Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1593-1678 Jacob Jordeans was born on May 19, 1593, the first of eleven children, to the wealthy linen merchant Jacob Jordaens Sr. and Barbara van Wolschaten in Antwerp. Little is known about Jordaens's early education. It can be assumed that he received the advantages of the education usually provided for children of his social class. This assumption is supported by his clear handwriting, his competence in French and in his knowledge of mythology. Jordaens familiarity with biblical subjects is evident in his many religious paintings, and his personal interaction with the Bible was strengthened by his later conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism. Like Rubens, he studied under Adam van Noort, who was his only teacher. During this time Jordaens lived in Van Noort's house and became very close to the rest of the family. After eight years of training with Van Noort, he enrolled in the Guild of St. Luke as a "waterscilder", or watercolor artist. This medium was often used for preparing tapestry cartoons in the seventeenth century. although examples of his earliest watercolor works are no longer extant. In the same year as his entry into the guild, 1616, he married his teacher's eldest daughter, Anna Catharina van Noort, with whom he had three children. In 1618, Jordaens bought a house in Hoogstraat (the area in Antwerp that he grew up in). He would then later buy the adjoining house to expand his household and workspace in 1639, mimicking Rubens's house built two decades earlier. He lived and worked here until his death in 1678. Jordaens never made the traditional trip to Italy to study classical and Renaissance art. Despite this, he made many efforts to study prints or works of Italian masters available in northern Europe. For example, Jordaens is known to have studied Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, and Bassano, either through prints, copies or originals (such as Caravaggio's Madonna of the Rosary). His work, however, betrays local traditions, especially the genre traditions of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in honestly depicting Flemish life with authenticity and showing common people in the act of celebratory expressions of life. His commissions frequently came from wealthy local Flemish patrons and clergy, although later in his career he worked for courts and governments across Europe. Besides a large output of monumental oil paintings he was a prolific tapestry designer, a career that reflects his early training as a "watercolor" painter. Jordaens' importance can also be seen by his number of pupils; the Guild of St. Luke records fifteen official pupils from 1621 to 1667, but six others were recorded as pupils in court documents and not the Guild records, so it is probable that he had more students than officially recorded. Among them were his cousin and his son Jacob. Like Rubens and other artists at that time, Jordaens' studio relied on his assistants and pupils in the production of his paintings. Not many of these pupils went on to fame themselves,however a position in Jordaens's studio was highly desirable for young artists from across Europe.  Related Paintings of Jacob Jordaens :. | The four Evangelists | The Holy Family with St.Anne, the Young Baptist and his Parents | Odysseus | The Satyr and the Peasant | Portrait of Govaert van Surpele and his wife |
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James Gibbs
1682-1754 James Gibbs was born at Footdeesmire near Aberdeen, Scotland, in December 1682, the younger son of a Scottish gentleman. As a young man, he traveled on the Continent, pursuing his fondness for drawing. In Rome he determined to become an architect and entered the school of Carlo Fontana. Gibbs became acquainted with many members of the English aristocracy, for whom he made drawings and who were helpful to him in later life. He returned to England in 1709. Through the influence of Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, Gibbs was made one of the surveyors to the commissioners for building 50 new churches in London in 1713, and in this capacity he designed St. Mary-le-Strand (1714-1717), his first public building. Here he expressed not only influences of Sir Christopher Wren but also ideas absorbed from Italian baroque and mannerist architecture. Gibbs was employed by Lord Burlington in rebuilding the east block of Burlington House, Piccadilly, before that patron embraced Palladianism, but was superseded by the earl protege, Colen Campbell. When the Whigs, who supported the Palladians, came to power, Gibbs as a Tory of baroque tendencies lost his official post in 1715, but his private practice among Tory patrons continued to be exclusive and remunerative. He built