1593-1652 French Georges de La Tour Galleries His early work shows influences from Caravaggio, probably via his Dutch followers, and the genre scenes of cheats??as in The Fortune Teller ??and fighting beggars clearly derive from the Dutch Caravaggisti, and probably also his fellow-Lorrainer, Jacques Bellange. These are believed to date from relatively early in his career. La Tour is best known for the nocturnal light effects which he developed much further than his artistic predecessors had done, and transferred their use in the genre subjects in the paintings of the Dutch Caravaggisti to religious painting in his. Unlike Caravaggio his religious paintings lack dramatic effects. He painted these in a second phase of his style, perhaps beginning in the 1640s, using chiaroscuro, careful geometrical compositions, and very simplified painting of forms. His work moves during his career towards greater simplicity and stillness ?? taking from Caravaggio very different qualities than Jusepe de Ribera and his Tenebrist followers did. He often painted several variations on the same subjects, and his surviving output is relatively small. His son Etienne was his pupil, and distinguishing between their work in versions of La Tour's compositions is difficult. The version of the Education of the Virgin, in the Frick Collection in New York is an example, as the Museum itself admits. Another group of paintings (example left), of great skill but claimed to be different in style to those of de La Tour, have been attributed to an unknown "Hurdy-gurdy Master". All show older male figures (one group in Malibu includes a female), mostly solitary, either beggars or saints. After his death in 1652, La Tour's work was largely forgotten until rediscovered by Hermann Voss, a German scholar, in 1915. In 1935 an exhibition in Paris began the revival in interest among a wider public. In the twentieth century a number of his works were identified once more, and forgers tried to help meet the new demand; many aspects of his œuvre remain controversial among art historians.  Related Paintings of Georges de La Tour :. | Petrus | The Education of the Virgin | Der Falschspieler, mit Karoass | The Fortune Teller | The Card-Sharp with the Ace of Diamonds |
Related Artists:
Jean-Baptiste Corot
1796-1875 was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796, in a house at 125 Rue du Bac, now demolished. His family were bourgeois people his father was a wigmaker and his mother a milliner and unlike the experience of some of his artistic colleagues, throughout his life he never felt the want of money, as his parents made good investments and ran their businesses well. After his parents married, they bought the millinery shop where she had worked and he gave up his career as a wigmaker to run the business side of the shop. The store was a famous destination for fashionable Parisians and earned the family an excellent income. Corot was the middle of three children born to the family, who lived above their shop during those years. Corot received a scholarship to study in Rouen, but left after having scholastic difficulties and entered a boarding school. He was not a brilliant student, and throughout his entire school career he did not get a single nomination for a prize, not even for the drawing classes. Unlike many masters who demonstrated early talent and inclinations toward art, before 1815 Corot showed no such interest. During those years he lived with the Sennegon family, whose patriarch was a friend of Corot's father and who spent much time with young Corot on nature walks. It was in this region that Corot made his first paintings after nature. At nineteen, Corot was a big child, shy and awkward. He blushed when spoken to. Before the beautiful ladies who frequented his mother's salon, he was embarrassed and fled like a wild thing Emotionally, he was an affectionate and well-behaved son, who adored his mother and trembled when his father spoke. When Corot's parents moved into a new residence in 1817, the twenty-one year old Corot moved into the dormer-windowed room on the third floor, which became his first studio as well. With his father's help he apprenticed to a draper, but he hated commercial life and despised what he called "business tricks", yet he faithfully remained in the trade until he was 26, when his father consented to his adopting the profession of art. Later Corot stated, I told my father that business and I were simply incompatible, and that I was getting a divorce. The business experience proved beneficial, however, by helping him develop an aesthetic sense through his exposure to the colors and textures of the fabrics. Perhaps out of boredom, he turned to oil painting around 1821 and began immediately with landscapes
George Morland
English genre, animal, and landscape painter, 1763-1804 was an English painter of animals and rustic scenes. Morland was born in London on 26 June 1763. His mother was a Frenchwoman, who possessed a small independent property of her own. His grandfather, George H. Morland, was a subject painter. Henry Robert Morland (c. 1719 ?C 1797), father of George, was also an artist and engraver, and picture restorer, at one time a rich man, but later in reduced circumstances. His pictures of Jaundry-maids, reproduced in mezzotint and representing ladies of some importance, were very popular in their time. At a very early age Morland produced sketches of remarkable promise, exhibiting some at the Royal Academy in 1773, when he was but ten years old, and continuing to exhibit at the Free Society of Artists in 1775 and 1776, and at the Society of Artists in 1777, and then sending again to the Royal Academy in 1778, 1779 and 1780. His very earliest work, however, was produced even before that tender age, as his father kept a drawing which the boy had executed when he was but four years old, representing a coach and horses and two footmen. He was a student at the Royal Academy in early youth, but only for a very short time. From the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to his father for seven years, and by means of his talent appears to have kept the family together. He had opportunities at this time of seeing some of the greatest artists of the day, and works by old masters, but even then a strange repugnance for educated society showed itself, and no persuasion
HOFFMANN, Hans
German Painter, ca.1550-1591