1619-1693 Dutch Willem Kalf Galleries Willem Kalf was born in Rotterdam, in 1619. He was previously thought to have been born in 1622, but H. E. van Gelder??s important archival research has established the painter??s correct place and date of birth. Kalf was born into a prosperous patrician family in Rotterdam, where his father, a cloth merchant, held municipal posts as well. In the late 1630s, Willem Kalf travelled to Paris and spent time in the circle of the Flemish artists in Saint-Germain-des-Pr??s, Paris. In Paris he painted mainly small-scale rustic interiors and still-lifes. Kalf??s rustic interiors are typically dominated by groups of vegetables, buckets, pots and pans, which he arranged as a still-life in the foreground (e.g. Kitchen Still-life, Dresden, Gemäldegal; Alte Meister). Figures usually appeared only in the blurred obscurity of the background. Though painted in Paris, those pictures belong to a pictorial tradition practised primarily in Flanders in the early 17th century, by such artists as David Teniers the Younger. The only indication of the French origin of the paintings are a few objects that Flemish exponents of the same genre would not have pictured in their works. Kalf??s rustic interiors had a large influence on French art in the circle of the Le Nain brothers. The semi-monochrome still-lifes which Kalf created in Paris form a link to the banketjes or 'little banquet pieces' painted by such Dutch artists as Pieter Claesz, Willem Claeszoon Heda and others in the 1630s. During the 1640s, Kalf further developed the banketje into a novel form of sumptuous and ornate still-life (known as pronkstilleven), depicting rich groupings of gold and silver vessels. Like other still-lifes of this period, these paintings were usually expressing vanitas allegories.  Related Paintings of Willem Kalf :. | Style life with Nautilus goblet | with a Nautilus Cup | Still Life with Nautilus Goblet | Style life with Porzellankanme | Dessert |
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Francis Picabia
French Dadaist/Surrealist Painter 1879-1953 was a well-known painter and poet born of a French mother and a Spanish-Cuban father who was an attach?? at the Cuban legation in Paris, France. Born in Paris and financially independent, he studied under Fernand Cormon and other at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in the late 1890s. In the beginning of his own career, from 1903 to 1908, he was influenced by the impressionist paintings of Alfred Sisley. From 1909, he came under the influence of the cubists and the Golden Section (Section d'Or). The same year, he married Gabrielle Buffe. Around 1911 he joined the Puteaux Group, which met at the studio of Jacques Villon in the village of Puteaux. There he became friends with artist Marcel Duchamp and close friends with Guillaume Apollinaire. Other group members included Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Leger and Jean Metzinger. In 1913 Picabia was the only member of the Cubist group to personally attend the Armory Show, and Alfred Stieglitz gave him a solo exhibition at his gallery 291. From 1913 to 1915 Picabia traveled to New York City several times and took active part in the avant-garde movements, introducing modern art to America. These years can be characterized as Picabia's proto-Dada period, consisting mainly of his portraits mecaniques. Later, in 1916, while in Barcelona he started his well-known Dada periodical 391, modeled on Stieglitz's own periodical. He continued the periodical with the help of Duchamp in America. Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zurich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art. (See Cannibale, 1921.) He denounced Dada in 1921, and issued a personal attack against Breton in the final issue of 391, in 1924. The same year, he put in an appearance in the Rene Clair surrealist film Entr'acte, firing a cannon from a rooftop.
abraham sehopfer

Thomas Frye
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.