1858-1921 Belgian Fernand Khnopff Gallery Fernand Khnopff was born to a wealthy family that was part of the high bourgeoisie for generations. Khnopff's ancestors had lived in Flanders since the early 17th-century but were of Austrian and Portuguese descent. Most male members of his family had been lawyers or judges, and young Fernand was destined for a juridical career. In his early childhood (1859-1864) he lived in Bruges where his father was appointed Substitut Du Procureur Du Roi. His childhood memories of the medieval city of Bruges would play a significant role in his later work. In 1864 the family moved to Brussels. To please his parents he went to law school at the Free University of Brussels (now divided into the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) when he was 18 years old. During this period he developed a passion for literature, discovering the works of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle and other mostly French authors. With his younger brother Georges Khnopff - also a passionate amateur of contemporary music and poetry - he started to frequent Jeune Belgique ("Young Belgium"), a group of young writers including Max Waller, Georges Rodenbach, Iwan Gilkin and Emile Verhaeren. Khnopff left University due to a lack of interest in his law studies and began to frequent the studio of Xavier Mellery, who made him familiar with the art of painting. On the 25th of October 1876 he enrolled for the Cours De Dessin Apres Nature ("course of drawing after nature") at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts en Bruxelles. At the Academie, his most famous fellow student was James Ensor, whom he disliked from the start. Between 1877 and 1880 Khnopff made several trips to Paris where he discovered the work of Delacroix, Ingres, Moreau and Stevens. At the Paris World Fair of 1878 he became acquainted with the oeuvre of Millais and Burne-Jones. During his last year at the Acad??mie in 1878-1879 he neglected his classes in Brussels and lived for a while in Passy, were he visited the Cours Libres of Jules Joseph Lefebvre at the Acad??mie Julian.   Related Paintings of Fernand Khnopff :. | Avec Georges Rodenbach Une Ville Morte | A Dreamer Nevermore | Portrait of a Woman | Portrait of Jeanne Keeer | Design for frontispiece for the works of Auguste Villiers de L Isle-d-Adam |
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Jules Elie Delaunay
Nantes 1828 - Paris 1891. French Neoclassical Painter. Studied under Hippolyte Flandrin. French Neoclassical Painter. Studied under Hippolyte Flandrin. French painter. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris on 7 April 1848, where he was a pupil of Joachim Sotta (1810-77), Hippolyte Flandrin and Louis Lamothe (1822-69). He became a disciple of Flandrin, and, though making his debut in the Salon in 1853 with the Saltworkers of Guerande (Nantes, Mus. B.-A.), he soon concentrated on history painting. In 1856 he won the Prix de Rome with the Return of the Young Tobias (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.) and left Paris to study at the Academie de France in Rome. His work is imbued with a deep religious sentiment cast in the restrained, controlled style and formal repertoire of Neo-classicism. From early in his career he produced many easel and wall paintings on religious subjects, such as Jesus Healing the Lepers (1850; Le Croisic,). In 1854 he received a commission to produce four fresco decorations for the church of the monastery of the Visitation-Ste-Marie in Nantes, which he completed the following year. In 1865 he returned to the monastery to decorate the chapel of St-Francois de Sales with scenes from that saint's life.
Nikolai Roerich
Russian, 1874-1947 Russian painter, stage designer and founder of cultural institutions. The son of a lawyer of Scandinavian descent, he graduated from the studio of the landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi at the Academy of Fine Arts (1897) and from the faculty of law at the University of St Petersburg (1898). He then studied in Paris with the history painter Fernand Cormon (1900). Roerich had wide interests and made an important contribution to Russian culture: he lectured at the Institute of Archaeology (1898); he became secretary of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (1901) and director of its school (1906); and he was the first chairman of the World of Art (Rus. Mir Iskusstva) Society (1910). The first volume of his collected cultural writings was published in Moscow in 1914. As a painter he exhibited with the Academy from 1897, WORLD OF ART from 1902, the Vienna Secession c. 1905 and the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1906. From c. 1903 he was a leading member of the artists' colony at TALASHKINO, where he designed mosaics, friezes, murals and furniture. As a stage designer in Russia, he worked between 1907 and 1915 for such directors as Nikolay Yevreinov (1879-1953),
Nicola Forcella
Italian, 19th century