Spanish, 1595-1657,Spanish painter. Although he is sometimes thought to have been a Sevillian painter, his career is documented in Madrid. Barrera enjoyed considerable prestige and authority within the artistic community of the Spanish capital and in 1634 and 1639 represented his profession in significant legal battles concerning the status and rights of painters. However, Barrera's known paintings, all of which are still-lifes, are those of a derivative artist of modest abilities. In Still-life with Basket of Grapes, signed and dated 1642 (Florence, Uffizi), his arrangement of objects in a window-frame and on a stone ledge derives from works by Juan van der Hamen y Le?n but without that artist's refined compositional sense or mastery of pictorial space. The rather weak modelling of objects in this painting is consistent with Barrera's other still-lifes, which are further characterized by their light tonality, bland colouring and monotonous brushwork. Comparable stylistic features are found in the more accomplished still-lifes of Antonio Ponce, with whom Barrera is documented in the 1630s. Barrera's best works are those depicting the Four Seasons, signed and dated 1638 (Seville, priv. col., see 1982 exh. cat., pp. 78-85). These are still-lifes of abundant seasonal foodstuffs and, in landscape settings, large symbolic and genre figures drawn from traditional iconography.  Related Paintings of Francisco Barrera :. | Annunciation The Merode Altarpiece | Drifting | Adoration of the Shepherds sw | Sbor nedoimok by Vasiliy Pukirev | Im Gemusegarten an der Flubmundung |
Related Artists:
Marcel Couchaux
painted Pecheurs dans le port de Honfleur in 1920
Hugo Wilhelm Kauffmann
(7 August 1844 - 30 December 1915) was a German painter, the son of Hermann Kauffmann. Kauffmann was born in Hamburg. In 1861 he went to Frankfurt and worked there under Jakob Becker, Edward Jakob von Steinle and Johann Nepomuk Zwerger. From 1863-71 he lived in Kronberg in the Taunus. During this time he spent one winter in Hamburg and a five-month period in Desseldorf too; afterwards he spent 1½ years in Paris, until 1870 when the war drove him out. He lived until 1871 in Munich. He died in Prien at the Chiemsee in 1915.
emile-Rene Menard
(1861 - 1930) was a French painter born in Paris. From early childhood he was immersed in an artistic environment: Corot, Millet and the Barbizon painters frequented his family home, familiarizing him thus with both landscape and antique subjects. Menard studied at the Academy Jullian from 1880 after having been a student of Baudry, Bouguereau, and Henri Lehmann. He participated in the Salon of the Secession in Munich, and the Salon de la Libre Esthetique in Brussels during 1897. Several personal exhibitions were also devoted to him at the Georges Small Gallery. In 1921 he exhibited in the Twelfth Salon along with Henri Martin and Edmond Aman-Jean. Galleries in Buffalo, New York and Boston, Massachusetts exposed Menard and his art to the United States. However, the numerous commissions that Menard received from the French government crowned his career; for example, the cycle for the Hautes Etudes e la Sorbonne, the Faculte de Droit, and the fresco Atoms for the Chemistry institute, and finally the Caise des Depôts in Marseilles. Menard's art allies a rigorous, clear classicism with a diffuse and dreamlike brushwork. In 1894, Victor Shoe wrote of Menard in l' Art et la Vie (Art and Life): "visions of a pacified, bathed nature, of dawn and of twilight, where the soul seems to immerse itself in the innocence of daybreak, and breathe the divine anointment that comes with the dawn."