Jessica Brown
Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588-1629)
Brugghen has been referred to as the Dutch Caravaggio and is noted as one of the most important dutch painters to be influenced by Caravaggio. Brugghen is rarely mentioned in his early life and in several of his earliest mentions is misnamed such as Verbrugghen and Verbrug. His son Richard ter Brugghen brings most light to his life and notes that he was a great painter throughout his life as he traveled from Utrecht to Rome and back, abruptly dying at the age of 42. While a baroque artist Brugghen is noted as having studied under Abraham Bloemaert, a mannerist painter.
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Artist: Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter during the Neoclassicism movement. He was an active supporter and was inspired by the French Revolution painting “The Death of Marat” in home of the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat. He was effectively the dictator of arts under the French Republic. Once in this position he abolished the Académie Royale. In his later years he became devoted to teaching hundreds of young European painters and became the official painter of Napoleon I.
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Artist: Rembrandt
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch painter and etcher from the first half of the 17th century. He is well known for painting dramatic portraits of his contemporaries, biblical scenes, and truthful self portraits. Influenced by Caravaggio, his paintings employ dramatic uses of light and shadows. He was a painting teacher and would have his students imitate his own self portraits for practice, so the number of self portraits that are actually his is unknown. He also depicted his biblical, mystical, or historical scenes in a way that personally related to his life, sometimes including his wife and son, etc.
This painting is still missing after being stolen from a Museum in 1990..
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Artist: Artemisia Gentileschi
Gentileschi was an Italian painter, who was considered one of the best baroque painters following Carvaggio. She was the daughter of well-known Roman artist, Orazio Gentileschi, whom she received early training from. With the art community being male-dominated, it was telling of Gentileschi’s talent that she received so much recognition. She was the first woman to receive the Accademia di Arte del Disegno (academy and company of the arts of drawing), which is located in Florence and recognizes accomplished artists. Before being accepted into this academy, she had to train under a friend of her father’s, Agostino Tassi. He was later tried for rape of Gentileschi, whose life and painting were dramatically effected by the trauma of the rape. These paintings often featured powerful female heroines defeating evil men.
http://www.artbible.info/art/large/727.html
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Caravaggio (1571-1610)
Caravaggio was known for his tenebrism technique which is a very pronounced chiaroscuro where darkness becomes the dominating feature of the work. His work was characterized by realistic depiction of the human state, physically and emotionally. He portrayed many religious scenes with his own dark interpretation and included prostitutes, beggars, and thieves in them. Caravaggio’s private life was tumultuous to say the least. Most of his family died during the Bubonic Plague leaving him an orphan at age 11. He got into many brawls and eventually killed a man soon before his death at age 38. Scientists suspect that lead poisoning from the paint he used may have driven him mad. During his life he supposedly had relationships with female prostitutes as well as men, including his apprentice, Cecco. Cecco is the subject of several of his paintings. His piece, Amor Vincit Omnia, for which Cecco may have modeled, is pictured below.
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Johannes Vermeer lived from 1632-1675 and captured everyday scenes of middle-class life during his life as a Dutch. Most of the 34 works accredited to Vermeer fall into either the genre or portrait category, with the exception of a few landscapes. He was known to use bright colors and spend extensive time on his paintings, capturing light successfully. His favorite colors to use were lapis lazuli and Indian yellow, which both can be seen in one of his most famous works, Girl with a Pearl Earring, as seen below. This use of bright color made his artwork seem like a more perfect world and was most likely inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. Vermeer did not gain much recognition for his work until long after his death, in the 19th century and is now considered one of the best painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
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Artist: Anselm Feuerbach
Feuerbach was the leading neo-classical painter in Germany (around the time period of the 18th century school). Quite a few of his works are portraits but also refer to the styles of classical-ism that have drawn from the culture and styles of Ancient Rome and Greece. I though that it was interesting that he studied under many other different artists through his career including:Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Wilhelm von Schadow, Carl Sohn and Gustav Wappers. He also used a model for four years who featured in his works and also completed self-portraits as well. Like most neo-classical works, his pieces were more serious, at times unemotional, and “sternly heroic” in nature. This can be scene in the protraits that he has painted–the backgrounds of each portrait only highlight the person being centered. I have also found it interesting that most of his portraits of women are those that are looking away, outwards opposite from a viewing audience. This can be seen in many portraits of Nanna Risi and as pictured below in his work: “Mandolinenspielerin” (Mandolin Player).
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Anton Raphael Mengs
Anton Raphael Mengs was widely regarded in his day as Europe’s greatest living painter. He studied under his father in Dresden, Saxony and then later in Rome. He became a painter to the Saxon court, and while there created numerous brightly colored pastel paintings. In 1761, his fresco painting Parnassus (pictured below) helped establish the style of Neoclassical paintings. Mengs’ treatise Reflections on Beauty and Taste in Painting was also a very influential piece.
Parnassus:
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J.A.D. Ingres
The painting career of J.A.D. Ingres was very inconsistent throughout his life. Ingres was one of the last Neoclassical painters, and died as one of, if not the greatest living artist in France at that time. As a Neoclassisist, he was a “conservator…not an innnovator.” It is interesting that while he was a Neoclassisist, he was known for his anatomical distortions and elongations in his female paintings due to his obsession with idealistic beauty.
