Kronach 1472-Weimar 1553 German painter and engraver. The son of a painter, he settled in Wittenberg c.1504 and was court painter successively under three electors of Saxony. There he maintained a flourishing workshop and was twice burgomaster. Cranach was a close friend of Martin Luther, whose doctrine he upheld in numerous paintings and woodcuts, and he has been called the painter of the Reformation. He was a rapid and prolific painter, and the work turned out by his studio is uneven in quality. Naïve and fanciful, often awkward in draftsmanship, it has, nonetheless, freshness and originality and a warm, rich palette. His portraits are particularly successful. Among his best-known works are Repose in Egypt (Gemäldgalerie, Staatliche Mus., Berlin-Dahlem); Judgment of Paris (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe); Adam and Eve (Courtauld Inst., London); and Crucifixion (Weimar). The latter contains figures of Luther and Cranach. His many famous protraits include those of Elector John Frederick and Self-Portrait (Uffizi). Cranach was also an accomplished miniaturist. He produced a few copperplates and designs for woodcuts. His son and pupil Lucas Cranach, the Younger,   Related Paintings of Lucas Cranach :. | The Judgment of Paris | Portrat der Herzogin Katharina von Mecklenburg | Die Heilige Dorothea | Portrait of Lucas Cranach the Elder | Doppelbildnis Herzog Heinrichs des Frommen und seiner Gemahlin Herzogin Katharina von Mecklenburg |
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Robert Lefere
Robert Jacques François Faust Lefevre (24 September 1755, Bayeux - 3 October 1830, Paris) was a French painter of portraits, history paintings and religious paintings. He was heavily influenced by Jacques-Louis David and his style s reminiscent of the antique. Robert Lefevre made his first drawings on the papers of a procureur to whom his father had apprenticed him. With his parents' consent, he abandoned this apprenticeship and walked from Caen to Paris to become a student of Jean-Baptiste Regnault (in whose studio he met and became friends with Charles Paul Landon). At the 1791 Paris Salon he exhibited his Dame en velours noir, the point of departure for his reputation. Lefevre made 1805 the portrait empress Josephine. 1807 manufactured the counterpart of emperor Napoleon Louis-Andre-Gabriel Bouchet. Napoleon gave both paintings to the city Aachen 1807, where they are today in the city hall and decorate the entrance hall. His other portraits of Napoleon, Josephine, Madame Laetitia, Guerin, Carle Vernet (a portrait which is now at the Louvre) and pope Pius VII made him a fashionable portrait artist and one of the main portraitists of the imperial personalities, a reputation sealed by his portrait of Napoleon's new wife Marie Louise. On the Bourbon Restoration Robert Lefevre painted a portrait of Louis XVIII for the Chambre des Pairs and received the cross of the Legion d'honneur and the title of First Painter to the King, losing the latter on the July Revolution. He painted a large number of portraits and history paintings. The main example of his portraits are those of Malherbe (Bibliotheque publique de Caen), Charles X, the duchesse deAngouleme, the duchesse de Berry, Charles-Pierre-François Augereau duc de Castiglione (Musee de Versailles), and of Dominique Vivant-Denon. Two of his mythological paintings - Love sharpening his arrows and Love disarmed by Venus (t. 1,84 sur 1,30 ), were engraved by Desnoyers - the latter is reproduced in le Nu Ancien et Moderne. His most notable history paintings are his Phocion getting ready to drink hemlock, Roger delivering Angelique, Heloïse and Abelard and a Crucifixion for the Mont Valerien. His last painting was The Apotheosis of Saint Louis for the Cathedral of La Rochelle.
Peter Birmann
Swiss, 1758-1844,He began his career as a portrait painter in Basle and Pruntrut but in 1775 moved to Berne, where he took up landscape painting. From 1777 to 1781 he worked with Johann Ludwig Aberli and was also a colour-printer with the publisher Abraham Wagner (1734-82). In 1781 he went to Rome, where he remained for ten years working for Louis Ducros and for Giovanni Volpato. While in Rome he painted landscapes in watercolour and drew in bistre, using a soft brush and making little use of the pen. He also sketched in the Alban Hills, being particularly attracted to the waterfalls at Tivoli and Terni. He became a member of Goethe's circle in Rome, and, under the influence of its members, he adopted Claude as his model. His watercolours and bistre drawings, enlivened by Greco-Roman or contemporary staffage, became more tranquil, more classical in style and increasingly strengthened with pen outlines. In 1792 he returned to Basle to teach. He soon became an art dealer, opened his own shop and set up his own publishing house, and in 1802 he printed his best-known work, a series of aquatints of Voyage pittoresque de Basle ? Bienne par les vallons de Mottiers-Grandval. From 1802 to 1804 he showed at the annual exhibitions of the K?nstlergesellschaft in Zurich, and in 1804 and 1810 in Berne he exhibited work in oils, a medium that was becoming increasingly important for him. In 1805 he was commissioned by the publishing house of Artaria & Co. in Vienna to sketch the scenery in the region of the north Italian lakes. For the next 30 years he continued to paint and draw, but after 1834 he tended to repeat the locales and compositions of his earlier landscapes.
Oscar Bluhm
German Painter, 1867-1912