Dutch 1599-1641 Anthony Van Dyck Locations Flemish painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and England. He was the leading Flemish painter after Rubens in the first half of the 17th century and in the 18th century was often considered no less than his match. A number of van Dyck studies in oil of characterful heads were included in Rubens estate inventory in 1640, where they were distinguished neither in quality nor in purpose from those stocked by the older master. Although frustrated as a designer of tapestry and, with an almost solitary exception, as a deviser of palatial decoration, van Dyck succeeded brilliantly as an etcher. He was also skilled at organizing reproductive engravers in Antwerp to publish his works, in particular The Iconography (c. 1632-44), comprising scores of contemporary etched and engraved portraits, eventually numbering 100, by which election he revived the Renaissance tradition of promoting images of uomini illustri. His fame as a portrait painter in the cities of the southern Netherlands, as well as in London, Genoa, Rome and Palermo, has never been outshone; and from at least the early 18th century his full-length portraits were especially prized in Genoese, British and Flemish houses, where they were appreciated as much for their own sake as for the identities and families of the sitters.  Related Paintings of Anthony Van Dyck :. | Prince Charles Louis Elector Palatine | Portrait of a Man | george hayter aofed | salvador dali | Portrait of Jean de Montfort |
Related Artists:
Francois Bonvin
1817-1887 French Francois Bonvin Location Bonvin was born in humble circumstances in Paris, the son of a police officer and a seamstress. When he was four years old his mother died of tuberculosis and young Francois was left in the care of an old woman who underfed him. Soon his father married another seamstress and brought the child back into the household. Nine additional children were born, putting a strain on the familys resources, and to make matters worse his stepmother took to abusing and undernourishing Francois. The young Bonvin started drawing at an early age. His potential was recognized by a friend of the family, who paid for him to attend a school for drawing instruction at age eleven. This instruction ended after two years, when his father apprenticed him to a printer, and Bonvin was to remain mostly self-taught as an artist. He spent his free time at the Louvre where he especially appreciated the Dutch old masters. Bonvin married a laundress at the age of twenty, at about the same time that he secured a job at the headquarters of the Paris police. It was during this period in his life that he also contracted an illness which would trouble him for the rest of his life. Bonvin exhibited three paintings in the Salon of 1849, where he was awarded a third-class medal. He exhibited in the Salon of 1850 with Courbet, and won recognition as a leading realist, painting truthfully the lives of the poor which he knew at first hand. His paintings were well received by critics and by the public. Although his work had elements in common with Courbets, his modestly scaled paintings were not seen as revolutionary. He was awarded the Legion d honneur in 1870. His subjects were still life and the everyday activities of common people, painted in a style that is reminiscent of Pieter de Hooch and Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. It is the latter who is especially recalled by Bonvins delicate luminosity. In 1881 he underwent an operation which did not restore him to health, and he became blind. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 1886. He died at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1887.
PERRONNEAU, Jean-Baptiste
French Rococo Era Painter, ca.1715-1783 French pastellist, painter and engraver. He was, with his older contemporary Maurice Quentin de La Tour, the most important pastel artist and portrait painter in 18th-century France. Perronneau trained first with the engraver Laurent Cars and then with the successful portrait painter Hubert Drouais. His work as an engraver, which includes prints after Charles-Joseph Natoire, Fran?ois Boucher, Edme Bouchardon and Carle Vanloo (see Vaillat and Ratouis de Limay,), did not continue beyond the 1730s. Nevertheless, his involvement with Cars, much of whose work consisted in the reproduction of portraits by artists such as Hyacinthe Rigaud, left its mark on the composition of his pastels, most of which employ the bust-length format, often within a feigned stone oval typical of 17th- and 18th-century engraved portraits. His early pastel portrait of Mme Desfriches (1744; France, A.M. Ratouis de Limay priv. col.), mother of his friend and patron, the Orl?ans collector Aignan-Thomas Desfriches,
Wassily Kandinsky
1866-1944 Wassily Kandinsky Galleries was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of the most famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession??he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat??he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30. In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied first in the private school of Anton Azbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.