1865-1925was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He was born into a conservative middle class family in Lausanne, and there he attended College Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882. In that year he moved to Paris to study art under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Academie Julian. He spent many hours in the Louvre, where he greatly admired the works of Holbein, Derer and Ingres; these artists would remain exemplars for Vallotton throughout his life.[1] His earliest paintings, such as the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach (1885), are firmly rooted in the academic tradition, and his self portrait of 1885 (seen at right) received an honorable mention at the Salon des artistes français in 1886. During the following decade Vallotton painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and were recognized as radically innovative in printmaking. They established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium; in the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been mainly utilized unimaginatively as a medium for the reproduction of drawn or painted images and, latterly, photographs. Vallotton's starkly reductive woodcut style features large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. While emphasizing outline and flat patterns, Vallotton generally made no use of the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. The influences of post-Impressionism, symbolism and the Japanese woodcut are apparent; a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints had been presented at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and Vallotton, like many artists of his era an enthusiast of Japonism, collected these prints. He depicted street crowds and demonstrations including several scenes of police attacking anarchists bathing women, portrait heads, and other subjects which he treated with a sardonic humor. His graphic art reached its highest development in Intimit's (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women. Vallotton's prints have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner .By 1892 he was affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail.  Related Paintings of Felix Vallotton :. | Still Life with Ham | The Rape of Europe | Poker | Nude sleeping on a bank | Nude Seated in a red armchair |
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John Singleton Copley
American Colonial Era Painter, 1738-1815 John Singleton Copley (1738[1] - 1815) was an American painter, born presumably in Boston, Massachusetts and a son of Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Irish. He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects. His paintings were innovative in their tendency to depict artifacts relating to these individuals' lives.
Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys
1829-1904 English painter, illustrator and draughtsman. He was the son of Anthony Sands (1804-83), a minor local artist. He began his artistic education with his father and attended the Norwich School of Design from 1846. His precocious talent was recognized by the award of silver medals by the Society of Arts in 1846 and 1847. He moved to London in 1851, when he first exhibited at the Royal Academy, but he continued to spend time at Norwich until the death of his parents in 1883. After publishing in 1857 A Nightmare, a gentle caricature of John Ruskin and his Pre-Raphaelite prot?g?s William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and based on Millais's Sir Isumbras at the Ford (Port Sunlight, Lady Lever A.G.), he met Rossetti and became a member of his circle.
BABUREN, Dirck van
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1595-1624 1624). Dutch painter. His father, Jasper van Baburen (d ?1599), had been in the service of Geertruijd van Bronckhorst van Battenburg, Baroness (vrijvrouw) of Vianen, Viscountess (burggravin) of Utrecht, and thus Dirck must have received a better than average education, a fact at least partially confirmed by the innovative and often literary nature of his subject-matter. In 1611 he is recorded as a pupil of the portrait and history painter Paulus Moreelse in Utrecht. It is likely that this was the last year of his apprenticeship. Van Baburen probably left for Italy shortly after 1611, for a document rediscovered in the late 1980s records a signed and dated altarpiece of the Martyrdom of St Sebastian (1615; untraced), executed for a church in Parma. His most important pictures made in Italy were painted in collaboration with David de Haen (d 1622) for the Piet? Chapel of S Pietro in Montorio, Rome, which was decorated between 1615 and 1620. Van Baburen's paintings for the chapel were mentioned by Giulio Mancini in his manuscript notes, Considerazioni sulla pittura (c. 1619-20); there Mancini claims the artist was 22 or 23 years old when he carried out the commission. One of his best-known works, the Entombment (formerly dated 1617), is still in situ on the altar of the chapel. This much-copied composition reveals van Baburen's close study of Caravaggio's famous Entombment (Rome, Pin. Vaticana). In 1619 and the spring of 1620 van Baburen and de Haen were recorded as living in the same house in the Roman parish of S Andrea delle Fratte. Caravaggio's close follower and presumed student, Bartolomeo Manfredi, was living in the same parish in 1619. Van Baburen must have known the works of Manfredi.