Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1593-1678 Jacob Jordeans was born on May 19, 1593, the first of eleven children, to the wealthy linen merchant Jacob Jordaens Sr. and Barbara van Wolschaten in Antwerp. Little is known about Jordaens's early education. It can be assumed that he received the advantages of the education usually provided for children of his social class. This assumption is supported by his clear handwriting, his competence in French and in his knowledge of mythology. Jordaens familiarity with biblical subjects is evident in his many religious paintings, and his personal interaction with the Bible was strengthened by his later conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism. Like Rubens, he studied under Adam van Noort, who was his only teacher. During this time Jordaens lived in Van Noort's house and became very close to the rest of the family. After eight years of training with Van Noort, he enrolled in the Guild of St. Luke as a "waterscilder", or watercolor artist. This medium was often used for preparing tapestry cartoons in the seventeenth century. although examples of his earliest watercolor works are no longer extant. In the same year as his entry into the guild, 1616, he married his teacher's eldest daughter, Anna Catharina van Noort, with whom he had three children. In 1618, Jordaens bought a house in Hoogstraat (the area in Antwerp that he grew up in). He would then later buy the adjoining house to expand his household and workspace in 1639, mimicking Rubens's house built two decades earlier. He lived and worked here until his death in 1678. Jordaens never made the traditional trip to Italy to study classical and Renaissance art. Despite this, he made many efforts to study prints or works of Italian masters available in northern Europe. For example, Jordaens is known to have studied Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, and Bassano, either through prints, copies or originals (such as Caravaggio's Madonna of the Rosary). His work, however, betrays local traditions, especially the genre traditions of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in honestly depicting Flemish life with authenticity and showing common people in the act of celebratory expressions of life. His commissions frequently came from wealthy local Flemish patrons and clergy, although later in his career he worked for courts and governments across Europe. Besides a large output of monumental oil paintings he was a prolific tapestry designer, a career that reflects his early training as a "watercolor" painter. Jordaens' importance can also be seen by his number of pupils; the Guild of St. Luke records fifteen official pupils from 1621 to 1667, but six others were recorded as pupils in court documents and not the Guild records, so it is probable that he had more students than officially recorded. Among them were his cousin and his son Jacob. Like Rubens and other artists at that time, Jordaens' studio relied on his assistants and pupils in the production of his paintings. Not many of these pupils went on to fame themselves,however a position in Jordaens's studio was highly desirable for young artists from across Europe.  Related Paintings of Jacob Jordaens :. | Portrait of the Artist's Daughter Elizabeth | Diana and Actaeon | Studies of the Head of Abraham Grapheus | Madonna and Child Wreathed wih Flowers | Allegory of Fettility |
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Andre Beauneveu
Netherlandish Gothic Era Painter and Sculptor, 1335-ca.1401 Andre Beauneveu was born in Valenciennes. Little is known about his early life and he is first documented in 1360. Four years later, he commissioned to create a collection of royal tombs in Paris for King Charles V. In 1366, Beauneveau left Paris and began working for the Count of Flanders in Courtrai beginning in 1374. Then in 1386, he began working for Jean, Duc de Berry and served him for the rest of his life. Beauneveau was primarily a sculptor, but also produced illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows. His work was integral to the development of naturalism in the 15th century.
Eduard Hildebrandt
(1818 - October 25, 1868) was a German painter. He served as apprentice to his father, a house-painter at Danzig. He was not twenty when he came to Berlin, where he was taken in hand by Wilhelm Krause, a painter of sea pieces. Several early pieces exhibited after his deathea breakwater, dated 1838, ships in a breeze off Swinemunde (1840), and other canvases of this and the following yeareshow Hildebrandt to have been a careful student of nature, with inborn talents kept down by the conventionalisms of the formal school to which Krause belonged. Accident made him acquainted with masterpieces of French art displayed at the Berlin Academy, and these awakened his curiosity and envy. He went to Paris, where, about 1842, he entered the atelier of Isabey and became the companion of Lepoittevin. In a short time he sent home pictures which might have been taken for copies from these artists. Gradually he mastered the mysteries of touch and the secrets of effect in which the French at this period excelled. He also acquired the necessary skill in painting figures, and returned to Germany, skilled in the rendering of many kinds of landscape forms. His pictures of French street life, done about 1843, while impressed with the stamp of the Paris school, reveal a spirit eager for novelty, quick at grasping, equally quick at rendering, momentary changes of tone and atmosphere. After 1843 Hildebrandt, under the influence of Humboldt, extended his travels, and in 1864-1865 he went round the world. Whilst his experience became enlarged his powers of concentration broke down. He lost the taste for detail in seeking for scenic breadth, and a fatal facility of hand diminished the value of his works for all those who look for composition and harmony of hue as necessary concomitants of tone and touch. In oil he gradually produced less, in water colours more, than at first, and his fame must rest on the sketches which he made in the latter form, many of them represented by chromolithography. Fantasies in red, yellow and opal, sunset, sunrise and moonshine, distances of hundreds of miles like those of the Andes and the Himalaya, narrow streets in the bazaars of Cairo or Suez, panoramas as seen from mast-heads, wide cities like Bombay or Pekin, narrow strips of desert with measure-less expanses of skyall alike display his quality of bravura. Hildebrandt died at Berlin on the 25th of October 1868.
FIGINO, Giovanni Ambrogio
Italian painter, Lombard school (b. ca. 1551, Milano, d. 1608, Milano) was an Italian Renaissance painter from Milan. An important representative of the Lombard school of painting, he had been taught by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo. Best known as a draftsman, he was also a skilled portrait painter. Among the few portraits that can be traced back to Figino, the portrait of Field Marshal Lucio Foppa is one of the best known. On January 25, 2001, his Portrait of Giovanni Angelo was auctioned at Sotheby's for US$ $1,435,750; after a high estimate of US$ 180,000[1]. The organ shutters for the Cathedral of Milan were painted after 1590 by Ambrogio, Camillo Procaccini, and Giuseppe Meda, depicting the Passage of the Red Sea and the Ascencion of Christ. In the Castello Sforcesco there is a painting of his of Saint Ambrose expelling the Arians. A still life painting, a thematic uncommon among Italians of his day, of peaches is attributed to him He also painted in Milan an Immaculate conception for Sant'Antonio,