Russian Symbolist Painter, 1869-1939 Russian painter and graphic artist. He was the son of a curator at the Hermitage, and he attended the St Petersburg Academy of Art from 1888 to 1897, studying under the Realist painter Il'ya Repin from 1894. In 1897 and again in 1898-9 he went to Paris and attended the studios of Filippo Colarossi and of Whistler. Neither the Realism of his Russian teachers nor the evanescent quality of Whistler's art was reflected for long in Somov's work. He turned instead for inspiration to the Old Masters in the Hermitage and to works of contemporary English and German artists  Related Paintings of Konstantin Somov :. | Ploughland | Firework Display | Portrait of the artist anna ostroumova | Pierrot and Lady | Sorcery (mk19) |
Related Artists:
BACKER, Jacob Adriaensz.
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1608-1651 Backer was born in Harlingen, but his family moved soon (in 1611) to Amsterdam. Between 1627 and 1633 he and Govert Flinck were pupils of Lambert Jacobsz in Leeuwarden. In 1633 he returned to Amsterdam, where he remained until his death. His extreme quickness in painting portraits has been particularly noticed, and it is said by his Amsterdam colleague Joachim von Sandrart that he completely finished, in one day, the half length portrait of a lady in full dress, even so early, that she was able to return the same day to Haarlem. Besides being an important portrait painter - some 70 portraits can be attributed to him with certainty, among them the 1642 Company of Cornelis de Graeff voor de Nieuwe Doelen in Amsterdam, on the same wall as Rembrandt's Night Watch - Backer was an excellent painter of religious and mythological paintings. He was especially interested in pastoral subjects, themes from contemporary history, like the huge Crowning of Mirtillo from 1641 in the Brukenthal collection in Sibiu (250 x 250 cm.). In fact, Backer was a leading artist in Amsterdam until his premature death in 1651.
Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein
(26 June 1788, Wildenfels, Kursachsen - 4 March 1868, Munich), born Vogel, was a German painter. Son of the child and portrait painter Christian Leberecht Vogel, Vogel was trained early in life by his father. From 1804 he visited the Kunstakademie in Dresden, where he copied many paintings in the Gemäldegalerie and also produced the first of his own portraits. In 1807 he replied to an invitation from Baron von Löwenstern, whose children he had taught in Dresden, to come to Dorpat in Livland. In 1808 he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he set up a studio in the princely and successfully worked producing portraits of nobles and diplomats. In 1812 Vogel was finally rich enough to make a long-desired grand tour to Italy, stopping off at Berlin and Dresden on the way, where he painted his parents and Franz Pettrich. From 1813 to 1820 he lived in Rome, where many German artists were active at that time. He tried to run a middle course between the classicising and romanticising schools then prevailing there, with a style of his own closely drawing on that of Raphael Mengs. In Italy he copied a large number of paintings and wall paintings by the old masters. On later journeys he further augmented his collection of copies and in 1860 published a catalogue of them. Besides religious paintings, landscapes and anatomical studies, Vogel also produced portraits in Rome, of subjects such as Bertel Thorvaldsen, Lucien Bonaparte and - on behalf of the king of Saxony - Pope Pius VII. Vogel much enjoyed Rome, as Ringseis illustrates by this story - in 1818 he received a gift of a bottle of 1634 Rheinwein wine (given by crown prince Louis I of Bavaria in thanks for the decoration of a festal hall) by unanimous resolution of his colleagues
Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres
French Neoclassical Painter, 1780-1867 was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres' portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy. A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eug??ne Delacroix. His exemplars, he once explained, were "the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art ... I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator." Nevertheless, modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of his era as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time, while his expressive distortions of form and space make him an important precursor of modern art..