French portraits painter, 1674-1735 French painter, active also in Spain. His father was the painter Antoine Ranc (1634-1716), under whom he must have trained. From 1697 he lived in Paris, where he continued his apprenticeship in Hyacinthe Rigaud's studio. After working for some years as Rigaud's assistant, he joined the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris in 1703 and reached the rank of academician as a portrait painter in 1707. As Rigaud's protege he worked for the French court, painting portraits of Louis XV (1718; Versailles, Cheteau) and almost certainly other members of the royal family as well as of the aristocracy. He also painted some allegorical and mythological works, such as Vertumnus and Pomona   Related Paintings of Jean Ranc :. | Francois Verdier, painter | Francois Verdier | Portrait of Prince Louis of Spain | The Family of Philip V | Portrait of Charles de Bourbon |
Related Artists:
Johannes Adam Oertel
German, 1823-1909
Thomas Jones
Thomas Jones (26 September 1742 - 29 April 1803) was a British landscape painter. He was a pupil of Richard Wilson and was best known in his lifetime as a painter of Welsh and Italian landscapes in the style of his master. However, Jones's reputation grew in the 20th century when more unconventional works by him, ones not been intended for public consumption, came to light. Most notable among these is a series of views of Naples which he painted from 1782 to 1783. By breaking with the conventions of classical landscape painting in favour of direct observation, they look forward to the work of Camille Corot and the Barbizon School in the 19th century. His autobiography, Memoirs of Thomas Jones of Penkerrig, went unpublished until 1951 but is now recognised as a major work of commentary on the 18th-century art world.
Fernand Leger
French Cubist Painter, 1881-1955,was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker,Leger was born in the Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Leger initially trained as an architect from 1897-1899 before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles in 1902-1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts; he also applied to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gerome and others, while also studying at the Academie Julian. He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of Impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma mere (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Leger's work after he saw the Cezanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met such leaders of the avant-garde as Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, and Robert Delaunay. His major painting of this period is Nudes in the Forest (1909-10), in which Leger displayed a personal form of Cubism??his critics called it "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical formsethat made no use of the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso. In 1910 he joined with several other artists, including Delaunay, Jacques Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin to form an offshoot of the Cubist movement, the Puteaux Group??also called the Section d'Or (The Golden Section). Leger was influenced during this time by Italian Futurism, and his paintings, from then until 1914, became increasingly abstract. Their vocabulary of tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colours plus green, black and white, as seen in the series of paintings with the title Contrasting Forms. Leger's experiences in World War I had a significant effect on his work. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French Army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne. He produced many sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches, and painted Soldier with a Pipe (1916) while on furlough. In September 1916 he almost died after a mustard gas attack by the German troops at Verdun.