Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1696-1770 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was born in Venice on March 5, 1696. His father, who was part owner of a ship, died when Tiepolo was scarcely a year old, but the family was left in comfortable circumstances. As a youth, he was apprenticed to Gregorio Lazzarini, a mediocre but fashionable painter known for his elaborately theatrical, rather grandiose compositions. Tiepolo soon evolved a more spirited style of his own. By the time he was 20, he had exhibited his work independently, and won plaudits, at an exhibition held at the church of S. Rocco. The next year he became a member of the Fraglia, or painters guild. In 1719 he married Cecilia Guardi, whose brother Francesco was to become famous as a painter of the Venetian scene. They had nine children, among them Giovanni Domenico and Lorenzo Baldassare, who were also painters. In the 1720s Tiepolo carried out many large-scale commissions on the northern Italian mainland. Of these the most important is the cycle of Old Testament scenes done for the patriarch of Aquileia, Daniele Dolfin, in the new Archbishop Palace at Udine. Here Tiepolo abandoned the dark hues that had characterized his early style and turned instead to the bright, sparkling colors that were to make him famous.  Related Paintings of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo :. | A Genius on Pegasus Banishing Time | Anbetung der Heiligen Drei Konige | Treffen von Marc Antonius und Kleopatra | Rinaldo and Armida | Triumph of ephy and Flora |
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Mark Gertler
British 1891-1939 Mark Gertler Gallery English painter. He was the son of Polish Jews and was brought up in Whitechapel in severe poverty until his father furrier workshop became moderately successful. As a child he knew nothing of art except advertisements and the work of pavement artists. He was 14 before he heard of any art institutions, and his career was determined by the discovery of W. P. Frith Autobiography in a secondhand bookshop. In 1906 he began attending art classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, as well as a series of talks on Dutch and Flemish painting. His earliest still-lifes show the influence of Dutch 17th-century painting and the work of Chardin. Gertler left the Polytechnic for financial reasons in 1907 and apprenticed himself to Clayton and Bell, a firm of glass painters. In 1908 he won a prize in a national art competition and, on the strength of this, successfully applied for financial assistance from the Jewish Educational Aid Society, using William Rothenstein as a referee. That autumn he entered the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was taught by Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer. He won several prizes and scholarships and fell in love with Dora Carrington. This and other friendships established at the Slade introduced him into a society that gave him a new perspective on his own family background. While writing delightedly to others of his nice friends among the upper classes, his paintings
anna cramer
1857-1941
Merson, Luc-Olivier
French Painter, 1846-1920 French painter and illustrator. He was the son of the painter and art critic Charles-Olivier Merson (1822-1902) and trained initially at the Ecole de Dessin in Paris under Gustave Adolphe Chassevent (1818-1901) and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Isidore-Alexandre-Augustin Pils. He made his d?but at the Salon in 1867 and won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1869 with the melodramatic work, the Soldier of Marathon (1869; Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). As a prizewinner he then spent five years in Italy, where he was impressed and influenced by the works of the Italian Primitives, as is apparent in such works as St Edmund, King and Martyr (1871; Troyes, Mus. B.-A. & Arch?ol.), with its muted colours and rigid composition. In the Salon of 1875 he exhibited Sacrifice for the Country, St Michael, which had been commissioned as a design for a Gobelins tapestry for the Salle des Ev?ques in the Panth?on, Paris. Soon afterwards he was chosen to decorate the Galerie de St Louis in the Palais de Justice, Paris, with scenes from the life of Louis IX. This resulted in two large works, Louis Opening the Doors of the Gaols on his Accession and Louis Condemning Sire Enguerrand de Coucy (both 1877). He also used historical, often religious, subjects for his smaller-scale works, as in St Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Fish (1880; Nantes, Mus. B.-A.).