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 :. | Landschaft mit Apollo, den Musen und einem Flubgott | Landscape with Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert (mk17) | landscape with ascanius shooting the stag of sylvia | Landscape with a Hermit | Seaport : The Embarkation of St.Ursula |
Related Artists:
Carlos de Haes
Spanish 1826-1898 Carlos de Haes Galleries Spanish painter of Belgian birth. In 1835 he moved with his parents to M?laga, where he studied under the court portrait painter and miniature painter Luis de la Cruz y R?os (1776-1853). In 1850 he returned to Belgium and studied with the landscape painter Joseph Quineaux (1822-95). During his studies there and on his travels in France, Germany and Holland, he became acquainted with contemporary Realist trends. He returned to Spain in 1855, becoming a naturalized Spaniard, and the following year he exhibited numerous landscapes at the Exposici?n Nacional, Madrid, to much acclaim. In 1857 he won the competition for the fourth chair of landscape painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Madrid with View of the Royal Palace from the Casa de Campo (1857; Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando), a work showing characteristics of the Barbizon and Fontainebleau landscape schools. In 1860 he was elected Acad?mico de m?rito at the Real Academia de S Fernando in Madrid. By 1861 he was officiating and drawing up the regulations for the landscape competitions for aspiring pensionnaires. Consequently plein-air works came to be required in place of the previous tradition of submitting historical landscapes executed in the studio, a practice that discouraged the study of nature. De Haes suggested that only final corrections should be made in the studio, an attitude that indicates his timid initiation and acceptance of Realist trends.
Ramon Casas i Carbo
1866-1932,was a Catalan artist. Living through a turbulent time in the history of his native Barcelona, he was known as a portraitist, sketching and painting the intellectual, economic, and political elite of Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, and beyond; he was also known for his paintings of crowd scenes ranging from the audience at a bullfight to the assembly for an execution to rioters in the Barcelona streets.
Andrea del Sarto
b.July 16, 1486, Florence d.Sept. 28, 1530, Florence Italian Andrea del Sarto Galleries Andrea del Sarto (1486 ?C 1531) was an Italian painter from Florence, whose career flourished during the High Renaissance and early-Mannerism. Though highly regarded by his contemporaries as an artist "senza errori" (i.e., faultless), he is overshadowed now by equally talented contemporaries like Raphael. Andrea fell in love with Lucrezia (del Fede), wife of a hatter named Carlo, of Recanati; the hatter dying opportunely, Andrea married her on 26 December 1512. She has come down to us in many a picture of her lover-husband, who constantly painted her as a Madonna and otherwise; even in painting other women he made them resemble Lucrezia. She was less gently handled by Giorgio Vasari, a pupil of Andrea, who describes her as faithless, jealous, and vixenish with the apprentices; her offstage character permeates Robert Browning's poem-monologue "Andrea del Sarto called the 'faultless painter'" (1855) . He dwelt in Florence throughout the memorable siege of 1529, which was soon followed by an infectious pestilence. He caught the malady, struggled against it with little or no tending from his wife, who held aloof, and he died, no one knowing much about it at the moment, on 22 January 1531, at the comparatively early age of forty-three. He was buried unceremoniously in the church of the Servites. His wife survived her husband by forty years. A number of paintings are considered to be self-portraits. One is in the National Gallery, London, an admirable half-figure, purchased in 1862. Another is at Alnwick Castle, a young man about twenty years, with his elbow on a table. Another youthful portrait is in the Uffizi Gallery, and the Pitti Palace contains more than one.