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 :. | The Inconsolable Widow | ''Portrait of Count Stroganov as a Child | A Girl | Portrait of a Boy | Portrait de Claude Henri Watelet |
Related Artists:
Eldress Polly Jane Reed
b.1818 d.1881
GHEERAERTS, Marcus the Younger
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1561-1636 was an artist of the Tudor court, described as "the most important artist of quality to work in England in large-scale between Eworth and Van Dyck" He was brought to England as a child by his father Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, also a painter. He became a fashionable portraitist in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I under the patronage of her champion and pageant-master Sir Henry Lee, introducing a new aesthetic in English court painting that captured the essence of a sitter through close observation. He became a favorite portraitist of James I's queen Anne of Denmark, but fell out of fashion in the later 1610s. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger was the son of the artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder and his wife Johanna. Hardly anything is known of the paintings of the elder Gheeraerts, although his work as a printmaker reached around Europe. Like other Protestant artists, Gheeraerts the Elder fled to England with his son to escape persecution in the Netherlands under the Duke of Alva. His wife was a Catholic and remained behind; she is assumed to have died a few years later. Father and son are recorded living with a Dutch servant in the London parish of St Mary Abchurch in 1568. On 9 September 1571, the elder Gheeraerts remarried. His new wife was Susanna de Critz, a member of an exiled family from Antwerp. It is uncertain by whom young Marcus was trained, although it is likely to have been his father; he was possibly also a pupil of Lucas de Heere. Records suggest that Marcus was active as a painter by 1586 In 1590 he married Magdalena, the sister of his stepmother Susanna and of the painter John de Critz.
Balthasar Denner
(15 November 1685 in Altona - 14 April 1749 in Rostock) was a German painter, highly-regarded as a portraitist. He painted mostly half-length and head-and-shoulders portraits and a few group portraits of families in interiors. Usually Denner concentrated on the face; clothes and paraphernalia were done by other painters or later his daughter.