Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings. Yet he died insolvent, perhaps because of losses in his various business ventures, and soon after his death on April 27, 1656,   Related Paintings of GOYEN, Jan van :. | Beach at Scheveningen df | Haymaking dg | River Landscape with a Windmill and a Ruined Castle sdg | Village at the River sg | View of The Hague in Winter dg |
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Lucas van Uden
(18 October 1595 - 4 November 1672) was a Flemish Baroque painter specializing in landscapes. Lucas van Uden was born in Antwerp, where he entered the guild of St. Luke in 1626-27. Although he was never part of Peter Paul Rubens's studio, his works are partly indebted to that master. Van Uden even made copies of Rubens's works on several occasions. His technique, however, owes as much to earlier painters like Joos de Momper and Jan Brueghel the Elder. General characteristics are a tonally-green recessive view punctuated by slender trees and populated by incidental pastoral and peasant figures. Many of Van Uden's figures were either copied from Rubens or painted by David Teniers the Younger. He is often associated with fellow landscape painter Jan Wildens.
Justus van Gent
(or Joos van Wassenhove), Justus or Jodocus of Ghent, or Giusto da Guanto (c. 1410 - c. 1480) was an Early Netherlandish painter who later worked in Italy. The public records of the city of Ghent have been diligently searched, but in vain, for a clue to the history of Justus or Jodocus, whom Vasari and Guicciardini called Giusto da Guanto. Flemish annalists of the 16th century have enlarged upon the scanty, unsourced statements of Vasari, and described Jodocus as a pupil of Hubert van Eyck. The registers of the Guild of St Luke at Ghent comprise six masters of the name of Joos or Jodocus who practised at Ghent in the 15th century. But none of the works of these masters has been preserved, and it is impossible to compare their style with that of Giusto. Federico da Montefeltro and His Son, GuidobaldoBetween 1465 and 1474, this artist executed the Communion of the Apostles which Vasari described, and which is now in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino. It was painted for the brotherhood of Corpus Christi at the bidding of Frederick of Montefeltro, who was introduced into the picture as the companion of Caterino Zeno, a Persian envoy at that time on a mission to the court of Urbino. From this curious production it may be seen that Giusto, far from being a pupil of the putative Hubert Van Eyck, must have been studied with a later master, possibly Dieric Bouts. As a composer and draughtsman Giusto compares unfavourably with the better-known painters of Flanders; though his portraits are good, his ideal figures are not remarkable for subtlety of character and expression. Technically, he compares on a level with that of Geertgen tot Sint Jans, whose most famous pictures are preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum at Vienna. Vespasian, a Florentine bookseller who contributed much to form the antiquarian taste of Frederick of Montefeltro, states that this duke sent to the Netherlands for a capable artist to paint a series of ancient worthies for a library recently erected in the palace of Urbino. It has been conjectured that the author of these 28 portraits of "Famous Men," which are still in existence at the Louvre and in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche at Urbino, was Justus van Gent. Seven (?) Liberal Arts: a young man (Constanzo Sforza?) before Music (National Gallery, London). Another painting from this cycle, with Federigo da Montefeltro before Rhetoric was destroyed in Berlin in 1945Yet there are notable divergences between these pictures and the Communion of the Apostles. Still, it is possible that Giusto should have been able, after a certain time, to temper his Flemish style by studying the masterpieces of Santi and Melozzo, and so to acquire the mixed manner of the Flemings and Italians which these portraits of worthies display. Such an assimilation, if it really took place, might justify the Flemings in the indulgence of a certain pride, considering that Raphael not only admired these worthies, but copied them in the sketch-book which is now the ornament of the Venetian Academy. There is no ground for presuming that Giusto da Guanto is identical with Justus d'Allamagna who painted the Annunciation (1451) in the cloisters of Santa Maria di Castello at Genoa. The drawing and coloring of this wall painting shows that Justus d'Allamagna was as surely a native of south Germany as his homonym at Urbino was a born Netherlander.
Karoly Lotz
(16 December 1833 - 13 October 1904) was a German-Hungarian painter. Karl Lotz was born in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany, the 7th and youngest surviving child of Wilhelm Christian Lotz and Antonia Höfflick (Höfflich). His father was a valet of Prince Gustav zu Hessen-Homburg at the time when the prince was representing Austria at the Congress of Vienna, which among other matters dealt with the House of Hessen-Homburg's rights of sovereignty over Hessen-Darmstadt. The sudden death of the young Baron von Sinclair, charge d'affaires, forced W. C. Lotz temporarily into the rôle. While in Hungary in 1815 he made the acquaintance of the 13-year-old Antonie Hoefflich, whom he married three years later. She gave birth to 8 children, of whom Karl was the youngest. W. C. Lotz died in 1837 and Antonie moved the family to Pest (now one of the three constituent parts of Budapest; the one on the east bank of the River Danube). Karl attended the Piaristengymnasium, where, although Calvinist, he was awarded a scholarship for his exceptional academic performance. He began his artistic career as a pupil of the Hofkapellmeister Destouches, then in the academy of the Venetian master Jacopo Marastoni (1804-1860). Later he was a pupil of the historical painters Henrik Weber (1818-1866) in Budapest and Carl Rahl (1812-1865) in Vienna. Together with Rahl he worked on numerous commissions. Later he started on his own original works, first as a romantic landscape artist in scenes of the Alföld (the Hungarian lowland plain), and then as a creator of monumental murals and frescos in the style of the Venetian master Tiepolo. After various works in Budapest he became active in Vienna. He laid out plans for a grandiose palace, and completed murals commissioned by the Abbot of Tihany for his abbey church on the shore of Lake Balaton. He became known for his portraits and nudes, for which both his wife and his daughters (Katarina in particular) posed. Lotz found married bliss only at the age of 58, when he married the widow Jacoboy, the former wife of his brother Paul Johann Heinrich, who had died in 1828. From then on he signed his works Keroly Jacoboy-Lotz. In 1882 Lotz was appointed Professor at various art academies in Budapest, and in 1885 he became dean of a newly-established department for women painters. He was an honorary member of the Academy of Pictorial Arts in Vienna. Tomb of Keroly Lotz by Jenos Pesztor (Kerepesi cemetery in Budapest)Hist last important public commission was the "Apotheosis of the Habsburg Dynasty", a huge ceiling fresco in the Habsburg Room of the newly rebuilt Royal Palace, that he painted in 1903, one year before his death. Lotz was already seriously ill when he worked on the fresco. The "Apotheosis" followed the traditions of Baroque court painting and the work was praised by contemporary critics. The fresco survived the war unscathed, but it was destroyed in the 1950s. He died in 1904 in Budapest. As a "Prince of Hungarian Artists" he was given a state funeral and interred inside a memorial. His pictures, drawings and sketches were donated to the State of Hungary and are now in the Szepműveszeti Mezeum. Several Hungarian cities have streets named after him, there are Hungarian stamps bearing his likeness, and there is a bust in the National Museum in Budapest.