Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1697-1768 Italian painter, etcher and draughtsman. He was the most distinguished Italian view painter of the 18th century. Apart from ten years spent in England he lived in Venice, and his fame rests above all on his views (vedute) of that city; some of these are purely topographical, others include festivals or ceremonial events. He also painted imaginary views (capriccios), although the demarcation between the real and the invented is never quite clearcut: his imaginary views often include realistically depicted elements, though in unexpected surroundings, and in a sense even his Venetian vedute are imaginary. He never merely re-created reality. He was highly successful with the English, helped in this by the British connoisseur JOSEPH SMITH, whose own large collection of Canaletto works was sold to King George III in 1762. The British Royal Collection has the largest group of his paintings and drawings.  Related Paintings of Canaletto :. | the Old Horse Guards from St James-s Park | Grand Canal, Looking Northeast from Palazo Balbi toward the Rialto Bridge | The Bucintore Returning to the Molo on Ascension Day c | London- Westminster Abbey with a Procession of the Knights of the Bath | Arrival of the French Ambassador in Venice (detail) f |
Related Artists:
WET, Gerrit de
Dutch painter, Amsterdam school (c. 1616 - 1674, Leyden)
Edouard Castres
Swiss 1838 - 1902 Swiss painter. His father was a clock engraver, and he initially trained as an enamellist. He took drawing lessons from Barthelemy Menn and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1859. He soon decided to concentrate on oil painting. He was assistant to the genre and figure painter Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala (1842-71). In the Franco-Prussian War he joined the Red Cross, moving into Switzerland at the beginning of February 1871 with the army led by Gen. Bourbaki. He painted military scenes from sketches carried out on the battlefield and received consistently good reviews, which also brought financial success. He was commissioned by a Belgian panorama company to record the entry of the French army into Switzerland, which he had witnessed in 1871. He spent the winter of 1876-7 on site at Les Verrieres, painting preparatory studies, and in 1881 he completed the panorama, Gen. Bourbaki's Army Retreating into Switzerland (Lucerne, Panorama). He was aided by nine assistants, recruited from among Menn's pupils, who included Ferdinand Hodler. The work was exhibited in Geneva and was brought to a rotunda in Lucerne in 1889. Among panorama paintings it is a work of a high order: despite the colossal dimensions and the barely comprehensible mass of people depicted, the dominant impression is of individual suffering.
LONGHI, Alessandro
Italian painter, Venetian school (b. 1733, Venezia, d. 1813, Venezia). Painter, engraver and writer, son of (1) Pietro Longhi. He must have received his first artistic training from his father, although the only evidence of this is the similarity of their styles. He was apprenticed to Giuseppe Nogari, one of the better Venetian portrait painters of the first half of the eighteenth century, and his earliest works are bust-length, mostly life-size portraits in Nogari's style. He first exhibited in 1757 and by 1758 must have been considered a reasonably established artist,