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 :. | La Transfiguration | Cimon and Pero | Anbetung der Hirten | The Judgment of Paris | Coronation of Marie de Medicis. |
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Vasilii Dmitrievich Polenov
1844-1927
Abraham Cooper
British Painter, 1787-1868 English animal and battle painter, the son of a tobacconist, was born in London. At the age of thirteen he became an employee at Astley's Amphitheatre, and was afterwards groomed in the service of Sir Henry Meux. When he was twenty-two, wishing to possess a portrait of a favorite horse under his care, he bought a manual of painting, learned something of the use of oil-colours, and painted the picture on a canvas hung against the stable wall. His master bought it and encouraged him to continue in his efforts. He accordingly began to copy prints of horses, and was introduced to Benjamin Marshall, the animal painter, who took him into his studio, and seems to have introduced him to the Sporting Magazine, an illustrated periodical to which he was himself a contributor. In 1814 he exhibited his Tam O'Shanter, and in 1816 he won a prize for his Battle of Ligny. In 1817 he exhibited his Battle of Marston Moor and was made associate of the Academy, and in 1820 he was elected Academician. Cooper, although ill-educated, was a clever and conscientious artist; his coloring was somewhat flat and dead, but he was a master of equine portraiture and anatomy, and had some antiquarian knowledge.
Gustave Loiseau
French, 1865-1935 French painter. He was apprenticed first to a butcher and in 1880 to a house painter. It was not until 1887, when he received a small inheritance, that he was able to devote himself to painting. He spent a year studying modelling and design at the Ecole des Arts D?coratifs in Paris and then entered the studio of the French landscape painter Fernand Just Quignon (b 1854) for six months in 1889. After settling in 1890 in Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he met the painters Maxime Maufra and Henri Moret (1856-1913), he produced such carefully executed works as the Green Rocks (1893; Geneva, Petit Pal.). It was not until 1894, however, that he met Gauguin on the latter return from Tahiti, and though he did not accept Gauguin synthetist ideas the encounter led to a stronger structure and freer brushstrokes in his subsequent work.