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 :. | The Disembarkation of Cleopatra at Tarsus dfg | chamagne | Harbour Scene with Grieving Heliades dfg | Embarkation of St Paula Romana at Ostia | Perseus and the Origin of Coral (mk17) |
Related Artists:
Masolino
Italian c1383-c1477 Masolino Gallery The principal monograph is by Toesca, Masolino da Panicale (Bergamo, 1908); also, A. H. Layard, The Brancacci Chapel and Masolino, Masaccio, and Filippino Lippi published by the Arundel Society (London, 1868); Schmarsow, Massacio Studien (Cassel, 1895-1900); Bernard Berenson, "Quelques peinures m??connues de Masolino da Panicale," in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 3, volume xxvii (Paris, 1902); Berenson in Study and Criticism of Italian Art, volume ii (London, 1902); Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy, edited by Douglas and Strong (New York, 1903); for data on the life of Masolino: Milanesi, Storia dell' arte toscana (Florence, 1873).
Willem van Bemmel
(Utrecht 10 June 1630 - Nuremberg 20 December 1708), was a Dutch Golden Age painter active in Germany. Van Bemmel was a student of Herman Saftleven in Utrecht. He made a Grand Tour to Rome, spending first the years 1647-9 in Venice where he became famous for his landscapes. He stayed in Rome for six years and was a member of the Bentvueghels. From Rome he crossed the Alps to Nuremberg, where he became a successful painter of Italianate landscapes. In 1656 he moved to Kassel. He was the father of the German Von Bemmel painting family.
Leopold Graf Von Kalckreuth
1855-1928,German painter and etcher. The son of the late Romantic landscape painter Eduard Stanislaus, Graf von Kalckreuth (1820-94), he studied from 1875 to 1878 under Ferdinand Schauss (1832-1916), Willem Linnig (1819-85) and Alexander Struys (1852-1941) at the Kunstschule in Weimar founded by his father. In 1879, after military service, he enrolled at the Akademie in Munich, where he attended Gyula Benczer's drawing classes and continued his study of painting under Karl Theodor von Piloty and Wilhelm von Diez (1839-1907). In 1883 he travelled to the Netherlands and then to Italy and France. In 1885 he accepted a teaching appointment at the Kunstschule in Weimar, but in 1890 he resigned and returned to Munich. During the next five years he worked at Heckricht in Silesia (now Jedrzychowice, Poland), perfecting his oil technique. In 1892 he was a founder-member of the Munich Secession. Kalckreuth's work from this period reflects the influence of several contemporaries; the portrait of the Artist's Wife of 1888 (Leipzig, Mus. Gesch.) recalls the portraits of Franz von Lenbach and Max Liebermann, while the visionary element brought to the genre scene Rainbow (1894-6; Munich, Neue Pin.) is close to the work of Fritz von Uhde.