Conrad Martens
England/Australia Painter , 1801-1878
Australian painter, lithographer and librarian of English birth. Son of a London merchant, he studied c. 1816 under Copley Fielding. His training was as a watercolourist and his most important works are watercolours, although he also produced paintings in oils. His early work displays the taste then current for the Picturesque. Francis Danby, David Cox and Turner were artists he admired. Martens left for India in 1832 or 1833 but at Montevideo joined Charles Darwin's expedition, replacing Augustus Earle as topographical draughtsman aboard the Beagle. The work strengthened his observation of detail and skill as a draughtsman. He left the expedition in October 1834 and, travelling via Tahiti and New Zealand, arrived in Sydney in April 1835. There he worked as a professional artist, in the 1840s and 1850s producing lithographic views of the Sydney area to augment his income. In 1863 he was appointed Parliamentary Librarian, which secured his finances. The skills he had acquired aboard the Beagle helped to gain him commissions to depict the estates around Sydney. However, his admiration for Turner, and with this the desire to elevate landscape as a subject, prompted him to subordinate line to mood in a Romantic treatment of the landscape. His thoughts were clearly stated in a lecture on landscape painting given in 1856 at the Australian Library, Sydney (see Smith, 1975). Related Paintings of Conrad Martens :. | Aboriginal camp site | Cloud study | Cloud study | Cloud Study | Rio Santa Cruz | Related Artists: Minerva Josephine Chapman(1858 - 1947) was an American painter. She was known for her work in miniature portraiture, landscape, and still life.
She was born in Sand Bank, New York and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She studied at a number of institutions including Mount Holyoke College (where she graduated from in 1880) and the Art Institute of Chicago. She lived and studied in Paris from the late 1880s to 1915, and again after the first world war, where she established her reputation as an artist. She retired to Palo Alto, California and died at the age of 88.
Anastagio FontebuoniFirenze 1571 -1626 Pedro WeingatnerPedro Weingärtner (Porto Alegre, 1853 e 1929) was an important Academic painter of Brazil, and the first artist born in Rio Grande do Sul to win international praise for his work.
Born to a family of German immigrants, he began his artistic career as an amateur, helped by his brother Ineio, who was a lithographer, and possibly also by painter Delfim da Câmara. Anyway, in 1878 he moved to Germany in order to study in the Grossherrzoglisch Badische Kunstschule, in Karlsruhe. There he became a pupil of Ferdinand Keller, Theodor Poeckh and Ernst Hildebrand. In 1880 Keller moved to Berlin, being followed by Weingärtner, who then enrolled in the local Academy.
In 1882 he left Germany for France, studying in the Academie Julian under Tony Robert-Fleury and William Adolphe Bouguereau. Wrecked by financial issues, he thought of abandoning his studies, but such situation was reverted by supportive friends, including Baron of Itajube, who got for him a special scholarship from emperor Peter II upon Bouguereau's advice. Then he could further his education in Rome.
Thereafter for many years he divided his time between Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Rome, traveling very often and being celebrated as one of the most important Brazilian painters of his generation. In Rio Grande do Sul he was a star. In 1920 he was back in Porto Alegre, where the remained until death. His fame declined from 1925 on, facing competition from new painters and changing tastes in local art.
He devoted all his efforts to a half-Realist half-Romantic approach to Academicism even while such styles were already being severely challenged by Modern tendencies. Major themes in his work were mythological scenes, landscapes and genre paintings focusing mainly immigrants and the gaucho, the folk type of Rio Grande do Sul people.
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