1599-1660,Spanish painter. He was apprenticed to Francisco Herrera the Elder before being trained by Francisco Pacheco. His early works were mostly religious or genre scenes. After arriving in Madrid in 1623, he painted a portrait of Philip IV that won him immediate success and an appointment as court painter. His position gave him access to the royal collections, including works by Titian, who exerted the greatest influence on his style. In his portraits from this period, only the faces and hands of the figures are accentuated, and the dark figures stand out against a light background. A visit to Italy (1629 ?C 31) further developed his style, and on his return to Madrid he entered his most productive period. Velazquez created a new type of informal royal portrait for Philip hunting lodge, and his portraits of court dwarfs display the same discerning eye as those of his royal subjects. On a second visit to Rome (1649 ?C 51) he painted a portrait of Pope Innocent X. The powerful head, brilliant combinations of crimson of the curtain, chair, and cope are painted with fluent technique and almost imperceptible brushstrokes that go far beyond the late manner of Titian and announce the last stage in Velazquez development. This portrait was copied innumerable times and won him immediate and lasting renown in Italy. In his last years he created his masterpiece, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour, 1656). In this casual scene, the artist is shown painting the king and queen in the presence of the infanta Margarita and her attendants; the nearly life size figures are painted in more or less detail according to their relation to the central figure of the infanta and to the source of light, creating a remarkable illusion of reality never surpassed by Velazquez or any other artist of his age. He is universally acknowledged as one of the giants of Western art.   Related Paintings of Velasquez :. | The Louise Asia gram raises | Aesop | Carlos Prince Buster | Perrone Prince | St. Thomas s confusing |
Related Artists:
Herbert menzies marshall,r.w.s
1841-1913
Jules Tavernier
1844-1889 Jules Tavernier was born in Paris in 1844. He studied with the French painter, F??lix Joseph Barrias (1822-1907), but left France in the 1870s, never to return. Tavernier was employed as an illustrator by Harper's Magazine, which sent him on assignment to California in the 1870s. Eventually he continued westward to Hawaii, where he made a name for himself as a landscape and portrait painter. He was captivated by Hawaii??s erupting volcanoes??a subject that was to pre-occupy him for the rest of his life, which was spent in Hawaii, Canada and the western United States. He is considered the most important artist of Hawaii??s Volcano School. Tavernier died in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1889. His students included David Howard Hitchcock (1861-1943), Am??d??e Joullin (1862-1917), Charles Rollo Peters (1862-1917) and Manuel Valencia (1856-1935). The Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Stark Museum of Art (Orange, Texas) are among the public collections having paintings by Jules Tavernier.
Thomas Girtin
English Romantic Painter, 1775-1802 English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. With his rival, J. M. W. Turner, he extended the technical possibilities of watercolour and in doing so demonstrated that watercolours could have the visual impact and emotional range of oils. Although close in style throughout the 1790s, by 1800 Turner and Girtin were beginning to diverge: whereas the former dissolved forms to express his idea of Nature in a state of flux, the latter sought out a landscape's underlying patterns to convey his awe of Nature's permanence as well as its grandeur. Girtin's reduction of landscape to simple and monumental forms