French Rococo Era Painter, 1725-1805 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 (tetes 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-Franeois, 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 litt?raire. 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 Theophile Thore, Arsene Houssaye and, most notably, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their book L'Art du dix-huitieme 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.   Related Paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze :. | Count P.A Stroganov as a Child | The Inconsolable Widow | A Young Man in a Hat | The Village Marriage Contract | L'Accordee du Village |
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Januarius Zick
German,1730-1797 was a painter and architect. He is considered to be the one of the main masters of the Late-Baroque. Januarius Zick was born in Munich and began to learn his trade from his father, Johannes Zick, a renowned painter himself, to whom he was apprenticed in order to learn how to paint frescoes. In 1744, when Januarius Zick was fourteen years old, his brother, three years his junior, fell to his death from a scaffolding in Weingarten. From 1745 to 1748, Januarius Zick was apprenticed as a bricklayer to Jakob Emele in Schussenried. Having finished his apprenticeship, he worked, together with his father, at the residence of the Prince-Bishop of Wurzburg and then, until the mid-1750s, at the residence of the Prince-Bishop of Speyer in Bruchsal. In 1756, Januarius Zick went to Paris to further his education. There, he came into contact with artists and art connoiseurs from Rome, Basel and Augsburg, who broadened his horizon concerning his art and had a considerable influence on him. After having furnished Castle Engers near Neuwied with frescoes in 1760, he was appointed court painter to the Prince-Elector of Trier, the archbishop of Trier. He married in Ehrenbreitstein and settled there. After 1774, he also designed intarsia paintings for cabinet maker David Roentgen. From the late 1770s on, Januarius Zick was very active in Upper Swabia, furnishing a number of monastery churches and parish churches with frescoes and altarpieces.
Wilmot Pilsbury,RWS
1840-1908
Moritz von Schwind
Austrian Romantic Painter, 1804-1871 Austrian painter and illustrator. He studied at the Akademie der Bildende K?nste in Vienna (1821-3), where he was influenced by the Biedermeier genre painter Peter Krafft and the Nazarene painter Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld. He made copies after the Old Masters at the Belvedere in Vienna, exploring especially D?rer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Raphael and Titian, which completed his early, largely autodidactic experience of art. His friendship with Franz Schubert, the poet and playwright Franz Grillparzer and the painters Ferdinand and Friedrich Olivier, as well as the cultural environment of Biedermeier Vienna in his years there between 1823 and 1828, shaped his spiritual development as a painter. His love of music inspired his later 'symphonic' compositions and flowing linear rhythms. Extensive reading of the work of Romantic writers such as Achim von Arnim, Clemens von Brentano, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Heinrich von Hagen and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm helped prepare his mature pictorial themes of fairytales, legends and sagas. He was unsuccessful as a painter and eked out a meagre livelihood by drawing naturalistic genre scenes for engravers, while occasionally selling a painting. Walk before the City Gate