1598-1664 Spanish Francisco de Zurbaran Galleries Spanish baroque painter, active mainly at Llerena, Madrid, and Seville. He worked mostly for ecclesiastical patrons. His early paintings, including Crucifixion (1627; Art Inst., Chicago), St. Michael (Metropolitan Mus.), and St. Francis (City Art Museum, St. Louis), often suggest the austere simplicity of wooden sculpture. The figures, placed close to the picture surface, are strongly modeled in dramatic light against dark backgrounds, indicating the influence of Caravaggio. They were clearly painted as altarpieces or devotional objects. In the 1630s the realistic style seen in his famous Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas (1631; Seville) yields to a more mystical expression in works such as the Adoration of the Shepherds (1638; Grenoble); in this decade he was influenced by Ribera figural types and rapid brushwork. While in Seville, Zurbur??n was clearly influenced by Velazquez. After c.1640 the simple power of Zurbaran work lessened as Murillo influence on his painting increased (e.g., Virgin and Child with St. John, Fine Arts Gall., San Diego, Calif.). There are works by Zurbar??n in the Hispanic Society of America, New York City; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art..  Related Paintings of Francisco de Zurbaran :. | st, apolonia | Still Life | The Girlhood of the Virgin | the virgin appears to the monks of soriano | blessed john houghton |
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Alfred Bastien
(16 September 1873e7 June 1955) was a Belgian artist, academic and soldier. He attended the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Ghent, where he studied with Jean Delvin. He then enrolled in the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he studied with Jean-François Portaels. He won the Prix Godecharle there in 1897. He traveled to Paris, where he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was in Paris when hostilities broke out in what would become the First World War.
HAMEN, Juan van der
Spanish painter (b. 1596, Madrid, d. 1631, Madrid). was a Spanish painter, a master of the still life paintings, also called bodegones. During his lifetime, he was prolific and versatile, painting allegories, landscapes, and large-scale works for churches and convents. However, today he is remembered mostly for his still lifes. In the 1620s, He popularized still life painting in Madrid. Juan van der Hamen y Leon was baptized on 8 April 1596 in Madrid, therefore, he must have been born there just days before that date. He was the son of Jehan van der Hamen, a Flemish courtier, who had moved to Madrid from Brussels before 1586, and Dorotea Whitman Gemez de Leon, a half-Flemish mother of noble Toledan ancestry . Van der Hamen and his two brothers Pedro and Lorenzo (both of whom were writers) emphasized their Spanish roots by using all or part of their maternal grandmother's family name, Gemez de Leon. The painter's father, Jan van der Hamen, had come to Spain, as an archer, to the court of Philip II were he settled, married, and his children were born. According to 18th-century sources, the artist's father had also been a painter, but there is no evidence for this. Juan van der Hamen inherited his father's honorary positions at court and also served as unsalaried painter of the king. Van der Hamen's artistic activity in the service of the crown is first recorded on 10 September 1619, when he was paid for painting a still-life for the country palace of El Pardo, to the north of Madrid. Noted for his versatility, Juan van der Hamen painted religious history paintings; allegories, landscapes, low-life subjects, portraits and still-lifes but the last two categories brought him the greatest fame. He served at the courts of Philip III and Philip IV and established the popularity of the new genre of still-life in Madrid in the 1620s. A prolific artist, van der Hamen painted all his works during the first decade of the reign of Philip IV. It is known that he painted more still lifes in 1622 than in any other period of his life. He also reached great personal fame as a portraitist, being this field, the one that provided him with greater personal success, since still life was considered a lesser genre. He executed a portrait of Philip IV and worked during the 1620s in a series of portraits of the principal intellectuals and writers of his time, including: Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Gengora, Jose de Valdivieso, Juan Perez de Montalbon, Juan Ruiz de Alarcen and Francisco de Rioja. On van der Hamen's death, twenty of these portraits were inventoried as a single item among his belongings. The portrait of his older brother, Lorenzo van der Hamen, probably belonged to this series. The series itself was a focal point for philosophic speculation on the art of portraiture by some of the most distinguished minds of the time, who frequently praised Juan van der Hamen in verse and prose. Among Van der Hamen portraits, there is one of a dwarf, painted around 1623 in a powerful naturalistic style. This painting (Madrid, Museo del Prado) anticipated the later made by Velezquez. In 1626, van der Hamen painted cardinal Francesco Barberini, after a previous portrait by Velezquez had failed to please the sitter. Well satisfied with his work Cardinal Barberini acquired three further works from him. As a religious painter Juan van der Hamen worked for several religious institutions in and around Madrid and Toledo, like the Monastery of the Descalzas Reales, in Madrid, for which he painted altars. Few of these paintings are extant. The best surviving examples of his religious work are in the cloister of the Royal Convent of La Encarnacion in Madrid, painted in 1625 in a naturalistic tenebristic style. Juan van der Hamen was also a pioneer in the field of flower painting. Van der Hamen probably began painting floral arrangements in response to the flower pieces of Flemish artists, such as Jan Brueghel, who were regarded as exemplary masters in the field and whose works were much sought after in Spain. One good example of his work as a flower painter is his Offering to Flora , a visual poem that parallels the lyric verse of his time, in which he united his skills as portraitist and flower painter to produce one of the most beautiful paintings of the allegory of spring.
Alexis Simon Belle
(12 January 1674 - 21 November 1734) was a French portrait painter, known for his portraits of the French and Jacobite nobility. Belle was born in Paris, the second child and only son of Jean-Baptiste Belle (born before 1642, died 1703), also a painter, and of Anne his wife (died 1705). Belle's birth and baptism are recorded in the parish register of the church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris, and quoted in Eugene Piot's Le Cabinet de l'amateur for the years 1861 and 1862