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 Lady | Bubende Maria Magdalena, Detail | The Opening of the Fifth Seal | Saint Jerome as a Cardinal | The Holy Family iwth St Anne |
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Jacob Duck
1600-1667 Dutch Jacob Duck Location Dutch painter and etcher. He was long confused with Jan le Ducq (1629/30-76). In 1621 he was listed as an apprentice portrait painter in the records of the Utrecht Guild of St Luke. His teacher was probably Joost Cornelisz. Droochsloot (1586-1666). The St Job Hospital in Utrecht acquired a Musical Company by him in 1629. By 1630-32 he was a master in the guild. Like Pieter Codde, he painted guardroom scenes (kortegaerdjes), for example Soldiers Arming Themselves (c. 1635; New York, H. Shickman Gal., see 1984 exh. cat., no. 36) or the Hoard of Booty (Paris, Louvre), in which the figures and their interactions are apparently full of underlying symbolic meaning. He also painted merry companies (e.g. c. 1630; Names, Mus. B.-A.) and domestic activities, such as Woman Ironing (Utrecht, Cent. Mus.), employing motifs perhaps symbolic of domestic virtue. He placed his figures in high, bare interiors in which the deep local colours of the foreground stand out well against the cool, greyish-brown background. Only a few of his etchings are known (Hollstein, Dut. & Flem., vi, pp. 9-11), depicting figures in contemporary dress, for example Young Gentleman with Broad Hat and Cloak (Hollstein, no. 10) or Virgin and Child with Magi (nos 1-4). Between 1631 and 1649 Duck presence is documented in Utrecht, Haarlem and Wijk bij Duurstede. Afterwards, and probably by 1656, he was living in The Hague. He was buried at the monastery of St Mary Magdalene in Utrecht.
Henry Bacon
1839-1922 Henry Bacon Gallery Henry Bacon was born in Watseka, Illinois to father civil engineer Henry Bacon and mother Elizabeth Kelton Bacon, both of Massachusetts. Bacon was largely raised in Wilmington, N.C., where his father settled down and served as a government engineer in charge of the Cape Fear River improvements. At age 15, Henry Bacon was sent north to Boston's Chauncey Hall School. In 1884 he matriculated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but left within a year to launch an architectural career in the office of Chamberlin & Whidden in Boston as a draftsman. Bacon was soon hired into the office of famed McKim, Mead & White in New York City, the best-known American architectural firm of its time. While at McKim, Mead & White (MMW), Bacon won, in 1889, the Rotch Traveling Scholarship for architectural students, which gave him two years of study and travel in Europe, learning and drawing details of Roman and Greek architecture as far afield as Turkey, where he met his future wife, Laura Florence Calvert, daughter of a British Consul. He traveled with another fellowship student, Albert Kahn who would become a leading industrial architect. Returning to the U.S. he spent a few more years with his mentor, McKim, working on projects like the Rhode Island State House in Providence, Rhode Island, and serving as McKim's personal representative in Chicago during the World's Fair in Chicago, where MMW was at work designing certain buildings for the World's Fair. In 1897, Bacon left the office of McKim, Mead & White (MMW) to found, with a younger MMW architect James Brite, a new partnership Brite and Bacon Architects, where Brite was in charge of financial, administrative, and contracting aspects of the partnership, while Henry Bacon was in charge of the architectural design and construction. The partnership immediately won the competition for the Jersey City Public Library, the Hall of History for the American University at Washington, DC, and thereafter built a good number of public buildings and a small number of private residences. The partnership was selected to build two private residences in 1897, the "La Fetra Mansion" in Summit, New Jersey, and a three-story Georgian mansion "Laurel Hill" in Columbia, NC. The "La Fetra Mansion" was completed by the partnership sometime during 1899 to 1900, and published in the September 1901 issue of The Architecture, the pre-eminent architectural professional journal of its time. The LeFetra Mansion fully exhibits Bacon's Greek and Roman architectural predilections, his simple, austere, elegant lines, and his skill in dimensions and proportions that give rise to a feeling of the presence of divine spirituality, peaceful tranquility, and a sense of divine protection. While the La Fetra Mansion in Summit, NJ bears Bacon's signature style, the Georgian Mansion "Laurel Hill" was most probably designed by Brite.
Anthonis Mor
(c. 1517 - 1577) was a Netherlandish portrait painter, much in demand by the courts of Europe. He has also been referred to as Antoon, Anthonius, Anthonis, or Mor van Dashorst, Antonio Moro, Anthony More, etc., but signed most of his portraits as, Anthonis Mor. Mor was born in Utrecht, Netherlands by some estimation between 1516 and 1520. What is known of his early life is that his artistic education commenced under Jan van Scorel. His earliest work is probably a portrait at Stockholm, dated 1538. A group of Knights of St. John, at Utrecht, supposed to have been painted about 1541; a picture of two pilgrims at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, dated 1544; together with the portrait of an unknown woman, in the Lille gallery, were probably among his earliest works although their authenticity has not been proved. In 1547, he was received as a member of the Venerable Guild of St. Luke at Antwerp, and shortly afterwards (about 1548) he attracted the attention of Cardinal Granvelle, Bishop of Arras, who became his steady patron. Of the portraits executed during the early period of his career as Granvelle's protege, two are especially notable: one of the bishop himself (in the imperial gallery in Vienna), and one of the Duke of Alba, which now belongs to the Hispanic Society of New York. Between 1549 and 1550 Prince Philip II of Spain (1527-1598) traveled around the Netherlands to present himself as the future ruler. Mor painted his portrait in Brussels in 1549. He probably visited Italy (when exactly is not known) where he copied some works by Titian, notably the Danaë.