1629-1684 Dutch Pieter de Hooch Galleries De Hooch was born in Rotterdam to Hendrick Hendricksz de Hooch, a bricklayer, and Annetge Pieters, a midwife. He was the eldest of five children and outlived all of his siblings. He studied art in Haarlem under the landscape painter, Nicolaes Berchem. Beginning in 1650, he worked as a painter and servant for a linen-merchant and art collector named Justus de la Grange. His service for the merchant required him to accompany him on his travels to The Hague, Leiden, and Delft, to which he eventually moved. It is likely that de Hooch handed over most of his works to la Grange during this period in exchange for board and other benefits, as this was a common commercial arrangement for painters at the time, and a later inventory recorded that la Grange possessed eleven of his paintings. De Hooch was married in Delft in 1654 to Jannetje van der Burch, by whom he fathered seven children. While in Delft, de Hooch is also believed to have learned from the painters Carel Fabritius and Nicolaes Maes, who were both early members of the Delft School. He became a member of the painters' guild of Saint Luke in 1655, and had moved to Amsterdam by 1661. The early work of de Hooch, like most young painters of his time, was mostly composed of scenes of soldiers in stables and taverns, though he used these to develop great skill in light, color, and perspective rather than to explore an interest in the subject matter. After beginning his family in the mid-1650s, he switched his focus to domestic scenes and family portraits. His work showed astute observation of the mundane details of everyday life while also functioning as well-ordered morality tales. These paintings often exhibited a sophisticated and delicate treatment of light similar to those of Vermeer, who lived in Delft at the same time as de Hooch. 19th century art historians had assumed that Vermeer had been influenced by de Hooch's work, but the opposite is now believed.   Related Paintings of Pieter de Hooch :. | Woman Nursing an Infant | Soldiers Playing Cards | Skittle Players in a Garden | A Woman Peeling Apples | Paying the Hostess |
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CAROSELLI, Angelo
Italian painter, Roman school (b. 1585, Roma, d. 1652, Roma) Italian painter. He was the son of a dealer in second-hand goods and taught himself to paint. According to Baldinucci, he knew Caravaggio, who fled Rome in 1606, and this association may have encouraged his decision to become a painter. After visits to Florence (1605) and Naples (1613), Caroselli settled in Rome, where, in 1615, he married a Sicilian, Maria Zurca. His weakness for beautiful women was notorious (Baldinucci; Passeri). His second marriage, to Brigitta Lauri, daughter of the Flemish painter Balthasar Lauwers or Lauri (1578-1645),
Niko Pirosmani
Pirosmani was born in the Georgian village of Mirzaani to a peasant family in the Kakheti province. His family owned a small vineyard. He was later orphaned and put in the care of his two elder sisters. He move with them to Tbilisi in 1870. In 1872 he worked as a servant for wealthy families and learned to read and write Russian and Georgian. In 1876 he returned to Mirzaani and worked as a herdsman. Pirosmani gradually taught himself to paint. One of his specialties was painting directly into black oilcloth. In 1882 he opened a workshop in Tbilisi which was unsuccessful. In 1890 he worked as a railroad conductor, and in 1895 worked creating signboards. In 1893 he co-founded a dairy farm in Tbilisi which he left in 1901. Throughout his life Pirosmani, who was always poor, was willing to take up ordinary jobs including housepainting and whitewashing buildings. Although his paintings had some local popularity (about 200 survive) his relationship with professional artists remained uneasy; making a living was always more important to him than abstract aesthetics.
Carl d Unker
(3 February 1828 - 23 June 1866)was a Swedish artist. He was mostly known as a socially oriented genre painter whose works were contemporary subjects of his time, like waiting rooms at railway stations, and scenes from pawnshops for example. D'Unkers father was a Norwegian military, his mother Swedish. He began his career as a military and had served at the Svea Life Guards for a short time, when he in 1848 volunteered in the First Schleswig War 1848-1849. Shortly after his return to Sweden he abandoned his military path and went to the arts. He moved to Desseldorf to study painting, there he got married to a wealthy Russian woman and could live a carefree life financially. He became a very popular artist on the continent. From 1861 he suffered from sickness in his right arm so he had to paint with his left arm. He made a brief visit to Sweden in 1865, and was appointed professor by Swedish king Charles XV. The following year he died.