German-born American Hudson River School Painter, 1830-1902 Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany. His family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1833. He studied painting with the members of the D??sseldorf School in D??sseldorf, Germany from 1853 to 1857. He taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself to painting. Bierstadt began making paintings in New England and upstate New York. In 1859, he traveled westward in the company of a Land Surveyor for the U.S. government, returning with sketches that would result in numerous finished paintings. In 1863 he returned west again, in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he would later marry. He continued to visit the American West throughout his career. Though his paintings sold for princely sums, Bierstadt was not held in particularly high esteem by critics of his day. His use of uncommonly large canvases was thought to be an egotistical indulgence, as his paintings would invariably dwarf those of his contemporaries when they were displayed together. The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light was felt to be excessive by contemporary critics. His paintings emphasized atmospheric elements like fog, clouds and mist to accentuate and complement the feel of his work. Bierstadt sometimes changed details of the landscape to inspire awe. The colors he used are also not always true. He painted what he believed is the way things should be: water is ultramarine, vegetation is lush and green, etc. The shift from foreground to background was very dramatic and there was almost no middle distance Nonetheless, his paintings remain popular. He was a prolific artist, having completed over 500 (possibly as many as 4000) paintings during his lifetime, most of which have survived. Many are scattered through museums around the United States. Prints are available commercially for many. Original paintings themselves do occasionally come up for sale, at ever increasing prices.  Related Paintings of Albert Bierstadt :. | Deer and River | The Oregon Trail | Mount Hood, Oregon | Sunrise, Yosemite Valley | Minnehaha Falls |
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Lodewijk Toeput
(ca.1550, Antwerp - 1605, Treviso), was a Mannerist landscape painter active in Italy. According to Karel van Mander who listed him as one of two painters from Northern Europe who he met in Venice, he was a good poet (rederijker) as well as a painter, who he thought came from Mechelen. Van Mander listed him with Dirck de Vries, a painter of kitchen pieces and fruit markets from Friesland. According to the RKD he was from Antwerp and spent most of his life in Treviso, Italy. He painted several historical allegories from the Bible and mythological themes from Metamorphoses.
Berkes Antal
(1874-1938) was a Hungarian painter, born in Budapest, Hungary. Lived in Paris for some time and produced cityscapes there as well as similar street scenes of Budapest and Vienna. He studied at The Academy of Fine Arts between 1889-1894 in Budapest, Hungary. He first started painting landscapes, and later changed to painting street scenes of Budapest. His popularity and sales increased so he started "mass producing" many of his works, meeting the requirements of the art dealers of his age. His work went through light and dark periods as he experimented with light.
Maria Sibylla Merian
German Baroque Era Illustrator, 1647-1717,Daughter of Mattheus Merian. After her father's death, her mother married in 1651 the flower still-life painter Jacob Marell, who became Maria Sibylla's teacher. On 16 May 1665 she married Johann Andreas Graff, another pupil of her stepfather. She thenceforth specialized in illustrations of flowers, fruit and, especially, grubs, flies, gnats and spiders. In 1670 the family moved to Nuremberg. In 1675 Sandrart referred to her in the Teutsche Academie, reporting that she painted on cloth (i.e. silk, satin). With Graff, she produced a book of flowers, the first part appearing in 1675; a second edition, enlarged by parts 2 and 3 ,came out in 1680, entitled Florum fasciculi tres. It included 36 engravings intended to serve as patterns for embroidery.