Edvard Munch
Norwegian
1863-1944
Edvard Munch Locations
Edvard Munch (pronounced , December 12, 1863 ?C January 23, 1944) was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker, and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best-known composition, The Scream is one of the pieces in a series titled The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy.
Edvard Munch was born in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Adalsbruk in Loten, Norway to Christian Munch, the son of a prominent priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer, who married Laura Cathrine Bjølstad, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an older sister, Johanne Sophie (born 1862), and three younger siblings: Peter Andreas (born 1865), Laura Cathrine (born 1867), and Inger Marie (born 1868). Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have gotten their art talent from their mother. Edvard Munch was related to painter Jacob Munch (1776?C1839) and historian Peter Andreas Munch (1810?C1863).
The family moved to Kristiania (now Oslo) in 1864 when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress. Edvard??s mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did Munch's favorite sister Johanne Sophie in 1877. After their mother's death, the Munch siblings were raised by their father and by their aunt Karen. Often ill for much of the winters and kept out of school, Edvard would draw to keep himself occupied. He also received tutoring from his school mates and his aunt. Christian Munch also instructed his son in history and literature, and entertained the children with vivid ghost stories and tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
Christian??s positive behavior toward his children, however, was overshadowed by his morbid pietism. Munch wrote, ??My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious??to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angles of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.?? Christian reprimanded his children by telling them that their mother was looking down from heaven and grieving over their misbehavior. The oppressive religious milieu, plus Edvard??s poor health and the vivid ghost stories, helped inspire macabre visions and nightmares in Edvard, who felt death constantly advancing on him. One of Munch's younger sisters was diagnosed with mental illness at an early age. Of the five siblings only Andreas married, but he died a few months after the wedding. Munch would later write, "I inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies??the heritage of consumption and insanity."
Christian Munch??s military pay was very low, and his attempts at developing a private side practice failed, keeping his family in perrenial poverty. They moved frequently from one sordid flat to another. Munch??s early drawings and watercolors depicted these interiors, and the individual objects such as medicine bottles and drawing implements, plus some landscapes. By his teens, art dominated Munch??s interests. At thirteen, Munch has his first exposure to other artists at the newly formed Art Association, were he admired the work of the Norwegian landscape school, and where he returned to copy the paintings, and soon he began to paint in oils. Related Paintings of Edvard Munch :. | Portrait | Whoop | Murderer | Self-Portrait | The Duchess of richmond and lady lennox watching the duke-s racehorses at exercisee | Related Artists: George Price Boyce.RWS1826-1897
English painter. He was the son of a prosperous wine merchant and pawnbroker. His childhood was spent in London, and in 1846 he was apprenticed to the firm of architects Wyatt & Brandon, where he remained for three years. He was always fascinated by ancient buildings but gradually lost interest in architecture as a career. In 1849, perhaps as a result of meeting David Cox at Betws-y-Coed (Gwynedd, Wales), he decided to become a painter. In the early 1850s Boyce drew landscape and architectural subjects with a fluent watercolour technique derived from Cox. In 1854 Boyce made an extended journey to Italy; he painted views of buildings in Venice and Verona, which were commended by Ruskin, and semi-abstract twilight studies Thomas HearneBritish Painter, 1744-1817
English painter and engraver. From 1765 to 1771 Hearne studied printmaking as apprentice to the landscape engraver William Woollett, exhibiting watercolours meanwhile at the Free Society of Artists and the Society of Artists. In 1771 he abandoned engraving and accompanied Sir Ralph Payne to the Leeward Islands (where Payne had just been appointed Governor), returning in 1775; several of his fastidious watercolours of Antigua survive, for example the Court House and Guard House in the Town of St John's in the Island of Antigua (n.d.; London, V&A). From then on British topography was his main concern. He travelled widely in England, Scotland and Wales with Sir George Beaumont and from these excursions was able to provide 84 drawings which, engraved by William Byrne, were published as The Antiquities of Great Britain (1778-81). This series set new standards in the pictorial recording of medieval architecture. Hearne also provided drawings for etchings of landscapes and 'rural sports'. Sir John Everett MillaisEnglish Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1829-1896
Millais showed a prodigious natural facility for drawing, and his parents groomed him from an early age to become an artist. His father was a man of independent means from an old Jersey family. He spent his childhood in Southampton (where his mother's family were prosperous saddlers), Jersey and Dinan in Brittany, before going to London in 1838. After a brief period at Henry Sass's private art school, he was accepted into the Royal Academy Schools in 1840, its youngest-ever student. He won a silver medal there in 1843 for his drawing from the Antique, made his d?but at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1846 with the accomplished though conventional history painting Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru (London, V&A) and won a gold medal in 1847 for the Tribe of Benjamin Seizing the Daughters of Shiloh (priv. col., sale cat., London, Sotheby's, 21 Nov 1973, lot 44),
|
|
|