b.Jan. 8, 1836, Dronrijp, Netherlands. d.June 25, 1912, Wiesbaden, Germany. Painter and designer of Dutch birth. The son of a notary, Alma-Tadema demonstrated an early artistic ability. In 1852 he entered the Antwerp Academy, where he studied under Gustaf, Baron Wappers, and Nicaise de Keyser. An important influence at this time was Louis De Taye, Professor of Archaeology at the academy and a practising artist. Alma-Tadema lived and worked with De Taye from 1857 to 1859 and was encouraged by him to depict subjects from the early history of France and Belgium. This taste for historical themes increased when Alma-Tadema entered Baron Henri Leys studio in 1859 and began assisting him with his monumental frescoes for the Antwerp Town Hall. While in Leys studio, Alma-Tadema produced several major paintings, for example the Education of the Children of Clovis (1861; ex-Sir John Pender priv. col., see Zimmern, p. 3) and Venantius Fortunatus Reading his Poems to Radagonda (1862; Dordrecht, Dordrechts Mus.), which are characterized by their obscure Merovingian subject-matter, rather sombre colouring and close attention to detail.  Related Paintings of Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence :. | The Death of the First-Born (mk23) | When Flowers Return (mk23) | The Siesta (mk23) | The Year ' s at the Spring (mk24) | A Favourite Custom (mk23) |
Related Artists:
Clara Peeters
Clara Peeters (1594 - c. 1657) was a Flemish painter noted for painting still lifes, particularly of breakfast scenes and florals. Few details of her life are known. She was baptized in Antwerp in 1594, and married there in 1639. She is known to have lived in Amsterdam and The Hague. Her first known work was dated 1608, when she was 14. The quality of this work reveals a master teacher, and scholars believe she was influenced by Osias Beert. He was probably also an influence on the flower paintings of her contemporary, Catarina Ykens I (1608/1618 - 1666/1685), who was the wife of Frans Ykens, a pupil of Beert's. Clara Peeters's last painting was dated 1657, and is now lost. The circumstances of her death are unknown.
Samuel Lancaster Gerry
(1813-1891) was an artist in 19th-century Boston, Massachusetts. He painted portraits, and also landscapes of the White Mountains and other locales in New England. He was affiliated with the New England Art Union, and the Boston Artists' Association. In 1857 he co-founded the Boston Art Club. Born in Boston, Gerry was self-taught as an artist. He showed works in many public settings, such as the 1841 exhibit of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association; and an 1879 exhibit of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He attended the 1860 convention of the National Art Association in Washington, DC. New England Homestead, 1839, by S.L. GerryStudents of Gerry included H. Frances Osborne, Samuel Green Wheeler Benjamin, Fannie Elliot Gifford, Charles Wesley Sanderson, and J. Frank Currier. With the exception of three years abroad, his professional life was passed chiefly in Boston
Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi
(June 8 (O.S. May 27), 1837 ?C April 6 (O.S. March 24), 1887; was a Russian painter and art critic. He was an intellectual leader of the Russian democratic art movement in 1860-1880. Kramskoi came from a poor petty-bourgeois family. From 1857 to 1863 he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts; he reacted against academic art and was an initiator of the "revolt of fourteen" which ended with the expulsion from the Academy of a group of its graduates, who organized the Artel of Artists Influenced by the ideas of the Russian revolutionary democrats, Kramskoi asserted the high public duty of the artist, principles of realism, and the moral substance and nationality of art. He became one of the main founders and ideologists of the Company of Itinerant Art Exhibitions (or Peredvizhniki). In 1863-1868 he taught at the drawing school of a society for the promotion of applied arts. He created a gallery of portraits of important Russian writers, scientists, artists and public figures (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1873, Ivan Shishkin, 1873, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov, 1876, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, 1879, Sergei Botkin, 1880) in which expressive simplicity of composition and clarity of depiction emphasize profound psychological elements of character. Kramskoi's democratic ideals found their brightest expression in his portraits of peasants, which portrayed a wealth of character-details in representatives of the common people. In one of Kramskoi's most well known paintings, Christ in the Desert (1872, Tretyakov gallery), he continued Alexander Ivanov's humanistic tradition by treating a religious subject in moral Cphilosophical terms. He imbued his image of Christ with dramatic experiences in a deeply psychological and vital interpretation, evoking the idea of his heroic self-sacrifice. Aspiring to expand the ideological expressiveness of his images, Kramskoi created art that existed on the cusp of portraiture and genre-painting ("Nekrasov during the period of 'Last songs,'" 1877-C78; "Unknown Woman," 1883; "Inconsolable grief," 1884; all in Tretyakov gallery). These paintings disclose their subjects' complex and sincere emotions, their personalities and fates. The democratic orientation of Kramskoi's art, his acute critical judgments about it, and his persistent quest for objective public criteria for the evaluation of art exerted an essential influence on the development of democratic art and aesthetics in Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century.