English Romantic Painter, 1775-1851 Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 ?C 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321) Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840). Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321) One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.  Related Paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner :. | River | The Battle of Trafalgar by J. M. W. Turner | Black spot | Lincon church | Rom, vom Vatikan aus gesehen |
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Pierre de Valenciennes
Toulouse 1750-Paris 1819 .French painter. He trained at the academy in Toulouse under the history painter Jean-Baptiste Despax (1709-73). In 1769 he went to Italy for the first time, with Mathias Du Bourg, a councillor at the Toulouse parliament. Du Bourg introduced him to Etienne-Fran?ois, Duc de Choiseul, a keen patron of the arts, who in turn recommended him to Gabriel-Fran?ois Doyen, one of the leading history painters in Paris, whose studio he entered in 1773. Doyen gave his pupil a sense of the elevated ideals of history painting but was also sympathetic to the lesser genre of landscape. Valenciennes presumably frequented Choiseul's country seat at Chanteloup, near Amboise, meeting there the landscape painters Hubert Robert and Jean Hoeel, both proteg's of Choiseul. His early interest in the native landscape can be seen in his sketchbooks (Paris, Louvre), especially one dated 1775 that contains drawings made at Amboise, Compiegne and Fontainebleau
Rudolf Swoboda
1859 - 1914 was a 19th-century Austrian painter, born in Vienna. He studied under Leopold Carl M??ller, and voyaged with him to Egypt in 1880. He was a well-known Orientalist. In 1886, Queen Victoria commissioned Swoboda to paint several of a group of Indian artisans who had been brought to Windsor as part of the Golden Jubilee preparations. Victoria liked the resulting paintings so much that she paid Swoboda's way to India to paint more of her Indian subjects.Swoboda painted many of the ordinary people of India in a grouping of small (no more than eight inches high) paintings which resulted. While in India, he stayed, part of the time, with John Lockwood Kipling, and met his son Rudyard Kipling. The younger Kipling was unimpressed with Swoboda, writing to a friend about two "Austrian maniacs" who thought they were "almighty" artists aiming to "embrace the whole blazing East".Upon his return from India, he also painted (in 1888 and 1889) two portraits of Abdul Karim,
Paolo Anesi
Italian , Romer 1697-1773 Italian painter, draughtsman and engraver. He was the son of Pietro Anesi, a silk weaver from Venice. Paolo studied figure painting with Giuseppe Chiari and, in 1715, landscape painting with Bernardino Fergioni (1674-?1738), who was also teaching Andrea Locatelli at that time. Sebastiano Conca was another of Anesi's teachers. In 1723 Anesi married the daughter of the architect Giuseppe Sardi. His earliest known work is a drawing (1719; Florence, Uffizi), but he made his reputation with the only known example of his engraved work: Varie vedute inventate ed intagliate, dedicated to Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiali and published in Rome in 1725.