French Romantic Painter, 1798-1863
For 40 years Eugene Delacroix was one of the most prominent and controversial painters in France. Although the intense emotional expressiveness of his work placed the artist squarely in the midst of the general romantic outpouring of European art, he always remained an individual phenomenon and did not create a school. As a personality and as a painter, he was admired by the impressionists, postimpressionists, and symbolists who came after him.
Born on April 28, 1798, at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, the son of an important public official, Delacroix grew up in comfortable upper-middle-class circumstances in spite of the troubled times. He received a good classical education at the Lycee Imperial. He entered the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guerin in 1815, where he met Theodore Gericaul Related Paintings of Eugene Delacroix :. | Selbstportrat, Detail | Fan with Caricatures | Liberty Leading the People | Lion Devouring a Rabbit (mk05) | Hamlet und Horatio auf dem Friedhof | Related Artists:
Antonio Rottapainted L'enfant avec les raisins in 1884
Henri MatisseFrench Fauvist Painter and Sculptor, 1869-1954
Henri Matisse is considered the most important French artist of the 20th century and, along with Pablo Picasso, one of the most influential modernist painters of the last century. Matisse began studying drawing and painting in the 1890s. A student of the masters of Post-Impressionism, Matisse later made a reputation for himself as the leader of a group of painters known as Les Fauves. An ironic label given to them by a critic, the name reflected Matisse's aggressive strokes and bold use of primary colors. In 1905 Matisse gained sudden fame with three paintings, including Woman with the Hat, purchased by the wealthy American ex-patriot Gertrude Stein. Beyond painting, he worked with lithographs and sculpture, and during World War II he did a series of book designs. Later in his career he experimented with paper cutouts and designed decorations for the Dominican chapel in Vence, France. Along with Picasso,
Charles Codman (circa 1800-1842) was a landscape painter of Portland, Maine. His art is featured at the Portland Museum of Art as mature, fine early American landscape painting.
Codman was probably from Boston and was apprenticed to the ornamental painter, John Ritto Penniman. Codman began as a decorative painter and had no formal training but eventually produced mature works of romance and beauty. One of his more important commissions was to design and paint five fireboards (decorative panels placed over hearths during the summertime) in the landscape style, for the Portland mansion of shipbuilder James Deering. He also filled commissions for both portraiture and decorative arts.