French Fauvist Painter and Sculptor, 1869-1954 Henri Matisse is considered the most important French artist of the 20th century and, along with Pablo Picasso, one of the most influential modernist painters of the last century. Matisse began studying drawing and painting in the 1890s. A student of the masters of Post-Impressionism, Matisse later made a reputation for himself as the leader of a group of painters known as Les Fauves. An ironic label given to them by a critic, the name reflected Matisse's aggressive strokes and bold use of primary colors. In 1905 Matisse gained sudden fame with three paintings, including Woman with the Hat, purchased by the wealthy American ex-patriot Gertrude Stein. Beyond painting, he worked with lithographs and sculpture, and during World War II he did a series of book designs. Later in his career he experimented with paper cutouts and designed decorations for the Dominican chapel in Vence, France. Along with Picasso,   Related Paintings of Henri Matisse :. | Girls wearing black clothes | Sitting in the chair of the Nude | Studio | plommongren mot gron bakgrund | The two women out of the window |
Related Artists:
Pietro Longhi
1702-1785 Italian Pietro Longhi Galleries Pietro Longhi was born in Venice in the parish of Saint Maria, first child of the silversmith Alessandro Falca and his wife, Antonia. He adopted the Longhi last name when he began to paint. He was initially taught by the Veronese painter Antonio Balestra, who then recommended the young painter to apprentice with the Bolognese Giuseppe Maria Crespi, who was highly regarded in his day for both religious and genre painting. He was married in 1732 to Caterina Maria Rizzi. Among his early paintings are some altarpieces and religious themes. In 1734, he completed frescoes in the walls and ceiling of the hall in Ca' Sagredo, representing the Death of the giants. Henceforward, his work would lead him to be viewed in the future as the Venetian William Hogarth, painting subjects and events of everyday life in Venice. The gallant interior scenes reflect the 18th century's turn towards the private and the bourgeois. Many of his paintings show Venetians at play, such as the depiction of the crowd of genteel citizens awkwardly gawking at a freakish Indian rhinoceros (see image). This painting chronicles Clara the rhinoceros brought to Europe in 1741 by a Dutch sea captain and impresario from Leyden, Douvemont van der Meer. This rhinoceros was exhibited in Venice in 1751. There are two versions of this painting, nearly identical except for the unmasked portraits of two men in Ca' Rezzonico version. Ultimately, there may be a punning joke to the painting, since the young man on the left holds aloft the sawed off horn (metaphor for cuckoldry) of the animal. Perhaps this explains the difference between the unchaperoned women. Other paintings chronicle the daily activities such as the gambling parlors (Riddoti) that proliferated in the 18th century. In some, the insecure or naive posture and circumstance, the puppet-like delicacy of the persons, seem to suggest a satirical perspective of the artists toward his subjects. Nearly half of the figures in his genre paintings are faceless, hidden behind Venetian Carnival masks. Like Crespi before him, Longhi was commissioned to paint seven canvases documenting the seven Catholic sacraments. Longhi is well-known as a draughtsman, whose drawings were often done for their own sake, rather than as studies for paintings. Pietro's son, Alessandro, was also an accomplished painter. A paraphrase of Bernard Berenson states that "Longhi painted for the Venetians passionate about painting, their daily lives, in all dailiness, domesticity, and quotidian mundane-ness. In the scenes regarding the hairdo and the apparel of the lady, we find the subject of gossip of the inopportune barber, chattering of the maid; in the school of dance, the amiable sound of violins. It is not tragic... but upholds a deep respect of customs, of great refinement, with an omnipresent good humor distinguishes the paintings of the Longhi from those of Hogarth, at times pitiless and loaded with omens of change".
ANGELUCCIO
Italian painter, Roman school (active 1640-1650 in Rome) Italian painter. He is the only known pupil of Claude Lorrain other than Claude's long-standing assistant Giandomenico Desiderii (b 1620-24; d after 1657). Pascoli, the only biographer to record him, claimed in his life of Claude that Angeluccio was Claude's most able student but had died young and was able to work little. Angeluccio appears to have lived in Rome and, like Claude, was exclusively a landscape painter. About 25 paintings and 35 drawings, all dated 1640-45, comprise his entire oeuvre. Claude's influence can be seen in such paintings as Landscape with Figures and Bridge (priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., no. 88). This is a composition with centrally placed foreground figures framed by trees in the middle ground, which in turn stand before a bridge and a distant vista, and was borrowed directly from such paintings by Claude as Pastoral Landscape (1644-5; Merion Station, PA, Barnes Found.). Although Angeluccio shared Claude's approach to landscape, he was not merely an imitator. His paintings form a coherent stylistic group of wooded landscapes, rich in foliage and undergrowth and characterized by a blue-green tonality, which indicates that he also embraced the tradition of landscape painting brought to Rome in the 17th century by Dutch and Flemish artists. The Landscape with Hunters (Rome, Pal. Barberini), painted on an intimate scale and aligned vertically, like most of Angeluccio's paintings, betrays the artist's debt to this tradition. In the painting the pockets of sunlight and the highlighted foliage, indicated with the abbreviated white brushstrokes typical of Angeluccio's manner, provide sharp contrast to a dark, tunnel-like wood. The resulting sense of the landscape closing in on the figures is an effect often found in the landscapes of the Flemish artist Paul Bril. The distant vista, however, is similar to those that appear in works by Claude. The romanticism evoked by this blending of borrowed elements gives Angeluccio's works their distinguishing quality. His paintings frequently also contain rustic genre figures.
Ferdynand Ruszczyc
(1870-1936) was a Polish painter, printmaker, and stage designer. Ruszczyc originally studied law at the University of St. Petersburg, but then switched majors and began taking painting classes at the Academy of Fine Art. He was a student of famous Russian landscape painters Ivan Shishkin and Arkhip Kuindzhi. Ruszczyc travelled to the Crimea to paint seascapes, and later to the Baltic islands and Sweden to paint northern landscapes. He visited Berlin, where he was significantly influenced by the Symbolist painters such as Arnold Bocklin. After graduation, Ruszczyc made extensive tours of Western Europe incorporating much of the styles he came across into his own art.