Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1696-1770 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was born in Venice on March 5, 1696. His father, who was part owner of a ship, died when Tiepolo was scarcely a year old, but the family was left in comfortable circumstances. As a youth, he was apprenticed to Gregorio Lazzarini, a mediocre but fashionable painter known for his elaborately theatrical, rather grandiose compositions. Tiepolo soon evolved a more spirited style of his own. By the time he was 20, he had exhibited his work independently, and won plaudits, at an exhibition held at the church of S. Rocco. The next year he became a member of the Fraglia, or painters guild. In 1719 he married Cecilia Guardi, whose brother Francesco was to become famous as a painter of the Venetian scene. They had nine children, among them Giovanni Domenico and Lorenzo Baldassare, who were also painters. In the 1720s Tiepolo carried out many large-scale commissions on the northern Italian mainland. Of these the most important is the cycle of Old Testament scenes done for the patriarch of Aquileia, Daniele Dolfin, in the new Archbishop Palace at Udine. Here Tiepolo abandoned the dark hues that had characterized his early style and turned instead to the bright, sparkling colors that were to make him famous.  Related Paintings of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo :. | St James the great | A Seated Man and a Girl with a Pitcher | Neptune Bestowing Gifts upon Venice | Die Verstobung der Hagar | Sarah and the Archangel |
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Felice Ficherelli
Italian painter , b. 1603, San Gimignano, d. 1660, Firenze Firenze,Italian painter. His most original works were easel pictures, for private collectors, often of cruel and violent subjects, which he interpreted with a morbid sensuality and ambiguous tenderness. He was brought to Florence when very young by the collector Conte Alberto Bardi (d 1632), who arranged for him to study with Jacopo da Empoli and to copy works by Andrea del Sarto. Ficherelli's clear compositions and luminous drapery, which remain evident throughout his career, reflect this training. In the early 1630s he was attracted by the delicate sfumato effects of Francesco Furini and developed a style close to that of Cecco Bravo; his works of this period include the Sacrifice of Isaac (Florence, priv. col., for illustration see Gregori, 1968, p. 26) and the Martyrdom of St Agatha (priv. col., see Cantelli, fig. 338). There followed in the late 1630s Tarquin and Lucretia, which is known in several versions (e.g. Rome, Accad. N. S Luca), the theatrical Julia Receiving the Bloodstained Garments of Pompey (Genoa, priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat., pl. 1.208), an Allegory of Patience (Florence, Bigongiari priv. col., see Gregori, 1974, fig. 23) and Antiochus and Stratonica (Auckland, C.A.G.).
Bartolomeo Manfredi
(baptised 25 August 1582 - 12 December 1622) was an Italian painter, a leading member of the Caravaggisti (followers of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio) of the early 17th century. Manfredi was born in Ostiano, near Cremona. He may have been a pupil of Caravaggio in Romeat his famous libel trial in 1603 Caravaggio mentioned that a certain Bartolomeo, accused of distributing scurrilous poems attacking Caravaggio's detested rival Baglione, had been a servant of his. Certainly the Bartolomeo Manfredi known to art history was a close follower of Caravaggio's innovatory style, with its enhanced chiaroscuro and insistence on naturalism, with a gift for story-telling through expression and body-language. Caravaggio in his brief careerehe rocketed to fame in 1600, was exiled from Rome in 1606, and was dead by 1610 had a profound effect on the younger generation of artists, particularly in Rome and Naples. And of these Caravaggisti (followers of Caravaggio), Manfredi seems in turn to have been the most influential in transmitting the master's legacy to the next generation, particularly with painters from France and the Netherlands who came to Italy. Unfortunately no documented, signed works by Manfredi survive, and several of the forty or so works now attributed to him were formerly believed to be by Caravaggio. The steady disentangling of Caravaggio from Manfredi has made clear that it was Manfredi, rather than his master, who was primarily responsible for popularising low-life genre painting among the second generation of Caravaggisti. Manfredi was a successful artist, able to keep his own servant before he was thirty years old, "a man of distinguished appearance and fine behaviour" according to the biographer Giulio Mancini, although seldom sociable. He built his career around easel paintings for private clients, and never pursued the public commissions upon which wider reputations were built, but his works were widely collected in the 17th century and he was considered Caravaggio's equal or even superior. His Mars Chastising Cupid offers a tantalising hint at a lost Caravaggio: the master promised a painting on this theme to Mancini, but another of Caravaggio's patrons, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, had taken it, and Mancini therefore commissioned Manfredi to paint another for him, which Mancini considered Manfredi's best work. Manfredi died in Rome in 1622. Gerard Seghers (or Segers; 1589-1651) was one of his pupils
Joseph Whiting Stock
1815-1855 American painter. He was physically handicapped and confined to his house until his doctor advised a wheelchair, which, when placed on a railway carriage, allowed him to travel. He took painting lessons as therapy from Franklin White, a pupil of Chester Harding, and became proficient as an artist. This enabled him to make a living painting portraits, landscapes and miniatures throughout New England and part of New York State. He kept a journal that lists 912 examples of his work executed between 1832 and 1846, with the names of his sitters, canvas sizes, the prices charged and where the pictures were painted. No examples of his landscapes have survived and only a few of his 80 miniatures have been located. The earliest miniatures date from 1836, but most were executed in 1842 and 1845 when he lived in New Bedford, MA. Few American primitive artists of the 19th century were as productive as Stock.