(born Niko Pirosmanashvili; May 5, 1862-1918) was a Georgian primitivist painter. Pirosmani was born in the Georgian village of Mirzaani to a pleasant family in the Kakheti province. His family owned a small vineyard. He was later orphaned and put in the care of his two elder sisters. He moved with them to Tbilisi in 1870. In 1872 he worked as a servant for wealthy families and learned to read and write Russian and Georgian. In 1876 he returned to Mirzaani and worked as a herdsman. Pirosmani gradually taught himself to paint. One of his specialties was painting directly into black oilcloth. In 1882 he opened a workshop in Tbilisi which was unsuccessful. In 1890 he worked as a railroad conductor, and in 1895 worked creating signboards. In 1893 he co-founded a dairy farm in Tbilisi which he left in 1901. Throughout his life Pirosmani, who was always poor, was willing to take up ordinary jobs including housepainting and whitewashing buildings. Although his paintings had some local popularity (about 200 survive) his relationship with professional artists remained uneasy; making a living was always more important to him than abstract aesthetics.  Related Paintings of Niko Pirosmanashvili :. | The Ferry at Didubeh | The Russian-Japanese War | Lion | Kakhetian Epos - Alasan Valley | Giorgi Saakadze |
Related Artists:
Christian Schilbach
( -1742 ) - Painter
Philip Reinagle
1802-1835 British Philip Reinagle Gallery Philip Reinagle entered the schools of the Royal Academy in 1769, and afterwards became a pupil of Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), whom he assisted in the numerous portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. He exhibited first at the Royal Academy in 1773, sending portraits almost exclusively until 1785, when the monotonous work of producing replicas of royal portraits appears to have given him a distaste for portraiture, and to have led him to abandon it for animal painting. He became very successful in his treatment of sporting dogs, especially spaniels, of birds, and of dead game. In 1787, however, he sent to the academy a 'View taken from Brackendale Hill, Norfolk,' and from that time his exhibited works were chiefly landscapes. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1787, but did not become an academician until 1812, when he presented as his diploma picture 'An Eagle and a Vulture disputing with a Hyaena'. He likewise exhibited frequently at the British Institution. Reinagle was also an accomplished copyist of the Dutch masters, and his reproductions of the cattle-pieces and landscapes of Paul Potter, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Berchem, Wouwerman, Adnaan van de Velde, Karel Dujardin, and others have often been passed off as originals. He also made some of the drawings for Robert John Thornton's New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus, 1799-1807, and for his Philosophy of Botany, 1809-10 ; but his best drawings for book illustration were those of dogs for William Taplin's Sportsman's Cabinet, 1803, which were admirably engraved by John Scott.[1] Reinagle died at 5 York Place, Chelsea, London, on 27 Nov. 1833, aged 84. A drawing by him, 'Fox-hunting the Death', is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Reinagle's daughter Frances Arabella was married to John Levett-Yeats, grandson of the English merchant and planter Francis Levett. His son, Ramsey Richard Reingate, was also an artist, and followed his father's style.
VEEN, Otto van
Flemish painter (b. 1556, Leiden, d. 1629, Bruxelles). Flemish painter and draughtsman of Dutch birth. Although born in Holland, he is regarded as an artist of the Catholic southern Netherlands, where he spent most of his active life. He seems to have been acquainted with most of the Netherlandish scholars of his time, and his works testify to his broad humanistic learning. This and his prominent role in the early manifestations of the Counter-Reformation in Antwerp may have led Rubens to choose him as a teacher. Van Veen's importance as an artist has often been compared to the career of his famous pupil, for whom he was certainly the most important exemplar of the pictor doctus or learned painter. Van Veen obviously represents the older generation's more classicizing and conservative response to the Counter-Reformation. For him, the return to the spiritual values of the past also implied a recovery of the pictorial style of the High Renaissance, with its deliberate borrowings from the paintings of such artists as Raphael and Correggio.