1593-1652 French Georges de La Tour Galleries His early work shows influences from Caravaggio, probably via his Dutch followers, and the genre scenes of cheats??as in The Fortune Teller ??and fighting beggars clearly derive from the Dutch Caravaggisti, and probably also his fellow-Lorrainer, Jacques Bellange. These are believed to date from relatively early in his career. La Tour is best known for the nocturnal light effects which he developed much further than his artistic predecessors had done, and transferred their use in the genre subjects in the paintings of the Dutch Caravaggisti to religious painting in his. Unlike Caravaggio his religious paintings lack dramatic effects. He painted these in a second phase of his style, perhaps beginning in the 1640s, using chiaroscuro, careful geometrical compositions, and very simplified painting of forms. His work moves during his career towards greater simplicity and stillness ?? taking from Caravaggio very different qualities than Jusepe de Ribera and his Tenebrist followers did. He often painted several variations on the same subjects, and his surviving output is relatively small. His son Etienne was his pupil, and distinguishing between their work in versions of La Tour's compositions is difficult. The version of the Education of the Virgin, in the Frick Collection in New York is an example, as the Museum itself admits. Another group of paintings (example left), of great skill but claimed to be different in style to those of de La Tour, have been attributed to an unknown "Hurdy-gurdy Master". All show older male figures (one group in Malibu includes a female), mostly solitary, either beggars or saints. After his death in 1652, La Tour's work was largely forgotten until rediscovered by Hermann Voss, a German scholar, in 1915. In 1935 an exhibition in Paris began the revival in interest among a wider public. In the twentieth century a number of his works were identified once more, and forgers tried to help meet the new demand; many aspects of his œuvre remain controversial among art historians.  Related Paintings of Georges de La Tour :. | St Sebastian Attended by St Irene | Ijob will mock of its woman | Die Auffindung der Leiche des Hl.Sebastian | The Dream of St. Joseph | Hurdy gurdy player |
Related Artists:
Woolner, Thomas
1825 - 1892,English sculptor and poet. He ranks with John Henry Foley as the leading sculptor of mid-Victorian England. He trained with William Behnes and in 1842 enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy, London. In 1844 he exhibited at Westminster Hall, London, a life-size plaster group, the Death of Boadicea (destr.), in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain sculptural commissions for the Houses of Parliament. His earliest important surviving work is the statuette of Puck (plaster, 1845-7; C. G. Woolner priv. col.), which was admired by William Holman Hunt and helped to secure Woolner's admission in 1848 to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The work's Shakespearean theme and lifelike execution, stressing Puck's humorous malice rather than traditional ideal beauty, made it highly appealing. Although eclipsed by Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Woolner was an important figure in the Brotherhood. He contributed poetry to its journal, The Germ (1850), and his work was committed to truthfulness to nature more consistently than that of any other Pre-Raphaelite, except for Hunt. This is evident in Woolner's monument to William Wordsworth (marble, 1851; St Oswald, Grasmere, Cumbria).
Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot
(1586, Utrecht (city) - May 14, 1666, Utrecht (city)), was a Dutch Golden Age painter. According to Houbraken his village scenes (Boerekermisstuk) were as popular as flower pieces by Bartholomeus Assteyn.Houbraken thought he was born in Gorinchem or Dordrecht, and claimed he worked for a long time in Dordrecht. He felt his work was always according to a set pattern, where cake sellers were portrayed in front of village houses with figures in a festive setting called a "farmer's circus". It is unclear why Houbraken would have thought he was from Dordrecht, especially since Houbraken's data on painters from Dordrecht was generally quite accurate. Droochsloot and his son were highly respected citizens of Utrecht with a large workshop. According to the RKD his monogram was "JCODS" and he became a member of the Utrecht Guild of Saint Luke in 1616. He later became deacon of the guild in 1623 and regent of the St. Jobs Gasthuis in 1638, deacon of the Dutch Reformed church, and in 1665 officer of the Utrecht schutterij. He was the father of the painter Cornelis Droochsloot (1630-1673) whose paintings are hard to distinguish from his own, and the teacher of Jacob Duck.
Willem Roelofs
Dutch Painter, 1822-1897 Dutch painter. He is said to have made his first sketches at the age of four; at fifteen he completed his first landscape painting. Many of these early works are in the print rooms of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. In c. 1837-8 he was apprenticed to the amateur painter Abraham Hendrik de Winter (1800-61) in Utrecht, where the Roelofs family had moved in 1826. In 1838 he entered his first paintings in the Exhibition of Living Masters in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. In the late summer of 1840 Roelofs became a pupil of the landscape and animal painter Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuyzen (1795-1860), with whom he made a study trip to Germany in 1841. Roelofs took a special interest in nature: he applied himself energetically both to painting and drawing, almost always selecting landscape subjects. He also studied entomology and accumulated a large collection of insects. After his training he returned to his parents in Utrecht.