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 :. | River Landscape | River Landscape (mk08) | View of Leiden | View of Dordrecht | The Meuse at Dordrecht with the Grote Kerk. |
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oskar kokoschka
Kokoschka was born in Pöchlarn. His early career was marked by portraits of Viennese celebrities, painted in a nervously animated style. He served in the Austrian army in World War I and was wounded. At the hospital, the doctors decided that he was mentally unstable. Nevertheless, he continued to develop his career as an artist, traveling across Europe and painting the landscape.
Gijsbrecht Leytens
(1586-1643 or 1656), also known as The Master of the Winter Landscapes, was a Flemish Baroque painter who specialized in winter landscapes influenced by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Gillis van Coninxloo. He became a master in Antwerp's guild of St. Luke in 1611, but little else is known of his career. Like his contemporaries in Antwerp, Abraham Govaerts and Alexander Keirincx, Leytens painted wooded landscapes populated with small figures, bracketed by strong repoussoir trees. His paintings, however, were generally winter scenes, a recognized specialty known as a Winterken ("little winter").
Jean Leon Gerome
French 1824-1904 Jean Leon Gerome Galleries French painter, sculptor, and teacher. Son of a goldsmith, he studied in Paris and painted melodramatic and often erotic historical and mythological compositions, excelling as a draftsman in the linear style of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. His best-known works are scenes inspired by several visits to Egypt. In his later years he produced mostly sculpture. He exerted much influence as a teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; his pupils included Odilon Redon and Thomas Eakins. A staunch defender of the academic tradition, he tried in 1893 to block the government acceptance of the Impressionist works bequeathed by Gustave Caillebotte.