Caribbean-born French Pointillist/Impressionist Painter, ca.1830-1903 .Painter and printmaker. He was the only painter to exhibit in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886, and he is often regarded as the 'father' of the movement. He was by no means narrow in outlook, however, and throughout his life remained as radical in artistic matters as he was in politics. Thad?e Natanson wrote in 1948: 'Nothing of novelty or of excellence appeared that Pissarro had not been among the first, if not the very first, to discern and to defend.' The significance of Pissarro's work is in the balance maintained between tradition and the avant-garde. Octave Mirbeau commented: 'M. Camille Pissarro has shown himself to be a revolutionary by renewing the art of painting in a purely working sense;  Related Paintings of Camille Pissarro :. | Apple | market | Autumn in Eragny | Jeanne Holding a Fan | River boat |
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Polk, Charles Peale
American, 1767-1822 American painter. Orphaned as a child, he was raised in Philadelphia, PA, by his uncle, Charles Willson Peale, who taught him to paint. In 1791 Polk moved to Baltimore, MD, where he achieved limited success as a portrait painter. Seeking commissions, he moved to Frederick, MD, in 1796. Over the next five years during travels as an itinerant limner through western Maryland and Virginia he reached his mature style. Abandoning his academic training, Polk developed a distinctive but naive artistic vocabulary with a heightened palette, electric highlights and an exaggerated attenuation of the human form. The portraits of Isaac Hite and his wife Eleanor Madison Hite, as well as James Madison sr and Eleanor Conway Madison (all Middletown, VA, Belle Grove), were commissioned in 1799 and are accepted as his masterpieces. Isaac Hite also commissioned the quintessentially 'republican' portrait of Thomas Jefferson (New York, Victor Spark priv. col.), executed at Monticello in 1799. In 1801 Polk moved to Washington, DC, working as a clerk in the Treasury. During the next 16 years he painted few portraits in oil
Henri Delavallee
French, 1862-1943
WEST, Benjamin
American Neoclassical Painter, 1738-1820 American historical painter who worked in England. He was born in Springfield, Pa., in a house that is now a memorial museum at Swarthmore College. After some instruction from a local artist named William Williams, he set up as a portrait painter in Philadelphia at 18, subsequently moving to New York City. In 1760 he went to Europe, where he remained for the rest of his life. For three years he studied in Italy. Working under the tutelage of Anton Mengs, he was also inspired by the classical research of Johann Winckelmann. He then settled in London, becoming a leader of the neoclassical movement. Under the patronage of George III, commissions came to him in great numbers, and in 1772 he was appointed historical painter to the king. A founder of the Royal Academy, he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as its president in 1792. West executed more than 400 canvases, chiefly historical, mythological, and religious subjects painted on a heroic scale. He had many pupils and was a generous friend and adviser to younger artists, particularly American painters studying in England, among whom were Washington Allston, Samuel Morse, Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and John Singleton Copley. His influence on American painting of the period was predominant. Among West's best-known works are Death of General Wolfe (Grosvenor Gall., London) and Penn's Treaty with the Indians (Pa. Acad. of the Fine Arts). In these paintings he created a new departure in historical painting by clothing his figures in the costume of their period instead of the traditional classical garb.