1728-1779 Dutch Anton Raphael Mengs Gallery Mengs was born in 1728 at Usti nad Labem (German: Aussig) in Bohemia on 12 March 1728; he died in Rome 29 June 1779. His father, Ismael Mengs, a Danish painter, established himself finally at Dresden, whence in 1741 he took his son to Rome. In Rome, his fresco painting of Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter. The appointment of Mengs in 1749 as first painter to Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony did not prevent his spending much time in Rome, where he had married Margarita Quazzi who had sat for him as a model in 1748, and abjured the Protestant faith, and where he became in 1754 director of the Vatican school of painting, nor did this hinder him on two occasions from obeying the call of Charles III of Spain to Madrid. There Mengs produced some of his best work, and specially the ceiling of the banqueting-hall of the Royal Palace of Madrid, the subject of which was the Triumph of Trajan and the Temple of Glory. Among his pupils there was Agust??n Esteve. After the completion of this work in 1777, Mengs returned to Rome, and there he died, two years later, in poor circumstances, leaving twenty children, seven of whom were pensioned by the king of Spain. His portraits and autoportraits recall an attention to detail and insight, often lost from the grand manner paintings. Besides numerous paintings in the Madrid gallery, the Ascension and St Joseph at Dresden, Perseus and Andromeda at Saint Petersburg, and the ceiling of the Villa Albani must be mentioned among his chief works. In 1911, Henry George Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland, possessed a Holy Family, and the colleges of All Souls and Magdalen, at Oxford, possessed altar-pieces by Mengs's hand. In his writings, in Spanish, Italian and German, Mengs has put forth his eclectic theory of art, which treats of perfection as attainable by a well-schemed combination of diverse excellences Greek design, with the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colour of Titian. He would have fancied himself the first neoclassicist, while in fact he may be the last flicker of Baroque art. Or in the words of Wittkower, In the last analysis, he is as much an end as a beginning. His intimacy with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who constantly wrote at his dictation, has enhanced his historical importance, for he formed no scholars, and the critic must now concur in Goethe's judgment of Mengs in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert; he must deplore that so much learning should have been allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism. Mengs was famous for his rivalry with the contemporary Italian painter Pompeo Batoni.  Related Paintings of Anton Raphael Mengs :. | Maria Luisa von Parma | Self-Portrait | Retrato de la Marquesa de Llano | Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane | The Judgment of Paris, painting by Anton Raphael Mengs, now in the Eremitage, St. Petersburg |
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victor pasmore
Edwin John Victor Pasmore (3 December 1908 - 23 January 1998) was a British artist and architect. He pioneered the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Pasmore was born in Chelsham, Surrey. He studied at Harrow but with the death of his father in 1927 he was forced to take an administrative job at the London County Council. He studied painting part-time at the Central School of Art and was associated with the formation of the Euston Road School and the first post-war exhibition of abstract art. After experimenting with abstraction Pasmore worked for a time in a lyrical figurative style, painting views of the Thames from Hammersmith much in the style of Turner and Whistler. Beginning in 1947 he developed a purely abstract style under the influence of Ben Nicholson and other artists associated with Circle, becoming a pioneering figure of the revival of interest in Constructivism in Britain following the War. Pasmore's abstract work, often in collage and construction of reliefs, pioneered the use of new materials and was sometimes on a large architectural scale. Herbert Read described Pasmore's new style as 'The most revolutionary event in post-war British art'. Pasmore's abstract Mural for the canteen of a bus depot in Kingston upon Thames 1950Pasmore was a leading figure in the promotion of abstract art and reform of the fine art education system. From 1943-1949 he taught at Camberwell School of Art where one of his students was Terry Frost whom he advised not to bother with the School's formal teaching and to instead study the works in the National Gallery. In 1950 he was commissioned to design an abstract mural for a bus depot in Kingston upon Thames and the following year Pasmore contributed a mural to the Festival of Britain that promoted a number of the British Constructivists. From 1952 he was leader of the art course of Kings College, Durham based in Newcastle upon Tyne. There he developed a general art and design course inspired by the 'basic course' of the Bauhaus that became the model for higher arts education across the UK. Pasmore was a supporter of fellow artist Richard Hamilton, giving him a teaching job in Newcastle and contributing a constructivist structure to the exhibition "This Is Tomorrow" in collaboration with Ernő Goldfinger and Helen Phillips. Pasmore was commissioned to make a mural for the new Newcastle Civic Centre. His interest in the synthesis of art and architecture was given free hand when he was appointed Consulting Director of Architectural Design for Peterlee development corporation in 1955. Pasmore's choices in this area proved controversial; the centerpiece of the town design became an abstract public art structure of his design, the Apollo Pavilion. The structure became the focus for local criticism over the failures of the Development Corporation but Pasmore remained a defender of his work, returning to the town to face critics of the Pavilion at a public meeting in 1982. Pasmore represented Britain at the 1961 Venice Biennale, was participating artist at the documenta II 1959 in Kassel and was a trustee of the Tate Gallery, donating a number of works to the collection. He gave a lecture on J.M.W.Turner as 'first of the moderns' to the Turner Society, of which he was elected a vice president in 1975.
Charles Wellington Furse
(January 13, 1868 - October 16, 1904) was an English painter. He was born at Staines, the son of the Rev. C. W. Furse, archdeacon of Westminster, and rector of St John's, Smith Square and descended collaterally from Sir Joshua Reynolds; and in his short span of life achieved such rare excellence as a portrait and figure painter that he forms an important link in the chain of British portraiture which extends from the time when Van Dyck was called to the court of Charles I into the 20th century. His talent was precocious; at the age of seven he gave indications of it in a number of drawings illustrating Scott's novels. He entered the Slade School in 1884, winning the Slade scholarship in the following year, and completed his education at Julians Atelier in Paris. Hard worker as he was, his activity was frequently interrupted by spells of illness, for he had developed signs of consumption when he was still attending the Slade school. An important canvas called Cain was his first contribution (1888) to the Royal Academy, to the associateship of which he was elected in the year of his death. For some years before he had been a staunch supporter of the New English Art Club, to the exhibitions of which he was a regular contributor. In October 1900 he married Katharine Symonds, the daughter of John Addington Symonds. She later became known as Dame Katharine Furse. The couple had 2 sons. His fondness for sport and of an open-air life found expression in his art and introduced a new, fresh and vigorous note into portraiture. There is never a suggestion of the studio or of the fatiguing pose in his portraits. The sitters appear unconscious of being painted, and are generally seen in the pursuit of their favourite outdoor sport or pastime, in the full enjoyment of life. Such are the Diana of the Uplands, the Lord Roberts and The Return from the Ride at the Tate Gallery; the four children in the Cubbing with the York and Ainsty, The Lilac Gown, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Fishing and the portraits of Lord Charles Beresford and William Johnson Cory. Most of these pictures, and indeed nearly all the work completed in the few years of Furse's activity, show a pronounced decorative tendency. His sense of space, composition and decorative design can best be judged by his admirable mural decorations for Liverpool town hall, executed between 1899 and 1902. A memorial exhibition of Furse's paintings and sketches was held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1906.
CAVALLINI, Pietro
Italian Gothic Era Painter, ca.1250-1330 Italian painter and mosaicist active mainly in Rome. His major surviving works are mosaics depicting scenes from the life of the Virgin for the Roman church of Santa Maria in Trastevere (1290s) and fragments of a fresco cycle, including a Last Judgment, for the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere (c. 1293). He was the first to break with the stylizations of Byzantine art; his figures have a sense of weight and three-dimensionality. Cavallini had many students,