1801-1848 Thomas Cole Galleries Thomas Cole (February 1, 1801 - February 11, 1848) was a 19th century American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century. Cole's Hudson River School, as well as his own work, was known for its realistic and detailed portrayal of American landscape and wilderness, which feature themes of romanticism and naturalism. In New York he sold three paintings to George W. Bruen, who financed a summer trip to the Hudson Valley where he visited the Catskill Mountain House and painted the ruins of Fort Putnam. Returning to New York he displayed three landscapes in the window of a bookstore; according to the New York Evening Post, this garnered Cole the attention of John Trumbull, Asher B. Durand, and William Dunlap. Among the paintings was a landscape called "View of Fort Ticonderoga from Gelyna". Trumbull was especially impressed with the work of the young artist and sought him out, bought one of his paintings, and put him into contact with a number of his wealthy friends including Robert Gilmor of Baltimore and Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford, who became important patrons of the artist. Cole was primarily a painter of landscapes, but he also painted allegorical works. The most famous of these are the five-part series, The Course of Empire, now in the collection of the New York Historical Society and the four-part The Voyage of Life. There are two versions of the latter, one at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the other at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York. Cole influenced his artistic peers, especially Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, who studied with Cole from 1844 to 1846. Cole spent the years 1829 to 1832 and 1841-1842 abroad, mainly in England and Italy; in Florence he lived with the sculptor Horatio Greenough.  Related Paintings of Thomas Cole :. | Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower | The Voyage of Life: Manhood | The Titan's Goblet (mk13) | The Departure (mk13) | The Voyage of Life: Old Age |
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Robert Havell Jr Prints
1793-1878 Engraver and painter, cousin of William Havell. He learnt the art of aquatint engraving from his father, Robert Havell I. He worked first in the family engraving business and then c. 1825-7 with Colnaghi in London. In 1827 he undertook the execution in aquatint of the plates for John James Audubon Birds of America, published in parts in London between 1827 and 1838. Havell engraved 425 of the plates and reworked the ten that had been engraved by William Home Lizars in Edinburgh. Havell father printed and coloured some of the double elephant folio sheets in 1827-8 after which Havell took on those tasks himself, establishing himself as a master of aquatint. Among his other important works in the medium are the plates for Mrs E. Bury Selection of Hexandrian Plants (London, 1831-4). In 1839, at Audubon invitation, Havell moved with his family to New York and embarked on a new career as a landscape painter in the style of the Hudson River school, while also working as an engraver. He settled in the Hudson River villages of Ossining (1841) and Tarrytown (1857) but painted throughout north-eastern America. View of Deerfield, Massachusetts (1847; Hist. Deerfield, MA) is characteristic of his quietly romantic idealization of his subjects. Niagara Falls from the Chinese Pagoda (1845; New York, Pub. Lib.), engraved by Havell after one of his paintings, is among the best known of his American aquatints. Though his reputation rests largely on his work for Audubon, his original subjects gave him greater opportunities to display the full range of his aquatint technique. Part of the Havell family
Henri Leys
(18 February 1815 - 26 August 1869), also known as Henri Leys, was a Belgian painter and printmaker. Henri Leys was born and died in Antwerp. He studied with Mathieu Ignace Van Bree (1773-1839) at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp and then with his brother-in-law Ferdinand De Braekeleer (1792-1883). At the start of his career, he worked with the Belgian Romantic painter Egide Charles Gustave Wappers (1803-1874). Both artists were interested in nationalistic subjects painted in styles that owe much to the example of 16th- and 17th-century Flemish painting. In 1835 Leys went to Paris where he visited the studio of Eugene Delacroix and met Paul Delaroche. During the 1840s, Leys began painting scenes set in 16th-century Antwerp, combining details studied from life with a deliberately archaizing style reminiscent of 16th-century German painters like Albrecht Derer and Quinten Matsys. Some of the pictures have specific historical subjects, but others are genre scenes. With these pictures, he earned a following among many younger artists in Belgium as well as a considerable reputation in France, where he won a gold medal at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1855 for his historical painting The Mass of Berthal de Haze (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels). In 1862 Leys was created a baron by King Leopold I. At the time of his death, he was engaged in decorating the interior of the Antwerp Town Hall with monumental frescoes depicting the city's history (1863-9). There are easel replicas of these in Brussels. Among the artists who studied with him are James Tissot and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. His best-known pupil is his nephew Henri De Braekeleer (1840-1888).
Jean-Baptiste Greuze
French Rococo Era Painter, 1725-1805 French painter and draughtsman. He was named an associate member of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, in 1755 on the strength of a group of paintings that included genre scenes, portraits and studies of expressive heads (tetes d'expression). These remained the essential subjects of his art for the next 50 years, except for a brief, concentrated and unsuccessful experiment with history painting in the late 1760s, which was to affect his later genre painting deeply. Though his art has often been compared with that of Jean-Simeon Chardin in particular and interpreted within the context of NEO-CLASSICISM in general, it stands so strikingly apart from the currents of its time that Greuze's accomplishments are best described, as they often were by the artist's contemporaries, as unique. He was greatly admired by connoisseurs, critics and the general public throughout most of his life. His pictures were in the collections of such noted connoisseurs as Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, Claude-Henri Watelet and Etienne-Franeois, Duc de Choiseul. For a long period he was in particular favour with the critic Denis Diderot, who wrote about him in the Salon reviews that he published in Melchior Grimm's privately circulated Correspondance litt?raire. His reputation declined towards the end of his life and through the early part of the 19th century, to be revived after 1850, when 18th-century painting returned to favour, by such critics as Theophile Thore, Arsene Houssaye and, most notably, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their book L'Art du dix-huitieme siecle. By the end of the century Greuze's work, especially his many variations on the Head of a Girl, fetched record prices, and his Broken Pitcher (Paris, Louvre) was one of the most popular paintings in the Louvre.