Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1593-1652
Tuscan painter, daughter and pupil of Orazio Gentileschi, b. Rome. She studied under Agostino Tassi, her father's collaborator, who was convicted of raping the teen-age Artemisia in 1612. Over the years, she has been portrayed as a strumpet, a feminist victim or heroine, and an independent woman of her era and her life has been fictionalized in several novels and plays. In purely artistic terms, she achieved renown for her spirited execution and admirable use of chiaroscuro in the style of Caravaggio, and during her life she achieved both success and fame. In 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the Academy of Design in Florence. About 1638 she visited England, where she was in great demand as a portraitist. Among her works are Judith and Holofernes (Uffizi); Related Paintings of GENTILESCHI, Artemisia :. | Judith Beheading Holofernes (detail) sdg | Judith Beheading Holofernes dfg | Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting fdg | Birth of St John the Baptist dfg | Susanna and the Elders gfg | Related Artists:
Francis TowneEnglish Painter, 1739-1816
was an English water-colour painter. He was born in Isleworth, Middlesex, the son of a corn chandler. Apprenticed to a coach painter in London, he won a design prize from the Society of Arts, and studied for a while at St Martin??s Lane Academy. In 1763 he was employed by a coach painter called Thomas Watson, and went to Exeter on business. He had already begun painting in oils and also taught drawing, and now he began to accept commissions from wealthy families in Devon. After a tour of north Wales in 1777, undertaken with his friend, the lawyer John White, he began to specialize in water-colours. In 1780 he travelled to Rome and from there to Naples. On his return to Devon, he was asked by Sir Thomas and Lady Acland of Killerton to paint some views in Devon and North Wales, and in 1786 he went on a painting tour of the Lake District
Wilhelm Ferdinand Bendz(March 20, 1804 - November 14, 1832), Danish genre and portrait painter, is one of the main personages associated with the Golden Age of Danish Painting. He was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Art (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi) in Copenhagen from 1820 to 1825, winning both silver medals but never the gold prize. He studied under professor Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, but may at the same time have acquired some knowledge of contemporary German painting.
Today he is mainly remembered for his many technically accomplished portraits, though his ambition most of all ran towards a refined fusion of portrait, genre scene and allegorical history painting. His technical virtuosity is particularly visible in his depictions of the play of light cast from an obscured source and the resulting shadows. During his travel to Italy - which also brought him a one-year stay in Munich - he caught a sickness to the lungs and died at the age of 28 in 1832.
ZUCCARELLI FrancescoItalian painter, Venetian school (b. Pitigliano, 1702, d. 1788, Firenze)
Florentine landscape painter and decorator. He twice visited London, where he decorated the Opera House and was well known through popular engravings of his scenes on the Thames. He was a charter member of the Royal Academy. His facile paintings of landscapes with ruins and small figures are best seen in Windsor Castle and in the Academy, Venice.