(born Niko Pirosmanashvili; May 5, 1862-1918) was a Georgian primitivist painter. Pirosmani was born in the Georgian village of Mirzaani to a pleasant family in the Kakheti province. His family owned a small vineyard. He was later orphaned and put in the care of his two elder sisters. He moved with them to Tbilisi in 1870. In 1872 he worked as a servant for wealthy families and learned to read and write Russian and Georgian. In 1876 he returned to Mirzaani and worked as a herdsman. Pirosmani gradually taught himself to paint. One of his specialties was painting directly into black oilcloth. In 1882 he opened a workshop in Tbilisi which was unsuccessful. In 1890 he worked as a railroad conductor, and in 1895 worked creating signboards. In 1893 he co-founded a dairy farm in Tbilisi which he left in 1901. Throughout his life Pirosmani, who was always poor, was willing to take up ordinary jobs including housepainting and whitewashing buildings. Although his paintings had some local popularity (about 200 survive) his relationship with professional artists remained uneasy; making a living was always more important to him than abstract aesthetics.  Related Paintings of Niko Pirosmanashvili :. | Porter with a Wineskin | Shepherd in a Sheepskin Cloak on a Red Background | The Russian-Japanese War | Still-Life | The Ferry at Didubeh |
Related Artists:
CAMPI, Vincenzo
Italian Painter, 1536-1591 Vicenzo Campi (c. 1536 - 1591) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance from Cremona. His style merges Lombard with Mannerist styles, however, unlike his siblings, he is known for a series of canvases, mostly painted after 1570s , displaying genre scenes and local produce. At the time, this type of paintings were uncommon in Italy, and more common in Netherlands, as exemplified by the canvases of Joachim Beuckelaer. In Cremona, his extended family was the main artistic studio of his time. Giulio Campi and Antonio Campi were reportedly half-brothers, while Bernardino Campi was a distant relative. All were active and prominent local painters. In 1586-1589, he and his brother Antonio completed paintings for the church of San Paolo Converso in Milan.
Gaspare Landi
Italian, 1756-1830,was an Italian painter of the Neoclassic period, active in Rome and his native city of Piacenza. He is said to have been a fun-loving younth, but in 1781 he procured a subsidy to study painting in Rome from patron and distant relative, Marquis Giambattista Landi. At age 25, he moved to Rome to work under Domenico Corvi and Pompeo Battoni. He is considered a rival of Vincenzo Camuccini. Two of his pictures were once in the Pinacoteca at Parma, Diomedes and Ulysses bearing off the Palladium (1783) and the Marriage of Abraham and Sarah. Above one of the altars in the church of the Santa Casa at Loreto there is a later work by this Landi showing the Madonna addolorata. A major work is his large canvas representing the fainting of Christ as he struggles along over the road to Calvary weighted down by the burden of the Cross, Lo Spasimo for San Giovanni at Piacenza. It hung opposite Vincenzo Camuccini's Presentation. Landi became a member of the Accademia di San Luca of Rome in 1805, professor of the theory of painting in 1812, and president of the Academy in 1817. He was also made a Chevalier of the Order of the Iron Crown, of the Order of San Giuseppe, and of a Neapolitan order. About 1820 he returned to Piacenza, intending to remain there, but soon tired of the monotonous existence of a provincial town, and in 1824 reestablished himself at Rome. His last work was an Assumption and was placed in the church of San Francesco di Paola, at Naples. He returned to Piacenza in 1829, where he died.
Karoly Lotz
(16 December 1833 - 13 October 1904) was a German-Hungarian painter. Karl Lotz was born in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany, the 7th and youngest surviving child of Wilhelm Christian Lotz and Antonia Höfflick (Höfflich). His father was a valet of Prince Gustav zu Hessen-Homburg at the time when the prince was representing Austria at the Congress of Vienna, which among other matters dealt with the House of Hessen-Homburg's rights of sovereignty over Hessen-Darmstadt. The sudden death of the young Baron von Sinclair, charge d'affaires, forced W. C. Lotz temporarily into the rôle. While in Hungary in 1815 he made the acquaintance of the 13-year-old Antonie Hoefflich, whom he married three years later. She gave birth to 8 children, of whom Karl was the youngest. W. C. Lotz died in 1837 and Antonie moved the family to Pest (now one of the three constituent parts of Budapest; the one on the east bank of the River Danube). Karl attended the Piaristengymnasium, where, although Calvinist, he was awarded a scholarship for his exceptional academic performance. He began his artistic career as a pupil of the Hofkapellmeister Destouches, then in the academy of the Venetian master Jacopo Marastoni (1804-1860). Later he was a pupil of the historical painters Henrik Weber (1818-1866) in Budapest and Carl Rahl (1812-1865) in Vienna. Together with Rahl he worked on numerous commissions. Later he started on his own original works, first as a romantic landscape artist in scenes of the Alföld (the Hungarian lowland plain), and then as a creator of monumental murals and frescos in the style of the Venetian master Tiepolo. After various works in Budapest he became active in Vienna. He laid out plans for a grandiose palace, and completed murals commissioned by the Abbot of Tihany for his abbey church on the shore of Lake Balaton. He became known for his portraits and nudes, for which both his wife and his daughters (Katarina in particular) posed. Lotz found married bliss only at the age of 58, when he married the widow Jacoboy, the former wife of his brother Paul Johann Heinrich, who had died in 1828. From then on he signed his works Keroly Jacoboy-Lotz. In 1882 Lotz was appointed Professor at various art academies in Budapest, and in 1885 he became dean of a newly-established department for women painters. He was an honorary member of the Academy of Pictorial Arts in Vienna. Tomb of Keroly Lotz by Jenos Pesztor (Kerepesi cemetery in Budapest)Hist last important public commission was the "Apotheosis of the Habsburg Dynasty", a huge ceiling fresco in the Habsburg Room of the newly rebuilt Royal Palace, that he painted in 1903, one year before his death. Lotz was already seriously ill when he worked on the fresco. The "Apotheosis" followed the traditions of Baroque court painting and the work was praised by contemporary critics. The fresco survived the war unscathed, but it was destroyed in the 1950s. He died in 1904 in Budapest. As a "Prince of Hungarian Artists" he was given a state funeral and interred inside a memorial. His pictures, drawings and sketches were donated to the State of Hungary and are now in the Szepműveszeti Mezeum. Several Hungarian cities have streets named after him, there are Hungarian stamps bearing his likeness, and there is a bust in the National Museum in Budapest.