(27 February 1824 - 17 July 1895) was a French painter born in Nantes.His oeuvre began with portraits and classical historical subject matter but he later moved on to allegorical and mythological themes.He was an academic painter and one of the founders of the Neo-Grec school, along with his close friends Gustave Boulanger, Jean-L??on G??rôme, and Jean-Louis Hamon, also academic painters. All of them studied in the workshops of both Paul Delaroche and later Charles Gleyre. Picou's style was noticeably influenced by Gleyre. While the rest of the group generally painted classical and mythological subjects, Picou also received commissions for large religious frescoes from many churches, including the Église Saint-Roch. His artistic debut was at the Salon in 1847. The next year he was awarded a second-class medal for his painting, Cl??opâtre et Antoine sur le Cydnus. Also known as Cleopatra on the Cydnus, it is commonly regarded as Picou's masterpiece. This showing at the Salon in 1848 was written about by the critic Th??ophile Gautier, who felt that the subject matter was too ambitious, but also said that "As it is, it gives the best hope for the future of the young artist, and ranks among the seven or eight most important paintings of the Salon.In 1875 the painting was exhibited in New York, and afterward found lodgment on the walls of a private art gallery in San Francisco.Picou maintained a large workshop in Paris on the Boulevard de Magenta, which provided him room to work on his expansive frescoes. His popularity continued to rise and he went on to win the Second Prix de Rome in 1853 for his painting, J??sus chassant les vendeurs du Temple (The Moneylenders Chased from the Temple), and another second-class medal for his Salon painting in 1857. From his debut in 1847, he was a regular at the Salon, showing almost every year until his final exhibit in 1893.He has been called the most fashionable painter towards the close of the Second French Empire  Related Paintings of Henri-Pierre Picou :. | Young women bathing | Ronde De Mai | Ronde De Mai | Ronde De Mai | Venus |
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Grigory Gagarin
Russian: 11 May [O.S. 29 April] 1811 - 30 January [O.S. 18 January] 1893) was a Russian painter, Major General and administrator. Grigory Gagarin was born in Saint Petersburg to the noble Rurikid princely Gagarin family. His father, Prince Grigory Ivanovich Gagarin (Saint Petersburg, 17 March 1782 - Tegernsee, 12 February 1837), was a Russian diplomat in France and later the ambassador to Italy. His father married in Saint Petersburg in 1809 his mother Yekaterina Petrovna Sojmonova (Saint Petersburg, 23 May 1790 - Moscow, 27 February 1873). Thus until the age 13 the boy was with his family in Paris and Rome and then studied in the collegium Tolomei in Siena. Grigory did not receive a formal artistic education, but took private lessons from the famous Russian painter Karl Briullov who at that time lived in Italy. In 1832 he returned to Saint Petersburg, became acquainted with Alexander Pushkin and illustrated his works The Queen of Spades and The Tale of Tsar Saltan.He also became close to the opposition Circle of Sixteen and Mikhail Lermontov.
Anton Raphael Mengs
1728-1779 Dutch Anton Raphael Mengs Gallery Mengs was born in 1728 at Usti nad Labem (German: Aussig) in Bohemia on 12 March 1728; he died in Rome 29 June 1779. His father, Ismael Mengs, a Danish painter, established himself finally at Dresden, whence in 1741 he took his son to Rome. In Rome, his fresco painting of Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter. The appointment of Mengs in 1749 as first painter to Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony did not prevent his spending much time in Rome, where he had married Margarita Quazzi who had sat for him as a model in 1748, and abjured the Protestant faith, and where he became in 1754 director of the Vatican school of painting, nor did this hinder him on two occasions from obeying the call of Charles III of Spain to Madrid. There Mengs produced some of his best work, and specially the ceiling of the banqueting-hall of the Royal Palace of Madrid, the subject of which was the Triumph of Trajan and the Temple of Glory. Among his pupils there was Agust??n Esteve. After the completion of this work in 1777, Mengs returned to Rome, and there he died, two years later, in poor circumstances, leaving twenty children, seven of whom were pensioned by the king of Spain. His portraits and autoportraits recall an attention to detail and insight, often lost from the grand manner paintings. Besides numerous paintings in the Madrid gallery, the Ascension and St Joseph at Dresden, Perseus and Andromeda at Saint Petersburg, and the ceiling of the Villa Albani must be mentioned among his chief works. In 1911, Henry George Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland, possessed a Holy Family, and the colleges of All Souls and Magdalen, at Oxford, possessed altar-pieces by Mengs's hand. In his writings, in Spanish, Italian and German, Mengs has put forth his eclectic theory of art, which treats of perfection as attainable by a well-schemed combination of diverse excellences Greek design, with the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colour of Titian. He would have fancied himself the first neoclassicist, while in fact he may be the last flicker of Baroque art. Or in the words of Wittkower, In the last analysis, he is as much an end as a beginning. His intimacy with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who constantly wrote at his dictation, has enhanced his historical importance, for he formed no scholars, and the critic must now concur in Goethe's judgment of Mengs in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert; he must deplore that so much learning should have been allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism. Mengs was famous for his rivalry with the contemporary Italian painter Pompeo Batoni.
BEERT, Osias
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1580-1624 Flemish painter. In 1596 he went to study with Andries van Baseroo and in 1602 became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke; these two dates suggest his probable date of birth. Beert married Marguerite Ykens on 8 January 1606. Contemporary documents describe him as a cork merchant. The esteem enjoyed by Beert is indicated by the large number of pupils he had, including, in 1610, Frans van der Borch; in 1615, Frans Ykens; in 1616, Paulus Pontius; and, in 1618, Jan Willemssen. Beert's son, Osias Beert the younger (1622-78), was also a painter and became a master in 1645.