Belgian Painter, 1806-1865 Belgian painter and sculptor. He was from very humble origins, but his talent for drawing was detected at an early age. He was sent to the Antwerp Academie, where he attended classes given by W. J. Herreyns (1743-1827) and Mathieu Ignace Van Br?e. During a stay in Paris from 1829 to 1832 he came into contact with the Romantic painters, in particular Th?odore G?ricault, who fostered his admiration for Rubens. In 1832 he won the Belgian Prix de Rome and in 1834 left for Italy where the works of Raphael and, above all, Michelangelo made an overwhelming impression on him. In Rome he abandoned the landscapes and scenes from Roman life, for which he showed a certain talent, and embarked on a much more ambitious work, the Greeks and the Trojans Contesting the Body of Patroclus (1835; Brussels, Mus. Wiertz.). The painting proved the turning-point in Wiertz's career. Its frenzied composition and violently contorted figures excited considerable interest in Rome.  Related Paintings of Antoine Wiertz :. | Reader of Novels | The Reader of Novels | self portrait by Antoine Wiertz | The Lovely Rosine (mk22) | Two Young Girls or the Beautiful Rosine |
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CARDUCHO, Vicente
(b. 1576, Florence, d. 1638, Madrid Painter and theorist, brother of Bartolom Carducho. He became a prolific painter for both the church and the court in Castile, adapting a late 16th-century Italianate style, introduced into Spain in the 1580s, to Spanish themes and settings. After his death this style was superseded in monastic programmes by Zurbarn's pietistic simplicity and in altarpieces and devotional painting by the elegant compositions of van Dyck and Rubens, while Velezquez was unrivalled as a portrait painter. Of more enduring influence than Vicente's paintings, however, was his Dielogos de la pintura (Madrid, 1633), an erudite defence of painting as a noble pursuit and of the artist as a learned humanist. While painters in Spain struggled until the 18th century to attain freedom from artisanship, the Dielogos featured significantly in 17th-century efforts to achieve that goal,
C.R. Leslie
English genre painter , 1794-1859 was an American artist best known for his cartoons and caricatures of actors and other celebrities. Though his work was heavily in demand through the 1920s and is often considered to epitomize the era, his personal life was troubled by mental illness, and he was nearly forgotten soon after his suicide, shortly before his fortieth birthday. English genre painter, was born in London on 19 October 1794. His parents were American, and when he was five years of age he returned with them to their native country. They settled in Philadelphia, where their son was educated and afterwards apprenticed to a bookseller. He was, however, mainly interested in painting and the drama, and when George Frederick Cooke visited the city he executed a portrait of the actor from recollection of him on the stage, which was considered a work of such promise that a fund was raised to enable the young artist to study in Europe. He left for London in 1811, bearing introductions which procured for him the friendship of West, Beechey, Allston, Coleridge and Washington Irving, and was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy, where he carried off two silver medals. At first, influenced by West and Fuseli, he essayed high art, and his earliest important subject depicted Saul and the Witch of Endor; but he soon discovered his true aptitude and became a painter of cabinet-pictures, dealing, not like those of David Wilkie, with the contemporary life that surrounded him, but with scenes from the great masters of fiction, from Shakespeare and Cervantes, Addison and Moliere, Swift, Sterne, Fielding and Smollett. Of individual paintings we may specify Sir Roger de Coverley going to Church (1819); May-day in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (1821); Sancho Panza and the Duchess (1824); Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman (1831); La Malade Imaginaire, act iii. sc. 6 (1843); and the Dukes Chaplain Enraged leaving the Table, from Don Quixote (1849).
E.Munier
French 1810-1895