1637-1712 Dutch Jan Van Der Heyden Gallery Van der Heyden grew up in Gorcum, but the family moved to Amsterdam around 1650. They lived on Dam Square. As a young guy he witnessed the fire in the old townhall which made a deep impression on him. He later would describe or draw 80 fires in almost any neighborhood of Amsterdam. When he married in 1661 the family was living on Herengracht, the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam. In 1668 Cosimo II de' Medici bought one of his paintings, a view of the townhall with a manipulated perspective. Van der Heyden often painted country estates, like Goudestein, owned by Joan Huydecoper II. He was not good in drawing figures and used for his paintings a metal plate for bricks, a sponge or moss for the leaves. Johannes Lingelbach, Adriaen van de Velde und Eglon van der Neer assisted him drawing the figures. Jan van der Heyden also introduced the lamp post and in 1672 impoved the design of the fire engine. He died in wealth as the superintendent of the lighting and director of the (voluntary) firemen's guild at Amsterdam. Van der Heyden was a contemporary of the landscape painters Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael, with the advantage, which they lacked, of a certain professional versatility; for, whilst they painted admirable pictures and starved, he varied the practice of art with the study of mechanics. Until 1672 he painted in partnership with Adriaen van de Velde. After Adrian's death, and probably because of the loss which that event entailed upon him, he accepted the offices to which allusion has just been made. At no period of artistic activity had the system of division of labour been more fully or more constantly applied to art than it was in Holland towards the close of the 17th century. Van der Heyden, who was perfect as an architectural draughtsman insofar as he painted the outside of buildings and thoroughly mastered linear perspective, seldom turned his hand to the delineation of anything but brick houses and churches in streets and squares, or rows along canals, or "moated granges," common in his native country. He was a travelled man, had seen The Hague, Ghent and Brussels, and had ascended the Rhine past Xanten to Cologne, where he copied over and over again the tower and crane of the great cathedral. But he cared nothing for hill or vale, or stream or wood. He could reproduce the rows of bricks in a square of Dutch houses sparkling in the sun, or stunted trees and lines of dwellings varied by steeples, all in light or thrown into passing shadow by moving cloud. He had the art of painting microscopically without loss of breadth or keeping. But he could draw neither man nor beast, nor ships nor carts; and this was his disadvantage. His good genius under these circumstances was Adrian van der Velde, who enlivened his compositions with spirited figures; and the joint labour of both is a delicate, minute, transparent work, radiant with glow and atmosphere.  Related Paintings of Jan van der Heyden :. | The crossroads of the forest landscape | Gothic churches | Church of the landscape | Wooded landscape | The Dam with the New Town Hall in Amsterdam (mk05) |
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Floris Verster
1861-1927 Dutch Floris Verster Gallery Dutch painter. He trained first at the Ars Aemula Naturae school in Leiden under George Hendrik Breitner, then at The Hague Academie (1879-82) and the Brussels Academie (1882). In Leiden in 1882 he started painting landscapes in the style of the Hague school. From 1882 to 1892 he shared a studio in Leiden with the still-life painter Menso Kamerlingh Onnes (1860-1925), who was to become his brother-in-law. Influenced by Onnes and such French realists as Antoine Vollon and Theodule Ribot, in 1885 he turned to painting still-lifes in a mildly Impressionist style that by 1888-9 often attained monumental formats, as in Peonies (1.35*2.00 m, 1889; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.). He submitted some of these to exhibitions, where their reception was mixed; artists including Breitner, H. W. Mesdag and Jacob Maris were enthusiastic, but the critics quite often were not. He participated in a few exhibitions abroad, notably from 1890 to 1894 in Munich and in 1891 with Les XX in Brussels.
Florine Stettheimer
(August 29, 1871 - May 11, 1944) was an American artist. She has been described as "a Deco-influenced early Modernist whos never really gotten her due". Florine was born in Rochester, New York to Joseph Stettheimer and Rosetta Walter. Her father, a banker, left the family before the children were grown. She was the fourth of five children: Walter, Stella, Carrie, Florine, and Ettie. After Walter and Stella married, the youngest three immured with their mother to form an epicurean way of life.She spent much of her early life traveling, studying art in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Switzerland. She studied for three years in the mid-1890s at the Art Students League of New York, but came into her own artistically upon her permanent return to New York after the start of World War I. In October 1916, the only one-person exhibition of her work during her lifetime took place at New York's Knoedler & Company. She exhibited 12 "high-keyed, decorative paintings", none of which were sold. Cushioned by family resources, Stettheimer refrained from self-promotion and considered her painting "an entirely private pursuit". She intended to have her works destroyed after her death, a wish defied by her sister Ettie, her executor. Stettheimer's privileged position pervades her work. As one critic has written, "money she regarded as a birthright, decidedly not something to be flaunted in the shape of a dozen yachts, but rather to be used as a palliative against the more unpleasant aspects of the world outside... In this frame of mind, she felt free to depict life as a series of boating parties, picnics, summertime naps, parades and strolls down Fifth Avenue." She created the sets and costumes for the 1934 production of Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera by Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. Her designs, which used cellophane in innovative ways, proved to be the project for which she was best known during her lifetime. She assisted her sister Carrie in the creation of the Stettheimer Dollhouse, now in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York. The house is a whimsical depiction of an upper-class residence, filled with works by Stettheimer's artist friends, including William Zorach, Alexander Archipenko, and Gaston Lachaise.
Semyon Fyodorovich Shchedrin
(1745-1804) was a Russian landscape painter, the uncle and mentor of Sylvester Shchedrin. He was born in St. Petersburg into the family of a life guard. In 1759, he entered the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, and in 1765 graduated with a gold medal and grants to study abroad. Shchedrin ventured to Paris, then to Rome. In Paris he studied the works of old and contemporary painters. Under the influence of Rousseau's idea that beauty exists not only in classic patterns of arts but also in everyday life and nature, Shchedrin worked much en plein-air, otherwise known as painting in outdoor environments. In Rome, however, he fell under the influence of classicism, the idea that art should reflect the works of antiquity and thus prolong their successes. Shchedrin returned to St. Petersburg in 1776 and became a professor of landscape painting in the Academy of Arts. He was assigned to draw views of the palaces and parks of Catherine the Great, which brought into existence such works as View of the Large Pond Island in the Tsarskoselsky Gardens (1777), View of the Large Pond in the Tsarskoselsky Gardens (1777), View of the Farmyard in the Tsarskoye Selo (1777). After 1780, Shchedrin also participated in the restoration of pictures in the Hermitage, and in 1799 he headed a new class of landscape graphics. The pinnacle of his art career came in the 1790s. The most famous of his works of the period are views of parks and palaces in Pavlovsk, Gatchina, and Petergof: The Mill and the Peel Tower at Pavlovsk (1792), View of the Gatchina Palace from the Silver Lake (1798), View of the Gatchina Palace from Long Island (1798), The Stone Bridge at Gatchina (1799-1801), View of the Kamennoostrovsky Palace through Bolshaya Nevka from the Stroganov Seashore (1803).