French 1856-1931   Related Paintings of Leopold Kowalsky :. | Portrait of a Child of the Harmon Family | The Grand Canal with San Simeone Piccolo and Santa Lucia sdg | Mona Lisa and key | Still Life with Three Beer Mugs (nn04) | Penitent Mary Magdalene |
Related Artists:
Joseph Mallord William Turner
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.
Lundbye, Johan Thomas
Danish Painter, 1818-1848 Danish painter. He studied at the Kongelige Akademi for de Sk?nne Kunster, Copenhagen, under Johan Ludvig Lund (1777-1867) and the animal painter Christian Holm (1804-46) between 1832 and 1842. Early on he was influenced by the ideas of the art historian N. L. H?yen, especially his concept of a truly national school of landscape painting. Kalundborg Church (1837; Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst) depicts a historical monument familiar to all Danes, and one that had a particular nostalgic attraction for a painter born in Kalundborg. The picture is both sharply naturalistic and emphatically painterly. In Landscape Near Arres? (1838; Copenhagen, Thorvaldsens Mus.) Lundbye was more occupied with the representation of light and space. There is no anecdotal element; the lake, the open sky, the low hills, the ancient cairn, the cattle and the playing children sum up a typical Danish summer landscape. His larger canvases emphasize openness; flat expanses of land terminate in low tree-fringed horizons below vast skies. They have little of Constable's temperament or the broadness of Corot but are close to the elegiac mood of Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl. Danish landscape painting during the mid-1830s was greatly influenced by Romanticism
Matthijs Maris
Dutch Painter, 1839-1917 Brother of Jacob Maris. In 1851 he was apprenticed for one year to Isaac Elink Sterk (1808-71); from 1852 to 1855 he attended classes at the Academie in The Hague, and in 1854 he joined the studio of Louis Meijer, where his brother Jacob was also working. It was due to Meijer that in 1855 he was granted a monthly allowance by Queen Sophie to continue his training in Antwerp, where he moved in with Jacob. Through his studies at the Academie, Matthijs met the German painter Georg Laves, who introduced him to the work of the 19th-century German Romantic painters, in particular Ludwig Richter.