1725-1805 French Jean Baptiste Greuze Galleries French painter and draughtsman. He was named an associate member of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, in 1755 on the strength of a group of paintings that included genre scenes, portraits and studies of expressive heads (t?tes d'expression). These remained the essential subjects of his art for the next 50 years, except for a brief, concentrated and unsuccessful experiment with history painting in the late 1760s, which was to affect his later genre painting deeply. Though his art has often been compared with that of Jean-Simeon Chardin in particular and interpreted within the context of NEO-CLASSICISM in general, it stands so strikingly apart from the currents of its time that Greuze's accomplishments are best described, as they often were by the artist's contemporaries, as unique. He was greatly admired by connoisseurs, critics and the general public throughout most of his life. His pictures were in the collections of such noted connoisseurs as Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, Claude-Henri Watelet and Etienne-Francois, Duc de Choiseul. For a long period he was in particular favour with the critic Denis Diderot, who wrote about him in the Salon reviews that he published in Melchior Grimm's privately circulated Correspondance litteraire. His reputation declined towards the end of his life and through the early part of the 19th century, to be revived after 1850, when 18th-century painting returned to favour, by such critics as Th?ophile Thore, Arsene Houssaye and, most notably, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their book L'Art du dix-huiti?me siecle. By the end of the century Greuze's work, especially his many variations on the Head of a Girl, fetched record prices, and his Broken Pitcher (Paris, Louvre) was one of the most popular paintings in the Louvre. The advent of modernism in the early decades of the 20th century totally obliterated Greuze's reputation. It was only in the 1970s, with Brookner's monograph, Munhall's first comprehensive exhibition of the artist's work, increased sale prices, important museum acquisitions and fresh analyses of his art by young historians, that Greuze began to regain the important place that he merits in the history of French art of the 18th century.  Related Paintings of Jean Baptiste Greuze :. | Septimius Severus and Caracalla | The Paternal Curse or and Ungrateful Son (mk05) | Young Woman Seen from the Back | Young Girl Weeping for her Dead Bird | la petit paresseux |
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Duccio
1255-c1319 Italian Duccio Location Italian painter. He was one of the most important painters of the 14th century and like his slightly younger contemporary, Giotto, was a major influence on the course of Italian painting. An innovator, he introduced into Sienese painting new altarpiece designs, a dramatic use of landscape, expressive emotional relationships, extremely complex spatial structures and a subtle interplay of colour. His most important and revolutionary work, the Maeste for Siena Cathedral, was never matched during the 14th century, if at all, and his influence lasted well into the 15th century.
Johann Peter Hasenclever
1810 Remscheid-1853 Dusseldorf, German painter. His artistic talent was recognized in 1827, while he was at school in D?sseldorf. The same year he embarked on a course in architecture at the Akademie in D?sseldorf. In 1828 he turned to the study of history painting. After a difference of opinion over the theory of art with the Director of the Akademie, Wilhelm von Schadow, Hasenclever went home to Remscheid. There he taught himself portrait painting. An example of his work from this period is the portrait of Gertraude Scharff (1832-3; Remscheid, Dt. Werkzeugmus. & Heimatmus.). From 1832 to 1838 Hasenclever again studied at the Akademie in D?sseldorf in a painting class taught by Ferdinand Theodor Hildebrandt (1804-74). In portraits and humorous genre paintings Hasenclever found a field suited to his gifts. Pithy commentaries on the everyday life of the lower middle classes are present in all of Hasenclever's work. He was best known for subjects such as wine-tastings and cellar scenes, and he also made a series of Jobs pictures, humorous, ironic interpretations of popular life based on the poem 'Jobsiade', a grotesque and comic heroic epic written by Carl Arnold Kortum in 1784.
Dirk van der Aa
Dirk van der Aa , 1731 -- February 23, 1809. He was born in The Hague, and first apprenticed to Johann Heinrich Keller, and then to Gerrit Mes with whom he would later start a workshop; they specialized in grisaille decorative paintings. He counted Evert Morel, Cornelis Kuipers, Johan Christiaan Roedig and Andries van der Aa amongst his students. He died in his home city of The Hague.