1637-1712 Dutch Jan Van Der Heyden Gallery Van der Heyden grew up in Gorcum, but the family moved to Amsterdam around 1650. They lived on Dam Square. As a young guy he witnessed the fire in the old townhall which made a deep impression on him. He later would describe or draw 80 fires in almost any neighborhood of Amsterdam. When he married in 1661 the family was living on Herengracht, the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam. In 1668 Cosimo II de' Medici bought one of his paintings, a view of the townhall with a manipulated perspective. Van der Heyden often painted country estates, like Goudestein, owned by Joan Huydecoper II. He was not good in drawing figures and used for his paintings a metal plate for bricks, a sponge or moss for the leaves. Johannes Lingelbach, Adriaen van de Velde und Eglon van der Neer assisted him drawing the figures. Jan van der Heyden also introduced the lamp post and in 1672 impoved the design of the fire engine. He died in wealth as the superintendent of the lighting and director of the (voluntary) firemen's guild at Amsterdam. Van der Heyden was a contemporary of the landscape painters Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael, with the advantage, which they lacked, of a certain professional versatility; for, whilst they painted admirable pictures and starved, he varied the practice of art with the study of mechanics. Until 1672 he painted in partnership with Adriaen van de Velde. After Adrian's death, and probably because of the loss which that event entailed upon him, he accepted the offices to which allusion has just been made. At no period of artistic activity had the system of division of labour been more fully or more constantly applied to art than it was in Holland towards the close of the 17th century. Van der Heyden, who was perfect as an architectural draughtsman insofar as he painted the outside of buildings and thoroughly mastered linear perspective, seldom turned his hand to the delineation of anything but brick houses and churches in streets and squares, or rows along canals, or "moated granges," common in his native country. He was a travelled man, had seen The Hague, Ghent and Brussels, and had ascended the Rhine past Xanten to Cologne, where he copied over and over again the tower and crane of the great cathedral. But he cared nothing for hill or vale, or stream or wood. He could reproduce the rows of bricks in a square of Dutch houses sparkling in the sun, or stunted trees and lines of dwellings varied by steeples, all in light or thrown into passing shadow by moving cloud. He had the art of painting microscopically without loss of breadth or keeping. But he could draw neither man nor beast, nor ships nor carts; and this was his disadvantage. His good genius under these circumstances was Adrian van der Velde, who enlivened his compositions with spirited figures; and the joint labour of both is a delicate, minute, transparent work, radiant with glow and atmosphere.  Related Paintings of Jan van der Heyden :. | Church of Jesus landscape | City Hall and Plaza | Baroque palaces and the Cathedral | Forest landscape | Castle Garden in the rear |
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Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld
(1758 - 1846) was a French painter. A native of the city of Carpentras, Bidauld first studied painting with his elder brother, Jean-Pierre-Xavier, in Lyons. In 1783 he traveled to Paris, there winning the favor of an art dealer and perfume seller named Dulac. This latter subsidized Bidauld's travels in Italy, where for five years he lived in Rome and traveled widely. Most of his contacts within the French artistic community in that city were history painters. In 1790 Bidauld returned to Paris; in 1791 he entered the Salon for the first time. Thereafter he participated regularly. In 1792 he began receiving official commissions, and in 1823 he became the first landscape painter elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts. 1825 saw him awarded the Legion d'honneur. His reputation began to decline at about this time; as a member of the Salon jury, he was seen as blocking a new generation of landscape painters from gaining entry. Chief among these was Theodore Rousseau. Bidauld was savaged in the press, and as a result became unable to sell his work. By the time of his death, he was near penury.
Thomas Faed
Scottish Painter, 1826-1900 was a Scottish painter born in Gatehouse of Fleet, Kirkcudbrightshire, and was the brother of John Faed. He received his art education in the school of design, Edinburgh and was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1849. He came to London three years later, was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1861, and academician in 1864, and retired in 1893. He had much success as a painter of domestic genre, and had considerable executive capacity. Three of his pictures, The Silken Gown, Faults on Both Sides, and The Highland Mother are in the Tate Gallery and a further two, Highland Mary and The Reaper hang in the Aberdeen Art Gallery. The Last of the Clan, completed in 1865.
Cornelis van Dalem
1535-1576 Dutch Cornelis van Dalem Location Flemish painter. He was the son of a well-to-do cloth merchant living in Antwerp, but of Dutch origin. Cornelis received a humanistic education. His father, who owned land in Tholen, as a vassal to the Counts of Holland and Zeeland, was dean of the chamber of rhetorics De Olijftak (The Olive Branch) in Antwerp in 1552-3. According to van Mander, Cornelis was himself learned in poetry and history and only painted as an amateur, not for a living. Documents in the Antwerp archives invariably refer to him as a merchant, never as a painter, which no doubt accounts for the small number of known paintings by him. He learnt to paint with an otherwise unknown artist, Jan Adriaensens, who had also taught his older brother Lodewijk van Dalem ( fl 1544-85). The latter was inscribed as a pupil in 1544-5 and became a master in the guild in 1553-4. Cornelis was himself inscribed a year after his brother, and he became a master in 1556, the same year he married Beatrix van Liedekercke, a member of an Antwerp patrician family. They lived in Antwerp until late 1565, when, apparently for religious reasons, they left for Breda, together with the artist mother, who had become a widow in 1561. In 1571 several local witnesses testified that van Dalem, who was then living in a small castle, De Ypelaar, in Bavel, near Breda, was strongly suspected of being a heretic. He was never seen in church and was said, on the contrary, to have often attended Protestant services and to have publicly expressed contempt for Papists.