de Figueiredo e Melo (Areia, Brazil, 29 April 1843 - Florence, Italy, 7 October 1905) was one of the most important academic painters of Brazil. He was also a writer and a teacher. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1854, where he was granted a scholarship to study in the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (Imperial Academy of Fine Arts). Later he furthered his studies in Europe, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, being a pupil of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Hippolyte Flandrin and Carle-Horace Vernet, winning much praise for his paintings, and achieving the Doctorate in Sciences at the University of Brussels, in 1868. Returning to Brazil, he produced a great series of masterpieces, including one of the most well known works of art in Brazil: Independence or Death!, depicting the moment when Prince Peter declared the country independent from Portugal, a work that has illustrated History books for elementary schools in Brazil for decades. Living mostly in Florence, Italy but traveling extensively back and forth from Rio de Janeiro, Pedro Am??rico managed to work also as a lecturer and an art historian. He married Carlota de Ara??jo Porto-alegre (1844?C1918), daughter of painter and diplomat Manuel de Ara??jo Porto-alegre, and they had children. Knighted by the German Crown he was also Great Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. With the proclamation of the Republic in Brazil in 1889, he was elected a deputy of the National Assembly.   Related Paintings of Pedro Americo :. | Fala do Trono | A Vaidosa | Independency or death | Night with the Genii of Study and Love | Passagem do chaco |
Related Artists:
Ellen Bernard Thompson
American , 1876-1936
Karoly Marko the Elder
1791-1860
Nicolas-Andre Monsiau
(1754 -- 31 May 1837) was a French history painter and a refined draughtsman who turned to book illustration to supplement his income when the French Revolution disrupted patronage. His cool Poussiniste drawing style and coloring marked his conservative art in the age of Neoclassicism. His training at the school of the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Paris, was under the direction of Jean-François-Pierre Peyron. An early patron, the marquis de Corberon, paid for a sojourn at Rome, where he studied at the French Academy in Rome from 1776. On his return to Paris, he was unable to exhibit in the annual Paris salons, which were closed to all but those who had been received by the Academie or were members, under the Ancien Regime. Instead he found an outlet in the smaller Salon de la correspondance, where in 1782 he showed a tenebrist Piquant effect of the light of a lamp. Two years later he was received at the Academie with a historical subject, Alexander taming Bucephalus and was made a member 3 October 1787, his second attempt, on the strength of The Death of Agis. The influence of Jacques-Louis David, an acquaintance from Monsiau's days in Rome, is most vividly represented by Monsiau's Ulysses, after returning to his palace and slaying Penelope's suitors, orders the women to remove the corpses (1791 Salon), where the action is played out in a shallow frieze-like space defined by a colonnade parallel to the picture plane. In his best-known painting, Zeuxis choosing among the most beautiful girls of Crotona, shown at the Salon of 1791,Monsiau illustrates an anecdote of the painter Zeuxis, recorded in Pliny's Natural History, that exemplifies an essential aspect of the Classical approach to artistic creation, in the artist's refining an ideal Art by selecting from among the lesser beauties of Nature. Monsiau's great public commission was a commemoration of the occasion on 26 January 1802, at which Napoleon delivered an authoritarian constitution to the Cisalpine Republic at a convocation of notables (the consulta) at Lyon. François Gerard had turned down the commission, preferring to continue his series of individual portraits of the Bonapartes. Monsiau received the commission in 1806; the finished painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1808 and was installed at the Tuileries the following year. Monsiau was among the first history painters to depict scenes from modern history that were not commemorations of battles. He showed Moliere reading Tartuffe at the house of Ninon de Lenclos at the Salon of 1802. It was engraved by Jean-Lous Anselin. His painting of Louis XVI giving instructions to the sea captain-explorer La Perouse before his attempted circumnavigation was exhibited at the Salon of 1817 and was purchased for the recently restored Louis XVIII. His portrayal of a sensational episode in which an escaped lion from the Grand Ducal menagerie in Florence had dropped a child it had picked up, without harming it, was exhibited at the Salon of 1801 and is conserved in the Louvre. Among his pupils was the portrait draughtsman Louis Letronne (1790--1842), whose pencil portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven is iconic.