English Painter, 1782-1857 English painter and illustrator. He was apprenticed to the line-engraver Benjamin Smith (d 1833) in 1797, but his greater interest in portrait painting led him to take life classes at the Royal Academy, London; he exhibited portraits there from 1799. Versatile and industrious, he painted miniature likenesses, taught drawing, designed and engraved illustrations for books in French, Portuguese and English, and wrote for and illustrated Rudolph Ackermann's Repository. His half-a-crown watercolours, known as 'pretty faces', were particularly popular, and he found employment as an assiduous copyist. In 1809 he was elected to the Society of Painters in Water-Colours and for the next nine years exhibited careful and colourful images of the countryside that provided views of the year's harvest. In 1817 Uwins travelled to France to record the Burgundian grape harvest, identifying the labour force more obviously as peasants than their English counterparts. In debt, he moved in 1820 to Edinburgh, where he illustrated books by Walter Scott and painted portraits. In 1824, his debt paid, he left for Italy, where he spent seven years; he sent highly valued copies of Italian works back to England (to Thomas Lawrence among others) and made studies of life in and around Rome and Naples, from which his later successes at the Royal Academy derived. An immodest Protestant, Uwins deplored but revelled in the 'polluted streams' of Catholic Italy, and provided London with oils renowned for their clarity and colour. A Neapolitan Saint Manufactory (exh. RA 1832; Leicester, Mus. & A.G.) shows monks haggling, women gazing and children playing amid carved and painted icons.   Related Paintings of Thomas Uwins :. | Personification of Astrology | Bombardment of Algiers | Three woman and a young girl playing the water | Syende fiskerpige | Queen Sophie Amalie |
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Francesco Maria Schiaffino
Italian Rococo Era Sculptor, 1688-1763,Brother of Bernardo Schiaffino. He was the pupil and then assistant of Bernardo, who in 1721 sent him to complete his training in Rome, where he entered the workshop of Camillo Rusconi. He remained there until 1724, enriching his technique and cultural education by studying the works of Bernini, Rusconi and other sculptors. Back in Genoa, he executed such works as St Dominic (Genoa, Teatro Carlo Felice), in which Rusconi's influence is evident. The marble group of Pluto and Proserpine, sculpted for the Durazzo family and still in its original location (Genoa, Pal. Reale), is based on a bozzetto by Rusconi. In 1731 Schiaffino executed the grandiose Crucifix with Angels for King John V of Portugal (Mafra, Convent) and in 1738 began the theatrical funeral monument to Caterina Fieschi Adorno (Genoa, SS Annunziata di Portoria). The wax models of the Eight Apostles and Four Doctors of the Church that he modelled in 1739 (all untraced) were clearly inspired by the large Apostles by Rusconi and other sculptors in S Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. They were made for the stuccoist Diego Francesco Carlone so that he could, under Schiaffino's directions, execute 12 monumental statues in stucco (Genoa, S Maria Assunta in Carignano). In these latter works the classicizing authority of Rusconi's figures was transformed into a freer and more restless arrangement, the compact forms dissolving in the light, animated draperies. The statues reveal how Schiaffino had combined his knowledge of Roman sculpture with his study of Pierre Puget's Genoese works and with the style of the Piola workshop. He emulated the free rhythms of the Rococo found in the painting of Gregorio de' Ferrari, developing a decorative approach that is even more marked in the Assumption of the Virgin (1740; Varazze, S Ambrogio) and in the Rococo chapel of S Francesco da Paola (1755; Genoa, S Francesco da Paola), which he covered in polychrome marbles. His last works include the Virgin of Loreto (1762; Sestri Levante, Parish Church).