Irish 1878-1931 Sir William Orpen Location Irish painter. He attended the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin (1891-7), and the Slade School of Art, London (1897-9), there winning the composition prize of 1899 with The Play Scene from Hamlet (Houghton Hall, Norfolk). He became a friend of Augustus John and joined the New English Art Club. From very early years he had been an impassioned student of the Old Masters, and he went to Paris with John in 1899 to see Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa (Paris, Louvre). In the following years his perception of their works   Related Paintings of Sir William Orpen :. | A Breezy Day,Howth | Mrs St George | Some Members of the Allied Press Camp,with their Pres Officers | The Mirror | The Official Entry of the Kaiser |
Related Artists:
GOYEN, Jan van
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings. Yet he died insolvent, perhaps because of losses in his various business ventures, and soon after his death on April 27, 1656,
William Havell
English Painter, 1782-1857
wyndham lewis
British painter and writer. He attended Rugby School and then studied painting at the Slade School of Art, London (1898-1901), where he earned a reputation both as a draughtsman and as a poet. His early artistic and intellectual mentors were Augustus John and Thomas Sturge Moore. From 1902 to 1908 Lewis travelled widely in Europe and studied in many of the major museums. He was one of the first British artists to be aware of, and interested in, Cubism and Expressionism, though little of his work before 1909 survives as evidence of his early development. In late 1908 Lewis settled in London and as well as painting began to publish satirical short stories that take a mechanistic view of human social behaviour, evident in the deliberately clumsy and grotesque figures in his art of the period 1909 to 1912. By 1910 he was including Cubist elements in his watercolour drawings (his preferred medium), and by 1912 he had developed his own linear vocabulary of forms, indebted to Cubist, Futurist and Expressionist forms, which gives an often ironic visual dimension to the themes of his fiction. Another important influence on his art was that of Japanese woodblock prints, as seen in the watercolour drawing later called The Vorticist (1912; Southampton, C.A.G.). By 1913 he was popularly seen as the leading British avant-garde artist.