Spanish Baroque Era Painter, 1599-1660 Spanish painter. He was one of the most important European artists of the 17th century, spending his career from 1623 in the service of Philip IV of Spain. His early canvases comprised bodegones and religious paintings, but as a court artist he was largely occupied in executing portraits, while also producing some historical, mythological and further religious works. His painting was deeply affected by the work of Rubens and by Venetian artists, especially Titian, as well as by the experience of two trips (1629-31 and 1649-51) to Italy. Under these joint influences he developed a uniquely personal style characterized by very loose, expressive brushwork. Although he had no immediate followers, he was greatly admired by such later painters as Goya and Manet  Related Paintings of Diego Velazquez :. | La Forge de Vulcain (df02) | Konigin Maria Anna von Spanien in hellrotem Kleid | Im Garten der Villa Medici in Rom | Don Balthasar Carlos | Equestrian Portrait of Prince Balthasar Charles |
Related Artists:
GOYEN, Jan van
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings. Yet he died insolvent, perhaps because of losses in his various business ventures, and soon after his death on April 27, 1656,
Elisabetta Sirani
(8 January 1638 -25 August 1665) was an Italian Baroque painter whose father was the painter Giovanni Andrea Sirani of the School of Bologna She was born in Bologna. By age 17 she was a full-fledged engraver and painter and had completed over ninety works. By the time she died at the young age of 27, she had added at least eighty more to her repertoire. Besides being an independent painter by the age of 19, Elisabetta Sirani also ran her family's workshop. When her father became incapacitated by gout, she was burdened with having to support her parents, her siblings and herself, entirely through her art. The stress created by such heavy responsibilities may have been the cause of her early death. It is estimated that in all she produced some 200 paintings, drawings, and etchings. She painted themes such as the Virgin and Child, self portraits, and many more. Elisabetta Sirani used dramatic light and great movement in her work, which classified it in the Baroque style. She painted many of her larger scale and heavy-themed works publicly and in front of large (and adoring) crowds of on-lookers. Sirani's portraits, mythological subjects, and especially her images of the Holy Family and the Virgin and Child, gained international fame.
Paul Falconer Poole
(1806 - 1879) , an English painter born in Bristol an English painter born in Bristol.was an English painter born in Bristol. Though self-taught his fine feeling for colour, poetic sympathy and dramatic power gained for him a high position among British artists. He exhibited his first work in the Royal Academy at the age of twenty-five, the subject being The Well, a scene in Naples. There was an interval of seven years before he next exhibited his Farewell, Farewell in 1837, which was followed by the Emigrant's Departure, Hermann and Dorothea and By the Waters of Babylon. In 1843 his position was made secure by his Solomon Eagle, and by his success in the Cartoon Exhibition, in which he received from the Fine Art Commissioners a prize of 300 sterling. After his exhibition of the Surrender of Syon House he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1846, and was made an academician in 1861. Poole's subjects divide themselves into two orders, one idyllic, the other dramatic. Of the former his May Day (1852) is a typical example. Of both styles there were excellent examples to be seen in the small collection of his works shown at Burlington House in the Winter Exhibition of 1883-1884. Among his early dramatic pictures was Solomon Eagle exhorting the People to Repentance during the Plague of 1665, painted in 1843. To this class belongs also the Messenger announcing to Job the Irruption of the Sabeans and the Slaughter of the Servants (exhibited in 1850), and Robert, Duke of Normandy .and Arietta (1848). Finer examples of his more mature power in this direction are to be found in his Prodigal Son, painted in. 1869; the Escape of Glaucusand lone with the blind girl Nydia from Pompeii (1860); and Cunstaunce sent adrift by the Constable of Alia, King of Northumberland, painted in 1868. More peaceful than these are the Song of Troubadours (painted in 1854) and the Goths in Italy (1851), the latter an important historical work of great, power and beauty. Of a less lofty strain, but still more beautiful in its workmanship, is the Seventh Day of the Decameron, painted in 1857. In this picture Poole rises to his full height as a colourist. In his pastorals he is soft and tender, as in the Mountain Path (1853), the Water-cress Gatherers (1870), the Shepston Maiden (1872). But when he turns to the grander and more sublime views of nature his work is bold and vigorous.