Anton Raphael Mengs
1728-1779
Dutch
Anton Raphael Mengs Gallery
Mengs was born in 1728 at Usti nad Labem (German: Aussig) in Bohemia on 12 March 1728; he died in Rome 29 June 1779. His father, Ismael Mengs, a Danish painter, established himself finally at Dresden, whence in 1741 he took his son to Rome.
In Rome, his fresco painting of Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter. The appointment of Mengs in 1749 as first painter to Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony did not prevent his spending much time in Rome, where he had married Margarita Quazzi who had sat for him as a model in 1748, and abjured the Protestant faith, and where he became in 1754 director of the Vatican school of painting, nor did this hinder him on two occasions from obeying the call of Charles III of Spain to Madrid. There Mengs produced some of his best work, and specially the ceiling of the banqueting-hall of the Royal Palace of Madrid, the subject of which was the Triumph of Trajan and the Temple of Glory. Among his pupils there was Agust??n Esteve. After the completion of this work in 1777, Mengs returned to Rome, and there he died, two years later, in poor circumstances, leaving twenty children, seven of whom were pensioned by the king of Spain. His portraits and autoportraits recall an attention to detail and insight, often lost from the grand manner paintings.
Besides numerous paintings in the Madrid gallery, the Ascension and St Joseph at Dresden, Perseus and Andromeda at Saint Petersburg, and the ceiling of the Villa Albani must be mentioned among his chief works. In 1911, Henry George Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland, possessed a Holy Family, and the colleges of All Souls and Magdalen, at Oxford, possessed altar-pieces by Mengs's hand.
In his writings, in Spanish, Italian and German, Mengs has put forth his eclectic theory of art, which treats of perfection as attainable by a well-schemed combination of diverse excellences Greek design, with the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colour of Titian. He would have fancied himself the first neoclassicist, while in fact he may be the last flicker of Baroque art. Or in the words of Wittkower, In the last analysis, he is as much an end as a beginning.
His intimacy with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who constantly wrote at his dictation, has enhanced his historical importance, for he formed no scholars, and the critic must now concur in Goethe's judgment of Mengs in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert; he must deplore that so much learning should have been allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism.
Mengs was famous for his rivalry with the contemporary Italian painter Pompeo Batoni. Related Paintings of Anton Raphael Mengs :. | Portrait du cardinal Archinto | Das Urteil des Paris | Helios as Personification of Midday | Charles III of Spain | Prince of Asturias, Future Charles IV of Spain | Related Artists: Isaac IsraelsDutch, 1865-1934
Son of Jozef Israëls. He was largely self-taught, showing precocious talent and attending the Academie in The Hague in 1878-80. His first paintings date from 1880-84 and include a self-portrait, portraits of women and military subjects such as Bugle Practice. They were composed in the studio in a precise style, soft grey and brown tones predominating, showing the influence of the Hague school. In 1887 Israels moved to Amsterdam, where he was at the centre of the Tachtigers of writers and painters. Among his friends were George Hendrik Breitner, Lodewijk van Dyssel, Frans Erens, Max Liebermann, Jan Pieter Veth and Jan Voerman. In Amsterdam, after a brief and abortive period at the Rijksacademie, he sought a more fluent technique with which to record contemporary life. His drawings and watercolours are predominantly of cafes, cabarets, dance halls and the street life of Amsterdam. In 1889 he visited Paris, where he met St phane Mallarm, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon and Emile Zola. In 1894 he painted Three Servant Girls, the first of his plein-air pictures. From then on he applied transparent colours to capture the fleeting effects of light in oil, watercolour and pastel. His oils were painted in flat broad strokes. For the rest of his life he employed his very personal Impressionist style, which emphasized the interplay of light, colour, line and movement. His favourite subjects were beach, street and park scenes Hendrick ter Brugghen(1588 - Nov 1, 1629) was a Dutch painter, and a leading member of the Dutch followers of Caravaggio ?? the so-called Dutch Caravaggisti.
Little is known of the early life of ter Brugghen; he could have been born in The Hague, but his family seems to have moved to the strongly Catholic Utrecht in the early 1590s. Here he started painting at the age of thirteen, studying with Abraham Bloemaert. From Bloemaert, a Mannerist history painter, he learned the basics of the art. Around 1604, however, ter Brugghen travelled to Italy to expand his skills, a rather unusual move for Dutch painters at the time. He was in Rome in 1604, and could therefore have been in direct contact with Caravaggio. Louis Gauffier1762-1801
French
Louis Gauffier Gallery
French painter. Following his move to Paris, where he became a pupil of Hugues Taraval and a student at the Academie Royale, in 1784 Gauffier shared the Prix de Rome with Jean-Germain Drouais and Antoine-Denis Chaudet (for sculpture), his own work being Christ and the Woman of Canaan (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). During his time in Rome (1785-9) Gauffier worked hard, but his health was poor and the results variable. On his return to Paris he was accepted (agree) by the Academie as a history painter. Soon after, he returned to Rome in order to escape the worsening situation in Revolutionary Paris, although he continued to send his Neo-classical works to the Salon. In March 1790 he married Pauline Chatillon (d July 1801), a portrait painter whom he and Drouais had taught..
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