Italian Gothic Era Painter, active 1215-1242
Italian painter. Originally from Lucca, he was the most gifted of a family of Lombardian painters. His Scenes from the Life of St. Francis on the predella of the altar of San Francesco (Pescia) is the earliest known visual representation of St. Francis' life. Also noted are Scenes from the Life of St. Francis (Santa Croce, Florence) and St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata (Accademia, Florence). Related Paintings of BERLINGHIERI, Bonaventura :. | St. Franciscus | St Francis and Scenes from his Life | Saint Francis and Scenes from His Life | St Francis gh | Madonna and Child with Saints and Crucifixion | Related Artists:
William WestallEnglish painter and engraver
1781-1850
was an English artist who travelled aboard HMS Investigator on her voyage to Australia. Westall was born in Hertford, England. Westall, like the other botanical artist on HMS Investigator Ferdinand Bauer, was born into an artistic family. His older half brother Richard, was a member of the Royal Academy, and assisted him in securing a place for his younger half brother at the Royal Academy in 1799. During his studies at the Royal Academy Westall's work came to the attention of Joseph Banks, who was at the time keen to find a landscape artist for Matthew Flinders' expedition aboard HMS Investigator. With the support of Banks, Westall was appointed by the Admiralty in London as landscape and topographical artist on HMS Investigator. In 1801, at the age of 19, Westall found himself aboard HMS Investigator. The subsequent voyage of discovery to Terra Australise, has in time come to be regarded as one of the notable scientific and botanical studies ever undertaken. William Westall, King George's Sound in Albany, Western AustraliaWestall began sketching the Australian coast, south of Cape Leeuwin and later on Monday 7 December 1801, King George's Sound, Western Australia, thereby becoming one of the first professional artists to draw the Australian landscape painting. Many of the sketches that Westall created were coastal profiles, to assist with the important task of mapping Australian coastline. The subsequent circumnavigation of Australia took Westall from Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, across the Great Australian Bight to the South Australian gulf country, to Kangaroo Island, and thence to Port Jackson and the Gulf of Carpentaria. Particularly notable amongst the works created by Westall during the voyage are his accurate portraits of Aboriginal people and the watercolours of their cave paintings, the first European artist to depict the cave paintings.
Nicolas-Andre Monsiau (1754 -- 31 May 1837) was a French history painter and a refined draughtsman who turned to book illustration to supplement his income when the French Revolution disrupted patronage. His cool Poussiniste drawing style and coloring marked his conservative art in the age of Neoclassicism.
His training at the school of the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Paris, was under the direction of Jean-François-Pierre Peyron. An early patron, the marquis de Corberon, paid for a sojourn at Rome, where he studied at the French Academy in Rome from 1776. On his return to Paris, he was unable to exhibit in the annual Paris salons, which were closed to all but those who had been received by the Academie or were members, under the Ancien Regime. Instead he found an outlet in the smaller Salon de la correspondance, where in 1782 he showed a tenebrist Piquant effect of the light of a lamp.
Two years later he was received at the Academie with a historical subject, Alexander taming Bucephalus and was made a member 3 October 1787, his second attempt, on the strength of The Death of Agis. The influence of Jacques-Louis David, an acquaintance from Monsiau's days in Rome, is most vividly represented by Monsiau's Ulysses, after returning to his palace and slaying Penelope's suitors, orders the women to remove the corpses (1791 Salon), where the action is played out in a shallow frieze-like space defined by a colonnade parallel to the picture plane.
In his best-known painting, Zeuxis choosing among the most beautiful girls of Crotona, shown at the Salon of 1791,Monsiau illustrates an anecdote of the painter Zeuxis, recorded in Pliny's Natural History, that exemplifies an essential aspect of the Classical approach to artistic creation, in the artist's refining an ideal Art by selecting from among the lesser beauties of Nature.
Monsiau's great public commission was a commemoration of the occasion on 26 January 1802, at which Napoleon delivered an authoritarian constitution to the Cisalpine Republic at a convocation of notables (the consulta) at Lyon. François Gerard had turned down the commission, preferring to continue his series of individual portraits of the Bonapartes. Monsiau received the commission in 1806; the finished painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1808 and was installed at the Tuileries the following year.
Monsiau was among the first history painters to depict scenes from modern history that were not commemorations of battles. He showed Moliere reading Tartuffe at the house of Ninon de Lenclos at the Salon of 1802. It was engraved by Jean-Lous Anselin. His painting of Louis XVI giving instructions to the sea captain-explorer La Perouse before his attempted circumnavigation was exhibited at the Salon of 1817 and was purchased for the recently restored Louis XVIII.
His portrayal of a sensational episode in which an escaped lion from the Grand Ducal menagerie in Florence had dropped a child it had picked up, without harming it, was exhibited at the Salon of 1801 and is conserved in the Louvre.
Among his pupils was the portrait draughtsman Louis Letronne (1790--1842), whose pencil portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven is iconic.
Ferdinand Kobell(born in Mannheim, 7 June 1740; died in Munich, 1 February 1799) was a German painter and engraver.
He was studying at the University of Heidelberg when the Elector of Bavaria, admiring a landscape, aided him to devote his entire time to painting. He became the pupil of Peter Verschaffelt. He next studied art in Paris (1768-1769). On his return, he was appointed painter to the Cabinet (court painter), and later professor at the Academy. In 1793, he moved to Munich. He was appointed director of the Mannheim Gallery (1798) but died before entering on his duties.