The Anglo-Irish painter Thomas Frye (c. 1710 - 3 April 1762 best known for his portraits in oil and pastel, including some miniatures and his early mezzotint engravings, was also the patentee of the Bow porcelain factory, London, and claimed in his epitaph to be "the inventor and first manufacturer of porcelain in England," though his rivals at the Chelsea porcelain factory seem to have preceded him in bringing wares to market. The Bow porcelain works did not long survive Frye's death; their final auctions took place in May 1764. Thomas Frye was born at Edenderry, County Offaly, Ireland, in 1710; in his youth he went to London to practice as an artist. His earliest work are a pair of pastel portraits of boys, one dated 1734 (Earl of Iveagh). For the Worshipful Company of Saddlers he painted a full-length portrait of Frederick, Prince of Wales (1736, destroyed 1940), which he engraved in mezzotint and published in 1741. With his silent partner, a London merchant Edward Heylyn, he took out a patent on kaolin to be imported from the English colony of Virginia in November 1745, and became manager of the Bow factory from its obscure beginnings in the 1740s. He retired to Wales in 1759 for the sake of his lungs, but soon returned to London and resumed his occupation as an engraver, publishing the series of life-size fancy portraits in mezzotint, by which he is most remembered. He died of consumption on 2 April 1762. Frye had five children; his two daughters assisted him in painting porcelain at Bow until their marriages. One of them, who married a Mr. Willcox, was employed by Josiah Wedgwood at the Wedgwood Etruria works in painting figure-subjects from 1759 to 1776, the year of her death.  Related Paintings of Thomas Frye :. | The 28ste July De Freedom that the people leads | Philip IV as a Hunter (df01) | Vauxhall Garden Center | The Holy Family | Flamingo and Other Birds in a Landscape |
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MEMMI, Lippo
Italian Byzantine Style Painter, ca.1290-1347
Jan van Goyen
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.
Thomas Danby
(c. 1818 - 25 March 1886) was an English landscape painter. Danby was born, it is thought, in Bristol in south-west England, the younger son of Francis Danby (1793-1861). He had an elder brother, James Francis Danby (1816-75) who also became a landscape painter. Thomas went with his father to Europe in 1829, living for a time in Paris where he was able to earn a living by copying pictures at the Louvre in Paris. He thus became an earnest admireer and "student" of Claude Lorrain, whose aerial effects he sought to imitate. Returning to England about the same time as his father, he first exhibited at the British Institution in 1841, and afterwards frequently at the Royal Academy from 1843. He was a friend of Paul Falconer Poole, with whom he shared a house in Hampstead in 1843, and imbibed not a little of his romantic feeling for nature. From 1855 to his death, Danby resided in or near Hampstead in north London.. The subjects of his landscapes were usually taken from Welsh scenery, especially the old county of Merioneth; his pictures for the most part were not ideal compositions (unlike his father's work) but actual scenes pervaded with a true romantic spirit. "He was always trying" says the writer of his obituary in The Times newspaper, "to render his inner heart's feeling of a beautiful view rather than the local facts received on the retina." He came, it is said, within one vote of election as an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) but, failing eventually to attain Academy honours, he devoted himself in his latter years chiefly to watercolour painting. He became a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1860, an associate of the Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1867, and a full member of the latter in 1870; until his death his contributions were prominent amongst the works at the society's exhibitions. Danby died of a chest complaint, terminating in dropsy on 25 March 1886. He had been twice married, and had 2 daughters and a son from the second marriage.