English Romantic Painter, 1775-1851 Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 ?C 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321) Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840). Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321) One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.  Related Paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner :. | No title | Buttermere-See mit Teilansicht von Cromackwater | Self portrait | Hafulier | The picture with White line |
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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.
Antropov Aleksei
Russian, 1716-1795
Adrien Lavieille
(March 29, 1848, Montmartre - February 5, 1920, Chartres) was a French painter. Portrait of Adrien Lavieille in 1879, by his wife, Marie Adrien Lavieille. Oil on canvas (private collection).Son of the landscape painter Eugene Lavieille, and nephew of the wood engraver Jacques Adrien Lavieille, he was a painter of the country : near Paris, in Brittany, near Cancale and on the riverside of the Vilaine in the south of Rennes, in Touraine, at Saint-Jean-de-Monts in Vendee, where he was invited by a friend, the painter and engraver Auguste Lepere, around Vendôme where he sojourned in the home of his daughter, Andree Lavieille, so a painter, and of his son-in-law, the man of letters, Paul Tuffrau. He also painted in Montmartre, where he lived during his youthful days, and, as his father, at Moret-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau. Parallelly to his painter's activities, Adrien Lavieille executed, during his life, for money's reasons, works of restoration and decoration : basilica Saint-Martin in Tours (where he worked with the painter Pierre Fritel), Palais de Justice of Rennes, Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, Hôtel de Lauzun, quai d'Anjou in Paris. In 1878, he married the painter Marie Petit.