual scenes pervaded with a true romantic spirit. "He was always trying" says the writer of his obituary in The Times newspaper, "to render his inner heart's feeling of a beautiful view rather than the local facts received on the retina." He came, it is said, within one vote of election as an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) but, failing eventually to attain Academy honours, he devoted himself in his latter years chiefly to watercolour painting. He became a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1860, an associate of the Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1867, and a full member of the latter in 1870; until his death his contributions were prominent amongst the works at the society's exhibitions. Danby died of a chest complaint, terminating in dropsy on 25 March 1886. He had been twice married, and had 2 daughters and a son from the second marriage.