1638-1709 Dutch Meindert Hobbema Galleries In the exercise of his craft Hobbema was patient beyond all conception. It is doubtful whether any one ever so completely mastered as he did the still life of woods and hedges, or mills and pools. Nor can we believe that he obtained this mastery otherwise than by constantly dwelling in the same neighbourhood, say in Guelders or on the Dutch Westphalian border, where day after day he might study the branching and foliage of trees and underwood embowering cottages and mills, under every variety of light, in every shade of transparency, in all changes produced by the seasons. Though his landscapes are severely and moderately toned, generally in an olive key, and often attuned to a puritanical grey or russet, they surprise us, not only by the variety of their leafage, but by the finish of their detail as well as the boldness of their touch. With astonishing subtlety light is shown penetrating cloud, and illuminating, sometimes transiently, sometimes steadily, different portions of the ground, shining through leaves upon other leaves, and multiplying in an endless way the transparency of the picture. If the chance be given him he mirrors all these things in the still pool near a cottage, the reaches of a sluggish river, or the swirl of the stream that feeds a busy mill. The same spot will furnish him with several pictures. One mill gives him repeated opportunities of charming our eye; and this wonderful artist, who is only second to Ruisdael because he had not Ruisdael's versatility and did not extend his study equally to downs and rocky eminences, or torrents and estuaries - this is the man who lived penuriously, died poor, and left no trace in the artistic annals of his country. It has been said that Hobbema did not paint his own figures, but transferred that duty to Adriaen van de Velde, Lingelbach, Barendt Gael, and Abraham Storck. As to this much is conjecture.  Related Paintings of Meindert Hobbema :. | kvarnen | View Along the Amstel | The Watermills at Singraven near Denekamp | Landscape with a Hut | Cottages beside a Track through a Wood |
Related Artists:
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
Luca di Tomme
Italian Painter, ca.1330-1390
Henri Fantin-Latour
French 1836-1904 Henri Fantin Latour Locations Bure) French painter and printmaker. He was trained by his father, a portrait painter, and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Though he associated with progressive artists (Gustave Courbet, Eugene Delacroix, Edouard Manet), he was a traditionalist best known for his portraits and still lifes with flowers. His portrait groups, reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch guild portraits, depict literary and artistic persons of the time; his flower paintings were especially popular in England, thanks to James McNeill Whistler and John Everett Millais, who found patrons to support him. His later years were devoted to lithography.