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 :. | Stormy Landscape | The Raising of the Cross (mk05) | The Council of the Gods | The Wounds Van St. Franciscus Xaverius | Albert and Nicolaas Rubens |
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Jozef Israels
(27 January 1824, Groningen - 12 August 1911, Scheveningen) was a Dutch painter, and "the most respected Dutch artist of the second half of the nineteenth century".
Lundbye, Johan Thomas
Danish Painter, 1818-1848 Danish painter. He studied at the Kongelige Akademi for de Sk?nne Kunster, Copenhagen, under Johan Ludvig Lund (1777-1867) and the animal painter Christian Holm (1804-46) between 1832 and 1842. Early on he was influenced by the ideas of the art historian N. L. H?yen, especially his concept of a truly national school of landscape painting. Kalundborg Church (1837; Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst) depicts a historical monument familiar to all Danes, and one that had a particular nostalgic attraction for a painter born in Kalundborg. The picture is both sharply naturalistic and emphatically painterly. In Landscape Near Arres? (1838; Copenhagen, Thorvaldsens Mus.) Lundbye was more occupied with the representation of light and space. There is no anecdotal element; the lake, the open sky, the low hills, the ancient cairn, the cattle and the playing children sum up a typical Danish summer landscape. His larger canvases emphasize openness; flat expanses of land terminate in low tree-fringed horizons below vast skies. They have little of Constable's temperament or the broadness of Corot but are close to the elegiac mood of Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl. Danish landscape painting during the mid-1830s was greatly influenced by Romanticism
Meunier, Constantin
Belgian Painter and Sculptor, 1831-1905 Belgian sculptor, painter and draughtsman. He was directed towards an artistic career by his elder brother, the engraver Jean-Baptiste Meunier (1821-1900). He entered the Acad?mie des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in September 1845 and studied under the sculptor Louis Jehotte (1804-84) from 1848. In addition, in 1852 he attended the private studio of the sculptor Charles-Auguste Fraikin. Gradually he came to feel that sculpture, at least in the traditional form taught in Brussels, was incapable of providing an adequate vehicle for either exposition or expression. Still at the Academy, he transferred to painting, therefore, in 1853, and followed the courses given by Fran?ois-Joseph Navez, studying in the evenings at the Saint-Luc studio, with Charles De Groux. He became friends with Louis Dubois, F?licien Rops and other rebellious young artists who were to found the Soci?t? Libre des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1868. With these, Meunier was part of the realist avant-garde, while seeking out a path of his own in painting. It has been said that De Groux had a decisive influence on Meunier. The latter partly denied this and insisted that he had felt the need very early to practise an art that was more devoted to the masses, to the people. His interest in everyday life, in the experience and condition of man, can already be discerned in the sketches and studies he made during his stays in the Trappist monastery of Westmalle, near Antwerp, between 1857 and 1875.