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 :. | The Barque of Dante | lejonjakt | Le Massacre de Scio | Louis d'Orleans Showing his Mistress | Liberty Leading the People | Related Artists:
Thomas UwinsEnglish Painter, 1782-1857
English painter and illustrator. He was apprenticed to the line-engraver Benjamin Smith (d 1833) in 1797, but his greater interest in portrait painting led him to take life classes at the Royal Academy, London; he exhibited portraits there from 1799. Versatile and industrious, he painted miniature likenesses, taught drawing, designed and engraved illustrations for books in French, Portuguese and English, and wrote for and illustrated Rudolph Ackermann's Repository. His half-a-crown watercolours, known as 'pretty faces', were particularly popular, and he found employment as an assiduous copyist. In 1809 he was elected to the Society of Painters in Water-Colours and for the next nine years exhibited careful and colourful images of the countryside that provided views of the year's harvest. In 1817 Uwins travelled to France to record the Burgundian grape harvest, identifying the labour force more obviously as peasants than their English counterparts. In debt, he moved in 1820 to Edinburgh, where he illustrated books by Walter Scott and painted portraits. In 1824, his debt paid, he left for Italy, where he spent seven years; he sent highly valued copies of Italian works back to England (to Thomas Lawrence among others) and made studies of life in and around Rome and Naples, from which his later successes at the Royal Academy derived. An immodest Protestant, Uwins deplored but revelled in the 'polluted streams' of Catholic Italy, and provided London with oils renowned for their clarity and colour. A Neapolitan Saint Manufactory (exh. RA 1832; Leicester, Mus. & A.G.) shows monks haggling, women gazing and children playing amid carved and painted icons.
Peder AlsPeder Als, a Danish historical and portrait painter, born at Copenhagen in 1725, studied for some time under C. G. Pile. After gaining the first great prize given by the academy at Copenhagen in 1755, he went to Rome and entered the school of Mengs. He occupied himself chiefly in copying the pictures of Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, which it is said that he did with great accuracy. He also copied Correggio and Titian. On his return to his own country he painted some good portraits; but his colouring was too sombre to give a pleasing effect to his pictures of females, and his work was frequently so laboured as to be deprived of all animation. Copies of the works of the old masters by Als are to be seen in Denmark. He died in 1775.
Louis-Jean-Francois LagreneeFrench Neoclassical Painter, 1725-1805