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 :. | Ulysses Returns Chryseis to Her Father (mk05) | The Trojan Women Set Fire to their Fleet | Details of The Sermon on the mount | Coastal View (mk17) | Perseus and the Origin of Coral (mk17) |
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Edward Bower
floruit 1635-1667
Lady Anne Barnard
(12 December 1750-6 May 1825), nee Anne Lindsay, eldest daughter of James Lindsay, 5th Earl of Balcarres was born at Balcarres House, Fife, Scotland. She was author of the ballad Auld Robin Gray and an accomplished travel writer, artist and socialite of the period. Her five year residence in Cape Town, South Africa, although brief, had a significant impact on the cultural and social life of the time.
Leonardo Bazzaro
(Milan, 1853-1937) was an Italian painter. After picking up the basics in the studio of the painter Gaetano Fasanotti, Bazzaro enrolled at the Brera Academy in Milan, where he was awarded the Fumagalli Prize in 1875. The following years saw a series of perspective views set in Milanese churches and mansions. The success achieved with the public and critics alike at a number of major national and international events prompted him to take an interest also in portraiture and landscape painting, for which his favourite settings were Venice and Chioggia. The works of the 1880s and 1890s also include increasingly intimist scenes of everyday life in the setting of Valsassina, Valle deAosta and Verbano. Bazzaro continued to take part in numerous exhibitions in the region of Lombardy as well as the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadrenniale right up to his death, always achieving great success with collectors and being asked to execute replicas of his most popular subjects.