1728-1779 Dutch Anton Raphael Mengs Gallery Mengs was born in 1728 at Usti nad Labem (German: Aussig) in Bohemia on 12 March 1728; he died in Rome 29 June 1779. His father, Ismael Mengs, a Danish painter, established himself finally at Dresden, whence in 1741 he took his son to Rome. In Rome, his fresco painting of Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter. The appointment of Mengs in 1749 as first painter to Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony did not prevent his spending much time in Rome, where he had married Margarita Quazzi who had sat for him as a model in 1748, and abjured the Protestant faith, and where he became in 1754 director of the Vatican school of painting, nor did this hinder him on two occasions from obeying the call of Charles III of Spain to Madrid. There Mengs produced some of his best work, and specially the ceiling of the banqueting-hall of the Royal Palace of Madrid, the subject of which was the Triumph of Trajan and the Temple of Glory. Among his pupils there was Agust??n Esteve. After the completion of this work in 1777, Mengs returned to Rome, and there he died, two years later, in poor circumstances, leaving twenty children, seven of whom were pensioned by the king of Spain. His portraits and autoportraits recall an attention to detail and insight, often lost from the grand manner paintings. Besides numerous paintings in the Madrid gallery, the Ascension and St Joseph at Dresden, Perseus and Andromeda at Saint Petersburg, and the ceiling of the Villa Albani must be mentioned among his chief works. In 1911, Henry George Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland, possessed a Holy Family, and the colleges of All Souls and Magdalen, at Oxford, possessed altar-pieces by Mengs's hand. In his writings, in Spanish, Italian and German, Mengs has put forth his eclectic theory of art, which treats of perfection as attainable by a well-schemed combination of diverse excellences Greek design, with the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colour of Titian. He would have fancied himself the first neoclassicist, while in fact he may be the last flicker of Baroque art. Or in the words of Wittkower, In the last analysis, he is as much an end as a beginning. His intimacy with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who constantly wrote at his dictation, has enhanced his historical importance, for he formed no scholars, and the critic must now concur in Goethe's judgment of Mengs in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert; he must deplore that so much learning should have been allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism. Mengs was famous for his rivalry with the contemporary Italian painter Pompeo Batoni.  Related Paintings of Anton Raphael Mengs :. | Portrait of Domenico Annibali (1705-1779), Italian singer | Portrait of Infante Antonio Pascual of Spain | Maria Luisa of Parma | Portrait du cardinal Archinto | Self-Portrait |
Related Artists:
VAFFLARD, Pierre-Auguste
French painter b. 1777, Paris, d. 1837, Paris,French painter. A pupil of Jean-Baptiste Regnault, he exhibited regularly in the Salon between 1800 and 1831. He executed a number of unremarkable academic works on Classical subjects, for example Electra (1804; exh. Salon 1814) and Orestes Sleeping (1819; both Dijon, Mus. B.-A.). Vafflard gained more success with his Troubadour pictures, which he began to paint in the early 19th century, at the outset of this fashion. They are remarkable for their absence of colour, their theatrical quality and contrasted lighting effects. One of his earliest Troubadour scenes was Emma and Eginhard (exh. Salon 1804; Evreux, Mus. Evreux), based on an episode in the history of Charlemagne's court and painted at a time when the Holy Roman Empire was in fashion in official French circles. In this sentimental painting Vafflard demonstrated his historicizing intentions by emphasizing medieval costume and Gothic architecture and seeking to create an atmosphere similar to the romans de la chevalerie, so highly thought of in France at the end of the 18th century. In the same Salon he exhibited a strange and novel painting, Young Holding his Dead Daughter in his Arms (Angouleme, Mus. Mun.), taken from Edward Young's Night Thoughts (pubd in French in 1769-70).
Alfred Wahlberg
1834-1906,Swedish painter. He received some tuition in drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, although he was never formally enrolled as a student. In 1857 he went to D?sseldorf where he was a student of Hans Fredrik Gude. Swedish Landscape, Kolm?rden (1866; Stockholm, Nmus.) is representative of Wahlberg's D?sseldorf period. After a journey to the Netherlands and Belgium he returned to Stockholm in 1862 and became a member of the circle of artists around Karl XV.
Auguste Chabaud
1882-1955,French painter, sculptor and writer. He trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Avignon with Pierre Grivolas (1824-1905). After moving to Paris in 1899 he attended Fernand Cormon's atelier in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and William-Adolphe Bouguereau's studio in the Acad?mie Julian. He also studied at the Acad?mie Carriere, where he met Matisse, Jean Puy, Andre Derain and Pierre Laprade. While family responsibilities from 1901 and military service in World War I sharply curtailed much of his early output, he nonetheless produced noteworthy paintings and sculptures from 1907, the first year he exhibited at the Paris Salon, to 1913, when he exhibited at the Armory Show in New York.