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 de Village | Septimius Severus and Caracalla | L enfant a la colombe | The Village Betrothal (mk05) | la petit paresseux |
Related Artists:
Demuth, Charles
American Precisionist Painter, 1883-1935 American painter and illustrator. He was deeply attached to Lancaster, where his family had run a tobacco shop since 1770. Although not a Regionalist, Demuth maintained a strongly localized sense of place, and Lancaster provided him with much of the characteristic subject-matter of both his early and later work. He trained in Philadelphia at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (1901-5) and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1905-11), where his teachers included Thomas Anshutz, Henry McCarter (1864-1942), Hugh Breckenridge (1870-1937) and William Merritt Chase.
Artemisia Gentileschi
Italian 1593-1652 Artemisia Gentileschi Gallery Gentileschi was born on July 8, 1593 in Rome. She was the daughter of the painter Orazio Gentileschi and was trained by him. Our perception of Gentileschi has been colored by the legend surrounding her. Her alleged rape by her father colleague, the quadratura painter Agostino Tassi, when she was 17, was the subject of a protracted legal action brought by Orazio in 1611. Although she was subsequently married off to Pietro Antonio di Vicenzo Stiattesi in 1612 and gave birth to at least one daughter, she soon separated from her husband and led a strikingly independent life for a woman of her time - even if there is no firm evidence for the reputation she enjoyed in the 18th century as a sexual libertine. After her marriage, Gentileschi lived in Florence until about 1620. She then worked in Genoa and settled in Naples in 1630. Gentileschi traveled to England in 1638-40, where she collaborated with her father on a series of canvasses for the Queen House, Greenwich (now Marlborough House, London). Gentileschi died in Naples in 1652. It is tempting to adduce the established biographical data in partial explanation of the context of her art: the sympathy and vigor with which she evokes her heroines and their predicaments, and her obsession with that tale of female triumph, Judith and Holofernes. But such possibilities should not distract attention from the high professional standards that Gentileschi brought to her art. In a letter, dated July 3, 1612, to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Orazio claimed that "Artemisia, having turned herself to the profession of painting, has in three years so reached the point that I can venture to say that today she has no peer. Despite the obvious exaggeration, one can agree that Gentileschi art was of a consistently high quality virtually from the beginning.
Luke Clennell
Born, 1781, Back. Died, 1840, Country, England was an English engraver and painter. Born in Morpeth, Northumberland, the son of a farmer, he was apprenticed to the engraver Thomas Bewick in 1797. Between 1799 and 1803 he acted as Bewick's principal assistant on the second volume of the History of British Birds. After completing his seven-year apprenticeship with Bewick he moved to London, where he married a daughter of the copper-engraver Charles Turner Warren (1762-1823). Through his marriage he became acquainted with such book illustrators as William Finden and Abraham Raimbach. He gained a reputation as an engraver and in May 1806 he was awarded the gold palette of the Society of Arts for a wood-engraving of a battle scene. He subsequently gave up engraving for painting. In 1814 he received from the Earl of Bridgewater a commission for a large picture to commemorate the banquet given to the Allied Sovereigns at the Guildhall, London. He experienced great difficulty in getting the distinguished guests to sit for their portraits, and suffered a mental breakdown. After a spell in an asylum, he recovered and returned home.