Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings.   Related Paintings of Jan van Goyen :. | Peasant Huts with Sweep Well | View of Nijmegen | View of Dordrecht | Hollandische Flachlandschaft. | View of Leiden |
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Elliott Charles Loring
born in Scipio, New York, in December 1812; died in Albany, NY., 25 Sept., 1868. died in Albany, NY., 25 Sept., 1868., American painter. Resolved to become an artist, he moved from Syracuse, NY, to New York City around 1830, bearing a letter of introduction to John Trumbull and reportedly receiving some brief instruction from him. Elliott spent six months in the studio of the genre painter John Quidor but returned to upstate New York, where he worked for several years as an itinerant portrait painter. Back in New York City by 1839, his art steadily improved; Henry Inman met him around 1844-5, whereupon he predicted: 'When I am gone that young man will take my place'. Elliott's portrait of Capt. John Ericsson (c. 1845; untraced) won praise in 1845 as 'the best American portrait since [Gilbert] Stuart', and from that date he was acknowledged as New York's leading portrait painter. His facility for capturing a vivid, characteristic likeness and his genial personality assured a constant stream of private patrons and public commissions. In 1867 it was reported that he had executed nearly 700 portraits.