1632-1675 Johannes (or Jan) Vermeer is now recognized as one of the great Dutch painters, but while he was alive he could barely make ends meet, and his artistic achievement was almost entirely ignored for 200 years after his death. Little is known about his personal life, other than he died poor and young and left behind a wife and eleven children. Vermeer is admired for his realistic style, his subtle use of color and light and his unusual and inventive brush technique, but fewer than forty of his paintings exist. His most famous works include domestic scenes such as Girl With a Peal Earring (1665) and The Music Lesson (1662-65), and tranquil landscapes such as The Little Street (1657-58) and View of Delft (1659-60). Although his actual birth and death dates are unknown, Vermeer was baptized 31 October 1632 and buried 15 December 1675... During his career he used the names Johannes van der Meer, Johannes Vermeer and Jan Vermeer... He was played by actor Colin Firth in the 2003 film Girl With A Pearl Earring, which also starred Scarlett Johansson as the girl.   Related Paintings of JanVermeer :. | Woman with a Jug | A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal | Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window | Christ in the House of Mary and Martha | The Kitchen Maid |
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thomas creswick
Thomas Creswick (5 February 1811 - 28 December 1869) was an English landscape painter and illustrator, born in Sheffield, son of Thomas Creswick and Mary Epworth and educated at Hazelwood, near Birmingham. At Birmingham he first began to paint. His earliest appearance as an exhibitor was in 1827, at the Society of British Artists in London; in the ensuing year he sent to the Royal Academy the two pictures named Llyn Gwynant, Morning, and Carnarvon Castle. About the same time he settled in London; and in 1836 he took a house in Bayswater. He soon attracted some attention as a landscape painter, and had a career of uniform and encouraging, though not signal success. In 1842 he was elected an associate, and in 1850 a full member of the Royal Academy, which, for several years before his death, numbered hardly any other full members representing this branch of art. In his early practice he set an example, then too much needed, of diligent study of nature out of doors, painting on the spot all the substantial part of several of his pictures. English and Welsh streams may be said to have formed his favourite subjects, and generally British rural scenery, mostly under its cheerful, calm and pleasurable aspects, in open daylight. This he rendered with elegant and equable skill, color rather grey in tint, especially in his later years, and more than average technical accomplishment; his works have little to excite, but would, in most conditions of public taste, retain their power to attract. Creswick was industrious and extremely prolific; he produced, besides a steady outpouring of paintings, numerous illustrations for books. He was personally genial, a dark, bulky man, somewhat heavy and graceless in aspect in his later years. He died at his house in Bayswater, Linden Grove, after a few years of declining health. Among his principal works may be named England (1847); Home by the Sands, and a Squally Day (1848); Passing Showers (1849); The Wind on Shore, a First Glimpse of the Sea, and Old Trees (1850); A Mountain Lake, Moonrise (1852); Changeable Weather (1865); also the London Road, a Hundred Years ago; The Weald of Kent; the Valley Mill (a Cornish subject); a Shady Glen; the Windings of a River; the Shade of the Beech Trees; the Course of the Greta; the Wharfe; Glendalough, and other Irish subjects, 1836 to 1840; the Forest Farm Frith for figures, and Ansdell for animals, occasionally worked in collaboration with Creswick.
V.L.E. Sparre

Paul Falconer Poole
(1806 - 1879) , an English painter born in Bristol an English painter born in Bristol.was an English painter born in Bristol. Though self-taught his fine feeling for colour, poetic sympathy and dramatic power gained for him a high position among British artists. He exhibited his first work in the Royal Academy at the age of twenty-five, the subject being The Well, a scene in Naples. There was an interval of seven years before he next exhibited his Farewell, Farewell in 1837, which was followed by the Emigrant's Departure, Hermann and Dorothea and By the Waters of Babylon. In 1843 his position was made secure by his Solomon Eagle, and by his success in the Cartoon Exhibition, in which he received from the Fine Art Commissioners a prize of 300 sterling. After his exhibition of the Surrender of Syon House he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1846, and was made an academician in 1861. Poole's subjects divide themselves into two orders, one idyllic, the other dramatic. Of the former his May Day (1852) is a typical example. Of both styles there were excellent examples to be seen in the small collection of his works shown at Burlington House in the Winter Exhibition of 1883-1884. Among his early dramatic pictures was Solomon Eagle exhorting the People to Repentance during the Plague of 1665, painted in 1843. To this class belongs also the Messenger announcing to Job the Irruption of the Sabeans and the Slaughter of the Servants (exhibited in 1850), and Robert, Duke of Normandy .and Arietta (1848). Finer examples of his more mature power in this direction are to be found in his Prodigal Son, painted in. 1869; the Escape of Glaucusand lone with the blind girl Nydia from Pompeii (1860); and Cunstaunce sent adrift by the Constable of Alia, King of Northumberland, painted in 1868. More peaceful than these are the Song of Troubadours (painted in 1854) and the Goths in Italy (1851), the latter an important historical work of great, power and beauty. Of a less lofty strain, but still more beautiful in its workmanship, is the Seventh Day of the Decameron, painted in 1857. In this picture Poole rises to his full height as a colourist. In his pastorals he is soft and tender, as in the Mountain Path (1853), the Water-cress Gatherers (1870), the Shepston Maiden (1872). But when he turns to the grander and more sublime views of nature his work is bold and vigorous.