1858-1921 Belgian Fernand Khnopff Gallery Fernand Khnopff was born to a wealthy family that was part of the high bourgeoisie for generations. Khnopff's ancestors had lived in Flanders since the early 17th-century but were of Austrian and Portuguese descent. Most male members of his family had been lawyers or judges, and young Fernand was destined for a juridical career. In his early childhood (1859-1864) he lived in Bruges where his father was appointed Substitut Du Procureur Du Roi. His childhood memories of the medieval city of Bruges would play a significant role in his later work. In 1864 the family moved to Brussels. To please his parents he went to law school at the Free University of Brussels (now divided into the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) when he was 18 years old. During this period he developed a passion for literature, discovering the works of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle and other mostly French authors. With his younger brother Georges Khnopff - also a passionate amateur of contemporary music and poetry - he started to frequent Jeune Belgique ("Young Belgium"), a group of young writers including Max Waller, Georges Rodenbach, Iwan Gilkin and Emile Verhaeren. Khnopff left University due to a lack of interest in his law studies and began to frequent the studio of Xavier Mellery, who made him familiar with the art of painting. On the 25th of October 1876 he enrolled for the Cours De Dessin Apres Nature ("course of drawing after nature") at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts en Bruxelles. At the Academie, his most famous fellow student was James Ensor, whom he disliked from the start. Between 1877 and 1880 Khnopff made several trips to Paris where he discovered the work of Delacroix, Ingres, Moreau and Stevens. At the Paris World Fair of 1878 he became acquainted with the oeuvre of Millais and Burne-Jones. During his last year at the Acad??mie in 1878-1879 he neglected his classes in Brussels and lived for a while in Passy, were he visited the Cours Libres of Jules Joseph Lefebvre at the Acad??mie Julian.   Related Paintings of Fernand Khnopff :. | White Black and Gold | Study of A woman | Study of Marguerite Khnopff | The Garden in Famelettes | Dream Flowers |
Related Artists:
Meliore di Jacopo
Italian, active ca.1260-1271
Pier Francesco Mola
(9 February 1612 - 13 May 1666) was an Italian painter of the High Baroque, mainly active around Rome. Mola was born at Coldrerio (now in Ticino, Switzerland). At the age of four, he moved to Rome with his father Giovanni Battista, a painter. With the exception of the years 1633 - 40 and 1641 - 47, during which he resided in Venice and Bologna, respectively, he lived for the rest of his life in Rome. His early training was with the late mannerist painter Cavalier D'Arpino, and he worked under the classicizing Francesco Albani. His masterpiece is the fresco in the gallery of Alexander VII in the Quirinal Palace Gallery, entitled Joseph making himself known to his Brethren (1657). He made six versions of The Flight into Egypt, the earileist and best of which is the first one, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. He was elected Principe of the Accademia di San Luca, the Roman artists' professional association, in 1662, but his last years were neither profitable nor prolific. One of his pupils was Antonio Gherardi. With his looser style and handling, more naturalistic palette, and interest in exploring landscape elements, Mola rebelled against the prevailing, highly-theoretical classicism of such leading 17th-century Roman painters as Andrea Sacchi.
Antonio Mancini
(14 November 1852 - 28 December 1930) was an Italian painter. Mancini was born in Rome and showed precocious ability as an artist. At the age of twelve, he was admitted to the Institute of Fine Arts in Naples, where he studied under Domenico Morelli (1823-1901), a painter of historical scenes who favored dramatic chiaroscuro and vigorous brushwork, and Filippo Palizzi (1818-1899), a landscape painter. Mancini developed quickly under their guidance, and in 1872, he exhibited two paintings at the Paris Salon. Mancini worked at the forefront of Verismo movement, an indigenous Italian response to 19th-century Realist aesthetics. His usual subjects included children of the poor, juvenile circus performers, and musicians he observed in the streets of Naples. His portrait of a young acrobat in "Saltimbanco" (1877-78) exquisitely captures the fragility of the boy whose impoverished childhood is spent entertaining pedestrian crowds. While in Paris in the 1870s, Mancini met Impressionists Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet. He became friends with John Singer Sargent, who famously pronounced him to be the greatest living painter. His mature works show a brightened palette with a striking impasto technique on canvas and a bold command of pastels on paper. In 1881, Mancini suffered a disabling mental illness. He settled in Rome in 1883 for twenty years, then moved to Frascati where he lived until 1918. During this period of Mancini's life, he was often destitute and relied on the help of friends and art buyers to survive. After the First World War, his living situation stabilized and he achieved a new level of serenity in his work. Mancini died in Rome in 1930 and buried in the Basilica Santi Bonifacio e Alessio on the Aventine Hill. His painting,The Poor Schoolboy, exhibited in the Salon of 1876, is in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. Its realist subject matter and dark palette are typical of his early work. Paintings by Mancini also may be seen in major Italian museum collections, including Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and Museo Civico-Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Turin. The Philadelphia Art Museum holds fifteen oil paintings and three pastels by Mancini that were a gift of New York art dealer Vance N. Jordan.