Russian Painter, 1860-1900
Russian painter of Lithuanian birth. He largely painted landscapes (including pastel sketches), which are noted for their emotive or symbolic resonance. His 'landscapes of mood' had a profound influence on Russian landscape painting, to which he introduced a sense of the unity of humankind and nature, and of the spiritual power of the Russian Related Paintings of Levitan, Isaak :. | Gebirgskette. Montblanc | Spring-inundation | Warehouse fire | Autumn-Garden Plot | Flood | Related Artists:
Johann Geyerpainted Columbus and the Egg in 1847
1807-1875
VELDE, Willem van de, the YoungerDutch painter (b. 1633, Leiden, d. 1707, London).
was a Dutch marine painter. Willem van de Velde was baptised on 18 December 1633 in Leiden, Holland, Dutch Republic. A son of Willem van de Velde the Elder, also a painter of sea-pieces, Willem van de Velde, the younger, was instructed by his father, and afterwards by Simon de Vlieger, a marine painter of repute at the time, and had achieved great celebrity by his art before he came to London. In 1673 he moved to England, where he was engaged by Charles II, at a salary of £100, to aid his father in "taking and making draughts of sea-fights", his part of the work being to reproduce in color the drawings of the elder van de Velde. He was also patronized by the Duke of York and by various members of the nobility. He died on 6 April 1707 in London, England. Most of Van de Velde's finest works represent views off the coast of Holland, with Dutch shipping. His best productions are delicate, spirited and finished in handling, and correct in the drawing of the vessels and their rigging. The numerous figures are tellingly introduced, and the artist is successful in his renderings of sea, whether in calm or storm.
William Page1811-1885
William Page studied at Phillips Academy, Andover in 1828-29 (not the Andover Theological Seminary on the same campus, as is commonly asserted). A man of mercurial temperament, Page was lacking in religious belief in youth, but later became a Swedenborgian. He received his training in art from Samuel F. B. Morse (a Phillips Academy graduate) at the National Academy of Design, and in 1836 he became a National Academician. In the 1830s and 40s, Page was based in New York, achieving renown there as a portraitist.
Living in Rome from 1849 to 1860, he befriended Robert and Elizabeth Browning, whose portraits he painted. He was also a friend of William Wetmore Story and of James Russell Lowell, who dedicated his first collection of poems to him in 1843.
In 1873, Page became president of the National Academy of Design. His work includes a painting of Admiral David Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay, the Holy Family (now at the Boston Athenaeum) and The Young Merchants (now at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia), as well as countless portraits, including portraits of John Quincy Adams, James Russell Lowell and William Shakespeare, based on the Becker death mask. He also wrote A New Geometrical Method of Measuring the Human Figure (1860).
He died in 1885, aged 74 on Staten Island. Although extravagantly praised as an artist from the 1830s into the 1860s, Page's reputation suffered in later life because he changed his style so frequently and, more particularly, because technical characteristics of his painting method soon caused much of his work to darken excessively.