1656-1746 French Nicolas de Largilliere Gallery Nicolas de Largilli??re (October 10, 1656 - March 20, 1746), French painter, was born in Paris. His father, a merchant, took him to Antwerp at the age of three. As a boy, he spent nearly two years in London. Sometime after his return to Antwerp, a failed attempt at business led him to the studio of Goubeau. However, Largilli??re left at the age of eighteen to seek his fortune in England, where he was befriended and employed by Lely, for four years at Windsor. His skills attracted Charles II, who wished to retain him in his service, but the fury aroused by the Rye House Plot against Roman Catholics alarmed Largilli??re. He left for Paris where he was well received by Le Brun and Van der Meulen. Despite his Flemish training as a portrait-painter, his reputation was soon established. Largilli??re's brilliant colour and lively touch attracted celebrities of his day??actresses, public men and popular preachers flocked to his studio. President Lambert, with his beautiful wife and daughter, were among his most noted subjects.  Related Paintings of Nicolas de Largilliere :. | Portrait of Jean Baptiste Forest | Portrait of Catherine Coustard with her daughter Leonor | Portrait of Helene Lambert de Thorigny | Portrait of Jacques I | Portrait of Catherine Coustard with her daughter Leonor |
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Andrei Ryabushkin
(Russian:29 October [O.S. 17 October] 1861 - 10 May [O.S. 27 April] 1904) was a Russian painter. His major works were devoted to life of ordinary Russians of the 17th century. Andrey Petrovich Ryabushkin was born in the village Stanichnaya sloboda, Borisoglebskiy uezd, Tambov gubernia in 1861. His father and brother were icon painters, and he started to help them from his early childhood. At 14 years old he became an orphan. A student of Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture A. Kh. Preobrazhensky, who spent the summer in the village, happened to see the boyes drawings and was greatly impressed by them. He started to give him lessons and helped him to enter the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Ryabushkin was one of the youngest student of the school at all times. Ryabushkin stayed for seven years (1875-82) in the Moscow School, learning from Vasily Perov and Illarion Pryanishnikov. His first large work Peasant Wedding was bought by Pavel Tretyakov in 1880. After the death of Vasiliy Perov, Ryabushkin moved to Saint Petersburg in 1882, and entered the Imperial Academy of Arts where he learned from Pavel Chistyakov. The classes soon disappointed him, however, and he began to spend more and more time either in the library of the academy or sketching in the streets. His studies at the academy came to an end in 1892. He did not receive an award for his diploma work, Descent from the Cross, as was expected, because he did not follow the approved project. But the work was so good that the president of the academy, Grand Duke Vladimir Konstantinovich, provided Ryabushkin with a stipend for travel and studies abroad from his own means. Instead of going to Italy or Paris, Ryabushkin chose to make a tour of ancient Russian towns (Novgorod, Kiev, Moscow, Uglich, Yaroslavl). The inhabitants of them became his first models and his first critics.
Jan van Goyen
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings.
Ettore Cercone
1850-1896 Italian