German 1805-1873
Franz Xaver Winterhalter Galleries
German painter and lithographer. He trained as a draughtsman and lithographer in the workshop of Karl Ludwig Scheler (1785-1852) in Freiburg im Breisgau and went to Munich in 1823, sponsored by the industrialist Baron Eichtal. In 1825 he began a course of study at the Akademie and was granted a stipend by Ludwig I, Grand Duke of Baden. The theoretical approach to art of the Akademie under the direction of Peter Cornelius was unfamiliar to him, as in Freiburg he had been required to paint in a popular style. He found the stimulus for his future development in the studio of Joseph Stieler, a portrait painter who was much in demand and who derived inspiration from French painting. Winterhalter became his collaborator in 1825. From Stieler he learnt to make the heads of figures emerge from shadow and to use light in the modelling of faces. He moved to Karlsruhe in 1830 with his brother Hermann Winterhalter (1808-92), who had also trained with Scheler and had followed him to Munich. Related Paintings of Franz Xaver Winterhalter :. | Portrait of Empress Maria Alexandrovna | Albert Prince Consort | La Siesta | Malcy Louise Caroline Frederique Berthier de Wagram, Princess Murat | Unidentified Lady | Related Artists:
Antonio Munoz DegrainSpanish , Valencia, 1840 - M - laga, 1924
Henri GervexFrench Academic Painter, 1852-1929.French painter. His artistic education began with the Prix de Rome winner Pierre Brisset (1810-90). He then studied under Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where his fellow pupils included Henri Regnault, Bastien-Lepage, Forain, Humbert (1842-1934) and Cormon; and also informally with Fromentin. Gervexs first Salon picture was a Sleeping Bather (untraced) in 1873: the nude, both in modern and mythological settings, was to remain one of his central artistic preoccupations. In 1876 he painted Autopsy in the H?tel-Dieu (ex-Limoges; untraced), the sort of medical group portrait he repeated in 1887 with his Dr Pean Demonstrating at the Saint-Louis Hospital his Discovery of the Hemostatic Clamp (Paris, Mus. Assist. Pub.), which celebrated the progress of medical science with a sober, quasi-photographic realism. Gervexs most controversial picture was Rolla (1878; Bordeaux, Mus. B.-A.), refused by the Salon of 1878 on grounds of indecency, partly because of the cast-off corset Degas had insisted he include. The painting shows the central character in a de Musset poem, Jacques Rolla, who, having dissipated his family inheritance, casts a final glance at the lovely sleeping form of the prostitute Marion before hurling himself out of the window. As his friend, Manet, had done the year before with his rejected Nana (1877; Hamburg, Ksthalle), Gervex exhibited his work in a commercial gallery, with great success.
Sandro BotticelliItalian Early Renaissance Painter, 1445-1510
Italian painter and draughtsman. In his lifetime he was one of the most esteemed painters in Italy, enjoying the patronage of the leading families of Florence, in particular the Medici and their banking clients. He was summoned to take part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, was highly commended by diplomatic agents to Ludovico Sforza in Milan and Isabella d Este in Mantua and also received enthusiastic praise from the famous mathematician Luca Pacioli and the humanist poet Ugolino Verino. By the time of his death, however, Botticelli s reputation was already waning. He was overshadowed first by the advent of what Vasari called the maniera devota, a new style by Perugino, Francesco Francia and the young Raphael, whose new and humanly affective sentiment, infused atmospheric effects and sweet colourism took Italy by storm; he was then eclipsed with the establishment immediately afterwards of the High Renaissance style, which Vasari called the modern manner, in the paintings of Michelangelo and the mature works of Raphael in the Vatican. From that time his name virtually disappeared until the reassessment of his reputation that gathered momentum in the 1890s