German-born American Hudson River School Painter, 1830-1902 Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany. His family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1833. He studied painting with the members of the D??sseldorf School in D??sseldorf, Germany from 1853 to 1857. He taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself to painting. Bierstadt began making paintings in New England and upstate New York. In 1859, he traveled westward in the company of a Land Surveyor for the U.S. government, returning with sketches that would result in numerous finished paintings. In 1863 he returned west again, in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he would later marry. He continued to visit the American West throughout his career. Though his paintings sold for princely sums, Bierstadt was not held in particularly high esteem by critics of his day. His use of uncommonly large canvases was thought to be an egotistical indulgence, as his paintings would invariably dwarf those of his contemporaries when they were displayed together. The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light was felt to be excessive by contemporary critics. His paintings emphasized atmospheric elements like fog, clouds and mist to accentuate and complement the feel of his work. Bierstadt sometimes changed details of the landscape to inspire awe. The colors he used are also not always true. He painted what he believed is the way things should be: water is ultramarine, vegetation is lush and green, etc. The shift from foreground to background was very dramatic and there was almost no middle distance Nonetheless, his paintings remain popular. He was a prolific artist, having completed over 500 (possibly as many as 4000) paintings during his lifetime, most of which have survived. Many are scattered through museums around the United States. Prints are available commercially for many. Original paintings themselves do occasionally come up for sale, at ever increasing prices.  Related Paintings of Albert Bierstadt :. | Minnehaha Falls | Sunset Over a Mountain Lake | Attack on a Picket Post | Bridal Veil Falls. Yosemite | Sacramento River Valley |
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Gillis van Coninxloo
(1544 ?C 1607) was a Dutch painter of forest landscapes, the most famous member of a large family of artists. He travelled through France, and lived in Germany for several years to avoid religious persecution. He was born at Antwerp and studied under Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Lenaert Kroes and Gillis Mostaert. He practiced his art in France, but in 1587, on account of religious persecution, emigrated to Frankenthal and passed his later life in Amsterdam, where he died in 1607. Coninxloo ranks as one of the most important Dutch landscape painters of the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. He exercised a strong influence on Jan Brueghel the Elder, Schoubroeck, Savery, and other Flemish and Dutch landscape painters of the transition period. Coninxloo is considered the founder of a new approach to the painting of forests; while earlier forest landscapes had used woods as backdrops for human activity, van Coninxloo made them a subject, submerging tiny human figures in elaborate compositions of trees in hugely exaggerated scale. During his stay at Frankenthal from 1588 to 1595, he influenced several better known Dutch landscape-painters collectively referred to as the Frankenthal School. Karel van Mander wrote about him and his father Jan den Hollander in his Schilder-boeck. He wrote that his teacher Pieter Coeke van Aelst was his cousin, and that his landscapes were among the best of all Dutch landscape artists.
camille bombois

Marlow, William
English, 1740-1813 English painter. From c. 1756 to 1761 he was a pupil of Samuel Scott, the topographical and marine painter; he also studied at the St Martin's Lane Academy, London. Throughout his career Marlow made oils and watercolours of London views, for example Near Westminster Bridge, Evening (London, Guildhall A.G.), which shows his balanced, classical sense of composition, sensitivity to lighting effects and smooth handling of oil paint. Between 1765 and 1766 Marlow travelled in France and Italy, making numerous drawings of ruins, which provided the subjects for many paintings finished on his return to London. An Oxcart in the Grotto of Posillipo (c. 1770; New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A.) exemplifies his bold, blue-toned watercolour style, with washes applied in loose blotches to emphasize the picturesque roughness of masonry and terrain. The handling has much in common with Canaletto, whom Marlow copied; a letter of 1771 from Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann (see 1956 exh. cat., p. 3) records that two views of Verona by Marlow were mistakenly sold as Canalettos. Marlow specialized in souvenirs of the Grand Tour, portraits of country houses, seascapes and river scenes. He visited many parts of Britain and Ireland in search of subjects, such as Powys Castle, Montgomeryshire (U. Manchester, Whitworth A.G.).