1853-1918 Swiss Ferdinand Hodler Galleries Hodler was born in Berne and grew up in poverty. His father, Jean Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter; his mother, Marguerite (n??e Neukomm), was from a peasant family. By the time Hodler was eight years old, he had lost his father and two younger brothers to tuberculosis. His mother remarried to a decorative painter, but in 1867 she too died of tuberculosis. Before he was ten, Hodler received training in decorative painting from his stepfather, and was subsequently sent to Thun to apprentice with a local painter, Ferdinand Sommer. Hodler's earliest works were conventional landscapes, which he sold in shops and to tourists. In 1871, at the age of 18, he traveled on foot to Geneva to start a career as a painter. The works of Hodler's early maturity consisted of landscapes, figure compositions and portraits, treated with a vigorous realism. He made a trip to Basel in 1875, where he studied the paintings of Hans Holbein??especially Dead Christ in the Tomb, which influenced Hodler's many treatments of the theme of death. In the last decade of the 19th century his work evolved to combine influences from several genres including symbolism and art nouveau. He developed a style which he called Parallelism, characterized by groupings of figures symmetrically arranged in poses suggesting ritual or dance. In 1884 Hodler met Augustine Dupin (1852?C1909), who became his companion and model for the next several years. Their son, Hector Hodler, was born in 1887. In 1889 Hodler married Bertha Stucki; they were divorced in 1891. Hodler's work in his final phase took on an expressionist aspect with strongly coloured and geometrical figures. Landscapes were pared down to essentials, sometimes consisting of a jagged wedge of land between water and sky. However, the most famous of Hodler's paintings portray scenes in which characters are engaged in everyday activities, such as the famous woodcutter (Der Holzfaller, Mus??e d'Orsay, Paris). This picture went on to appear on the back of the 50 Swiss Franc bank note issued by the Swiss National Bank. In 1898, Hodler married Berthe Jacques. In 1914 he condemned the German atrocities conducted using artillery at Rheims. In retaliation for this, German art museums excluded Hodler's work. In 1908 he met Valentine Gode-Darel, who became his mistress. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1913, and the many hours Hodler spent by her bedside resulted in a remarkable series of paintings documenting her disintegration. Her death in January 1915 affected Hodler greatly. He occupied himself with work; a series of about 20 introspective self-portraits date from 1916. By late 1917 his declining health led him to thoughts of suicide. He died on May 19, 1918 in Geneva leaving behind a number of unfinished works portraying the city.  Related Paintings of Ferdinand Hodler :. | Genfersee mit sechs Schwanen | Thunersee mit symmetrischer Spiegelung | Apple tree in Blossom | Surprised by the Storm | Genfersee mit Mont-Blanc im Morgenlicht |
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hedvig eleonoras
Hedvig Eleonora av Holstein-Gottorp, född 23 oktober 1636, död 24 november 1715, var svensk drottning och riksföreståndare, dotter till Fredrik III av Holstein-Gottorp och Marie Elisabeth av Sachsen och gift i november 1654 med Karl X Gustav. Hon var med honom i Polen 1656 och i Danmark 1658. Hon var Sveriges drottning i sex år, men de facto "första dam" till sin död 1715, i femtiofem års tid. Hon blev änka 1660 och levde som änkedrottning i ytterligare 55 år. Kung Karl II av England friade till henne något år efter makens död, men hon tackade nej, med den formella motiveringen att hon önskade vara sin döde make evigt trogen. Hon satt i förmyndarregeringarna för både sin son Karl XI och sin sonson Karl XII, 1660-1672 samt 1697, och sedan i rådet 1700-1713, men hade i verkligheten aldrig så mycket att göra med politik, utan var nöjd med att formellt presidera över regeringen och hovet som monarkins symboliska överhuvud och representant. Hon stödde dock den profranska och antidanska policy som fördes av regenterna. Hennes son var djupt beroende av henne i hela sitt liv; då han blev gammal nog att sitta med vid regeringens sammanträden, talade han inte direkt till ledamöterna, han viskade i stället vad han ville veta till riksänkedrottningen, och Hedvig Eleonora frågade sedan regeringen med hög röst vad han ville veta. Då sorgeperioden formellt bröts år 1663 var hon värdinna för omfattande festligheter, och det var i hennes namn Sveriges första fasta teater öppnades i Stora Bollhuset och Lejonkulan 1667. Hedvig Eleonora, "Riksänkedrottningen", hade en dominant och temperamentsfull personlighet och dominerade det svenska hovet totalt fram till sin död. Även efter sin sons giftermål 1680 och fram till sin död 1715 var hon den verkliga drottningen och behöll sin position som "första dam"; sonen kallade henne "drottningen" och sin fru för "min fru". Under stora nordiska kriget var hon 1700-13 representant för kungen, men intresserade sig inte heller nu mycket för politik- vid audienser för utländska sändebud kunde antingen "moltiga" eller gapskratta åt dem. Hon intresserade sig för kortspel och arkitektur. Hon kunde spela kort till inpå småtimmarna. Drottningholms slott samt Strömsholms slott påbörjades av henne. Vid båda slotten lät hon anlägga stora parker i tidens stil.