Cannons House, Middlesex (1716-1719; demolished 1747) for the Duke of Chandos; added a chapel and library at Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire (ca. 1720), for Lord Harley; built the exquisite Octagon Room at Twickenham, Middlesex (1720), with beautiful plasterwork by Italian stuccoworkers; and erected Ditchley House, Oxfordshire (1720-1725), probably his most splendid house, for the Earl of Lichfield, again with remarkable plasterwork by Italian craftsmen. But public commissions were not entirely lacking. In 1720 Gibbs designed St. Martins-in-the-Fields (built 1722-1726), one of his outstandingly beautiful works. Like St. Mary-le-Strand and many of his houses, the interior was decorated with plasterwork by the fashionable Italian stuccoworkers, who probably came to England through his encouragement. St. Martins was followed by another building of extreme elegance and dignity, the Senate House at Cambridge (1722-1730), as well as the new buildings of King College. Many of the ornamental buildings in the park at Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, are his work, including the Temple of Diana (1726), the Temple of Friendship (1739), the Gothic Temple (1740), and the Column with a statue of Lord Cobham. Gibbs general influence among architects and clients was great because of his exhaustive knowledge of architecture acquired through long study in Rome, an experience rare among architects of that generation, although later more common. This influence he extended by means of his Book of Architecture (1728), a record of both his executed and unexecuted work, and especially his Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture (1732), a work used by countless architects, students, scholars, and builders up to the present day. Of Gibbs later works the circular Radcliffe Library at Oxford (1737-1749) is his most ambitious and monumental achievement; it shows much influence of Nicholas Hawksmoor. Gibbs published the designs in the large folio volume Bibliotheca Radcliviana in 1747, and he received from the university the honorary degree of master of arts. He designed the new decorations of Ragley Hall, Warwickshire (ca. 1750-1755), in the rococo taste then becoming fashionable. A distinguished late work is the church of St. Nicholas at Aberdeen (1751-1755). In his last years Gibbs held the sinecure post of architect to the Office of Ordnance. He died in London on Aug. 5, 1754. In his early buildings, especially in his churches, Gibbs displayed that discreet form of the baroque which he had absorbed from Carlo Fontana in Rome and also from Wren example. Characteristic features of his work are window architraves interrupted by prominent rustication blocks, oeil de boeuf (oxeye) windows, boldly projecting cornices, and parapets topped by urns. In his later buildings the exterior form conformed more closely to severe Palladian principles, but the interiors retained a baroque exuberance.
Johann Michael Sattler
(28 September 1786, Herzogenburg, Lower Austria - 28 September 1847, Mattsee, Salzburg) was an Austrian portrait and landscape painter, best known for his large-scale panoramas. Sattler attended the Vienna Academy beginning in 1804 under the tutelage of Hubert Maurer. In 1819 Sattler moved to Salzburg, where in 1824 he began to paint a 360-degree panorama of the city as seen from the top of Salzburg's castle. The massive work covered 125 square metres and was first exhibited in 1829. Salzburg made him an honorary resident. Stattler toured across Europe with the painting for ten years, writing about his return in 1838, "with 30 tons and crossing approximately 30,000 kilometres of land and water, a feat no one had ever done before me and one which would be difficult to repeat in the future." Satler's son, the artist Hubert Sattler, donated the work to the city in 1870. The painting is now on display at the Salzburg Museum in a specially designed area called the Panorama Museum.
Kazimir Malevich
1878-1935 Russian painter, printmaker, decorative artist and writer of Ukranian birth. One of the pioneers of abstract art, Malevich was a central figure in a succession of avant-garde movements during the period of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and immediately after. The style of severe geometric abstraction with which he is most closely associated, SUPREMATISM, was a leading force in the development of CONSTRUCTIVISM, the repercussions of which continued to be felt throughout the 20th century. His work was suppressed in Soviet Russia in the 1930s and remained little known during the following two decades. The reassessment of his reputation in the West from the mid-1950s was matched by the renewed influence of his work on the paintings of Ad Reinhardt and on developments