Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter, 1853-1890 Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 ?C 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art. Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide. The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.  Related Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh :. | Die Hirtin | Fritillaries in a Copper Vase (nn04) | Pork Butchers Shop in Arles | Portrait of a Young Peasant (nn04) | Meadow with flowers under a stormy sky |
Related Artists:
Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta
1841-1920 Spanish Son of Federico de Madrazo y Kentz. Because of his ability and training with his father, Federico, in the Real Academia de S Fernando in Madrid and with Leon Cogniet in Paris, he seemed destined to continue the family tradition of academic painting. However, due to the influence of the Belgian Alfred Stevens, of his brother-in-law, Mariano Jose Bernardo Fortuny y Marsal, and the Parisian environment, he exchanged dry historical painting for the preciousness of the tableautin, the small, intimate genre painting. He lived in Paris and New York and became so remote from Spanish artistic life that he and Fortuny y Marsal were the only Spanish artists not to participate in any national exhibition, and because of this the Spanish state never directly acquired their works. In 1882, with Giuseppe De Nittis, Stevens and the gallery owner Georges Petit, he co-founded the Exposition Internationale de Peinture, designed to promote foreign artists in Paris. Madrazo Garreta most characteristic works are the female portrait and the witty and elegant genre painting, with soft, delicate tones and suggestive poses. The influence of the Rococo and of Japanese art is reflected in his painting, which expresses an exquisite aristocratic or bourgeois ideal, the illusion of a refined, sensual and superficial life. Consequently, his works are also described as representing the Parisian seraglio. American collectors paid high prices for his paintings, for example Alexander Turney Stewart bought Lady with a Parrot; Carnival Festival (1878) was purchased by L. Wolfe; and Girls at the Window (1875) was bought by J. W. Vanderbilt, the last two now being in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His portraits were better received in Spain although because of collectors such as Ramen de Errazu (d 1909), the Museo del Prado has a good number of his paintings (e.g. After the Bath).
Knud Bergslien
(May 15, 1827 - November 27, 1908) was a Norwegian painter, art teacher and master artist. In his art, he frequently portrayed the lives of the Norwegian people, their history and heroes of the past. Bergslien is most associated with his historical paintings, especially Skiing Birchlegs Crossing the Mountain with the Royal Child. Knud Larsen Bergslien was born in Voss, in Hordaland, Norway. His parents were Lars Bergeson Bergslien and Kirsten Knutsdotter Gjelle. Knud Bergslien was the brother of sculptor Brynjulf Bergslien and uncle of painter and sculptor Nils Bergslien. Monuments honoring the three famous Bergslien artists now exist in Bergslien park located in Voss, Hordaland
Giovanni Bellini
Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1516 (b ?1431-6; d Venice, 29 Nov 1516). Painter and draughtsman, son of (1) Jacopo Bellini. Although the professional needs of his family background may have encouraged him to specialize at an early date in devotional painting, by the 1480s he had become a leading master in all types of painting practised in 15th-century Venice. Later, towards the end of his long life, he added the new genres of mythological painting and secular allegory to his repertory of subject-matter. His increasing dominance of Venetian art led to an enormous expansion of his workshop after c. 1490; and this provided the training-ground not only for his numerous shop-hands and imitators (generically known as Belliniani) but probably also for a number of major Venetian painters of the next generation. Throughout his career, Giovanni showed an extraordinary capacity for absorbing a wide range of artistic influences, both from within Venetian tradition and from outside. He also oversaw a technical revolution in the art of painting, involving the gradual abandonment of the traditional Italian use of egg tempera in favour of the technique of oil painting pioneered in the Netherlands. It was thanks to Giovanni Bellini that the Venetian school of painting was transformed during the later 15th century from one mainly of local significance to one with an international reputation. He thus set the stage for the triumphs of Venetian painting in the 16th century and for the central contribution that Venice was to make to the history of European art.