French Impressionist Painter, 1841-1919
French painter, printmaker and sculptor. He was one of the founders and leading exponents of IMPRESSIONISM from the late 1860s, producing some of the movement's most famous images of carefree leisure. He broke with his Impressionist colleagues to exhibit at the Salon from 1878, and from c. 1884 he adopted a more linear style indebted to the Old Masters.
His critical reputation has suffered from the many minor works he produced during his later years. Related Paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir :. | Mme. Charpentier and her children | Detail of woman of Paris | La baigneuse endormie | Dance in the Country | The Wave | Related Artists:
Anthony Van Dyck Dutch
1599-1641
Anthony Van Dyck Locations
Flemish painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and England. He was the leading Flemish painter after Rubens in the first half of the 17th century and in the 18th century was often considered no less than his match. A number of van Dyck studies in oil of characterful heads were included in Rubens estate inventory in 1640, where they were distinguished neither in quality nor in purpose from those stocked by the older master. Although frustrated as a designer of tapestry and, with an almost solitary exception, as a deviser of palatial decoration, van Dyck succeeded brilliantly as an etcher. He was also skilled at organizing reproductive engravers in Antwerp to publish his works, in particular The Iconography (c. 1632-44), comprising scores of contemporary etched and engraved portraits, eventually numbering 100, by which election he revived the Renaissance tradition of promoting images of uomini illustri. His fame as a portrait painter in the cities of the southern Netherlands, as well as in London, Genoa, Rome and Palermo, has never been outshone; and from at least the early 18th century his full-length portraits were especially prized in Genoese, British and Flemish houses, where they were appreciated as much for their own sake as for the identities and families of the sitters.
Auguste BorgetAuguste Borget (1808-1877) was a French artist who is best known for his drawings and prints of exotic places, in particular China. He was born in 1808 in Issoudun, Indre. At age 21, he went to Paris where he became a close friend of Honore de Balzac. Borget periodically exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1836 to 1859. Beginning in 1836, he traveled through North and South America before stopping briefly in Honolulu in May, 1838, on board the ship "Psyche", on a world tour. He went to Canton in September 1838 and stayed in the region for 10 months. While in Canton, he met the English artist George Chinnery, and they went on sketching trips together.
In July 1839 he visited Manila, Singapore and Calcutta. In 1840 he traveled widely in India, returning to Paris in the summer of that year. Borgetes sketches and watercolors from China were the basis for his most famous publication "Sketches of China and the Chinese", published in 1842. His book "La Chine ouverte" was illustrated with fine woodcut engravings. A major Salon of his original works, including watercolors and boldly executed oil paintings was held in Paris in 1843. Borget died in 1877.
Martin Johann SchmidtAustrian Painter, 1718-1801,was one of the most outstanding Austrian painters of the late Baroque/Rococo along with Franz Anton Maulbertsch. A son of the sculptor Johannes Schmidt and a pupil of Gottlieb Starmayr, he spent most of his life at Stein, where he mostly worked in the numerous churches and monasteries of his Lower Austrian homeland. While the evolution of his style after 1750 shows that he had either spent a formative period in northern Italy or had at least had extensive contact with northern Italian works of art prior to that date, his works are also clearly influenced by Rembrandt (visible above all in his etchings) and the great fresco-painters of the Austrian Baroque, Paul Troger and Daniel Gran. Despite not having received formal academic training, in 1768 he was made a member of the imperial academy at Vienna due to his artistic merits, which by that time had already been recognized by a wider public inside and outside of Austria. Primarily he painted devotional images for private devotion and churches, including a considerable number of large altar paintings. His lively and colourful style made him extremely popular with people from all levels of society already during his lifetime. From 1780 mythological and low-life themes became increasingly frequent, only to be replaced by a renewed concentration on religious topics during the very last years of Schmidt's life. He was at that an important draughtsman and has left numerous etchings which clearly show Rembrandt's influence. While his earlier works typically show a warm chiaroscuro, from about 1770 he used increasingly stronger and more lively colours. Simultanueously, both his style and his brush technique became much more free, making him, like Franz Anton Maulbertsch, an important predecessor of impressionism. In this aspect, his mature style is completely contrary to neoclassicism, the style which increasingly dominated European art after about 1780.