Vincent Van Gogh
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 | Les Vessenots a Auvers | Die Seine with Pont de la Grande Jatte | View of Montmartre with Windmills (nn04) | Garden in Bloom (mk09) | Related Artists: Claudio Jose Vicente Antolinezpainted Inmaculada in 1670 Edouard CastresSwiss 1838 - 1902
Swiss painter. His father was a clock engraver, and he initially trained as an enamellist. He took drawing lessons from Barthelemy Menn and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1859. He soon decided to concentrate on oil painting. He was assistant to the genre and figure painter Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala (1842-71). In the Franco-Prussian War he joined the Red Cross, moving into Switzerland at the beginning of February 1871 with the army led by Gen. Bourbaki. He painted military scenes from sketches carried out on the battlefield and received consistently good reviews, which also brought financial success. He was commissioned by a Belgian panorama company to record the entry of the French army into Switzerland, which he had witnessed in 1871. He spent the winter of 1876-7 on site at Les Verrieres, painting preparatory studies, and in 1881 he completed the panorama, Gen. Bourbaki's Army Retreating into Switzerland (Lucerne, Panorama). He was aided by nine assistants, recruited from among Menn's pupils, who included Ferdinand Hodler. The work was exhibited in Geneva and was brought to a rotunda in Lucerne in 1889. Among panorama paintings it is a work of a high order: despite the colossal dimensions and the barely comprehensible mass of people depicted, the dominant impression is of individual suffering. Maria Catharina Wiik(b Helsinki, 2 Aug 1853; d Helsinki, 19 June 1928). Finnish painter. She studied in Paris at the Academie Julian from 1875 to 1876 under Tony Robert-Fleury and continued her studies with him in the same studio between 1877 and 1880. Her paintings appeared at the Salon for the first time in 1880 (e.g. Marietta, 1880; Helsinki, priv. col., see Katerma, p. 31). The realist techniques Wiik absorbed in Paris came to form the basis of her work, tranquil in composition and restrained in colour. Her favourite subjects were relatively small-scale portraits such as Hilda Wiik (1881; Helsinki, Athenaeum A. Mus.) and still-lifes (e.g. Still-life, c. 1880; Helsinki, Athenaeum A. Mus.). Like many other foreign painters Wiik went to Brittany to paint. In 1883-4 she worked in Concarneau and Pont-Aven, where her enthusiasm for plein-air painting brought immediacy to her work and greater brightness to her colours (e.g. Breton Farm, 1883; Naantali, Fereningen Hedvigsminne). She preferred to record her impressions in portraits, although she also painted small, light-filled landscapes. In 1889 Wiik worked under the direction of Puvis de Chavannes in Henri Bouvet's studio in Paris, and in the same year she visited St Ives where she painted, among others, two major works: Out in the World (Helsinki, Athenaeum A. Mus.) and the St Ives Girl (Helsinki, priv. col., see Katerma, p. 93). Both works show Wiik moving towards an ever more internalized and minimal mode of expression, thereby taking part in the process that led, in the 1890s, to a general abandonment of realism in favour of a greater emphasis on emotion. Out in the World, which shows an old woman's sad parting from a young girl who is leaving home to begin work, shows a change in technique with the use of more united colour surfaces and of tone painting. (This work was awarded a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.) During the 1890s and the early 20th century Wiik's travels were concentrated in Scandinavia, although she visited Paris in 1905.
|
|
|