Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1708-1787 He was born in Lucca, the son of a goldsmith, Paolino Batoni. He moved to Rome in 1727, and apprenticed with Agostino Masucci, Sebastiano Conca and/or Francesco Imperiale (1679-1740). By the early 1740s, however, he started to receive independent commissions. In 1741, he was inducted into the Accademia di San Luca. His celebrated painting, The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena (1743) illustrates his academic refinement of the late-Baroque style. Another masterpiece, his Fall of Simon Magus was painted initially for the St Peter's Basilica. Batoni became a highly-fashionable painter in Rome, particularly after his rival, the proto-neoclassicist Anton Raphael Mengs, departed for Spain in 1761. Batoni befriended Winckelmann and, like him, aimed in his painting to the restrained classicism of painters from earlier centuries, such as Raphael and Poussin, rather than to the work of the Venetian artists then in vogue. He was greatly in demand for portraits, particularly by the British traveling through Rome , who took pleasure in commissioning standing portraits set in the milieu of antiquities, ruins, and works of art. There are records of over 200 portraits by Batoni of visiting British patrons . Such "Grand Tour" portraits by Batoni came to proliferate in the British private collections, thus ensuring the genre's popularity in the United Kingdom, where Sir Joshua Reynolds would become its leading practitioner. In 1760, the painter Benjamin West, while visiting Rome would complain that Italian artists "talked of nothing, looked at nothing but the works of Pompeo Batoni". In 1769, the double portrait of Joseph II and Leopold II won an Austrian nobility for Batoni. He also portrayed Pope Pius VI. According to a rumor, he bequeathed his palette and brushes to Jacques-Louis David.  Related Paintings of BATONI, Pompeo :. | Portrait of Charles Crowle | Sir Gregory Page-Turner dfhf | Achilles at the Court of Lycomedes | Madonna and Child ewgdf | Portrait of Princess Giacinta Orsini Buoncampagni Ludovisi |
Related Artists:
william henry hunt,o.w.s
1790-1864 was an English watercolour painter. He was born near Long Acre, London, and was apprenticed in about 1805 to John Varley, the landscape-painter, with whom he remained five or six years. He exhibited three oil pictures at the Royal Academy in 1807. He became connected with the Society of Painters in Water Colours at its beginning, and was elected an associate in 1824 and a full member in 1827. Until the year of his death, he was one of the most prolific contributors to the Society's exhibitions. Many years of Hunt's uneventful but industrious life were spent at Hastings. He died of apoplexy. Hunt was one of the creators of the English school of water-color painting. His subjects, especially those of his later life, are extremely simple; but, by the delicacy, humor and fine power of their treatment, they rank second to works of the highest art only. Considered technically, his works exhibit all the resources of the water-color painter's craft, from the purest transparent tinting to the boldest use of gouache, rough paper and scraping for texture. His sense of color is perhaps as true as that of any English artist. He was, says John Ruskin, all in all, the finest ever painter of still life. Several characteristic examples of Hunt's work, as the "Boy and Goat," "Brown Study and Plums," "Primroses and Birds' Nests" are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Sir edwin henry landseer,R.A.
1802-1873 Painter, draughtsman, sculptor and etcher, brother of (3) Charles Landseer. He became the best-known member of the family and was one of the most highly respected and popular British painters of the 19th century. He was first trained by his father, who taught him etching, and he then studied with Benjamin Robert Haydon and at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Precociously gifted, he drew competently from childhood and in 1813 he won the Silver Palette for draughtsmanship at the Society of Arts. In 1815 he exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time, showing some drawings of a mule and of the heads of dogs. From an early age he was a frequent visitor to the menagerie in Exeter Change in the Strand, London,
Mabel Pryde
(February 12,1871, Edinburgh - July 1918, England.) was an artist, best known for being the wife of artist William Nicholson and mother of artists Ben Nicholson and Nancy Nicholson and the architect Christopher 'Kit' Nicholson. Mabel was the daughter of David Pryde, Headmaster of Edinburgh Ladies College 1870-1891, and Barbara Lauder, whose father William was a brother of the famous Scottish artists Robert Scott Lauder and James Eckford Lauder. Mabel had one brother, the artist James Pryde. As children they lived at 10 Fettes Row, a north-facing Edinburgh house. Pryde trained at the Bushey School of Art under the tutilage of Hubert von Herkomer. Here she met fellow student William Nicholson whom she married in 1893. She introduced Nicholson to her brother James and all three moved to Eight Bells, Denham, Buckinghamshire, where Nicholson and James Pryde would collaborate on the famous series of lithographic posters they disseminated under the pseudonym J. & W. Beggerstaff. Pryde and Nicholson had four children - Ben (1894-1982); Anthony (1897-1918) who was killed in action during the First World War; Annie Mary "Nancy" (1899-1978), and Christopher "Kit" (1904-1948). In July 1918 Pryde died from influenza in during the 1918 flu pandemic and was survived by her husband.