1598-1664 Spanish Francisco de Zurbaran Galleries Spanish baroque painter, active mainly at Llerena, Madrid, and Seville. He worked mostly for ecclesiastical patrons. His early paintings, including Crucifixion (1627; Art Inst., Chicago), St. Michael (Metropolitan Mus.), and St. Francis (City Art Museum, St. Louis), often suggest the austere simplicity of wooden sculpture. The figures, placed close to the picture surface, are strongly modeled in dramatic light against dark backgrounds, indicating the influence of Caravaggio. They were clearly painted as altarpieces or devotional objects. In the 1630s the realistic style seen in his famous Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas (1631; Seville) yields to a more mystical expression in works such as the Adoration of the Shepherds (1638; Grenoble); in this decade he was influenced by Ribera figural types and rapid brushwork. While in Seville, Zurbur??n was clearly influenced by Velazquez. After c.1640 the simple power of Zurbaran work lessened as Murillo influence on his painting increased (e.g., Virgin and Child with St. John, Fine Arts Gall., San Diego, Calif.). There are works by Zurbar??n in the Hispanic Society of America, New York City; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art..  Related Paintings of Francisco de Zurbaran :. | The miracle of the hl. Hugo | St. Franciscus in meditation | Agnus Dei | st. peter the martyr | martyred hieronymite nun |
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Barocci, Federico
Italian, 1535-1612 .Italian painter. The leading altar painter in Italy in the second half of the 16th century, he enjoyed a greater popularity and exerted a more profound influence on the art of his time than any of his contemporaries. His patrons included the Pope, Emperor, King of Spain and Grand Duke of Tuscany, and among his admirers were Lodovico Cigoli, Annibale Carracci, Rubens and Guido Reni. However, his work did not begin to receive the acclaim accorded that of Tintoretto or El Greco until the mid-20th century. Several factors have obscured his importance, notably the relative inaccessibility and scarcity of his painted works, most of which were done on commission for specific locations in remote parts of Italy (where they have remained), and the type of painting he produced, which was almost exclusively devoted to religious subjects. He executed very few easel paintings. No autograph example of his painted work has ever left Europe, the portrait of Quintilia Fischieri (c. 1600; Washington, DC, N.G.A.) and pair of portraits of Federigo Ubaldo, Prince of Urbino
Henri De Braekeleer
Belgian Painter, 1840-1888 Belgian painter, was born at Antwerp. He was trained by his father, a genre painter, and his uncle, Baron Henri Leys, and devoted himself to scenes of everyday Antwerp life. The first pictures he exhibited, The Laundry (Van Cutsem collection, Brussels), and The Coppersmith's Workshop (Vleeshouwer collection, Antwerp), were shown. at the Antwerp exhibition in 1861. He received the gold medal at Brussels in 1872 for The Geographer and The Lesson (both in the Brussels gallery); the gold medal at Vienna in 1873 for The Painter's Studio and Grandmother's Birthday ; and the medal of honor at the Exposition Universelle at Amsterdam for The Pilot House. Among his more notable works are A Shoemaker (1862), A Tailor's Workroom (1863), A Gardener (1864, Antwerp gallery), Interior of a Church (1866), Interior, Flanders (1867), Woman Spinning (1869), Man Reading (1871), Theruedu Serment, Antwerp (1875), A Copperplate Printer, The Sailor's Return, The Man at the Window (Couteaux collection, Brussels), The Horn-blower (Couteaux collection), Man Retouching a Picture (Couteaux collection), The Potters (Marlier collection, Brussels), Staircase in the Hydraulic House at Antwerp (Marlier collection), and The Brewer's House at Antwerp (Marlier collection). The last, better known as A Man Sitting, is generally regarded as his masterpiece. As a lithographer and etcher, his work resembles that of Henri Leys.
robert delaunay
French painter, printmaker and writer. Taking Cubism as one of his points of departure, he first developed a vocabulary of colour planes only distantly dependent on observed motifs, and by the 1930s he had arrived at a purely self-sufficient language of geometric forms. He remained active as a theoretician until the end of his life, leaving a legacy of influential writings on the development of abstract art.