Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1577-1640 Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 ?C May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp which produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, king of Spain, and Charles I, king of England. Rubens was a prolific artist. His commissioned works were mostly religious subjects, "history" paintings, which included mythological subjects, and hunt scenes. He painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house. He also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the Joyous Entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not detailed; he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. He was one of the last major artists to make consistent use of wooden panels as a support medium, even for very large works, but he used canvas as well, especially when the work needed to be sent a long distance. For altarpieces he sometimes painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms 'Rubensian' or 'Rubenesque' for plus-sized women. The term 'Rubensiaans' is also commonly used in Dutch to denote such women.  Related Paintings of Peter Paul Rubens :. | Sitting old man | La decouverte de la pourpre | Reuige Magdalena und ihre Schwester Martha | Gewitterlandschaft mit Philemon und Baucis | The Moching of Christ (mk01) |
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Maron, Anton von
Austrian, 1733-1808 Austrian painter. He studied at the Vienna Akademie and, in 1755, he went to Rome, where he was based for the rest of his life. From 1756 to 1761 he was first the pupil then the assistant of Anton Raphael Mengs. In 1765 he married Mengs's sister, the miniature painter Theresia Concordia Mengs. After collaborating on Mengs's fresco paintings in Rome (at S Eusebio and the Villa Albani; both in situ), Maron, working independently in Rome, spent some time on altar pictures (S Maria dell'Anima) and on various decorative projects. Mengs's influence is evident in Maron's ceiling pictures in the casino of the Villa Borghese (1784; in situ), where five paintings tell the Story of Aeneas and Dido in the style of quadri riportati, using clear construction, sharply defined drawing and a historical concept based on antiquity. Although he received many commissions for this type of work, Maron's true gifts lay in the field of portraiture. Along with Pompeo Batoni, Maron was the most celebrated portrait painter in 18th-century Rome, and he received an enormous number of commissions from princes, diplomats and church dignitaries and from English aristocrats visiting Rome as part of their Grand Tour. Maron painted such sitters in the same style as did Batoni, usually full-length and life-size, in elegantly fashionable dress, against backgrounds of Classical sculptures and views of Rome. Portraits such as those of Francis, Prince of Anhalt Dessau
Adriaen de Gryef
Belgium (1670-1715 ) - Painter
MANTEGNA, Andrea
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1431-1506 Italian painter and printmaker. He occupies a pre-eminent position among Italian artists of the 15th century. The profound enthusiasm for the civilization of ancient Rome that infuses his entire oeuvre was unprecedented in a painter. In addition to its antiquarian content, his art is characterized by brilliant compositional solutions, the bold and innovative use of perspective and foreshortening and a precise and deliberate manner of execution, an aspect that was commented upon during his lifetime. He was held in great esteem by his contemporaries for his learning and skill and, significantly, he is the only artist of the period to have left a small corpus of self-portraits: two in the Ovetari Chapel; his presumed self-portrait in the Presentation in the Temple (Berlin, Gemeldegal.); one in the Camera Picta (Mantua, Pal. Ducale) and the funerary bust in his burial chapel in S Andrea, Mantua, designed and probably executed by himself. His printmaking activity is technically advanced and of great importance, although certain aspects of the execution remain to be clarified.