This obsession is evident in La Grande Odalisque, which was heavily criticized for being anatomically unrealistic. It seems that the figure has too many vertebrae, and that the curvature of the figure from the back to the hips is anatomically impossible. However, some suggest that the length of the figure’s back symbolizes distance from the figure’s pelvic area to her pensive expression on her face to represent the complexities of a woman’s thoughts. I like this suggestion because it makes sense. The disproportions, to me, seem intentional and purposeful. However, the figure’s legs stood out to me the most, possibly because of the way their positioned and colored, but the legs were not as scrutinized by others.
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Artist: Georges de La Tour
Georges de La Tour was a French Baroque painter. He was born in 1593 and was the second of seven children. Scholars debate over the details and chronology of his life, but they agree that he had a successful painting career during his time. Many noblemen, including Louis XIII and and the Duke of Loraine, owned his paintings. He was also the official court painter of Louis XIV. La Tour specialized in religious and genre scenes, and many of his subjects were candlelit and painted in the chiaroscuro style. Although it is unclear how he became acquainted with the style, La Tour’s work demonstrates an influence of Caravaggism. One of his most famous pieces is St. Joseph the Carpenter, which is pictured below. While La Tour was considered a master painter of his time, much of his work was lost, destroyed, or misattributed to other artists until they were rediscovered by a German scholar in 1915.
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Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
Rubens was a Flemish Baroque painter whose altarpieces, portraits, and landscape paintings were popular throughout Europe. He spread his fame by traveling and making prints of his works. The history of the time affected Rubens’ work, which often showed Conter-Reformation imagery. His commissioned paintings were often religious or historical works, but Rubens was known for his fondness of painting plus-sized women. For this, the terms “Rubensian” and “Rubenesque” were used to describe plus-sized women. One of his early works from 1615, “Venus at a Mirror,” reveals the backside of a voluptuous Venus. This painting stood out to me as mysterious and engaging because it captures a unique perspective. Venus stands out with her pale skin compared to the dark background, giving her an angelic appeal. Rubens uses this contrast between light skin and dark backgrounds in many of his works, making the details of the nude women’s body stand out in his paintings. This adds drama and depth to his paintings.
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Artist: Peter Paul Rubens
Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish Baroque painter who lived from 1577-1640. His work focused primarily on historical portraits, allegorical tales, and landscapes and is known for being powerful but not necessarily overly ornate or elaborate. Rubens was very fond of painting full-figured nudes. Besides painting, Rubens was prolific in etching, carving, and printing processes and his paintings reflect those precise techniques of carvings. His c. 1630s painting, “Venus and Adonis,” depicts Venus and Cupid trying to save [Venus’s lover] Adonis, from a potentially dangerous hunting expedition. An additional fun fact, according to my Herbal Essences shampoo bottle, is that roses became red when Venus step on a thorn and her blood stained the roses as she tried to pursue Adonis. To me, Ruben’s painting cites and enforces these frenzied, amorous notions desperation and desire.
“Venus and Adonis”
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/37.162
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Edit Typo: An additional fun fact, according to my Herbal Essences shampoo bottle: roses became red when Venus stepped on a thorn and her blood stained the roses as she tried to pursue Adonis.
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Gavin Hamilton
Gavin was born in Scotland in 1723 and in 1738 he became a student of classics at the University of Glasgow. Because Gavin spent most of his time in Italy, he mostly used classical Rome and Greek subjects when painting. He is most known for his six paintings of Homer’s Iliad. These paintings have since been reproduced due to their influential nature. Additionally, Gavin’s Death of Lucretia, or Oath of Brutus (pictured below), is a painting that is not only a memorable work, but also the spark to many oath paintings by European painters. When Hamilton was not painting, he was an art dealer and archaeologist.
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William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French painter that focused on the female human body with a modern approach. He was well known for his profound skill at contour and originality. His mythological themes and genre paintings had an idealized world view. He was recognized for his impeccable attention to detail in figure’s hands, skin and feet. He mainly used oil to get make his subjects come to life. This quote was particularly interesting to me, showing his life devotion to his artwork: “Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the next morning to come … if I cannot give myself to my dear painting I am miserable.” After facing tragedy of his son and wife both dying, this can be seen in his artwork and his mental health as he progresses as an artist.
This is one of my favorite pieces by him, illustrating everything he was admired for: the female contour body, a mythological world surrounding her, and his attention to skin and body parts. I absolutely love the color usage and the blending of these colors is impeccable.
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Agostino Carracci (1557-1602)
Carracci was an Italian printmaker and painter. His brother Annibale and cousin Lodovico were also artists. The three Carraccis founded the Accademia degli Incamminati school that competed with the gritty view of nature that Caravaggio expressed. The school help bring painters from the School of Bologna to fame. His son Antonio was also a painter who tried to compete with Agostino’s Academy. Agnostino Carracci worked with frescos, prints, paintings, and engravings. His works displayed the ideal forms of nature.
The Communion of St. Jerome (1592) – shown below – is considered his masterwork.
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Artist: Bartholomeus Strobel
Bartholomeus Strobel was a Baroque painter from Silesia (modern day Poland) who was known for his portrait and religious paintings. He served as the court artist for many peoples of royalty, including the Bishop of Wroclaw and King Sigismund III Vasa of Poland. His most highly regarded piece is known as “Feast of Harod with the Beheading of St. John the Baptist” (pictured below) and was painted in the 1630s. This enormous painting is over 10 meters wide and is considered to be is masterpiece, with his lavish depiction of court life and portraits of many leading Central European figures.
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