French Symbolist Painter, 1824-1898 Related Paintings of Chevannes, Pierre Puvis de :. | A Woman i n Blue | Self-Portrait with Pipe (nn04) | Village | Young Lady | Golgotha | Related Artists:
Ralph Albert Blakelock(October 15, 1847 - August 9, 1919) was a romanticist painter from the United States.
Ralph Blakelock was born in New York City on October 15, 1847. In 1864, Blakelock entered the Free Academy of the City of New York (now known as the City College) with aspirations of becoming a physician. After his third term he opted to dismiss his formal education and left college. From 1869-71 he traveled west, extensively wandering far from known civilization and spending time among the American Indians. Largely self-taught as an artist, he began producing competent landscapes, depicting select views from his travels, as well as scenes of American Indian life. His works were exhibited in the National Academy of Design.
Moonlight, 1885, the Brooklyn MuseumIn 1877 Blakelock married Cora Rebecca Bailey; they had nine children. In art, Blakelock was a genius, yet, in business dealings and in monetary transactions he proved a failure. He found it difficult, if not crushing to maintain and support his wife and children. In desperation he found himself selling his paintings for extremely low prices, far beneath their known worth. In hopes of lifting his family from abject poverty, reportedly on the day his 9th child was born, Blakelock had offered a painting to a collector for $1000. The collector made a counter offer and after refusing the proposed sum Blakelock found himself in a bitter argument with his wife. After the domestic dispute, Blakelock returned to the patron and sold the painting for a much lesser sum. Defeated and frustrated, it is said he broke down and tore the cash into pieces. And so it was after such repeated failed business transactions that he began to suffer from extreme depression and eventually show symptoms of mental frailty. In 1899 he suffered a breakdown.
Theodore WoresAmerican Painter, ca.1859-1939,was an American painter born in San Francisco. Wores began his art training at age twelve in the studio of Joseph Harrington, who taught him color, composition, drawing and perspective. When the San Francisco School of Design opened in 1874, Wores was one of the first pupils to enroll. After one year at that school under the landscape painter Virgil Macey Williams, he continued his art education at the Royal Academy in Munich where he spent six years. He also painted with William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck. Wores returned to San Francisco in 1881. He went to Japan for two extended visits and had successful exhibitions of his Japanese paintings in New York and London, where he became friends with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde. He visited Hawaii and Samoa in 1901-1902 and established a home in San Francisco about 1906. He visited Hawaii for a second time in 1910?C1911. For the remainder of his career, Wores painted the coast on the western edge of San Francisco. He died in San Francisco in 1939. His most famous work is The Lei Maker, which is on permanent display at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
Jean Baptiste Greuze1725-1805
French
Jean Baptiste Greuze Galleries
French painter and draughtsman. He was named an associate member of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, in 1755 on the strength of a group of paintings that included genre scenes, portraits and studies of expressive heads (t?tes d'expression). These remained the essential subjects of his art for the next 50 years, except for a brief, concentrated and unsuccessful experiment with history painting in the late 1760s, which was to affect his later genre painting deeply. Though his art has often been compared with that of Jean-Simeon Chardin in particular and interpreted within the context of NEO-CLASSICISM in general, it stands so strikingly apart from the currents of its time that Greuze's accomplishments are best described, as they often were by the artist's contemporaries, as unique. He was greatly admired by connoisseurs, critics and the general public throughout most of his life. His pictures were in the collections of such noted connoisseurs as Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, Claude-Henri Watelet and Etienne-Francois, Duc de Choiseul. For a long period he was in particular favour with the critic Denis Diderot, who wrote about him in the Salon reviews that he published in Melchior Grimm's privately circulated Correspondance litteraire. His reputation declined towards the end of his life and through the early part of the 19th century, to be revived after 1850, when 18th-century painting returned to favour, by such critics as Th?ophile Thore, Arsene Houssaye and, most notably, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their book L'Art du dix-huiti?me siecle. By the end of the century Greuze's work, especially his many variations on the Head of a Girl, fetched record prices, and his Broken Pitcher (Paris, Louvre) was one of the most popular paintings in the Louvre. The advent of modernism in the early decades of the 20th century totally obliterated Greuze's reputation. It was only in the 1970s, with Brookner's monograph, Munhall's first comprehensive exhibition of the artist's work, increased sale prices, important museum acquisitions and fresh analyses of his art by young historians, that Greuze began to regain the important place that he merits in the history of French art of the 18th century.