French 1600-1682 Claude Lorrain Galleries In Rome, not until the mid-17th century were landscapes deemed fit for serious painting. Northern Europeans, such as the Germans Elsheimer and Brill, had made such views pre-eminent in some of their paintings (as well as Da Vinci in his private drawings or Baldassarre Peruzzi in his decorative frescoes of vedute); but not until Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino do we see landscape become the focus of a canvas by a major Italian artist. Even with the latter two, as with Lorrain, the stated themes of the paintings were mythic or religious. Landscape as a subject was distinctly unclassical and secular. The former quality was not consonant with Renaissance art, which boasted its rivalry with the work of the ancients. The second quality had less public patronage in Counter-Reformation Rome, which prized subjects worthy of "high painting," typically religious or mythic scenes. Pure landscape, like pure still-life or genre painting, reflected an aesthetic viewpoint regarded as lacking in moral seriousness. Rome, the theological and philosophical center of 17th century Italian art, was not quite ready for such a break with tradition. In this matter of the importance of landscape, Lorrain was prescient. Living in a pre-Romantic era, he did not depict those uninhabited panoramas that were to be esteemed in later centuries, such as with Salvatore Rosa. He painted a pastoral world of fields and valleys not distant from castles and towns. If the ocean horizon is represented, it is from the setting of a busy port. Perhaps to feed the public need for paintings with noble themes, his pictures include demigods, heroes and saints, even though his abundant drawings and sketchbooks prove that he was more interested in scenography. Lorrain was described as kind to his pupils and hard-working; keenly observant, but an unlettered man until his death. The painter Joachim von Sandrart is an authority for Claude's life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Baldinucci, who obtained information from some of Claude's immediate survivors, relates various incidents to a different effect (Notizie dei professoni del disegno). John Constable described Claude Lorrain as "the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw", and declared that in Claude??s landscape "all is lovely ?C all amiable ?C all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart"  Related Paintings of Claude Lorrain :. | Ulysses Returns Chryseis to her Father vgh | landscape with ascanius shooting the stag of sylvia | Two Female Figures (mk17) | 2nd third of 17th century | The Sermon on the Mount (mk17) |
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Carl Ludwig Brandt
(22 September 1831 Holstein, Germany - 1905) was a German-born artist who worked mostly in the United States. Brandt was born near Hamburg, in Holstein, Germany. His father and grandfather were physicians in Hamburg. His father taught him drawing at the age of seven, and he subsequently studied in the principal galleries of Europe. He served in the First War of Schleswig (1848-1850), between Germany and Denmark. He came to the United States in 1852. He painted several portraits previous to 1864, and in that year built his studio in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, but lived in Europe from 1865 until 1869. He was chosen a national academician in 1872, and in 1883 was elected first director of the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences, Savannah, Georgia, where he resided in winter. At Telfair he offered art instruction and oversaw art acquisitions, including plaster casts, thus transforming a family mansion into a cultural institution.
Thomas Anshutz
American Realist Painter, 1851-1912 was an American painter and teacher. He studied art in Paris at the Academie Julian, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins. His most famous painting, The Ironworkers' Noontime (1880), depicts several workers on their break in the yard of a foundry. Painted near Wheeling, West Virginia, it is conceived in a naturalistic style similar to that of Eakins, although Eakins never painted industrial subjects.
PACHER, Michael
Austrian Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1498