English Romantic Painter, 1775-1851 Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 ?C 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321) Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840). Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321) One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.  Related Paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner :. | No title | Sunrise | Turner 1813 watercolour, Ivy Bridge | The Grand Canal - Scene - A Street In Venice | Self portrait |
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Lucien Levy-Dhurmer
French Art Nouveau Painter, 1865-1953,was a French Symbolist/Art Nouveau painter and potter. He was born Lucien Levy to a Jewish family in Algiers. In 1879 he began studying drawing and sculpture in Paris. In 1887 Levy began making his living in southern France, overseeing the decoration of ceramics. His own tastes in pottery decoration were influenced by Islamic Art. In 1895 he left for Paris to begin a career in painting; around this time he visited Italy and was further influenced by art of the Renaissance. In 1896 he exhibited his first pastels and paintings under the name Lucien Levy-Dhurmer; he'd added the last two syllables of his mother's maiden name (Goldhurmer), likely to differentiate himself from other people named Levy. His paintings soon became popular with the public and among fellow artists as well. He earned high praise for the academic attention to detail with which he captured figures lost in a Pre-Raphaelite haze of melancholy, contrasted with bright Impressionist colouration. His portrait of writer Georges Rodenbach is perhaps the most striking example of this strange and extraordinary synergy.
Thornton Oakley
an illustrator,American , 1881-1953 was an American artist and illustrator. Thornton Oakley was born March 27,1881, in Pittsburgh. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and received B.S. and M.S. degrees in architecture in 1901 and 1902. He first studied with Howard Pyle in 1902 at Chadds Ford in the mill, and described his first day there in a talk given at the Free Library in Philadelphia in 1951: "There we four - my new cronies - Allen Tupper True, George Harding, Gordon McCouch and I - made our first sketches from a model, and our efforts were frightful to behold! Not one of us had had a palette in our hands ever before: I had not the least idea as to procedure. My attempts were terrifying to behold, and when H.P. came to me to criticize my work he paused for a long, long time before speaking, and I know that he must have been appalled." Oakley studied with Pyle for three years. Oakley became an illustrator and writer for periodicals, including Scribner's, Century, Collier's, and Harper's Monthly. In the years 1914-19 and 1921-36 he was in charge of the Department of Illustration at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. In 1914-15 he also taught drawing at the University of Pennsylvania, and gave lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Curtis Institute. He was a member of the jury of selection and advisory committee of the Department of Fine Arts at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 and the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition in 1926.
Christoffel Pierson
Christoffel Pierson (1631-1714) was a Dutch Golden Age painter.