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 :. | The Four Quarters of the Globe | Bathsheba at the Fountain | The Massacre of the Innocents, | Interior of the Banquetiong House (mk01) | The Fall of Man |
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Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo
1538 - 1600 was an Italian painter, belonging to the second generation that produced Mannerism in Italian art and architecture. Gian Paolo Lomazzo was born in Milan from a family emigrated from the town of Lomazzo. His early training was with Giovan Battista della Cerva in Milan. He painted a large Allegory of the Lenten Feast for San Agostino in Piacenza (1567). He also painted an elaborate dome with Glory of Angels for the Capella Foppa in San Marco in Milan. He also painted the Fall of Simon Magus in the wall of the chapel. Lomazzo became blind in 1571, and turning to writing, produced two complex treatises that are milestones in the development of art criticism. His first work, Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584) is in part a guide to contemporary concepts of decorum, which the Renaissance inherited in part from Antiquity, which controlled a consonance between the functions of interiors and the kinds of painted and sculpted decors that would be suitable; Lespingola offered a systematic codification of esthetics that typifies the increasingly formalized and academic approaches typical of the later sixteenth century. His less practical and more metaphysical Idea del tempio della pittura ("The ideal temple of painting", 1590) offers a description along the lines of the "four temperaments" theory of the human nature and personality,
Theodor Kittelsen
1857-1914,was a Norwegian artist born in the coastal town of Kragero in Norway. He is famous for his nature paintings on the one hand, and on the other hand for his illustrations of fairytales and legends, especially of trolls. For a time, Kittelsen studied painting and watchmaking. When his talent was discovered by Diderich Maria Aall, he attended classes at the School of Art in Christiania (the present Oslo). Because of generous financial support by Aall he was able to continue his study in Munich. However, in 1879 Diderich Aall could no longer manage to support him, so Kittelsen had to earn his money as a draughtsman for German papers and magazines. When back in Norway, he found nature to be a great inspiration. Kittelsen started to write texts to his drawings here. In 1881, Kittelsen was hired to illustrate Norwegian fairy-tales by the Norwegian folklore collector Peter Christen Asbjornsen. His style could be classified between (Neo-)Romantic and naive painting. As a national artist he is highly respected and well known in Norway, but does not receive much international attention, which is the reason that his name is hardly registered in registers of painters. Black metal bands such as Burzum have used nearly all of his pictures as album art, notably illustrations taken from Kittelsen book Svartedauen (The Black Death).
Albert Weisgerber
German, 1878-1915 German painter and printmaker. He studied decoration at the Kreisbaugewerksschule in Kaiserlautern (1891-3) and began work in a decorator studio in Frankfurt am Main. However, in 1894 he moved to Munich to resume his studies, first at the Kunstgewerbeschule and later under Franz von Stuck at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste (1897-1901). For some years he concentrated on poster design and book illustration, contributing a total of 500 drawings to Jungend: Illustrierte Wochenschrift for Kunst und Leben from 1899. His early paintings such as the portrait of Ludwig Scharf II (c. 1905; Munich, Staatsgal. Mod. Kst) were executed in dark-toned academic style, but an exhibition of French Impressionism in Berlin in 1905 so impressed him that he went to Paris for nearly a year (until May 1906). Despite his association with the circle of artists around Matisse, he was more influenced by the work of Cezanne. In 1907 he made a second visit to Paris and joined Phalanx in 1909. In the latter year he was visited by Hans Purrmann and Matisse. By 1911 with a third visit to Paris and travels to Rome and Naples, he had established himself as one of the foremost German Impressionists. As well as such lyrical scenes as Munich Hofgarten (1911; Munich, Lenbachhaus), in common with many of his German contemporaries, Weisgerber reconceived classical scenes in an energetic style, for example in Amazon Camp (1910; Stuttgart, Staatsgal.). In 1912 he had a one-man show in the Kunsthaus, Zurich, and a year later participated in the annual Kunstausstellung in Munich. Although using an Impressionist style, he was equally at home in Expressionist circles, and this undoubtedly influenced his election to the presidency of the Neuen Menchner Sezession (1913). In the last four years of his career he was obsessed with sacrificial subject-matter from the Old and New Testaments, which he had originated in the theme of St Sebastian (e.g. St Sebastian Felled by Arrows, 1910; Munich, Staatsgal. Mod. Kst). While not exclusively tragic (e.g. David and Goliath, 1914; Saarbrecken, Saarland-Mus.), these final works strip away historical references to concentrate upon the fate of the isolated individual, as in Absalom (1914; Hamburg, Ksthalle).