Flemish 1618-1664 Michiel Sweerts (September 29, 1618 - 1664), also known as Michael Sweerts, was a Flemish painter of the Baroque period, active in Rome (1645-1656) in the style of the Bamboccianti. The Bamboccianti were known for depicting genre scenes of daily life. Born in Brussels, he arrived in Rome in the mid 1640s, and rapidly moved into the circle of Flemish painters that had arrayed around Pieter van Laer, and that resided near Santa Maria del Popolo. In 1647, he attended meetings of the Accademia di San Luca, although not as a member. By 1659, he had returned to Brussels, where he joined the painter's guild. He appears to have become mentally unstable in his last years. In Amsterdam, he joined the Jesuits as a "lay Brother" rather than a priest, and sailed from Marsaille to the East with a missionary group. Travelling to Jerusalem, and from there to Goa, where after causing tribulations to those around him, he died. Sweerts is an enigmatic and difficult artist to categorize, since he seems to have absorbed a variety of influences to create an eclectic hybrid that can be described as a Netherlandish genre adaptation of an early tenebrist styles: a blend of Vermeer's genre of painting and Caravaggio-influenced full bodied figures.   Related Paintings of Michael Sweerts :. | A Table of Desserts | Zelie Courbet | Matilda Stoughton de Jaudenes y Nebot | Pack the hay | Funeral of St Jerome fg |
Related Artists:
Bernardino Mei
(1612/15 - 1676) worked in a Baroque manner in his native Siena and in Rome, finding patronage above all in the Chigi family. Briefly a pupil of the Sienese draughtsman and cartographer Giuliano Periccioli, where he learned the art of engraving, Bernardino passed to the studio of the painter Rutilio Manetti and probably also served in the workshop of Francesco Rustici. He painted in and around Siena, where his work came to the attention of Cardinal Fabio Chigi, who, once elected pope as Alexander VII (1655), called Bernardino Mei to Rome in 1657. There Bernardino came under the influences of Mattia Preti, Andrea Sacchi and Pier Francesco Mola, and of Guercino, to the extent that until the 20th century Bernardino's fresco of Aurora in Palazzo Bianchi Bandinelli was attributed to Guercino himself. Through the fast friendship that bonded him to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose studio he frequented, he applied that sculptor's sense of theatrical action to his own mythological and allegorical subjects. He died in Rome in 1676.
Roll Alfed Philippe
Paris 1846-Paris 1919
Joseph Raphael
1869-1950 Joseph Morris Raphael holds a high place in the California, American and French Schools of Impressionism. Born in the town of Jackson, California on June 2, 1869, Raphael became one of the most famous students of his esteemed teacher Arthur F. Mathews at the California School of Design. Later Raphael would continue his art studies in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and at the Academie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens. Early in his career he made the decision to settle in Europe in Uccle, Belgium where he and his wife established a home and raised their family. For most of his career he remained a devoted follower of pure French Impressionism. He painted the countryside near his home in Uccle, Belgium and also ventured to Holland and France to paint. Just as Raphael's international reputation grew, his family grew as well to include four daughters and one son. His family frequently appeared in his figurative works, he created wonderful closeup studies of his children and frequently captured them in leisurely picnic settings. Other paintings featured local landscapes, and sometimes his charming cottage home with its vegetable and flower gardens which were perhaps a source for his still lifes of fruits, vegetables and flowers. He lived and worked in Europe for thirty-seven years always maintaining close ties with the San Francisco art community and his loyal art dealer and collector Albert M. Bender. In 1939 with the ominous clouds of World War Two approaching, he wisely chose to return to San Francisco where he lived and maintained a studio on Sutter Street until his death on December 11th, 1950.