English Painter, 1734-1802 The son of a cabinetmaker, George Romney was born in Dalton, Lancashire. He was apprenticed in 1755 to Christopher Steele, a provincial portrait painter, but was largely self-taught. Romney's ambition was to become a history painter. In 1762 he moved to London, where he studied the Duke of Richmond's collection of casts of antique sculpture and established himself as a portraitist. He went to Italy in 1773, and after his return in 1775 he became the favorite painter of high society. Morbidly sensitive and retiring, Romney kept aloof from the social world of his sitters and from the Royal Academy. By 1782 he was under the spell of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton and the mistress of Nelson, who sat for him as Circe, a Bacchante, Cassandra, the Pythian Priestess, Joan of Arc, St. Cecilia, Mary Magdalene, and other impersonations he suggested. In the 1780s he executed a number of Eton leaving portraits, which established him as the supreme interpreter of aristocratic adolescence in his age. For much of his life in London, Romney was under the wing of the poet William Hayley, who encouraged him in the choice of subjects from Milton and Shakespeare as well as the Bible and Greek tragedy. Romney's history paintings are today chiefly known from engravings, like the dramatic Tempest (1787-1790) commissioned for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. A large number of drawings for these projects survive. Romney had married early in life an uneducated woman whom he did not bring to London but to whom he returned when his health finally gave way. Ill health and the facility with which he converted his early realistic style into a fashionable sketchlike formula for idealizing his sitters probably account for an unevenness of execution that has partially justified his critics. Unlike Joshua Reynolds, Romney did not enter into the character of his sitters, unless they possessed nervous traits like his own, for example, the moving portrait William Cowper. But he was psychologically involved with the generalized charms of youth, beauty, and breeding that he admired in his aristocratic sitters, and by combining a neoclassic purity of line with free but masterly brushwork he achieved a number of incomparable images which transcend the realism of portraiture.   Related Paintings of ROMNEY, George :. | Miss Constable dg | Sidonian Recollections | The Leigh Family (mk08) | Lady in a Brown Robe s | Recollections |
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Nicolae Tonitza
(Romanian pronunciation: [nikoˈla.e toˈnit͡sa]; April 13, 1886 - February 27, 1940) was a Romanian painter, engraver, lithographer, journalist and art critic. Drawing inspiration from Post-impressionism and Expressionism, he had a major role in introducing modernist guidelines to local art. Born in Bârlad, he left his home town in 1902 in order to attend the Iaşi National School of Fine Arts, where he had among his teachers Gheorghe Popovici and Emanoil Bardasare.The following year he visited Italy together with University of Bucharest students of archeology under the direction of Grigore Tocilescu.During that period, together with some of his fellow students, Tonitza painted the walls of Grozeşti church. In 1908 he left for Munich, where he attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts; he began publishing political cartoons in Furnica, and contributing art criticism articles to Arta Română. Tonitza spent the following three years in Paris, where he visited artists' studios, and studied famous paintings.Although the young artist's creation would initially conform to the prevalent style, his gift for colour and his personal touch would eventually lead him towards experiment.Throughout his life, he remained committed to the Munich School, hailing its innovative style over the supposedly "obscure imitators of Matisse".
John Durand
American. active1766-1782 A signed portrait (priv. col.) dated 1765 provides the first documentary information on him. He advertised in the New York Journal on 26 November 1767 that he had opened a drawing school, and again on 7 April 1768, announcing his availability as a history painter, though no examples of this activity survive. Like other painters in the colonies, he made his living from portrait painting. His most noted work, the Rapalije Children (1768; New York, NY Hist. Soc.), demonstrates the strong decorative sense, the delicate use of colour and the attempts at sophisticated value and texture application that characterize all his paintings. His skill as a draughtsman is evident in the carefully described details. Here, as in other works, he used a dark outline to define one plane from another, and he imparted a sense of elegance, particularly in the slightly turned heads and animated arms and hands.
georges bizet
Born: Oct 25, 1838 in Paris, France Died: Jun 03, 1875 in Bougival, France Active: '30s, '50s, '70s-2000s Major Genres: Music, Theater Career Highlights: Carmen, Carmen Jones, Carmen First Major Screen Credit: The Burlesque on Carmen (1916)