1593-1648 French Louis Le Nain Gallery French family of painters. Antoine Le Nain (b Laon, c. 1600; bur Paris, 26 May 1648) and his brothers Louis Le Nain (b Laon, c. 1600; bur Paris, 24 May 1648) and Mathieu Le Nain (b Laon, c. 1607; bur Paris, 26 April 1677) lived together and shared a studio in Paris. Since the studio was headed by Antoine, he is assumed to have been older than Louis. The brothers reputation rests on a number of paintings signed Le Nain, on the basis of which other paintings (but no drawings) have also been attributed to them. None of the signed paintings bears a Christian name, and there is no secure way of attributing works to the individual brothers, although many attempts have been made. Eighteenth-century sale catalogues, fearful of anonymity, effectively chose from the three names at random. Since the writings of Witt (1910) and Jamot (1922) in particular, it has been habitual to ascribe small paintings on copper to Antoine, and austere, larger peasant scenes to Louis. This division of hands will be found in almost all the subsequent literature on the artists, although it must be stressed that there is no evidence at all to support it. Great efforts have also been made to identify works by Mathieu, since he survived his brothers by nearly 30 years and presumably continued to paint after their deaths in 1648. However, no such activity after 1648 is securely documented, and none of the surviving works bears a date later than 1647; and the arguments for a separate Mathieu oeuvre, though cogent, should not be regarded as conclusive. The outstanding feature of the work of the Le Nain brothers, and the basis of their celebrity since the mid-19th century, is the artists treatment of the poor.  Related Paintings of Louis Le Nain :. | The Cart or the Return from Haymaking (mk05) | La Charette | The Milkwoman-s Family | fransk bondkvinna | young prince, c |
Related Artists:
Jean Ranc
French portraits painter, 1674-1735 French painter, active also in Spain. His father was the painter Antoine Ranc (1634-1716), under whom he must have trained. From 1697 he lived in Paris, where he continued his apprenticeship in Hyacinthe Rigaud's studio. After working for some years as Rigaud's assistant, he joined the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris in 1703 and reached the rank of academician as a portrait painter in 1707. As Rigaud's protege he worked for the French court, painting portraits of Louis XV (1718; Versailles, Cheteau) and almost certainly other members of the royal family as well as of the aristocracy. He also painted some allegorical and mythological works, such as Vertumnus and Pomona
JANSSENS, Abraham
Flemish painter (b. 1575, Antwerpen, d. 1632, Antwerpen). Flemish painter. He painted historical, religious and mythological subjects, often on a large scale, derived principally from antique sculpture and the art of Michelangelo and Raphael and, to a lesser degree, from certain contemporaries, including the Dutch late Mannerists and the Bolognese school. He was highly esteemed in Antwerp but suffered, then and subsequently, from the inevitable comparison with his contemporary and formidable rival Rubens
Adrian Ludwig Richter
German, 1803-1884 German painter, printmaker and illustrator. He ranks with Moritz von Schwind as the most important representative of late Romantic painting and printmaking in Germany. In contrast to the work of such leading masters of early Romanticism as Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, which was ambitious in content and innovative in form, Richter's art was more modest in its aims, in line with the restrained intellectual climate of the Biedermeier period.