Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter, 1853-1890 Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 ?C 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art. Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide. The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.  Related Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh :. | Wheat Field with Crows (nn04) | The channel | Cows (nn04) | Wheat Field behind Saint-Paul Hospital with a Reaper (nn04) | On the outskirts of Paris |
Related Artists:
Jakob Alt
1789-1872 Austrian Jakob Wassermann was born on March 10, 1873, in Furth, the son of a Jewish merchant. After a childhood with many restrictions, he began his career as an office clerk, in Munich and then in Freiburg. In 1898 he moved to Vienna and eventually established himself as a writer. Derivative and imitative, Wassermanns novels showed from the outset a strong dependence upon Fyodor Dostoevsky - particularly in his fondness for the psychological probing of criminals and social outcasts - as well as the influence of the master of the romantic horror and detective story, E. T. A. Hoffmann. Wassermanns first significant work is Die Juden von Zirndorf (1897, The Jews of Zirndorf), in which his deep knowledge of his own community in F??rth and Nuremberg stands him in good stead. As in many of his other works, Wassermanns preoccupation with innocence and redemption is here interleaved with a somewhat crass depiction of depravity and superstition. Der Moloch (1902) pays tribute to the contemporary literary cult of the great city (here Vienna), seen as an all-devouring monster of sin and perversion. Caspar Hauser (1908) is probably the authors best novel; the book, based on fact, deals with the case of the mute youth who appeared one day in 1828 on the streets of Nuremberg. Resemblances to Dostoevskys The Idiot may also be noted in this tale of the rejection and contamination of innate purity by corrupt society. After Caspar Hauser Wassermanns novels and short stories become increasingly preoccupied with bizarre and perverse anecdotes and intrigue, often initially drawn from biography or the newspapers. Das Gansemannchen (1915; The Goose Man) illuminates the problem involved in simultaneous cohabitation with two wives. Christian Wahnschaffe (1919) exploits the theme of the rich mans son who rejects the world to turn toward Buddhism. Der Fall Maurizius (1928, The Mauritius Case) is a type of detective novel made colorful by excursions into hypnosis but also weighed down by a tedious mass of psychological dissection. Like Honor?? de Balzac, whom he imitated, Wassermann introduces the same characters into different novels; thus Etzel Andergast (1931) is a sequel to The Mauritius Case, and its hero, Joseph Kerkhoven, reappears in Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz (1934, Joseph Kerkhovens Third Existence). Wassermann is a somewhat uneven and labored writer, and he cannot in any sense be considered a stylist. His novels are often marred by diffuseness and miasmic obscurity. At the same time his extensive output is of considerable historical interest and illuminates rather well the consequences of marriage between the new depth psychology and the popular novel of sensation and crime. He died on Jan. 1, 1934, in Alt-Aussee.
Creator:Adolf Charlemagne.
painted Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov at the top of the St. Gotthard September 13 in 1855
John Gould
1804 - 1881. (Born Sept. 14, 1804, Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire, England. Died Feb. 3, 1881, London) was an English ornithologist. The Gould League in Australia was named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" was pivotal in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, though they are barely mentioned in Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species.Gould was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset, the son of a gardener, and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy and in 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist,