French 1844-1910 Henri Rousseau Locations He was born in Laval in the Loire Valley into the family of a plumber. He attended Laval High School as a day student and then as a boarder, after his father became a debtor and his parents had to leave the town upon the seizure of their house. He was mediocre in some subjects at the high school but won prizes for drawing and music. He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but "attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army," serving for four years, starting in 1863. With his father's death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his widowed mother as a government employee. In 1871, he was promoted to the toll collector's office in Paris as a tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties, and by age 49 he retired from his job to work on his art. His wife died in 1888 and he later remarried. Rousseau claimed he had "no teacher other than nature", although he admitted he had received "some advice" from two established Academic painters, Felix Auguste-Clement and Jean-Leon Gerome. Essentially he was self-taught and is considered to be a naive or primitive painter.  Related Paintings of Henri Rousseau :. | Portrait of Rousseau's Second Wife with a Lamp | The Haystacks | Peasant Woman in the Meadow | The Flamingos | Exotic Landscape |
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Jasper Cropsey
American Hudson River School Painter, 1823-1900 Jasper Francis Cropsey (February 18, 1823 - April 23, 1900) was an important American landscape artist of the Hudson River School. Cropsey was born on his father Jacob Rezeau Cropsey's farm in Rossville on Staten Island, New York, the oldest of eight children. As a young boy, Cropsey had recurring periods of poor health. While absent from school, Cropsey taught himself to draw. His early drawings included architectural sketches and landscapes drawn on notepads and in the margins of his schoolbooks. After studying architecture for five years, he turned his attention to landscape painting, under the instruction of Edward Maury. He visited England, France, Switzerland, and Italy in 1847, went abroad again in 1855, and resided seven years in London, sending his pictures to the Royal Academy and to the International exhibition of 1862. After his return home in 1863, he opened a studio in New York, where he resided until 1885, when he removed to Hastings-on-Hudson. Trained as an architect, he set up his own office in 1843. Cropsey studied watercolor and life drawing at the National Academy of Design and first exhibited there in 1844. A year later he was elected an associate member and turned exclusively to landscape painting in the 1840s, shortly after he was featured in an exhibition entitled "Italian Compositions." Cropsey married Maria Cooley in May 1847, traveled in Europe from 1847-1849, was elected a full member of the Academy in 1851, and lived in England 1856-1863. During this time he specialized in autumnal landscape paintings of the northeastern United States, often idealized and with vivid colors. One such painting is "The Valley of the Wyoming" set in eastern Pennsylvania. The name of this valley was given to the western state of Wyoming. He co-founded, with ten fellow artists, the American Society of Painters in Water Colors in 1866.
SANO di Pietro
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1406-1481
Gourlay Steell
Scottish , 1819-1894