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 :. | Satyr und Madchen mit Fruchtekorb | The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus | The Crowning with Tborns (mk01) | Garden of Love | The Majority of Louis XIII (mk05) |
Related Artists:
Andrea di Orcagna
Italian Byzantine Style Painter, ca.1320-1368
Pieter de Kempener
Pedro Campana (1503-1586) was a Flemish painter of the Renaissance period, mainly active in Italy and Spain. His actual name was Pieter de Kempeneer, translated into French as Champaigne, and was also known as Peter Van de Velde. Born in Brussels, he trained there with Bernard Van Orley. His early life appears to have been spent in Italy, where he carefully studied the paintings of Raphael, and declared himself as his pupil. In 1530 he was at work at some scene-painting, representing a triumphal arch to be erected on the occasion of the coronation of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in Bologna, and he then left for Spain, on the advice, it is said, of Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and spent the rest of his life in that country, only returning to Brussels about 1563 or 1565. Between 1537 and 1562 he was associated with Luis de Vargas and the Italian sculptor Torregiano in establishing a school of painting in Seville, which eventually became the academy of the place; amongst the pupils educated in it was Morales. He painted for the monastery of St. Mary of Grace, Church of Santa Cruz, in the city, an altar-piece representing the Descent from the Cross (1548), which is now in the cathedral, having been removed there when the church fell into ruins. There are other works by the same painter in Seville Cathedral, especially two representing the Purification of the Virgin and the Resurrection; and the various churches of the city, S. Isidoro, S. Pedro, S. Catalina, and S. Juan, all possess paintings by this artist. One of his last works was the restoration and repainting of a chapel belonging to Hernando de Jaen, an important resident of Seville. Murillo requested that he be buried near Campana's picture, and his burial took place in the Church of Santa Cruz, close underneath the Descent from the Cross, but the whole building was burned to the ground during the Napoleonic Wars, and the tomb perished.
Hans Thoma
German Symbolist Painter, 1839-1924 German painter, printmaker and museum director. He was the son of a miller, craftsman and smallholder and studied briefly as a lithographer in Basle in 1854 before being apprenticed to a watchcase painter in Furtwangen. Returning home the same year, he started to draw and paint in his spare time. In 1859 he enrolled at the Kunstschule in Karlsruhe, where he studied until 1866 with Ludwig Des Coudres (1820-78) and the landscape painter Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, by whom he was especially influenced. He spent his summer vacations drawing and painting in Bernau, and his landscapes, portraits and genre pictures from this time record his transition from amateur painter to accomplished artist. His pictures of his mother and his sister Agathe