1825-1894 George Inness Galleries George Inness (May 1, 1825 -August 3, 1894), was an American landscape painter; born in Newburgh, New York; died at Bridge of Allan in Scotland. His work was influenced, in turn, by that of the old masters, the Hudson River school, the Barbizon school, and, finally, by the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose spiritualism found vivid expression in the work of Inness' maturity. He is best known for these mature works that helped define the Tonalist movement. Inness was the fifth of thirteen children born to John Williams Inness, a farmer, and his wife, Clarissa Baldwin. His family moved to Newark, New Jersey when he was about five years of age. In 1839 he studied for several months with an itinerant painter, John Jesse Barker. In his teens, Inness worked as a map engraver in New York City. During this time he attracted the attention of French landscape painter Regis François Gignoux, with whom he subsequently studied. Throughout the mid-1840s he also attended classes at the National Academy of Design, and studied the work of Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole and Asher Durand; "If", Inness later recalled thinking, "these two can be combined, I will try." Concurrent with these studies Inness opened his first studio in New York. In 1849 Inness married Delia Miller, who died a few months later. The next year he married Elizabeth Abigail Hart, with whom he would have six children.  Related Paintings of George Inness :. | Old Farm-Montclair | Old Elm at Medfield | The Lackawanna Valley | Milton, New York | Sunset on the Passaic |
Related Artists:
Ciudad de la Pintura

Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi
(June 8 (O.S. May 27), 1837 ?C April 6 (O.S. March 24), 1887; was a Russian painter and art critic. He was an intellectual leader of the Russian democratic art movement in 1860-1880. Kramskoi came from a poor petty-bourgeois family. From 1857 to 1863 he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts; he reacted against academic art and was an initiator of the "revolt of fourteen" which ended with the expulsion from the Academy of a group of its graduates, who organized the Artel of Artists Influenced by the ideas of the Russian revolutionary democrats, Kramskoi asserted the high public duty of the artist, principles of realism, and the moral substance and nationality of art. He became one of the main founders and ideologists of the Company of Itinerant Art Exhibitions (or Peredvizhniki). In 1863-1868 he taught at the drawing school of a society for the promotion of applied arts. He created a gallery of portraits of important Russian writers, scientists, artists and public figures (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1873, Ivan Shishkin, 1873, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov, 1876, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, 1879, Sergei Botkin, 1880) in which expressive simplicity of composition and clarity of depiction emphasize profound psychological elements of character. Kramskoi's democratic ideals found their brightest expression in his portraits of peasants, which portrayed a wealth of character-details in representatives of the common people. In one of Kramskoi's most well known paintings, Christ in the Desert (1872, Tretyakov gallery), he continued Alexander Ivanov's humanistic tradition by treating a religious subject in moral Cphilosophical terms. He imbued his image of Christ with dramatic experiences in a deeply psychological and vital interpretation, evoking the idea of his heroic self-sacrifice. Aspiring to expand the ideological expressiveness of his images, Kramskoi created art that existed on the cusp of portraiture and genre-painting ("Nekrasov during the period of 'Last songs,'" 1877-C78; "Unknown Woman," 1883; "Inconsolable grief," 1884; all in Tretyakov gallery). These paintings disclose their subjects' complex and sincere emotions, their personalities and fates. The democratic orientation of Kramskoi's art, his acute critical judgments about it, and his persistent quest for objective public criteria for the evaluation of art exerted an essential influence on the development of democratic art and aesthetics in Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century.
Caspar Wolf
Caspar Wolf (Muri, Aargau, 3 May 1735 - Heidelberg, 6 October 1783) was a Swiss painter, known mostly for his dramatic paintings of Alps. He was strongly influenced by Albrecht von Hallers poem on the Alps, and the Sturm und Drang movement. After 1773 Wolf mostly painted glaciers, caves, waterfalls and gorges. Wolf was the son of a furniture maker, who was banned from his city. Wolf was trained in Konstanz, between 1753 and 1759 he worked in Augsburg, Munich, Passau as a decoration painter. Not being able to sell his work he went disappointed back to his home town. For Horben Castle he painted by hand the wallpaper on the first floor. In 1768 Wolf lived in Basel. From 1769 till 1771 he stayed in Paris and worked with Philip James de Loutherbourg. In 1774 he moved to Bern. Wolf made a deal with the local publisher Abraham Wagner who had a geological interest, to deliver 200 paintings. He travelled with Wagner or a minister Jakob Samuel Wyttenbach in Berner Oberland and Wallis. From 1780-1781 he was working in Spa, Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle and Desseldorf. He died in poor circumstances in a hospital. In 1779 his prints were exposed were Bern but the selling of the book became a failure. Wagner became help from a Swiss army officer in Dutch service and in 1785 30 aquatints were published in Amsterdam. Till 1948 90 of these aquatints were exposed in Keukenhof Castle, but sold. Today these works can be seen in the Kunsthaus in Aarau. His son Theodor Wolf (1770 - 1818) was a still life painter.