Flemish Northern Renaissance Manuscript Illuminator, ca.1483-1561 was a 16th century miniature painter of the Ghent-Bruges school, the last major artist of the Netherlandish tradition. Bening was trained in his father Alexander Bening's miniature painting workshop in Ghent. He made his own name after moving to Bruges. His specialty was the book of hours, but by his time these were becoming relatively unfashionable, and only produced for royalty and the very rich. He also created genealogical tables and portable altarpieces on parchment. Many of his finest works are Labours of the Months for Books of Hours which are largely small scale landscapes, at that time a nascent genre of painting. In other respects his style is relatively little developed beyond that of the years before his birth, but his landscapes serve as a link between the 15th century illuminators and Peter Brueghel. His self-portrait and other portraits equally are early examples of the portrait miniature. He served as dean of the calligraphers, booksellers, illuminators, and bookbinders in the Guild of Saint John and Saint Luke. He created books for German rulers, like Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, and royalty like Emperor Charles V and Don Fernando, the Infante of Portugal. The artistic tradition continued in his family. His eldest daughter, Levina Teerlinc  Related Paintings of Simon Bening :. | Dido Building Carthage aka The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire | St Jerome as Cardinal | Venus and Amor sf | pardon of the newfoundlanders | Pearl |
Related Artists:
Koch, Joseph Anton
Austrian Painter, 1768-1839 Painter and writer. He was one of the most important landscape painters of the early 19th century. With his friend Johann Christian Reinhart he pioneered the 'heroic' landscape style by heightening the grandeur and structural clarity of classical Italianate landscapes in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet. His work reflects a transitional period in European art. Largely under the influence of Asmus Carstens, Koch subscribed to many Neo-classical principles, but his work also has Romantic aspects. His interest in the natural sciences and Romantic philosophy betrayed an increasingly modern world-view, but he also embraced the medievalism of the Nazarenes.
John William Godward
English 1861-1922 Godward was a Victorian Neo-classicist, and therefore a follower in theory of Frederic Leighton. However, he is more closely allied stylistically to Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, with whom he shared a penchant for the rendering of Classical architecture, in particular, static landscape features constructed from marble. The vast majority of Godward's extant images feature women in Classical dress, posed against these landscape features, though there are some semi-nude and fully nude figures included in his oeuvre (a notable example being In The Tepidarium (1913), a title shared with a controversial Alma-Tadema painting of the same subject that resides in the Lady Lever Art Gallery). The titles reflect Godward's source of inspiration: Classical civilisation, most notably that of Ancient Rome (again a subject binding Godward closely to Alma-Tadema artistically), though Ancient Greece sometimes features, thus providing artistic ties, albeit of a more limited extent, with Leighton. Given that Classical scholarship was more widespread among the potential audience for his paintings during his lifetime than in the present day, meticulous research of detail was important in order to attain a standing as an artist in this genre. Alma-Tadema was, as well as a painter, an archaeologist who attended historical sites and collected artefacts that were later used in his paintings: Godward, too, studied such details as architecture and dress, in order to ensure that his works bore the stamp of authenticity. In addition, Godward painstakingly and meticulously rendered those other important features in his paintings, animal skins (the paintings Noon Day Rest (1910) and A Cool Retreat (1910) contain superb examples of such rendition) and wild flowers (Nerissa (1906), illustrated above, and Summer Flowers (1903) are again excellent examples of this). The appearance of beautiful women in studied poses in so many of Godward's canvases causes many newcomers to his works to categorise him mistakenly as being Pre-Raphaelite, particularly as his palette is often a vibrantly colourful one. However, the choice of subject matter (ancient civilisation versus, for example, Arthurian legend) is more properly that of the Victorian Neoclassicist: however, it is appropriate to comment that in common with numerous painters contemporary with him, Godward was a 'High Victorian Dreamer', producing beautiful images of a world which, it must be said, was idealised and romanticised, and which in the case of both Godward and Alma-Tadema came to be criticised as a world-view of 'Victorians in togas'.
George Luks
August 13.1866-October 29.1933,American painter and draughtsman. He lived as a child in the mining town of Shenandoah, PA, but moved to Philadelphia in 1883. The facts of his early career were later confused by the wild stories fabricated by him. After a short stint in vaudeville, he spent a year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. From 1885 he was in Europe, living most of the next decade in D?sseldorf, Munich, Paris and London, intermittently attending German and French art academies. In 1894 Luks became an artist-reporter for the Philadelphia Press, where he befriended Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J. Glackens and Everett Shinn.