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 :. | L'Accordee du Village (mk08) | Portrait of a Lady | Young Girl Weeping for her Dead Bird | Silence (mk25) | L-Accordee de Village |
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John Frederick Herring
British 1795-1865 was a painter, sign maker and coachman in Victorian England.John F. Herring, Sr. is the painter of the 1848 "Pharoah's Chariot Horses" (archaic spelling "Pharoah"). He amended his signature "SR" (senior) in 1836, with the growing fame of his teenage son John Frederick Herring, Jr.Herring, born in London in 1795, was the son of a London merchant of Dutch parentage, who had been born overseas in America. The first eighteen years of Herring's life were spent in London, England, where his greatest interests were drawing and horses.In the year 1814, at the age of 18, he moved to Doncaster in the north of England, arriving in time to witness the Duke of Hamilton's "William" win the St. Leger Stakes horserace. By 1815, Herring had married Ann Harris; his sons John Frederick Herring, Jr., Charles Herring, and Benjamin Herring were all to become artists, while his two daughters, Ann and Emma, both married painters. In Doncaster, England, Herring was employed as a painter of inn signs and coach insignia on the sides of coaches,and his later contact with a firm owned by a Mr. Wood led to Herring's subsequent employment as a night coach driver. Herring spent his spare time painting portraits of horses for inn parlors, and he became known as the "artist coachman" (at the time).Herring's talent was recognized by wealthy customers, and he began painting hunters and racehorses for the gentry. In 1830, John Frederick Herring, Senior left Doncaster for Newmarket, England, where he spent three years before moving to London, England. During this time, Herring might have received tuition from Abraham Cooper. In London, Herring experienced financial difficulties and was given financial assistance by W. T. Copeland, who commissioned many paintings, including some designs used for the Copeland Spode bone china. In 1840-1841, Herring visited Paris, painting several pictures, on the invitation of the Duc d'Orleans.
Gustave Le Gray
French Photographer, 1820-1884,French photographer, painter and teacher. He studied painting with Paul Delaroche until 1843. A study trip to Switzerland and Italy, financed by his parents, followed, but it was cut short by an untimely marriage in 1844, his sudden return to his family's home and the subsequent birth of two children in 1845 and 1846. Skilled in painting as an experimenter with pigments, he was attracted to the experimental side of the new paper negative processes available in France after 1847 and plunged into photography, probably to finance the burdens of the family life newly thrust upon him. His treatise, Trait? pratique de photographie sur papier et sur verre (1850), outlined his own variant of the dry waxed paper negative process using thinner paper, as well as a recipe for collodion on glass negatives rivalling that of the English inventor Frederick Scott Archer (see PHOTOGRAPHY,
Marianne Loir
French Painter, ca.1715-1769