French
1844-1910
Henri Rousseau Locations
He was born in Laval in the Loire Valley into the family of a plumber. He attended Laval High School as a day student and then as a boarder, after his father became a debtor and his parents had to leave the town upon the seizure of their house. He was mediocre in some subjects at the high school but won prizes for drawing and music. He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but "attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army," serving for four years, starting in 1863. With his father's death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his widowed mother as a government employee. In 1871, he was promoted to the toll collector's office in Paris as a tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties, and by age 49 he retired from his job to work on his art. His wife died in 1888 and he later remarried.
Rousseau claimed he had "no teacher other than nature", although he admitted he had received "some advice" from two established Academic painters, Felix Auguste-Clement and Jean-Leon Gerome. Essentially he was self-taught and is considered to be a naive or primitive painter. Related Paintings of Henri Rousseau :. | The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope | Portrait of Rousseau's Second Wife with a Lamp | View of the Luxembourg,Chopin Monument | The Flamingos | Portrait of Pierre Loti | Related Artists:
SWEERTS, MichielFlemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1618-1664
Flemish painter, active in Italy, Syria and India. He arrived in Rome in the mid-1640s, perhaps in circumstances similar to those depicted in his painting The Landing (Paris, Louvre). In 1646 he was registered as living in the Via Margutta in the parish of S Maria del Popolo, where documents indicate that he continued to reside until 1651, together with other Flemish Catholics like himself. In 1647 he attended a meeting of the Accademia di S Luca, not as an academician but simply as an associate. The following year he was visited by the Dutch poet Matthijs van de Merwede (1625-?1677), who later recalled the extremely poor welcome he received from the artist. On 1 June 1651 Sweerts was employed by the Antwerp merchant Jan Deutz to represent him at the Papal Customs to collect seven pieces of woollen cloth from Leiden. Sweerts's relationship with the Deutz family was always close: he painted portraits of Jeronimus Deutz (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) and Balthasar Deutz and a series of the Seven Acts of Mercy for the family; some scholars have identified this series with the cycle of paintings divided between the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, and two private collections
Pierre-Antoine BaudouinFrench Painter, 1723-1769
French painter. A pupil of Francois Boucher, whose younger daughter he married in 1758, he specialized in miniatures painted in gouache, which he first exhibited at the Salon of 1761. He was received as a member of the Acad?mie Royale in 1763 with a small gouache of a historical subject, Phryne Accused of Impiety before the Areopagite (Paris, Louvre), and he later painted illustrations of biblical episodes. However, he made his name as a painter of libertine scenes in contemporary settings, which he exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1763 until 1769. Some of his work is directly inspired by Boucher's scenes of pastoral love, but the ostensibly moral themes and careful attention to detail of such paintings as the Modest Model (exh. Salon 1769; Washington, DC, N.G.A.) demonstrate that he was also influenced by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. His pictures were condemned for their immorality, both by the Archbishop of Paris, who in 1763 and 1765 ordered that works by Baudouin be withdrawn from the Salon, and also by Denis Diderot and other critics who accused him of pandering to the decadent taste of his patrons. Nevertheless, Baudouin was one of the most popular artists of the last decades of the ancien regime.
FALCONE, AnielloItalian painter, Naples school (b. 1607, Napoli, d. 1656, Napoli).
Italian painter and draughtsman. He trained briefly with Jusepe de Ribera, the Caravaggesque Spanish painter. He quickly won fame as a specialist in scenes of battle, and his contemporaries nicknamed him the 'oracle' of this genre. Falcone created the 'battle scene without a hero' (Saxl): he showed the battle as a brutal, confused struggle between anonymous troops, without heroes, without defeats and without particular historical incidents. The Battle between Turks and Christians (1621; Paris, Louvre; see fig.) is one of the earliest. The frieze-like composition is elaborately structured, yet the picture is rich in intensely naturalistic, vividly coloured details of armour and weapons and precisely observed expressions of anger and pain. The famous dealer and collector Gaspar Roomer and other Neapolitan collectors commissioned many battle pictures from him, and these were soon introduced throughout Europe. He was especially favoured by Ferrante Spinelli, Prince of Tarsia, who gave Falcone a residence in his palace after 1651.