Russian Painter.1914-1955 was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles Nocolas de Stael was born in the family of a Russian Lieutenant General, Baron Vladimir Stael von Holstein, (a member of the Stael von Holstein family, and the last Commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress) and his wife, Olga Sakhanskaya. De Stael's family was forced to emigrate to Poland in 1919 because of the Russian Revolution; Both, his father and stepmother, would die in Poland and the orphaned Nicolas de Stael would be sent with his older sister Marina to Brussels to live with a Russian family (1922). He eventually studied art at the Brussels Acad??mie royale des beaux-arts (1932). In the 1930s, he travelled throughout Europe, lived in Paris (1934) and in Morocco (1936) (where he first met his companion Jeannine Guillou, also a painter and who would appear in some of his paintings from 1941-1942) and Algeria. In 1936 he had his first exhibition of Byzantine style icons and watercolors at the Galerie Dietrich et Cie, Brussels. He joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 and was demobilized in 1941.   Related Paintings of Nicolas de Stael :. | Red Sky | Figure | The evase Bottle of short-necked | Abstract Figure | Sicanian |
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Joseph Siffred Duplessis
French Painter, 1725-1802 was a French painter, known for the clarity and immediacy of his portraits. He was born into a family with an artistic bent and received his first training from his father, a surgeon and talented amateur, then with Joseph-Gabriel Imbert (1666?C1749), who had been a pupil of Charles Le Brun. From 1744-47 or later he worked in Rome, in the atelier of Pierre Subleyras, who was also from the south of France, who died in 1749. In Italy Duplessis became fast friends with Joseph Vernet, another Occitan. He returned to Carpentras, spent a brief time in Lyon then arrived about 1752 in Paris, where he was accepted into the Academie de Saint-Luc and exhibited some portraits, which were now his specialty, in 1764, but did not achieve much notice until his exhibition of ten paintings at the Paris salon of 1769, very well received and selected for special notice by Denis Diderot; the Academie de peinture et de sculpture accepted him in the category of portraitist, considered a lesser category at the time. He continued to exhibit at the Paris salons, both finished paintings and sketches, until 1791, and once more, in 1801. His portrait of the Dauphine in 1771 and his appointment as a peintre du Roi assured his success: most of his surviving portraits date from the 1770s and 1780s. He received privileged lodgings in the Galeries du Louvre. In the Revolution, he withdrew to safe obscurity at Carpentras during the Reign of terror. Afterwards, from 1796, he served as curator at the newly-founded museum formed at Versaillles, so recently emptied of its furnishings at the Revolutionary sales. His uncompromising self-portrait at this time of his life is at Versailles. His adjusted his style to the social condition of his sitter: his portrait of Charles-Claude, comte d'Angiviller, director of the Batiments du Roi, is as distant and conventional as his state portrait of Louis XVI in coronation robes (1776), while his realistic and intimate portrait of the opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) catches the composer at the keyboard in a moment of inspiration and his penetrating portrait of the sculptor Christophe Gabriel Allegrain (Louvre Museum, illustration) shows him having just laid down his chisel: this was the morceau de reception that gained him admittance to the Academie. Duplessis' Benjamin Franklin on the U.S. hundred dollar billHis portrait of Benjamin Franklin (1778),
El Greco
Greek-born Spanish Mannerist Painter, 1541-1614 Considered a representative of late Renaissance Spanish art, El Greco was actually born in Greece, on the island of Crete. After studying in Venice under Titian, El Greco settled in Toledo, Spain in 1577. At the time he was wildly popular, his emotionally religious paintings being just the ticket for the hometown of the Spanish Inquisition. After his death his work was largely ignored until the beginning of the 20th century; now he considered one of the inspired geniuses of Western art. His distinctive style features bold shapes and colors, with elongated and slightly distorted figures. In Toledo El Greco was in constant demand and liked living large: he maintained a private orchestra to accompany his meals.
LIPPI, Fra Filippo
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1406-1469 Filippo Lippi was born in Florence. He took his vows in 1421 in the monastery S. Maria del Carmine, where Masaccio frescoed the Brancacci Chapel in the church (1426-1427). By 1430 Lippi is mentioned in church documents as "painter." Masaccio's influence, as well as Donatello's, can be seen in Lippi's early works, such as the Tarquinia Madonna of 1437 (National Gallery, Rome) and the Annunciation (S. Lorenzo, Florence) and Barbadori Altar (Louvre, Paris), both begun in 1437/1438. However, the severity of Masaccio and Donatello was mitigated by Lippi, who was instrumental in salvaging from the Gothic past the lyrical expressiveness of a linear mode which Masaccio had all but given up for modeling in chiaroscuro. Toward the middle of the 15th century Lippi's pictures became more finely articulated and his surface design more complex. It is probable that he had a large workshop, and the hand of assistants may be observed in the important fresco decoration started in 1452 in the choir chapel of the Prato Cathedral. After delays and strong protests this commission was finally completed in 1466. The cycle, a highly important monument of Early Renaissance painting, demonstrates Lippi's increasingly more mature style, revealing him to be witty, original, and well versed in all the artistic accomplishments of his time, to which he himself contributed. Through linear perspective Lippi was able to render a convincing illusion of recession and plausible three-dimensional figures. He knew how to express emotions, and he was a keen observer of nature. Lippi painted astonishing portrait likenesses and combined figures and space with an animated surface rhythm, the best example of which can be seen in the Feast of Herod, one of the last scenes in the Prato cycle. During his stay at Prato he was the cause of a scandal (later resolved by papal indulgence): he ran off with a nun, Lucrezia Buti, who bore him two children, one of whom, Filippino Lippi (ca. 1457-1504), was also a painter. In the Prato frescoes as well as in his contemporary panel pictures, such as the Madonna with Two Angels (Uffizi Gallery, Florence), or in the exquisite tondo of the Madonna (Pitti Palace, Florence), Filippo Lippi anticipated later developments in 15th-century painting. In these pictures are to be found the sources of Sandro Botticelli, Lippi's most illustrious pupil. Lippi's innovations extended also to iconography. In his quest for realism he introduced the "bourgeoise" Madonna: the type of contemporary Florentine lady elegantly dressed in the fashion of the time with the hair on her forehead plucked to stress the height of it. He also introduced the subject of the Madonna adoring the Child in the woods (Museum of Berlin, and Uffizi, Florence).