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 :. | Landscape with Goatherd | Civitavecchia (mk17) | Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt | women in a garden | David Slaying Goliath (mk17) |
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John F.Francis
American Painter, 1808-1886 American painter. Beginning as an itinerant portrait painter in rural Pennsylvania, he produced works including flattering, colourful portraits of his sisters in the style of Thomas Sully, often incorporating small still-life details. He abandoned portraiture after 1850 to concentrate exclusively on still-life subjects in the tradition of the PEALE family.
Alexei Savrasov
Russian Painter, 1830-1897 was a Russian landscape painter and creator of the lyrical landscape style. Savrasov was born into the family of a merchant. He began to draw early and in 1838 he enrolled as a student of professor Rabus at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (graduated in 1850), and immediately began to specialize in landscape painting. In 1852, he traveled to Ukraine. Then, in 1854 by the invitation of the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna, President of the Imperial Academy of Arts, he moved to the neighborhood of St. Petersburg. In 1857, Savrasov became a teacher at the Moscow School of painting, sculpturing and architecture. His best disciples, Isaac Levitan and Konstantin Korovin, remembered their teacher with admiration and gratitude. The Rooks Have Come Back was painted by Savrasov near Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma.In 1857, he married Sophia Karlovna Hertz, sister of art historian K. Hertz. In their home they entertained artistic people and collectors including Pavel Tretyakov. Savrasov became especially close with Vasily Perov. Perov helped him paint the figures of the boat trackers in Savrasov's Volga near Yuryevets, Savrasov painted landscapes for Perov's Bird catcher and Hunters on Bivouac. In the 1860s, he traveled to England to see the International Exhibition, and to Switzerland. In one of his letters he wrote that no academies in the world could so advance an artist as the present world exhibition. The painters who influenced him most were British painter John Constable and Swiss painter Alexandre Calame. The Rooks Have Come Back (1871) is considered by many critics to be the high point in Savrasoves artistic career. Using a common, even trivial, episode of birds returning home, and an extremely simple landscape, Savrasov emotionally showed the transition of nature from winter to spring. It was a new type of lyrical landscape painting, called later by critics the mood landscape. The painting brought him fame. In 1870, he became a member of the Peredvizhniki group, breaking with government-sponsored academic art. In 1871,
Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville
(31 May 1835 - 18 May 1885) was a French Academic painter who studied under Eugene Delacroix. His dramatic and intensely patriotic subjects illustrated episodes from the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War, the Zulu War and portraits of soldiers. Some of his works have been collected by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and by the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Last Cartridges, 1873 The Defence of Rorke's Drift, oil on canvas painting by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville, 1880, Art Gallery of New South Wales. This incident occurred on 22 January 1879, in the Anglo-Zulu War. La bataille de VillersexelHe was born to wealthy parents at Saint-Omer, Pas-de-Calais. From school he went to college, where he took his degree of bachelier -lettres. In spite of the opposition of his family he entered the naval school at Lorient, and it was there, in 1856, that his artistic instincts first declared themselves. After being discouraged by several painters of repute, he was admitted to work in François-Edouard Picot's studio. He did not remain there long, and he was painting by himself when he produced his first picture, The Fifth Battalion of Chasseurs at the Gervais Battery (Malakoff). In 1860 Neuville painted an Episode of the taking of Naples by Garibaldi for the Artists' Club in the rue de Provence, and sent to the Paris Salon in 1861 The Guard Chasseurs in the Trenches of the Mamelon Vert. He participated in illustrating the Hetzel editions of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He also illustrated Le Tour du monde and Guizot's History of France. At the same time he painted a number of remarkable pictures: The Attack in the Streets of Magenta by Zouaves and the Light Horse (1864), A Zouave Sentinel (1865), The Battle of San Lorenzo (1867), and Dismounted Cavalry crossing the Tchernaia (1869). In these he showed peculiar insight into military life, but his full power was not reached until after the Franco-Prussian War. He then aimed at depicting in his works the episodes of that war, and began by representing the Bivouac before Le Bourget (1872). His fame spread rapidly, and was increased by The Last Cartridges (1873), memorializing an episode involving the Blue Division of the French marines, in which it is easy to discern the vast difference between the conventional treatment of military subjects, as practised by Horace Vernet, and that of a man who had lived the life that he painted. In 1874 the Fight on a Railroad was not less successful, and was followed by the Attack on a House at Villersexel (1875) and the Railway Bridge at Styring (1877). In 1878 the painter exhibited (not at the Great Exhibition) Le Bourget, the Surprise at Daybreak, The Intercepted Despatch-bearer, and a considerable number of drawings. He also exhibited in London some episodes of the Zulu War. Fifty thousand people paid to see his impression of The Defence of Rorke's Drift (1880), which the infant Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney paid a large sum to acquire. In 1881 he was made an officer of the Legion d'honneur for The Cemetery of Saint-Privat and The Despatch-bearer and the "Huns in the Battle of Chalon." During these years Neuville was at work with Édouard Detaille on an important though less artistic work, The Panorama of Rezonville. Neuville died in Paris on May 18, 1885. At the sale of his works the state purchased for the Palais du Luxembourg the Bourget and the Attack on a Barricaded House, with a water-color The Parley, and a drawing of a Turco in Fighting Trim.