b Pontormo, nr Empoli, 26 May 1494; d Florence, 31 Dec 1556). Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the leading painter in mid-16th-century Florence and one of the most original and extraordinary of Mannerist artists. His eccentric personality, solitary and slow working habits and capricious attitude towards his patrons are described by Vasari; his own diary, which covers the years 1554-6, further reveals a character with neurotic and secretive aspects. Pontormo enjoyed the protection of the Medici family throughout his career but, unlike Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari, did not become court painter. His subjective portrait style did not lend itself to the state portrait. He produced few mythological works and after 1540 devoted himself almost exclusively to religious subjects. His drawings, mainly figure studies in red and black chalk, are among the highest expressions of the great Florentine tradition of draughtsmanship; close to 400 survive, forming arguably the most important body of drawings by a Mannerist painter. His highly personal style was much influenced by Michelangelo  Related Paintings of Pontormo, Jacopo :. | Deposition | Christ the Judge with the Creation of Eve | St John the Evangelist | St Luke | Portrait of a Lady in Red |
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Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl
(1785-8 - Nashville, Tennessee, September 16, 1838), also known as Ralph E. W. Earl or Ralph Eleazer Whiteside Earl, was an American painter known as the "court painter" to President Andrew Jackson. Earl was the son of portrait painter Ralph Earl and his second wife Ann Whiteside. He was born c. 1785-88, probably in New York City, and likely received his early training in portraiture from his father, whose naive style is reflected in the younger Earl's earliest works. He traveled to London in 1809, where he studied for a year with John Trumbull and was advised by Benjamin West, learning perspective, anatomy, and three-dimensional illusion. He remained in England until 1814, living with his maternal grandfather and uncle in Norwich and executing portrait commissions. He then traveled to Paris before returning to the United States in December 1815 with the intention of creating grand-scale history paintings on the European model. As preparation for a planned project depicting the Battle of New Orleans, Earl met General Andrew Jackson and visited him at his Tennessee home, The Hermitage, in January 1817. Earl painted portraits of Jackson and his family, and married Mrs. Jackson's niece Jane Caffery on 19 May 1819. She died in childbirth in 1820.
Nicolas de Stael
Russian Painter.1914-1955 was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles Nocolas de Stael was born in the family of a Russian Lieutenant General, Baron Vladimir Stael von Holstein, (a member of the Stael von Holstein family, and the last Commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress) and his wife, Olga Sakhanskaya. De Stael's family was forced to emigrate to Poland in 1919 because of the Russian Revolution; Both, his father and stepmother, would die in Poland and the orphaned Nicolas de Stael would be sent with his older sister Marina to Brussels to live with a Russian family (1922). He eventually studied art at the Brussels Acad??mie royale des beaux-arts (1932). In the 1930s, he travelled throughout Europe, lived in Paris (1934) and in Morocco (1936) (where he first met his companion Jeannine Guillou, also a painter and who would appear in some of his paintings from 1941-1942) and Algeria. In 1936 he had his first exhibition of Byzantine style icons and watercolors at the Galerie Dietrich et Cie, Brussels. He joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 and was demobilized in 1941.
OOST, Jacob van, the Elder
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1601-1671