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 :. | Diana and Callisto (mk01) | The Wedding by Proxy of Marie de'Medici to King Henry IV (MK01) | The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus | Tiger-and Lowenjagd | The Union of Earth and Water |
Related Artists:
Robert Crannell Minor
(1839-1904), American artist, was born in New York City on 30 April 1839, and received his art training in Paris under Diaz, and in Antwerp under Joseph Van Luppen. His paintings are characteristic of the Barbizon school, and he was particularly happy in his sunset and twilight effects; but it was only within a few years of his death that he began to have a vogue among collectors. In 1897 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design, New York. After 1900 he lived at Waterford, Connecticut, where he died on 4 August 1904.
John Bettes the Elder
(active c. 1531 - 1570) was a Tudor artist whose few known paintings date from between about 1543 and 1550. His most famous work is his Portrait of a Man in a Black Cap. His son John Bettes the Younger, with whom he is sometimes confused, was a pupil of Nicholas Hilliard who painted portraits during the reign of Elizabeth I and James I. Nothing is known of John Bettes's life, except that he was living in Westminster in 1556, according to a documented court case. He is first recorded as working for Henry VIII at Whitehall Palace in 1531. Queen Catherine Parr's accounts for 1546/47 record payments to Bettes for "lymning" (painting in miniature) the king's and queen's portraits, and for six other portraits. Her new year's gift of 1547 to Prince Edward was a pair of portraits of the king and herself. Bettes has been identified as the designer of the engraved title-border for William Cuningham's Cosmographical Glasse, printed by John Day in 1559. He may also be the designer of engravings for Edward Hall's Chronicle, published in 1550, and of a woodcut portrait of Franz Burchard, the Saxon ambassador to England, published in 1560. In 1576, John Foxe referred to Bettes as already dead. An earlier second edition of Foxe's Actes and Monuments printed in 1570 refers to Bettes' death.
Agnes Goodsir
(18 June 1864, Portland, Victoria - 1939, France) was an Australian portrait painter who moved within lesbian circles in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Goodsir was one of eleven children born to David James Cook Goodsir, Commissioner of Customs at Melbourne, and Elizabeth Archer. Her early art training started with Arthur T. Woodward at the Bendigo School of Mines in the 1890s, and in 1899 some of her work was raffled in Bendigo to partly finance her study in Paris. The years following World War I saw a virtual exodus of Australian artists on a sort of Grand Tour to Paris, all intent on being part of the explosion of the arts taking place there. Painters like Rupert Bunny, Stella Bowen and Max Meldrum were drawn there by the appeal of the Left Bank. Others like Margaret Preston and Grace Crowley were inspired to develop in new directions by post-war Parisian art. Goodsir attended the Academie Delecluse, the Academie Julian and then the Academie Colarossi. From about 1912 she shuttled between London and Paris, but finally settled in Paris at 18 Rue de l'Odeon. Her constant companion was Rachel Dunn, depicted in several of her paintings, such as The Chinese Skirt 1933, Girl with Cigarette 1925, The Letter 1926 and Morning Tea 1925. Her work was acclaimed and exhibited at the New Salon, the Salon des Independants, and the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris as well as at the Royal Academy and the Royal Institute in London. On a short visit to Australia in 1927 she exhibited at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney and the Fine Arts Gallery in Melbourne. In 1938 four of her oils were shown at the sesquicentennial exhibition at the NSW National Art Gallery. On her death in 1939, her paintings were left to her companion Rachel Dunn, who sent some 40 to Agnes's family in Australia and others to Australian galleries.