(1735-1786) was a portrait painter and the first English painter to work in India. He was born in London, the son of a coach painter, in a family that had been members of the Brewers' Company of freemen for five generations. He studied drawing with William Shipley in the Strand and first entered professional portraiture in the 1750s. Kettle's first series of portraits appeared in the 1760s. His first surviving painting is a self-portrait from 1760, with his first exhibit at the Society of Artists in 1761. In 1762, he worked at restoring Robert Streater's ceiling fresco in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, and painted Francis Yarborough, a doctor of Brasenose College, Oxford in 1763. He painted many members of the family of William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth. In 1764-5, he was active in London and continued exhibiting at the Society of Artists. In 1768, Kettle sailed to India with the British East India Company, landing at Madras (now Chennai), where he remained for two years. There, he painted Lord Pigot and Muhammad Ali Kahn twice (once alone and once with five of his sons). He also painted non-portraits, including Dancing Girls (Blacks) in 1772 and a suttee scene in 1776 entitled, The ceremony of a gentoo woman taking leave of her relations and distributing her jewels prior to ascending the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. In 1770 Kettle painted a half-length portrait of 'Sir' Levett Hanson, a peripatetic writer on European knighthood and chivalry originally from Yorkshire. (The portrait is now in the collection of the Bury St Edmunds Manor House Museum.) Kettle moved on to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1771 and painted Shuja ud-Daula and Dancing-Girl Holding the Stem of a Hookah. In 1775,he painted George Bogle, Warren Hastings' emissary to Tibet, in Tibetan dress, presenting a ceremonial white scarf to Lobsang Yeshe the 5th Panchen Lama.He also took an Indian mistress and had two daughters by her.  Related Paintings of Tilly Kettle :. | Dancing Girl or An Indian Dancing Girl with a Hookah | The Orphan of China | future bishop of Winchester | The Orphan of China | Brownlow North (1741-1820), future bishop of Winchester |
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Aime Perret
(1847- 1927 ) - Painter
William Dunlap
(1 February 1766 - 28 September 1839) was a pioneer of the American theater. He was a producer, playwright, and actor, as well as a historian. He managed two of New York's earliest and most prominent theaters, the John Street Theatre (from 1796?C98) and the Park Theatre (from 1798?C1805). He was also an artist, despite losing an eye in childhood. He was born in Perth Amboy New Jersey, the son of an army officer wounded at the Battle of Quebec in 1759. In 1783, he produced a portrait of George Washington, now owned by the United States Senate, and later studied art under Benjamin West in London. After returning to America in 1787, he worked exclusively in the theater for 18 years, resuming painting out of economic necessity in 1805. By 1817, he was a full-time painter. In his lifetime he produced more than sixty plays, most of which were adaptations or translations from French or German works. A few were original: these were based on American themes and had American characters. However, he is best known for his encyclopedic three-volume History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, which was published in 1834, and which is now an invaluable source of information about artists, collecting, and artistic life generally in the colonial and federal periods.
Reinier Nooms
(c. 1623 - c. 1667), also known as Zeeman (Dutch for "sailor"), was a maritime painter known for his highly detailed paintings and etchings of ships. Nooms was born and died in Amsterdam. He started painting and drawing in his later years, following a rough, drunken life as a sailor. It is not known how he acquired his skill as an artist. His knowledge of ships is evident from his work: ships and foreign locations are depicted with high accuracy and in great detail, and served as an example to other artists of how to depict ships. A widely traveled artist, Nooms visited Paris, Venice and possibly Berlin, and also journeyed along the coast of North Africa. A favourite subject of his paintings were the Dutch victories in the Anglo-Dutch Wars. For instance, he painted the Amalia, the flagship of admiral Maarten Tromp, before the Battle of the Downs in 1639. This painting now hangs in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK. His painting of the Battle of Leghorn in 1653 is in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In the 1650s, Nooms made a series of etchings of ships and topographical views characterized by a high degree of detail and precision. These etchings served as an example to many artists. The 19th century French etcher Charles Meryon was highly influenced by Noom, whose etchings of Paris cityscapes inspired Meryon to his own series of Paris etchings. Meryon even dedicated some of this work to Nooms in poetic form.