Swedish Realist Painter, 1853-1919
Swedish painter, illustrator and printmaker. He came from a poor family and studied (1866-76) at the Konstakademi in Stockholm, supporting himself throughout this period. From 1871 to 1878 he contributed illustrations to the comic journal Kaspar and the Ny illustrerad tidning. From 1875, for several decades, he was a prolific book illustrator, his most renowned work in this field being his drawings for Föltskärns beröttelser ('The Barber-surgeon's tales'; pubd 1883-4) by Zacharius Topelius, and the Rococo-inspired watercolours for the Samlade skaldeförsök ('Collected attempts at poetry'; pubd 1884) by the 18th-century Swedish author Anna Maria Lenngren. Related Paintings of Carl Larsson :. | furstenbergska triptyken-nutida konst- | portratt av lars erik | Queen Lovisa Ulrika | Frukost under stora bjorken | kerstis fodelsedag | Related Artists:
Thomas Lyde Hornbrookpainted Vista do Outeiro da Gloria in 1838
William Knight Keeling (1807-1886) was a British (Victorian) artist, an illustrator of Walter Scott's novels and Shakespeare's plays, a founder and the third President of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts.
William Knight Keeling. Love's Messenger. 1856William Knight Keeling was born in Manchester. He was apprenticed to a wood-engraver, and in the 1830s went to London and became an assistant of William Bradley (1801-1857), a Manchester-born portrait painter who moved to London in 1822 and established himself as a portrait painter. However, Keeling returned to Manchester in 1835 and firmly established himself as a popular and respected portrait and figurative painter in oils and watercolour, and a drawing-master. From 1830s, he actively exhibited in Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere. In 1833, his painting 'The Bird's Nest' was awarded the silver medal from the Royal Manchester Institution. In 1841, he was elected a member of the New Society of Painters in Watercolours where he exhibited about 60 works.
In 1859, Keeling became a founder of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, and its third president from 1865 to 1877. He was a member of the Manchester Literary Club and the Brasenose Club.
In the 1850s, following the notion of the day, he travelled to Spain. This journey gave him new ideas, subjects, and motifs. Delicate details and clear and bright palette inspired by hot colours of the South, are distinctive features of his paintings and watercolours. In 1873, a Manchester newspaper praised one of his watercolours as "an exquisite work, perfectly Spanish". He also was influenced by works by the great Spanish artist Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682). Murilloes street children can be easily recognised in Keelinges compassionate depictions of poor children, both British and Spanish. His eSpanish Boye exhibited in Manchester in 1876, was described as "a very good example of the careful and accurate method pursued by the artist. He is thoroughly conscientious in all his professional work."
In 1851, in London, Keeling married Mary Ann Charker (b.1822). They had four children: Edith (b.1852), Dalton Harper (b.1853), Sidney Charles (b.1859), and Gertrude Ann (b.1862). Keeling died on 21.02.1886 in his house at Barton-upon-Irwell, Manchester.
Keeling did not strive for fame and glory, and remained in the background of the artistic life of his time, although many connoisseurs appreciated his works. Several his works have been preserved at Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In the 1870s, Wolverhampton industrialist and collector Sidney Cartwright purchased from a Manchester exhibition a large number of Keelinges works. In 1887, they were given to Wolverhampton Art Gallery which possesses today possibly the largest collection of Keelinges paitings and watercolours in the United Kingdom.
Witold PruszkowskiPolish Painter, 1846-1896
Polish painter and draughtsman. He spent his early years in Odessa and Kiev, subsequently living in France, in particular in Paris, where he studied under the Polish portrait painter Tadeusz Gorecki (1825-68), continuing (1868-71) at the Akademie der Kenste in Munich. In 1871 he moved to Krakew where he studied until 1875 under Jan Matejko at the School of Fine Arts. During ten years in Krakew he produced many striking portraits. In the portrait of Mrs Fedorowicz (1878; Krakew, N. Mus.) he achieved subtle effects of modelling by means of carefully differentiated tones and meticulously distributed light. The Realism of these portraits is subsumed into an advanced proto-Impressionist technique, on occasion using both small patches of distinct colour and broadly applied areas of impasto. Alongside such works, Pruszkowski produced paintings based on fantastic legends, fables and folk-tales. In these works one can trace influences going back to the artist's Munich period; but Pruszkowski's essentially Romantic vision translated his subjects into an entirely Polish context, as in Midsummer's Night (1875; Warsaw, N. Mus.) and Water Nymphs (1877; Krakew, N. Mus.). In 1882 Pruszkowski moved to the village of Mnikow outside Krakew, where he worked in the isolation he believed essential for creative activity. Contact with the country people, however, provided him with themes for his work; alongside his fantastic and legendary subjects he painted genre scenes of peasant life. He brought to his subjects a diversity of means of formal depiction, from the realistic to the near visionary. However, there are notable recurrent motifs, for example the image of the native willow, the symbolic haunt of spirits, as in Willow on Marshland (1892; Ledz, Mus. A.). The visionary element achieved its apogee in the pastel compositions from the last years of his life. In works such as Death of Ellenai (1892; Wroclaw, N. Mus.) the evanescent nature of forms is expressed through restrained colour schemes, generally tending towards silvery greyish azure or shades of pink.