1819-1877
French
Gustave Courbet Locations
was a French painter whose powerful pictures of peasants and scenes of everyday life established him as the leading figure of the realist movement of the mid-19th century.
Gustave Courbet was born at Ornans on June 10, 1819. He appears to have inherited his vigorous temperament from his father, a landowner and prominent personality in the Franche-Comte region. At the age of 18 Gustave went to the College Royal at Besancon. There he openly expressed his dissatisfaction with the traditional classical subjects he was obliged to study, going so far as to lead a revolt among the students. In 1838 he was enrolled as an externe and could simultaneously attend the classes of Charles Flajoulot, director of the ecole des Beaux-Arts. At the college in Besançon, Courbet became fast friends with Max Buchon, whose Essais Poetiques (1839) he illustrated with four lithographs.
In 1840 Courbet went to Paris to study law, but he decided to become a painter and spent much time copying in the Louvre. In 1844 his Self-Portrait with Black Dog was exhibited at the Salon. The following year he submitted five pictures; only one, Le Guitarrero, was accepted. After a complete rejection in 1847, the Liberal Jury of 1848 accepted all 10 of his entries, and the critic Champfleury, who was to become Courbet first staunch apologist, highly praised the Walpurgis Night. Related Paintings of Gustave Courbet :. | The Grain Sifters | The Origin of the World | Study of Smash | Deer | River | Related Artists:
Grant Wood1891-1942
Grant Wood Locations
His family moved to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901. Soon thereafter he began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. After graduating from Washington High School (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) , Wood enrolled in an art school in Minneapolis in 1910, and returned a year later to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. In 1913 he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and did some work as a silversmith.
From 1920 to 1928 he made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially impressionism and post-impressionism. But it was the work of Jan Van Eyck that influenced him to take on the clarity of this new technique and to incorporate it in his new works. From 1924 to 1935 Wood lived in the loft of a carriage house that he turned into his personal studio at "5 Turner Alley" (the studio had no address until Wood made one up himself). In 1932, Wood helped found the Stone City Art Colony near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression. He became a great proponent of regionalism in the arts, lecturing throughout the country on the topic.
Wood taught painting at the University of Iowa's School of Art beginning in 1934. During that time, he supervised mural painting projects, mentored students, produced a variety of his own works, and became a key part of the University's cultural community. On February 12, 1942, one day before his 51st birthday, Wood died at the university hospital of liver cancer.
When Wood died, his estate went to his sister, Nan Wood Graham, the woman portrayed in American Gothic. When she died in 1990, her estate, along with Wood's personal effects and various works of art, became the property of the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa.
Wood was an active painter from an extremely young age until his death, and although he is best known for his paintings, he worked in a large number of media, including ink, charcoal, ceramics, metal, wood and found objects.
Throughout his life he hired out his talents to many Iowa-based businesses as a steady source of income. This included painting advertisements, sketching rooms of a mortuary house for promotional flyers and, in one case, designing the corn-themed decor (including chandelier) for the dining room of a hotel. In addition, his 1928 trip to Munich was to oversee the making of the stained-glass windows he had designed for a Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. He again returned to Cedar Rapids to teach Junior High students after serving in the army as a camouflage painter.
GRANACCI, FrancescoItalian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1469-1543
was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. Born at Villamagna di Volterra, he trained in Florence in the studio of Domenico Ghirlandaio, and was employed painting frescoes for San Marco on commission of Lorenzo de'Medici. He is featured in Giorgio Vasari's Vite. His early works, such as the Enthroned Madonna between Saint Michael and John the Baptist (Staatliche Museen, Berlin), Adoration of the Child (Honolulu Academy of Arts) and four histories of Saint John the Baptist, were influenced by the style of Filippino Lippi. In 1508, Granacci went to Rome, where he and other artists helped his lifelong friend Michelangelo to transfer cartoons to the Sistine chapel ceiling. Returning to Florence, Granacci painted a Madonna with Child with Saints Francesco and Jerome for the Augustinian convent of San Gallo (now in the Gallery of the Academy), a Madonna della Cintola for the Company of San Benedetto Bigi, and in 1515 he participated in creating the decorations to celebrate the visit to Florence of Pope Leo X. In 1519, he painted a Madonna with Child and Saint John. Works of the years 1520-1525 betray a direct influence of Fra Bartolomeo, including a Madonna in throne between Saints Sebastiano and Francesco for Castelfiorentino and a Sacred Conversation for Montemurlo. An altarpiece of the Assumption is influenced by Pietro Perugino.
Alfred SisleyFrench
1839-1899
Alfred Sisley Galleries
Alfred Sisley (October 30, 1839 ?C January 29, 1899) was an English Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France. Sisley is recognized as perhaps the most consistent of the Impressionists, never deviating into figure painting or finding that the movement did not fulfill his artistic needs.
Sisley was born in Paris to affluent English parents; William Sisley was in the silk business, and his mother Felicia Sell was a cultivated music connoisseur. At the age of 18, Sisley was sent to London to study for a career in business, but he abandoned it after four years and returned to Paris. Beginning in 1862 he studied at the atelier of Swiss artist Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, where he became acquainted with Fr??d??ric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Together they would paint landscapes en plein air (in the open air) in order to realistically capture the transient effects of sunlight. This approach, innovative at the time, resulted in paintings more colorful and more broadly painted than the public was accustomed to seeing. Consequently, Sisley and his friends initially had few opportunities to exhibit or sell their work. Unlike some of his fellow students who suffered financial hardships, Sisley received an allowance from his father??until 1870, after which time he became increasingly poor. Sisley's student works are lost. His earliest known work, Lane near a Small Town is believed to have been painted around 1864. His first landscape paintings are sombre, coloured with dark browns, greens, and pale blues. They were often executed at Marly and Saint-Cloud.