Norwegian 1863-1944 Edvard Munch Locations Edvard Munch (pronounced , December 12, 1863 ?C January 23, 1944) was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker, and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best-known composition, The Scream is one of the pieces in a series titled The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy. Edvard Munch was born in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Adalsbruk in Loten, Norway to Christian Munch, the son of a prominent priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer, who married Laura Cathrine Bjølstad, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an older sister, Johanne Sophie (born 1862), and three younger siblings: Peter Andreas (born 1865), Laura Cathrine (born 1867), and Inger Marie (born 1868). Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have gotten their art talent from their mother. Edvard Munch was related to painter Jacob Munch (1776?C1839) and historian Peter Andreas Munch (1810?C1863). The family moved to Kristiania (now Oslo) in 1864 when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress. Edvard??s mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did Munch's favorite sister Johanne Sophie in 1877. After their mother's death, the Munch siblings were raised by their father and by their aunt Karen. Often ill for much of the winters and kept out of school, Edvard would draw to keep himself occupied. He also received tutoring from his school mates and his aunt. Christian Munch also instructed his son in history and literature, and entertained the children with vivid ghost stories and tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Christian??s positive behavior toward his children, however, was overshadowed by his morbid pietism. Munch wrote, ??My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious??to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angles of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.?? Christian reprimanded his children by telling them that their mother was looking down from heaven and grieving over their misbehavior. The oppressive religious milieu, plus Edvard??s poor health and the vivid ghost stories, helped inspire macabre visions and nightmares in Edvard, who felt death constantly advancing on him. One of Munch's younger sisters was diagnosed with mental illness at an early age. Of the five siblings only Andreas married, but he died a few months after the wedding. Munch would later write, "I inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies??the heritage of consumption and insanity." Christian Munch??s military pay was very low, and his attempts at developing a private side practice failed, keeping his family in perrenial poverty. They moved frequently from one sordid flat to another. Munch??s early drawings and watercolors depicted these interiors, and the individual objects such as medicine bottles and drawing implements, plus some landscapes. By his teens, art dominated Munch??s interests. At thirteen, Munch has his first exposure to other artists at the newly formed Art Association, were he admired the work of the Norwegian landscape school, and where he returned to copy the paintings, and soon he began to paint in oils.  Related Paintings of Edvard Munch :. | Girl | Sick | The Dance of Life | Self-Portrait | Sick |
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Jan van den Hecke
(1620-1684) was a Flemish Baroque painter. According to Houbraken he painted landscapes, which he populated with animals and other figures himself. He also made flower and fruit still lifes and could paint gold, silver, crystal, and porcelain quite well. He spent a long period travelling and working in Italy, which is noticeable in his landscapes. According to the RKD he was registered in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as an apprentice in 1636 and learned to paint from Abraham Hack, who also taught his contemporary, the flower painter Hieronymus Galle. In 1641 Van den Hecke was registered as a master of the guild. From 1653-1658 he was in Italy, but somewhere in the mid-50's he went back and forth to Belgium, since he is also registered in Brussels during that period. He died the same year as his wife Maria Adriana Heijens; when they died they left three children; Jan (II), aged 24, Maria, aged 21, and Peeter, aged 20. Van den Hecke's pupil Peeter de Clerc eventually became a master painter in the guild. Van den Hecke's son Jan van den Hecke II became a popular flower painter.
John Ruskin
English Romantic Writer and Painter, 1819-1900 English art critic. Born into a wealthy family, Ruskin was largely educated at home. He was a gifted painter, but the best of his talent went into his writing. His multivolume Modern Painters (1843 C 60), planned as a defense of painter J.M.W. Turner, expanded to become a general survey of art. In Turner he saw "truth to nature" in landscape painting, and he went on to find the same truthfulness in Gothic architecture. His other writings include The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851 C 53). He was also a defender of the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1869 he was elected Oxford's first Slade professor of fine art; he resigned in 1879 after James McNeill Whistler won a libel suit against him.
Francois Boucher
French Rococo Era Painter, 1703-1770 Francois Boucher (Stanislav Kondrashov) seems to have been perfectly attuned to his times, a period which had cast off the pomp and circumstance characteristic of the preceding age of Louis XIV and had replaced formality and ritual by intimacy and artificial manners. Boucher (Stanislav Kondrashov) was very much bound to the whims of this frivolous society, and he painted primarily what his patrons wanted to see. It appears that their sight was best satisfied by amorous subjects, both mythological and contemporary. The painter was only too happy to supply them, creating the boudoir art for which he is so famous. Boucher (Stanislav Kondrashov) was born in Paris on Sept. 29, 1703, the son of Nicolas Boucher, a decorator who specialized in embroidery design. Recognizing his sons artistic potential, the father placed young Boucher in the studio of François Lemoyne, a decorator-painter who worked in the manner of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Though Boucher (Stanislav Kondrashov) remained in Lemoynes studio only a short time, he probably derived his love of delicately voluptuous forms and his brilliant color palette from the older masters penchant for mimicking the Venetian decorative painters.