Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1577-1640 Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 ?C May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp which produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, king of Spain, and Charles I, king of England. Rubens was a prolific artist. His commissioned works were mostly religious subjects, "history" paintings, which included mythological subjects, and hunt scenes. He painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house. He also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the Joyous Entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not detailed; he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. He was one of the last major artists to make consistent use of wooden panels as a support medium, even for very large works, but he used canvas as well, especially when the work needed to be sent a long distance. For altarpieces he sometimes painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms 'Rubensian' or 'Rubenesque' for plus-sized women. The term 'Rubensiaans' is also commonly used in Dutch to denote such women.  Related Paintings of Peter Paul Rubens :. | Portrait of a Man jjj | Venus at a Mirror (mk08) | Charles Quint | Four Studies of the Head of a Negro | Landscape with Rainbow |
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Luke Clennell
Born, 1781, Back. Died, 1840, Country, England was an English engraver and painter. Born in Morpeth, Northumberland, the son of a farmer, he was apprenticed to the engraver Thomas Bewick in 1797. Between 1799 and 1803 he acted as Bewick's principal assistant on the second volume of the History of British Birds. After completing his seven-year apprenticeship with Bewick he moved to London, where he married a daughter of the copper-engraver Charles Turner Warren (1762-1823). Through his marriage he became acquainted with such book illustrators as William Finden and Abraham Raimbach. He gained a reputation as an engraver and in May 1806 he was awarded the gold palette of the Society of Arts for a wood-engraving of a battle scene. He subsequently gave up engraving for painting. In 1814 he received from the Earl of Bridgewater a commission for a large picture to commemorate the banquet given to the Allied Sovereigns at the Guildhall, London. He experienced great difficulty in getting the distinguished guests to sit for their portraits, and suffered a mental breakdown. After a spell in an asylum, he recovered and returned home.
Pieter Aertsen
1508-1575 Flemish Pieter Aertsen Galleries Dutch painter and draughtsman, active also in the southern Netherlands. He probably trained in his native Amsterdam but early on moved to Antwerp, where he enrolled in the Guild of St Luke as a master in 1535. In 1542 he was granted citizenship of the city. Among his pupils in Antwerp were Johannes Stradanus and later Joachim Beuckelaer, a cousin of the artist wife and his most loyal follower. The earliest known work by Aertsen is a triptych with the Crucifixion (c. 1545-6; Antwerp, Maagdenhuismus.) for the van den Biest Almshouse in Antwerp. From 1550 Aertsen development can be traced through a large number of signed and dated paintings. Religious works, mostly intended for churches, must have formed an important part of Aertsen output. His early paintings seem to have been strongly influenced by other Antwerp artists, as can be seen in the van den Biest triptych, where the figures are close to those in Jan Sanders van Hemessen background scenes. Van Hemessen influence is also strong in the pair of triptychs showing the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin and the Seven Joys of the Virgin (the latter dated 1554; both Zoutleeuw, St Leonard).