French 1600-1682 Claude Lorrain Galleries In Rome, not until the mid-17th century were landscapes deemed fit for serious painting. Northern Europeans, such as the Germans Elsheimer and Brill, had made such views pre-eminent in some of their paintings (as well as Da Vinci in his private drawings or Baldassarre Peruzzi in his decorative frescoes of vedute); but not until Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino do we see landscape become the focus of a canvas by a major Italian artist. Even with the latter two, as with Lorrain, the stated themes of the paintings were mythic or religious. Landscape as a subject was distinctly unclassical and secular. The former quality was not consonant with Renaissance art, which boasted its rivalry with the work of the ancients. The second quality had less public patronage in Counter-Reformation Rome, which prized subjects worthy of "high painting," typically religious or mythic scenes. Pure landscape, like pure still-life or genre painting, reflected an aesthetic viewpoint regarded as lacking in moral seriousness. Rome, the theological and philosophical center of 17th century Italian art, was not quite ready for such a break with tradition. In this matter of the importance of landscape, Lorrain was prescient. Living in a pre-Romantic era, he did not depict those uninhabited panoramas that were to be esteemed in later centuries, such as with Salvatore Rosa. He painted a pastoral world of fields and valleys not distant from castles and towns. If the ocean horizon is represented, it is from the setting of a busy port. Perhaps to feed the public need for paintings with noble themes, his pictures include demigods, heroes and saints, even though his abundant drawings and sketchbooks prove that he was more interested in scenography. Lorrain was described as kind to his pupils and hard-working; keenly observant, but an unlettered man until his death. The painter Joachim von Sandrart is an authority for Claude's life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Baldinucci, who obtained information from some of Claude's immediate survivors, relates various incidents to a different effect (Notizie dei professoni del disegno). John Constable described Claude Lorrain as "the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw", and declared that in Claude??s landscape "all is lovely ?C all amiable ?C all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart"  Related Paintings of Claude Lorrain :. | Belagerung von La Rochelle durch die Truppen Ludwigs XIII | Details of The Sermon on the mount | Landscape with Figures Before (mk17) | Landscape with St Onofrio (mk17) | Egeria beweint Numa |
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Francis Grant
Scottish Painter, 1803-1878 Scottish portrait painter. He was self-taught in painting, for which he abandoned a career in law. He began as a painter of hunting scenes (The Melton Hunt and The Cottesmore Hunt) but gained success as a fashionable portrait painter. Among his sitters were Scott, Macaulay, Disraeli, Palmerston, and Landseer. Sir Francis was president (1866 C 78) of the Royal Academy.
Bartolomeo Manfredi
(baptised 25 August 1582 - 12 December 1622) was an Italian painter, a leading member of the Caravaggisti (followers of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio) of the early 17th century. Manfredi was born in Ostiano, near Cremona. He may have been a pupil of Caravaggio in Romeat his famous libel trial in 1603 Caravaggio mentioned that a certain Bartolomeo, accused of distributing scurrilous poems attacking Caravaggio's detested rival Baglione, had been a servant of his. Certainly the Bartolomeo Manfredi known to art history was a close follower of Caravaggio's innovatory style, with its enhanced chiaroscuro and insistence on naturalism, with a gift for story-telling through expression and body-language. Caravaggio in his brief careerehe rocketed to fame in 1600, was exiled from Rome in 1606, and was dead by 1610 had a profound effect on the younger generation of artists, particularly in Rome and Naples. And of these Caravaggisti (followers of Caravaggio), Manfredi seems in turn to have been the most influential in transmitting the master's legacy to the next generation, particularly with painters from France and the Netherlands who came to Italy. Unfortunately no documented, signed works by Manfredi survive, and several of the forty or so works now attributed to him were formerly believed to be by Caravaggio. The steady disentangling of Caravaggio from Manfredi has made clear that it was Manfredi, rather than his master, who was primarily responsible for popularising low-life genre painting among the second generation of Caravaggisti. Manfredi was a successful artist, able to keep his own servant before he was thirty years old, "a man of distinguished appearance and fine behaviour" according to the biographer Giulio Mancini, although seldom sociable. He built his career around easel paintings for private clients, and never pursued the public commissions upon which wider reputations were built, but his works were widely collected in the 17th century and he was considered Caravaggio's equal or even superior. His Mars Chastising Cupid offers a tantalising hint at a lost Caravaggio: the master promised a painting on this theme to Mancini, but another of Caravaggio's patrons, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, had taken it, and Mancini therefore commissioned Manfredi to paint another for him, which Mancini considered Manfredi's best work. Manfredi died in Rome in 1622. Gerard Seghers (or Segers; 1589-1651) was one of his pupils
Thomas Hill
1829-1908 Thomas Hill was born in England on September 11, 1829. At the age of 15, he emigrated to the United States with his family. They settled in Taunton, Massachusetts. In 1851, he married Charlotte Elizabeth Hawkins. They had nine children. At the age of 24, Hill attended evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and studied under American painter Peter Frederick Rothermel (1812-1895). During his years as a student, Hill traveled to the White Mountains in New Hampshire as early as 1854 and sketched alongside members of the Hudson River School, such as Benjamin Champney. In 1856, Hill and his family moved to San Francisco, California. With painter Virgil Williams and photographer Carleton Watkins, Hill made his first trip to the Yosemite Valley in 1865. The next year, Hill traveled to the East Coast and Europe. He established his family on the East Coast but continued to take sketching trips to the West Coast and to attend meetings of the San Francisco Art Association. He moved his family back to San Francisco in 1873. Hill made yearly sketching trips to Yosemite, Mount Shasta, and, back east, to the White Mountains. Hill ran an art gallery and art supply store. He briefly acted as the interim director for the SFAA School of Design and went to Alaska on a commission for environmentalist John Muir. He lived on his stock market investments as well as his art proceeds. His marriage ended in the 1880s. Toward the end of his life, he maintained a studio at Yosemite??s Wawona Hotel. After suffering a stroke, Hill left Yosemite and traveled up and down the California coast, including stops in Coronado, San Diego and Santa Barbara. He died in Raymond, California, on June 30, 1908, and is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.