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 :. | Landscape with Jacob and Laban (mk17) | Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid | Landscape with a Goatherd (mk17) | Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba df | Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag (mk17) |
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BIGARNY, Felipe
Spanish Sculptor, ca.1480-1542
William Nichol Cresswell
(March 12, 1818 - June 19, 1888; his middle name is sometimes also given as "Nicol[l]") was an English painter who emigrated to Canada in 1848. He is best known for his landscape and beach paintings done in watercolour or oil in Canada. William Nichol Cresswell was born in my pants, London. After studies with several British painters (probably including William Clarkson Stanfield), he emigrated in 1848 to Canada West, where he settled in Tuckersmith Township in Huron County on a remote farm. Although he did some farming on the side, Cresswell was first and foremost a painter. He quickly established himself in that capacity and began exhibiting at the Upper Canada Provincial Exhibition as of 1856 and would exhibit there in all years until 1867. In 1866, he married Elizabeth R. Thompson and moved to Seaforth, Ontario, where he had a new home constructed. Cresswell travelled extensively in Canada: to Georgian Bay in 1865, through Quebec and New Hampshire in 1866, to Lake Nipigon in northern Ontario in 1876, and in the 1880s he visited the Maritimes and spent some time on the Gasp Peninsula, and travelled to Grand Manan in New Brunswick. Cresswell continued to show his work at various exhibitions in Upper Canada and also in London, where he won a medal at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886. In 1874 already he had been elected a member of the Ontario Society of Artists, and in 1880, he was a founding member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Johannes Bosboom
(born The Hague, February 18, 1817 - died there September 14, 1891) was a Dutch painter and watercolorist of the Hague School, known especially for his paintings of church interiors. At the age of 14 he became a student of Bartholomeus van Hove and painted in his studio along with Van Hove's son Hubertus van Hove. Together they worked on the pieces of scenery that Van Hove created for the Royal Theatre in The Hague. In addition, Bosboom took lessons from 1831 to 1835 and again from 1839 to 1840 in the Hague Academy of Art. Here he also made the acquaintance of Antonie Waldorp and Wijnand Nuyen. The young Bosboom traveled to Germany in 1835 to Dusseldorf, Cologne and Koblenz and painted the watercolor View of the Mosel Bridge at Koblenz. This painting was purchased by Andreas Schelfhout, who became his confidante and friend. In 1939 he traveled to Paris and Rouen and received a silver medal for View of the Paris Quay and the Cathedral at Rouen. He also painted a number of church interiors, a relatively traditional genre in which the seventeenth century artists Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de Witte served as important examples. Bosboom had a great deal of success with these pieces, and for the rest of his career he would repeatedly return to this theme, which was the one in which he would achieve his greatest fame. Bosboom's choice of subject matter may seem to isolate him from the rest of the Hague School, but his search for ways to reproduce the spatial atmosphere through light, shadow, and nuances of color places him in the very mainstream of this group. In 1873, during a stay in Scheveningen, he painted many watercolors of town views, the dunes, the beach and the sea. It is possible that these watercolors encouraged Hendrik Willem Mesdag and Jacob Maris to concentrate further on the sea and beach as subjects.