1684-1721
Antoine Watteau Art Locations
He is best known for his invention of a new genre, the fete galante, a small easel painting in which elegant people are depicted in conversation or music-making in a secluded parkland setting (see under FETE CHAMPETRE). His particular originality lies in the generally restrained nature of the amorous exchanges of his characters, which are conveyed as much by glance as by gesture, and in his mingling of figures in contemporary dress with others in theatrical costume, thus blurring references to both time and place.
Watteau work was widely collected during his lifetime and influenced a number of other painters in the decades following his death, especially in France and England. His drawings were particularly admired. Documented facts about Watteau life are notoriously few, though several friends wrote about him after his death (see Champion). Of over two hundred paintings generally accepted as his work Related Paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau :. | Fetes Venetiennes | A Capricious Woman | L'Indifferent | Gilles | Gersaint-s Shopsign | Related Artists:
Marcus Gheeraertz the Youngerpainted Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex in 1596
Witold PruszkowskiPolish Painter, 1846-1896
Polish painter and draughtsman. He spent his early years in Odessa and Kiev, subsequently living in France, in particular in Paris, where he studied under the Polish portrait painter Tadeusz Gorecki (1825-68), continuing (1868-71) at the Akademie der Kenste in Munich. In 1871 he moved to Krakew where he studied until 1875 under Jan Matejko at the School of Fine Arts. During ten years in Krakew he produced many striking portraits. In the portrait of Mrs Fedorowicz (1878; Krakew, N. Mus.) he achieved subtle effects of modelling by means of carefully differentiated tones and meticulously distributed light. The Realism of these portraits is subsumed into an advanced proto-Impressionist technique, on occasion using both small patches of distinct colour and broadly applied areas of impasto. Alongside such works, Pruszkowski produced paintings based on fantastic legends, fables and folk-tales. In these works one can trace influences going back to the artist's Munich period; but Pruszkowski's essentially Romantic vision translated his subjects into an entirely Polish context, as in Midsummer's Night (1875; Warsaw, N. Mus.) and Water Nymphs (1877; Krakew, N. Mus.). In 1882 Pruszkowski moved to the village of Mnikow outside Krakew, where he worked in the isolation he believed essential for creative activity. Contact with the country people, however, provided him with themes for his work; alongside his fantastic and legendary subjects he painted genre scenes of peasant life. He brought to his subjects a diversity of means of formal depiction, from the realistic to the near visionary. However, there are notable recurrent motifs, for example the image of the native willow, the symbolic haunt of spirits, as in Willow on Marshland (1892; Ledz, Mus. A.). The visionary element achieved its apogee in the pastel compositions from the last years of his life. In works such as Death of Ellenai (1892; Wroclaw, N. Mus.) the evanescent nature of forms is expressed through restrained colour schemes, generally tending towards silvery greyish azure or shades of pink.
Benjamin Duterrau1767 - 1851 , was an artist in England and in early colonial Australia. Duterrau was was born in London to parents of French descent. Duterrau was apprenticed to an engraver and in 1790 did two coloured stipple engravings after Morland, The Farmer's Door and The Squire's Door. Taking up painting, between 1817 and 1823 he exhibited six portraits at Royal Academy exhibitions, and he also exhibited three genre pieces at the British Institution about the same period. Duterrau emigrated to Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), arriving in August 1832 with his daughter. He lived at the corner of Campbell and Patrick Streets in Hobart, and practised as a portrait painter. In 1835 he did some etchings of Indigenous Australians, the first examples of that craft to be done in Australia. His most famous painting The Conciliation is in the Hobart gallery with a self-portrait and other works, including some modelling in relief. A large landscape is in the Beattie collection at Launceston, and he is also represented in the Dixson collection at Sydney. Duterrau died at Hobart in 1851.