Spanish 1618-1682 Bartolome Esteban Murillo Galleries Murillo began his art studies under Juan del Castillo in Seville. Murillo became familiar with Flemish painting; the great commercial importance of Seville at the time ensured that he was also subject to influences from other regions. His first works were influenced by Zurbaran, Jusepe de Ribera and Alonso Cano, and he shared their strongly realist approach. As his painting developed, his more important works evolved towards the polished style that suited the bourgeois and aristocratic tastes of the time, demonstrated especially in his Roman Catholic religious works. In 1642, at the age of 26 he moved to Madrid, where he most likely became familiar with the work of Velazquez, and would have seen the work of Venetian and Flemish masters in the royal collections; the rich colors and softly modeled forms of his subsequent work suggest these influences. He returned to Seville in 1645. In that year, he painted thirteen canvases for the monastery of St. Francisco el Grande in Seville which gave his reputation a well-deserved boost. Following the completion of a pair of pictures for the Seville Cathedral, he began to specialise in the themes that brought him his greatest successes, the Virgin and Child, and the Immaculate Conception. After another period in Madrid, from 1658 to 1660, he returned to Seville. Here he was one of the founders of the Academia de Bellas Artes (Academy of Art), sharing its direction, in 1660, with the architect, Francisco Herrera the Younger. This was his period of greatest activity, and he received numerous important commissions, among them the altarpieces for the Augustinian monastery, the paintings for Santa Mar??a la Blanca (completed in 1665), and others.  Related Paintings of Bartolome Esteban Murillo :. | Resurrection | Virgin and the Son | Santa Fei-Na | The Virgin and Child | Pure Conception of Our Lady |
Related Artists:
Bernardino Fungai
Italian 1460-1516 Italian painter. He is recorded in 1482 as Benvenuto di Giovanni garzone at work on the monochrome frescoes decorating the drum of the cupola of Siena Cathedral. Most scholars have accepted Benvenuto as Fungai teacher but stress the greater influence of Matteo di Giovanni; other proposals have included Giovanni di Paolo and, following the reattribution of paintings traditionally ascribed to Giacomo Pacchiarotti, Pietro Orioli. Fungai depended heavily on the preceding generation of Sienese painters and was considerably influenced by the contemporary activity of Pietro Perugino, Luca Signorelli and Bernardino Pinturicchio in and around Siena. His works are characterized by the docility of the figures, a keen decorative sensibility in the use of colour and the treatment of drapery and landscape, and a pleasantly engaging narrative skill. Although identification of works from his early career is problematic, a sizeable oeuvre has been ascribed on the basis of a signed and dated altarpiece executed for S Niccole al Carmine depicting the Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS Sebastian, Jerome, Nicholas and Anthony of Padua (1512; Siena, Pin. N.).
Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo
1612-1667 Spanish Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo Gallery Mazo??s works owe credit above all to Vel??zquez, whose style he was long compelled to emulate in court portraits. However, Mazo shows in his paintings a personality of his own. His portraits exhibit startling naturalism and marvelously executed. Mazo was specially skillful in painting small figures, a cardinal element in both his hunting scenes and the landscapes he painted as in his most celebrate work View of Saragossa. Mazo??s palette was rather like that of Vel??zquez, except for a penchant often shown for stressing blue or bluish tints. .The departure from his master style was in his way of shaping people and things by highlights which flash the pictorial image towards the surface of the painting, even from the background.. As a counterbalance, an explicit, even emphatic, perspective design marks out the spatial confines of the composition, making it appear squarish.. A further departure from Velazquez is his luxurious depiction of detail or incident, which he achieved with brilliant, depthless strokes, whether on the figure of a sitter, a curtain on a wall, a floor, the surface of a river, or plain grounds. .These stylistic traits reveal Mazo??s own personality as an artist. .For centuries, Mazo??s paintings were attributed to Vel??zquez, but modern art criticism, techniques and knowledge have been able to separate their works.
William Knight Keeling
(1807-1886) was a British (Victorian) artist, an illustrator of Walter Scott's novels and Shakespeare's plays, a founder and the third President of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. William Knight Keeling. Love's Messenger. 1856William Knight Keeling was born in Manchester. He was apprenticed to a wood-engraver, and in the 1830s went to London and became an assistant of William Bradley (1801-1857), a Manchester-born portrait painter who moved to London in 1822 and established himself as a portrait painter. However, Keeling returned to Manchester in 1835 and firmly established himself as a popular and respected portrait and figurative painter in oils and watercolour, and a drawing-master. From 1830s, he actively exhibited in Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere. In 1833, his painting 'The Bird's Nest' was awarded the silver medal from the Royal Manchester Institution. In 1841, he was elected a member of the New Society of Painters in Watercolours where he exhibited about 60 works. In 1859, Keeling became a founder of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, and its third president from 1865 to 1877. He was a member of the Manchester Literary Club and the Brasenose Club. In the 1850s, following the notion of the day, he travelled to Spain. This journey gave him new ideas, subjects, and motifs. Delicate details and clear and bright palette inspired by hot colours of the South, are distinctive features of his paintings and watercolours. In 1873, a Manchester newspaper praised one of his watercolours as "an exquisite work, perfectly Spanish". He also was influenced by works by the great Spanish artist Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682). Murilloes street children can be easily recognised in Keelinges compassionate depictions of poor children, both British and Spanish. His eSpanish Boye exhibited in Manchester in 1876, was described as "a very good example of the careful and accurate method pursued by the artist. He is thoroughly conscientious in all his professional work." In 1851, in London, Keeling married Mary Ann Charker (b.1822). They had four children: Edith (b.1852), Dalton Harper (b.1853), Sidney Charles (b.1859), and Gertrude Ann (b.1862). Keeling died on 21.02.1886 in his house at Barton-upon-Irwell, Manchester. Keeling did not strive for fame and glory, and remained in the background of the artistic life of his time, although many connoisseurs appreciated his works. Several his works have been preserved at Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In the 1870s, Wolverhampton industrialist and collector Sidney Cartwright purchased from a Manchester exhibition a large number of Keelinges works. In 1887, they were given to Wolverhampton Art Gallery which possesses today possibly the largest collection of Keelinges paitings and watercolours in the United Kingdom.