English Baroque Era Painter, ca.1617-1694,was a British baroque portrait painter. Wright trained in Edinburgh under the Scots painter George Jamesone, and acquired a considerable reputation as an artist and scholar during a long sojourn in Rome. There he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca, and was associated with some of the leading artists of his generation. He was engaged by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, to acquire artworks in Oliver Cromwell's England in 1655. He took up permanent residence in England from 1656, and served as court painter before and after the English Restoration. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he was a favourite of the restored Stuart court, a client of both Charles II and James II, and was a witness to many of the political manoeuvrings of the era. In the final years of the Stuart monarchy he returned to Rome as part of an embassy to Pope Innocent XI. Wright is currently rated as one of the leading indigenous British painters of his generation and largely for the distinctive realism in his portraiture. Perhaps due to the unusually cosmopolitan nature of his experience, he was favoured by patrons at the highest level of society in an age in which foreign artists were usually preferred. Wright's paintings of royalty and aristocracy are included amongst the collections of many leading galleries today.   Related Paintings of John Michael Wright :. | Catherine and James Cecil | Elizabeth Claypole | unknown scottish chieftain, c. | James Cecil by John Michael Wright | Wright's Duchess of Cleveland |
Related Artists:
Kurt Schwitters
German Dadaist Painter and Sculptor, 1887-1948 German painter, sculptor, designer and writer. He studied at the Kunstakademie in Dresden (1909-14) and served as a clerical officer and mechanical draughtsman during World War I. At first his painting was naturalistic and then Impressionistic, until he came into contact with Expressionist art, particularly the art associated with Der Sturm, in 1918. He painted mystical and apocalyptic landscapes, such as Mountain Graveyard (1912; New York, Guggenheim), and also wrote Expressionist poetry for Der Sturm magazine. He became associated with the DADA movement in Berlin after meeting Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah H?ch and Richard Huelsenbeck, and he began to make collages that he called Merzbilder. These were made from waste materials picked up in the streets and parks of Hannover, and in them he saw the creation of a fragile new beauty out of the ruins of German culture. Similarly he began to compose his poetry from snatches of overheard conversations and randomly derived phrases from newspapers and magazines. His mock-romantic poem An Anna Blume, published in Der Sturm in August 1919, was a popular success in Germany. From this time 'Merz' became the name of Schwitters's one-man movement and philosophy. The word derives from a fragment of the word Kommerz, used in an early assemblage (Merzbild, 1919; destr.; see Elderfield, no. 42), for which Schwitters subsequently gave a number of meanings, the most frequent being that of 'refuse' or 'rejects'. In 1919 he wrote: 'The word Merz denotes essentially the combination, for artistic purposes, of all conceivable materials, and, technically, the principle of the equal distribution of the individual materials .... A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint'; such materials were indeed incorporated in Schwitters's large assemblages and painted collages of this period, for example Construction for Noble Ladies (1919; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.; see fig. 1; see also COLLAGE). Schwitters's essential aestheticism and formalism alienated him from the political wing of German Dada led by Huelsenbeck, and he was ridiculed as 'the Caspar David Friedrich of the Dadaist Revolution'. Although his work of this period is full of hints and allusions to contemporary political and cultural conditions, unlike the work of George Grosz or John Heartfield it was not polemical or bitterly satirical.
Fritz Beinke
(1842- 1907 ) - Painter painted The toymaker of Nuremberg in 1882
Bicci, Neri di
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1419-1491 was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. A prolific painter of mainly religious themes, he was active mainly in Florence and in the medium of tempera. His father was Bicci di Lorenzo (1373-1452). His grandfather, Lorenzo di Bicci (c. 1350-1427) was also a painter in Florence, a pupil of Spinello Aretino. He painted a St. Giovanni Gualberto enthroned, with ten Saints for the church of San Pancrazio. His journals from the years 1453-1475,