French Rococo Era Painter, 1725-1805 French painter and draughtsman. He was named an associate member of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, in 1755 on the strength of a group of paintings that included genre scenes, portraits and studies of expressive heads (tetes d'expression). These remained the essential subjects of his art for the next 50 years, except for a brief, concentrated and unsuccessful experiment with history painting in the late 1760s, which was to affect his later genre painting deeply. Though his art has often been compared with that of Jean-Simeon Chardin in particular and interpreted within the context of NEO-CLASSICISM in general, it stands so strikingly apart from the currents of its time that Greuze's accomplishments are best described, as they often were by the artist's contemporaries, as unique. He was greatly admired by connoisseurs, critics and the general public throughout most of his life. His pictures were in the collections of such noted connoisseurs as Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, Claude-Henri Watelet and Etienne-Franeois, Duc de Choiseul. For a long period he was in particular favour with the critic Denis Diderot, who wrote about him in the Salon reviews that he published in Melchior Grimm's privately circulated Correspondance litt?raire. His reputation declined towards the end of his life and through the early part of the 19th century, to be revived after 1850, when 18th-century painting returned to favour, by such critics as Theophile Thore, Arsene Houssaye and, most notably, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their book L'Art du dix-huitieme siecle. By the end of the century Greuze's work, especially his many variations on the Head of a Girl, fetched record prices, and his Broken Pitcher (Paris, Louvre) was one of the most popular paintings in the Louvre.   Related Paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze :. | The Wool winder | The Lamentation of Time Passing | Portrait of a Lady, previously wrongly called Portrait of Sophie Arnould | A Young Man in a Hat | Portrait of a Boy |
Related Artists:
Edward Wadsworth
British 1889-1949 Edward Wadsworth Gallery 1949). English painter. He was raised in a northern industrial environment that was to appear with great forcefulness in his Vorticist work. He studied engineering in Munich from 1906 to 1907 and, like many other Vorticists (see VORTICISM), Wadsworth interest in the machine showed itself at an early age. He also studied art at the Knirr School in Munich in his spare time, before attending Bradford School of Art; he then studied through a scholarship at the Slade School of Art (1908-12) in London. Early paintings like Harrogate Corporation Brickworks (1908; untraced) show a growing interest in industrial subjects. Under the impact of the Post-Impressionists, he turned for a while to portraiture, beach scenes and still-lifes. His work was included in the final month of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition held at the Grafton Galleries in 1912, and in the summer of the same year he joined the Omega Workshops, although his alliance with Roger Fry was short-lived. Wadsworth new friendship with Wyndham Lewis led to an abrupt departure from Omega in October, when several of his works were included in Frank Rutter Post-Impressionist and Futurist exhibitions at the Doro Gallery in London. His painting L Omnibus (c. 1913; untraced; see 1974 exh. cat., no. 12) announced his involvement with motorized themes that clearly derived from Futurism.
Wassily Kandinsky
1866-1944 Wassily Kandinsky Galleries was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of the most famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession??he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat??he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30. In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied first in the private school of Anton Azbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.
Theodoros Vryzakis
Thebes 19 October 1814 - Munich 6 December 1878) was a major Greek painter of the 19th century. Vryzakis's father died in the Greek War of Independence. He is the first Greek painter who studied in Munich and the main representative of the type of historical painting that was popular in Greece in the 18th century. He is considered the first painter of modern Greece, a recorder of the Greek War of Independence, which he viewed in a romantic and nostalgic way. His paintings' characters are pompous, theatrical and detached figures. His interest in the traditional costumes and the decoration and the absence of any individual facial expression is according to art critics the result of the eye of a "foreign" artist, who looks for the conventional element in another land. The monumental size of his pictures, the ceremonial and theatrical compositions, and the meticulous style of academic idealistic romanticism make his style unique for among Greek Artists. Today, many of his works are exhibited at the National Gallery of Athens and the Benaki Museum in Athens.