French 1600-1682 Claude Lorrain Galleries In Rome, not until the mid-17th century were landscapes deemed fit for serious painting. Northern Europeans, such as the Germans Elsheimer and Brill, had made such views pre-eminent in some of their paintings (as well as Da Vinci in his private drawings or Baldassarre Peruzzi in his decorative frescoes of vedute); but not until Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino do we see landscape become the focus of a canvas by a major Italian artist. Even with the latter two, as with Lorrain, the stated themes of the paintings were mythic or religious. Landscape as a subject was distinctly unclassical and secular. The former quality was not consonant with Renaissance art, which boasted its rivalry with the work of the ancients. The second quality had less public patronage in Counter-Reformation Rome, which prized subjects worthy of "high painting," typically religious or mythic scenes. Pure landscape, like pure still-life or genre painting, reflected an aesthetic viewpoint regarded as lacking in moral seriousness. Rome, the theological and philosophical center of 17th century Italian art, was not quite ready for such a break with tradition. In this matter of the importance of landscape, Lorrain was prescient. Living in a pre-Romantic era, he did not depict those uninhabited panoramas that were to be esteemed in later centuries, such as with Salvatore Rosa. He painted a pastoral world of fields and valleys not distant from castles and towns. If the ocean horizon is represented, it is from the setting of a busy port. Perhaps to feed the public need for paintings with noble themes, his pictures include demigods, heroes and saints, even though his abundant drawings and sketchbooks prove that he was more interested in scenography. Lorrain was described as kind to his pupils and hard-working; keenly observant, but an unlettered man until his death. The painter Joachim von Sandrart is an authority for Claude's life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Baldinucci, who obtained information from some of Claude's immediate survivors, relates various incidents to a different effect (Notizie dei professoni del disegno). John Constable described Claude Lorrain as "the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw", and declared that in Claude??s landscape "all is lovely ?C all amiable ?C all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart"  Related Paintings of Claude Lorrain :. | Sermon on the Mount (mk17) | Perseus and the Origin of Coral (mk17) | seaport with the embarkation of the queen of sheba | Christ and the Magdalen (mk17) | The Embarkation of St Paula in Ostia |
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lesueur
Charles Alexandre Lesueur (Le Havre, January 1, 1778 - Le Havre, December 12, 1846) was a French naturalist, artist and explorer. Pictured here is the oil portrait by Charles Willson Peale of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur. The original hangs in the reading room of the of Ewell Sale Stewart Library in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. In 1801 he traveled to Australia as artist on the expedition of Nicolas Baudin. With François Peron he took over the duties as naturalist after the death of the expedition's zoologist Rene Mauge. Together they collected over 100,000 zoological specimens. Between 1815 and 1837 he lived in the United States In 1833, he visited Vincennes, Indiana where he sketched the first known drawing of Grouseland, the mansion of William Henry Harrison. The mansion is today a National Historic Landmark. In the years 1825-1837 Lesueur lived in New Harmony, Indiana, where he filled sketchbooks full of the finds discovered during the utopian adventure funded by his friend William Maclure. He drew the boat "Philanthropist", which arrived full of intellectuals who came to live in the small town of New Harmony, on the Wabash River. He took research trips and sketched the people and the small towns in the area. He was in New Harmony when Prince Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuweid, Germany, and artist Karl Bodmer came to spend five months there in 1832-1833. Prince Maximilian said of Bodmer "He had explored the country in many directions, was acquainted with everything remarkable, collected and prepared all interesting objects and had already sent considerable collections to France" (Elliott Johansen, p. 6) Indeed, LeSeur sent specimens of unique fish, animals and fossils, as well as artifacts he had dug from the Indian Mounds in New Harmony back to France, where they remain. LeSeur returned to France in 1837, only after his friends Thomas Say and Joseph Barabino had died and William MacClure had returned to Philadelphia, accompanied by many of his fine books. He had spent 21 years in the United States, but continued his scholarly studies and activities in France, where he resumed his occupation of artist-naturalist and began to catalogue his extensive research and artwork. At last, he was awarded the honor of Chevalier de l??Ordre Royal de la L??gion d'honneur for his long years of work in the sciences
Balthasar Anton Dunker
German, 1746-1807
Vladimir Baranov-Rossine
(1888?C1944) was a Russian-Ukrainian painter, avant-garde artist (Cubo-Futurist), and inventor of Jewish ethnicity Vladimir Baranov-Rossine was born in Kherson, Ukraine, to parents of Jewish ethnicity. In 1902 he studied at the School of the Society for the Furthering of the Arts in St. Petersburg. From 1903 to 1907 he attended the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. In 1908 he exhibited with the group Zveno ("The Link") in Kiev organized by the artist David Burliuk and his brother Wladimir Burliuk. In 1910 he moved to Paris, wher until 1914 he was a resident in the artist's colony La Ruche together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Nathan Altman and others. He exhibited regularly in Paris after 1911. He returned to Russia in 1914. In 1916 he had a solo exhibition in Oslo. In 1918 he had exhibits with the union of artists Mir Iskusstva ("World of Art") in Petrograd (St.Petersburg). In the same year he had an exhibition with the group Jewish Society for the Furthering of the Arts in Moscow, together with Nathan Altman, El Lissitzky and David Shterenberg. He participated at the First State Free Art Exhibition in Petrograd in 1919. In 1922 Baranov-Rossine was the teacher at the Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow. In 1924 he had the first presentation of his optophonic piano during a performance at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow - a synaesthetic instrument that was capable of creating sounds and coloured lights, patterns and textures simultaneously.