Cordelia Creigh Wilson
(28 November 1873, Georgetown, Colorado - 7 June 1953, Seattle, Washington) was a painter noted for her landscapes of New Mexico and the American Southwest. Cordelia "Cordie" Creigh was born in Clear Creek County, Colorado. Her father died in her early childhood, and she was raised by her mother, Emma Creigh who shuttled the family between Winfield, Kansas and Colorado. She married Willard Wilkinson in Boulder, Colorado in 1897 and gave birth to her only child, Louise, in Hayden the next year, however, the couple divorced shortly after the turn of the century. Cordelia then began to seriously develop her skills as an artist motivated by latest trends in American realism led by Robert Henri. Her academic training emphasized development of an alla prima technique and painting out of doors, which inspired her to produce bold impasto works quickly. She started making road trips to New Mexico and became friends with painters in the Taos Society of Artists and the Santa Fe art colony. Her numerous expressive oil sketches and en plein air canvases of adobe dwellings and rugged landscapes caught the attention of art dealers. Before the end of the First World War, Cordelia married John H. Wilson and took his surname for her entire professional career. They settled on Tremont Street in Denver, just around the corner from the J. Gibson Smith Gallery which displayed and sold her works. Many of her paintings had frames she hand-carved in rustic Arts and Crafts style and gilded with sheets of gold leaf. In 1917, Cordelia Wilson was honored by having two paintings selected for the inaugural exhibition of the new New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. The show featured easel works by George Bellows, Robert Henri, F. Martin Hennings, and Leon Kroll, who were working in the Southwest at that time, along with the "Taos Six" (Oscar Berninghaus, Ernest Blumenschein, Irving Couse, Herbert Dunton, Bert Geer Phillips, and Joseph Henry Sharp) and other members of the Taos Society. One of her paintings exhibited in the show, A Mexican Home, was reproduced in the January CFebruary 1918 issue of the journal Art and Archaeology (published by the Archaeological Institute of America) that featured a cover article about the museum's opening. Among Cordelia Wilson's largest landscapes is a 50" x 70" canvas, created for World War I military training. It was exhibited at the School of American Research of Santa Fe in 1917 with other large-scale so-called "Range Finder" paintings by Blumenschein, Berninghaus, Phillips, Gustave Baumann, Walter Ufer, Leon Gaspard, and others. They had been commissioned by the U.S. Army based on a proposal by the Salmagundi Club of New York, whose members wanted to make a special contribution to America's war effort. When the show closed, the works on display were shipped to Camp Funston at Fort Riley, Kansas and Camp Cody at Deming, New Mexico. The paintings were used for indoor instruction in range finding, topographical quizzes, and map drawing at Army camps. John Wilson, her husband, contracted tuberculosis in about 1921. The couple moved to the Seattle for his treatment at a sanitorium, where he passed away the following year. In 1923, Cordelia married for a third time to John N. Fahnestock, but this marriage ended in divorce in 1928. Cordelia continued to reside in Pacific Northwest producing still lifes, florals, and scenes of the Puget Sound region, although she periodically traveled, worked, and displayed her art in the Southwest.
Nittis, Giuseppe de
Italian, 1846-84 Italian painter, pastellist and printmaker. Throughout his career he was committed to a plein-air aesthetic and was particularly interested in rendering varying light effects, a concern that brought him into contact with the Impressionists. He was also acquainted with the members of the Macchiaioli, for whom his work was influential. In addition to oils, he experimented with printmaking and made innovative use of pastels. Practising a restrained, and therefore 'acceptable', form of Impressionism, he achieved great success in his lifetime,