Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1697-1768
Italian painter, etcher and draughtsman. He was the most distinguished Italian view painter of the 18th century. Apart from ten years spent in England he lived in Venice, and his fame rests above all on his views (vedute) of that city; some of these are purely topographical, others include festivals or ceremonial events. He also painted imaginary views (capriccios), although the demarcation between the real and the invented is never quite clearcut: his imaginary views often include realistically depicted elements, though in unexpected surroundings, and in a sense even his Venetian vedute are imaginary. He never merely re-created reality. He was highly successful with the English, helped in this by the British connoisseur JOSEPH SMITH, whose own large collection of Canaletto works was sold to King George III in 1762. The British Royal Collection has the largest group of his paintings and drawings. Related Paintings of Canaletto :. | The Grand Canal and the Church of the Salute (detail) ffg | London: Northumberland House | Regatta on the Canale Grande | Capriccio with Venetian Motifs df | Reception of the Ambassador in the Doge s Palace | Related Artists:
Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo1612-1667
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.
Hendrik Willem MesdagHendrik Willem Mesdag was born on February 23, 1831 in Groningen. His father, a merchant and banker, was an amateur painter who saw to it that his two sons were also educated in the art of painting. He was a Dutch marine painter. He was born in Groningen, the son of the banker Klaas Mesdag and his wife Johanna Wilhelmina van Giffen. Mesdag was encouraged by his father, an amateur painter, to study art. He married Sina van Houten in 1856, and when they inherited a fortune from her father, Mesdag retired from banking to pursue a career as a painter. He studied in Brussels with Willem Roelofs and in 1868 moved to The Hague to paint the sea. In 1870 he exhibited at the Paris Salon and won the gold medal for The Breakers of the North Sea. Preparations for departureIn 1880 he received a commission from a Belgian company to paint a panorama giving a view over the village of Scheveningen on the North Sea coast near The Hague .
Jan Provost1465-1529 Flemish Jan Provost Gallery
Jan Provoost, or Jan Provost (1462/5, Mons?CJanuary 1529, Bruges) was a Flemish painter. He was one of the most famous Netherlandish painters of his generation, a prolific master who left his early workshop in Valenciennes to run two workshops, one in Bruges, where he was made a burgher in 1494, the other simultaneously in Antwerp, which was the economic center of the Low Countries. Provoost was also a cartographer engineer and architect. He met Albrecht D??rer in Antwerp in 1520, and a D??rer portrait drawing at the National Gallery, London, is conjectured to be of Provoost. He married the widow of the miniaturist and painter Simon Marmion, after whose death he inherited the considerable Marmion estate.
The styles of Gerard David and Hans Memling can be detected in Provoost's religious paintings. The Last Judgement painted for the Bruges town hall in 1525 is the only painting for which documentary evidence identifies Provoost. Surprising discoveries can still be made: in 1971 an unknown and anonymous panoramic Crucifixion from the village church at Koolkerke was identified as Provoost's. It is on permanent loan to the Groeninge Museum, Bruges.