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 :. | View of the Chair Factory and the Seine Quay at Alfortville | The Artist Painting His Wife | View of the Bridge at Sevres and Saint-Cloud with Airplane,Balloon,and Dirigible | The Tollgate | The Customs House |
Related Artists:
Catharina Van Hemessen
1528-after1587 was a Flemish Renaissance painter. She is the earliest female Flemish painter for whom there is verifiable extant work. As with many Renaissance female painters, she was the daughter of a painter, Jan Sanders van Hemessen (c. 1500-after 1563), who was likely her teacher. She went on to create portraits of wealthy men and women often posed against a dark background. Included in her body of work is a self-portrait done in Basel. She has inscribed the painting with the year, 1548, and her age, 20 years. Her success is marked by her good standing in the Guild of St. Luke and her eventual position as teacher to three male students. Van Hemessen gained an important patron in the 1540s, Maria of Austria, who served as regent of the Low Countries for her brother Charles V. In 1554, she married Christian (or Christien) de Morien, an organist at the Antwerp Cathedral, which was at that time an important post. In 1556, when Maria resigned her post and returned to Spain, Caterina and her husband also moved, on invitation of her patron, to Spain. And two years later, when Maria died, Caterina was given a sizeable pension for life. Caterina and her husband returned to Antwerp. She was mentioned in Guicciardini's Description of the Low Countries of 1567 as one of the living women artists. She died after 1587. She mainly created portraits characterized by realism. The sitters, often seated, were usually seen against a dark or neutral ground. This type of framing and setting made for an intimate portrait. There are no extant works from after 1554, which has led some historians to believe her artistic career might have ended after her marriage. Van Hemessen is often given the distinction of creating the first self-portrait of an artist, of either gender, depicted seated at an easel.
William Matthew Prior
American, 1806-1873
Master of ST Ildefonso
Castile,end of the fifteenth century Spanish painter. He is named from St Ildefonso's Reception of a Chasuble from the Virgin Mary (Paris, Louvre), which is traditionally held to come from Valladolid; it may even have come from the chapel of S Ildefonso in the Colegiata there. The style, characterized by harmony of colour and intense expressions, resembles that of four panels of St Athanasius, St Louis of Toulouse, both enthroned, SS Peter and Paul and SS Andrew and James the Great, which probably came from the convent of La Merced, Valladolid. They have been attributed to the Master of vila, but Post considered them to be the work of the Master of St Ildefonso, a more sophisticated painter, although both artists modified the harshness of their Netherlandish models. There are also similarities with Jacomart's triptych of St Anne in the Colegiata, Jetiva, but these may be coincidental. Other works attributed to the Master include St Anne and St Anthony of Padua,