(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.   Related Paintings of Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi :. | Portrait of the Painter Ivan Shishkin | I. N. Kramskoy. D. I. Mendeleev. | Old Man with a Crutch | Old Man with a Crutch | The Mermaids |
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Jan van de Cappelle
1624-1679 Dutch Jan van de Cappelle Locations Dutch businessman, collector, painter, draughtsman and etcher. Though now considered the outstanding marine painter of 17th-century Holland, he was not a professional artist nor a member of the Amsterdam Guild of St Luke. His father owned a successful dye-works in Amsterdam, in which both Jan and his brother Louis were active. Their father enjoyed a long life and probably managed the firm until close to his death in 1674, when Jan inherited it. This left Jan with plenty of spare time to pursue his hobby, painting. He married Annetje Jansdr. (Anna Grotingh) before 1653. He died a widower, survived by his seven children, who inherited his considerable fortune. His last will shows that in addition to the dye-works and immense cash assets, van de Cappelle owned extensive properties and an art collection that must be rated among the most important of his time.
MIJN, George van der
Flemish Painter, 1719-1783
Jacques-Eugene Feyen
(1815, in Bey-sur-Seille, Meurthe-et-Moselle - 1908) was a French painter. The elder brother of painter Auguste Feyen-Perrin, Jacques-Eugene enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studied under Paul Delaroche. He had a notable career at the Paris Salon from 1841 to 1882. Vincent Van Gogh was a fan of Feyen and describes him as, "one of the few painters who pictures intimate modern life as it really is, and does not turn it into fashion plates." He set up studio and settled in summer in the town of Cancale.He spent several months every year painting views of Cancale, the oyster-picking Cancalaises and the bay of Mont St. Michel, and his paintings still enjoy a steady fame.