Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1591-1666 best known as Guercino or Il Guercino, was an Italian Baroque painter from the region of Emilia, and active in Rome and Bologna. Guercino is Italian for squinter, a nickname that was given to him because he was cross-eyed. He is especially noted for his many superb drawings. Guercino was born at Cento, a village between Bologna and Ferrara. By the age of 17 he was associated with Benedetto Gennari, a painter of the Bolognese School. By 1615 he moved to Bologna, where his work earned the praise of an elder Ludovico Carracci. He painted two large canvases, Elijah Fed by Ravens and Samson Seized by Philistines, in what appears to be a stark naturalist Caravaggesque style (although it is unlikely he had been able to see any of the Roman Caravaggios first-hand). They were painted for Cardinal Serra, Papal Legate to Ferrara. The Arcadian Shepherds (Et in Arcadia ego) was painted in 1618 contemporary with The Flaying of Marsyas by Apollo in Palazzo Pitti. His first style, he often claimed, was influenced by a canvas of Carracci in Cento. Some of his later pieces approach rather to the manner of his great contemporary Guido Reni, and are painted with more lightness and clearness. Guercino was esteemed very highly in his lifetime. He was then recommended by Marchese Enzo Bentivoglio to the Bolognese Ludovisi Pope, Pope Gregory XV. His two years (1621-23) spent in Rome were very productive. From this stay date his frescoes of Aurora at the casino of the Villa Ludovisi and the ceiling in San Crisogono (1622) of San Chrysogonus in Glory; his portrait of Pope Gregory (now in the Getty Museum, and, what is considered his masterpiece, The Burial of Saint Petronilla or St. Petronilla Altarpiece, for the Vatican (now in the Museo Capitolini). The Franciscan order of Reggio in 1655 paid him 300 ducats for the altarpiece of Saint Luke Displaying a Painting of the Madonna and Child (now in Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City). The Corsini also paid him 300 ducats for the Flagellation of Christ painted in 1657.   Related Paintings of GUERCINO :. | Apparition of Christ to the Virgin | The Return of the Prodigal Son | William of Aquitaine Receives the Crown of St.Bishop Felix | Apollo and Marsyas | return of the prodigal son |
Related Artists:
Morton Schamberg
American Painter and Architect , b.1881-d.1918 American painter and photographer. After training as an architect at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (A.B., 1903), he studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also in Philadelphia, from 1903 to 1906 under William Merritt Chase, with whom he travelled to Europe. From 1907 to 1909 he lived mostly in Paris, where he saw the work of major avant-garde artists, including C?zanne, Picasso and Matisse, and benefited from contact with Leo Stein, an important collector and writer. By 1909 Schamberg had responded to the example of C?zanne's paintings, including simplified and more solid forms in his own work. Following his participation in the Armory Show in 1913, Cubism became the dominant element of his art, modified in such works as Figure B, Geometric Patterns
George Luks
August 13.1866-October 29.1933,American painter and draughtsman. He lived as a child in the mining town of Shenandoah, PA, but moved to Philadelphia in 1883. The facts of his early career were later confused by the wild stories fabricated by him. After a short stint in vaudeville, he spent a year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. From 1885 he was in Europe, living most of the next decade in D?sseldorf, Munich, Paris and London, intermittently attending German and French art academies. In 1894 Luks became an artist-reporter for the Philadelphia Press, where he befriended Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J. Glackens and Everett Shinn.
Georgios Jakobides
Lesbos 11 January 1853 - Athens 13 December 1932) was a Greek painter and one of the main representatives of the Greek artistic movement of the Munich School. He founded and was the first curator of the National Gallery of Greece in Athens. His first education was in Izmir, Turkey. From 1870 to 1876 Jakobides studied sculpture and painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts, and in 1877 he went to the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste in Munich on a scholarship to continue his painting studies under Karl Theodor von Piloty. In Munich he lived for 17 years where he worked in his studio, painting mythological scenes, genre pictures, and portraits. His work is influenced by German academic Realism, his most famous paintings were of children. In the capital of Bavaria he was regarded as a successful German artist selling many of his works at high prices. The Greek government invited him in 1900 to return to Athens to organize the National Gallery of Athens, and in 1904 he was appointed Director of the Athens School of Fine Arts where he taught for 25 years. At this time, additional to his themes he produced formal portraits of eminent Greeks (e.g.Queen Sophia). He opposed all new artistic tendencies, including Impressionism and Expressionism, but supported younger artists to follow their own individual artistic tendencies. He was given awards at five international exhibhits: among those in Berlin 1891 and in Paris 1900.