Indian-born British Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1838-1904
Henry Prinsep was an intimate friend of G. F. Watts, under whom his son first studied. Val Prinsep also worked in Paris in the atelier Gleyre; and 'Taffy' in his friend George du Maurier's novel Trilby, is said to have been sketched from him. He was an intimate friend of John Everett Millais and of Burne-Jones, with whom he travelled in Italy. He had a share with Rossetti and others in the decoration of the hall of the Oxford Union.
Prinsep first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1862 with his Bianca Capella, his first picture, which attracted marked notice, being a portrait (1866) of General Gordon in Chinese costume. Princep lent the costume to Millais who used it in his own painting Esther.
The best of his later exhibits were A Versailles, The Emperor Theophilus chooses his Wife, The Broken Idol and The Goose Girl. He was elected A.R.A. in 1879 and R.A. in 1894. In 1877 he went to India and painted a huge picture of the Delhi Durbar, exhibited in 1880, and afterwards hung at Buckingham Palace. Related Paintings of Valentine Cameron Prinsep Prints :. | Study of a Girl Reading | The First Awakening of Eve | Home from Gleaning | Sweet Repose | Leonora di Mantua | Related Artists:
Henri MatisseFrench Fauvist Painter and Sculptor, 1869-1954
Henri Matisse is considered the most important French artist of the 20th century and, along with Pablo Picasso, one of the most influential modernist painters of the last century. Matisse began studying drawing and painting in the 1890s. A student of the masters of Post-Impressionism, Matisse later made a reputation for himself as the leader of a group of painters known as Les Fauves. An ironic label given to them by a critic, the name reflected Matisse's aggressive strokes and bold use of primary colors. In 1905 Matisse gained sudden fame with three paintings, including Woman with the Hat, purchased by the wealthy American ex-patriot Gertrude Stein. Beyond painting, he worked with lithographs and sculpture, and during World War II he did a series of book designs. Later in his career he experimented with paper cutouts and designed decorations for the Dominican chapel in Vence, France. Along with Picasso,
Jacopo Zanguidi BertoiaJacopo Bertoia, also known as Giacomo Zanguidi or Jacopo Zanguidi or Bertoja, (1544 - ca. 1574), was an Italian painter of a late-Renaissance or Mannerist style that emerged in Parma towards the end of the 16th century.
He was strongly influenced by Parmigianino.
Born in Parma, he apparently studied in Bologna with Sabatini. His masterpiece is the Sala del Bacio, in the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma. He also helped decorate the Sala di Orfeo in the same palace. He was part of the team that decorated the walls of the Oratorio del Gonfalone (Entry into Jerusalem) in Rome. He was commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in 1572-1573 to paint galleries (Sale del Giudizio, della Penitenza, dei Sogni, as well as the Anticamera degli Angeli) of the Villa Farnese in Caprarola, where he replaced the role of Taddeo Zuccari.
GAINSBOROUGH, ThomasEnglish Rococo Era/Romantic Painter, 1727-1788
English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was the contemporary and rival of Joshua Reynolds, who honoured him on 10 December 1788 with a valedictory Discourse (pubd London, 1789), in which he stated: 'If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of Art, among the very first of that rising name.' He went on to consider Gainsborough's portraits, landscapes and fancy pictures within the Old Master tradition, against which, in his view, modern painting had always to match itself. Reynolds was acknowledging a general opinion that Gainsborough was one of the most significant painters of their generation. Less ambitious than Reynolds in his portraits, he nevertheless painted with elegance and virtuosity. He founded his landscape manner largely on the study of northern European artists and developed a very beautiful and often poignant imagery of the British countryside. By the mid-1760s he was making formal allusions to a wide range of previous art, from Rubens and Watteau to, eventually, Claude and Titian. He was as various in his drawings and was among the first to take up the new printmaking techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching. Because his friend, the musician and painter William Jackson (1730-1803), claimed that Gainsborough detested reading, there has been a tendency to deny him any literacy. He was, nevertheless, as his surviving letters show, verbally adept, extremely witty and highly cultured. He loved music and performed well. He was a person of rapidly changing moods, humorous, brilliant and witty. At the time of his death he was expanding the range of his art, having lived through one of the more complex and creative phases in the history of British painting. He painted with unmatched skill and bravura; while giving the impression of a kind of holy innocence, he was among the most artistically learned and sophisticated painters of his generation. It has been usual to consider his career in terms of the rivalry with Reynolds that was acknowledged by their contemporaries; while Reynolds maintained an intellectual and academic ideal of art, Gainsborough grounded his imagery on contemporary life, maintaining an aesthetic outlook previously given its most powerful expression by William Hogarth.