Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings.   Related Paintings of Jan van Goyen :. | View of Dordrecht | River Scene | Marine Landscape with Fishermen | Vyhled na roviny | Rivierlandschap met gezicht op Arnhem. |
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ZUCCARELLI Francesco
Italian painter, Venetian school (b. Pitigliano, 1702, d. 1788, Firenze) Florentine landscape painter and decorator. He twice visited London, where he decorated the Opera House and was well known through popular engravings of his scenes on the Thames. He was a charter member of the Royal Academy. His facile paintings of landscapes with ruins and small figures are best seen in Windsor Castle and in the Academy, Venice.
Walter Langley,RI
1852-1922
John Anster Fitzgerald
(1819? - 1906) was a Victorian era fairy painter and portrait artist. He was nicknamed "Fairy Fitzgerald" for his main genre. Many of his fairy paintings are dark and contain images of ghouls, demons, and references to drug use; his work has been compared to the surreal nightmare-scapes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel. The year of his birth, in Lambeth Surrey,has been variously given, though 1819 is the likeliest.He was of Irish ancestry, the son of the minor poet William Thomas Fitzgerald. In 1849 Fitzgerald married Mary Ann Barr and they raised at least four sons and a daughter. As an artist, Fitzgerald appears to have been largely self-taught. His work was first shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1845; he also exhibited at the British Institution, the Society of British Artists, and the Watercolour Society. In the late 1850s he created a series of Christmas fairies for The Illustrated London News. Fitzgerald gave his works titles that often gave little clear indication of their subjects; art dealers and collectors frequently re-named them, causing great confusion in his artistic canon. Some of Fitzgerald's titles, like The Pipe Dream and The Captive Dreamer, suggest that "Fitzgerald was familiar with the opium dens which, with choral and laudanum, represented the Victorian drug scene." Fitzgerald created "remarkable fairy pictures of pure fantasy, rarely based on any literary theme."His paintings often use brilliant colors, especially reds, blues, and purples, as in The Captive Robin shown here. He produced a major series of paintings on the Cock Robin themeeamong others, Who Killed Cock Robin?, Cock Robin Defending his Nest, and Fairies Sleeping in a Bird's Nest (the last furnished with a frame made out of twigs).