Spanish Painter and Print engraver , 1591-1652 Information concerning the life and personality of Jusepe de Ribera is sparse. He was born the son of a shoemaker in Jetiva, Valencia Province. He appears to have gone to the city of Valencia while still a boy, but nothing is known of his possible artistic training there. As an adolescent, he traveled to Italy and spent time in Lombardy. Next he was in Parma, from which, it is said, he was driven by the contentious jealousy of local artists. He located himself in Rome until an accumulation of debts forced him to flee. Finally he settled in Naples, where in 1616 he married Caterina Azzolino, the daughter of a painter, by whom he had seven children between the years 1627 and 1636. The Academy of St. Luke in Rome elected Ribera to membership in 1625, and 6 years later the Pope conferred upon him the Order of Christ. It is understandably speculated that Ribera revisited Rome for these events. Being sought after in Naples by the Church and the various Spanish viceroys who ruled there in the name of the Spanish monarchy, he dismissed the idea of returning to his homeland. He was quoted as saying that he was honored and well paid in Naples and that Spain was a cruel stepmother to its own children and a compassionate mother to foreigners. Nevertheless, he generally added his nationality when he signed his works. This practice inspired the Italians to nickname him "the Little Spaniard" (Lo Spagnoletto). The last decade of Ribera's life was one of personal struggle. He suffered from failing health, the taunts of other artists that his fame was "extinct," and difficulty in collecting payments due him. Nevertheless, he kept it from being a tragic defeat by continuing to paint until the very year of his death in Naples. Actually, he was the victim of the local politics and finances. Naples was in the throes of a severe economic depression for which the foreign rulers, the patrons of Ribera, were naturally blamed, and the desperate citizenry was rioting in the streets. It is significant that Ribera continued to receive commissions in such a time, even if there was a dearth of payments. Ribera was inventive in subject matter, ranging through visionary spectacles, biblical themes, genre, portraits, mythological subjects, and portraits of ascetics and penitents.   Related Paintings of Jose de Ribera :. | Verklarung der Hl | St Jerome and the Angel | Landscape with Shepherds | El sueno de Jacob | Kopf der Maria |
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Cecilia Beaux
American figure and portrait painter , 1855-1942 American painter. She began her career painting on porcelain and producing lithographs and portrait drawings. She studied with Catharine Ann Drinker (1871), Francis Adolf van der Wielen (1872-3) and Camille Piton (1879), at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (1877-8), and privately with William Sartain (1881-3). Under Sartain's guidance, she learnt to paint, producing her first major portrait, the Last Days of Infancy
Henri-Horace Roland de La Porte
Paris 1724-1793 French painter. He was a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Oudry and was approved by the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1761 as a 'painter of animals and fruit'. He presented his morceau de reception, the ambitious Vase of Lapis, Ornamented with Bronze and Placed near a Globe (Paris, Louvre), in 1763. This large painting is reminiscent of Oudry's work and depicts a collection of sumptuous objects against a simple cloth backdrop. Roland de la Porte's later works are much more intimate in scale and approach and depict simple rustic objects in a restrained yet realistic fashion in a manner akin to Chardin, for whose works his own have been mistaken. The Still-life with Bread and Fruit (Rotterdam, Boymans-van Beuningen) is bathed in a warm light; the composition is unusual in that the bread, plums and preserve pot are represented at the viewer's eye level, obscuring the top of the table. The Little Orange Tree (Karlsruhe, Staatl. Ksthalle) uses several devices similar to those used by Chardin: a light source comes from the upper left-hand side, throwing some of the surfaces into relief and highlighting them against the indistinct background; a single straw is brought into focus and seems to protrude out of the picture
Isaac Grunewald
Swedish, 1889-1946,was a Swedish-Jewish Expressionist painter born in Stockholm. Having studied at a Swedish art school, at age nineteen Gr??newald travelled to Paris to study under Henri Matisse. In 1909 he gained recognition in his homeland when he exhibited his work at Halldins konsthandel. He met Fauvist painter Sigrid Hjert??n, who had studied at the College of Crafts and Design in Stockholm, and encouraged her to return with him to study in Paris. Married in 1911, they became part of a group of Scandinavian artists known as "De Unga" (The Young Ones). The Crane (1915) by Isaac GrunewaldGrenewald and Hjerten regularly exhibited together at home and abroad and art historians now often cite them as being responsible for introducing modernism to Sweden. At a time in history when anti-Semitism was widespread and women in art were frowned upon, although widely known they were never fully accepted by the artistic community of the day and their works were often the subject of ridicule. Partly as a result of this, Isaac Grunewald had to supplement his income creating stage designs for the Royal Dramatic Theatre and the Royal Swedish Opera. He decorated the walls and ceiling of an auditorium (since renamed Grunewald Hall) at the Stockholm Concert Hall, site of the Nobel Prize ceremony, and the walls of the Matchstick Palace. The author of numerous essays on art, with his 1918 exhibit at Stockholm's Liljevalchs Konsthall Isaac Grunewald published his manifesto on Expressionism and opened his own art school. During the Second World War Grunewald worked at the renowned Rorstrand porcelain factory. His wife Sigrid Hjerten suffered from lifelong mental health problems frequently evidenced by anxiety and paranoia that resulted in her being hospitalized for extended periods in the 1930s. During the marriage the couple were frequently apart from each other for long periods and they separated permanently in 1937 and soon divorced. Isaac Grunewald remarried and in 1946 both he and his second wife were killed in an airplane crash. He is buried in Stockholm's Norra begravningsplatsen ("Northern Cemetery"). His 1912 self-portrait and his 1915 painting "The Singing Tree" appeared on Swedish postage stamps. Today, institutions such as the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishoj, Denmark rank Grunewald and Hjerten among the 20th Century's most important Scandinavian artists.