Greek-born Spanish Mannerist Painter, 1541-1614 Considered a representative of late Renaissance Spanish art, El Greco was actually born in Greece, on the island of Crete. After studying in Venice under Titian, El Greco settled in Toledo, Spain in 1577. At the time he was wildly popular, his emotionally religious paintings being just the ticket for the hometown of the Spanish Inquisition. After his death his work was largely ignored until the beginning of the 20th century; now he considered one of the inspired geniuses of Western art. His distinctive style features bold shapes and colors, with elongated and slightly distorted figures. In Toledo El Greco was in constant demand and liked living large: he maintained a private orchestra to accompany his meals.  Related Paintings of El Greco :. | Portrait of a Cardinal | St.Jerome | View of Toledo | The Annunciation | Mary Magdalen in Penitence |
Related Artists:
Robert Campin
1406-1444 Robert Campin Location South Netherlandish painter. He is first mentioned in 1405-6 as a painter in Tournai. As he purchased citizenship there in 1410, he may have been born elsewhere. There is evidence of some connection with Valenciennes, where the name Campin is said to have been common, but nothing certain is known of his artistic training and background.
James Seymour
British Painter , ca.1702-1752 English painter and draughtsman. The son of James Seymour (d 1739), a dealer in pictures and precious metals, Seymour was among the first English painters to specialize exclusively in sporting subject-matter. Though he possibly received some informal drawing instruction from the topographer Francis Place, Seymour was essentially a self-taught artist whose education was based on the study of pictures that passed through his father's hands; one of his earliest known works is a sketch of a horse's head after van Dyck (sold London, Christie's, 16 June 1970). His early 'genius to drawing of horses' was, according to George Vertue, compromised by 'modish extravagances' through living 'gay high and loosely' and because he 'never studied enough to paint or colour well'. Elsewhere, however, it was recorded that by 1739 he was 'reckoned the finest draughtsman in his way [of horses, hounds etc.] in the whole world' (Universal Spectator, 1739), and he was certainly preferred to his chief rival, John Wootton, by many sporting patrons. Among his employers was William Jolliffe MP, of Ammerdown. Though many of his paintings are either derivative of Wootton or simply inept, or both, others are characterized by a self-conscious stylistic naivety in which meticulous attention to detail and eerily static compositions combine to create curiously memorable images of some apparent sophistication.
Johann Jakob Ulrich
impression atist 28 Feb 1798 -- 17 March 1877. Swiss painter. He first studied under his father and then in Paris in 1822 in the studio of Jean-Victor Bertin. As a student he concentrated on unusual lighting effects in his landscape paintings well before they became a hallmark of the precursors of the Impressionists. In 1824 at the Salon in Paris he first saw paintings by Constable. On a trip to Italy in 1828 he did studies en plein air as preliminary sketches for his studio paintings. His early paintings emphasize brilliant colour, low horizons and scientific observation of cloud formations in a manner similar to Constable's studies, which he actually saw on visits to England in 1832 and 1835. Like Eugene Boudin, Ulrich was interested in poetic evocations of sun, water and effects of atmosphere rather than in the precise delineations of topography typical of Swiss art of that period. From 1824 he showed regularly at the Salons in Paris and in 1837 he returned to Zurich. Because the Swiss public was reluctant to accept his freer,