English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1828-1882 Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. His incomplete picture Found was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted up from the street by a country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones. This was also true of his later poetry. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the image of idealized Botticelli's Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci. Although he won support from the John Ruskin, criticism of his clubs caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to waterhum, which could be sold privately. In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices. Both these developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix. These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst another of his mistresses Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.  Related Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti :. | A Sea Spell | The Annunciation | Jane Morris | Portrait of Maria Leathart (mk28) | La Ghirlandata |
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Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov
Russian Painter, 1865-1911 Russian painter, graphic artist and stage designer. As a child he lived in St Petersburg, but he made frequent trips abroad. In 1874 he travelled to Paris with his mother and frequented the studio of the Russian Realist painter, Il'ya Repin. In 1875 the art patron Savva Mamontov invited Serov and his mother to settle at ABRAMTSEVO outside Moscow, where he again had the opportunity to study under Repin and to meet other artists in the Mamontov circle. The Symbolist paintings of Mikhail Vrubel' and the late Impressionist landscapes and figure studies of Konstantin Korovin he saw at Abramtsevo had a lasting influence on the young Serov. From 1880 to 1885 he studied at the Academy of Art, St Petersburg, under Pavel Chistyakov (1832-1919). During the 1880s Serov also travelled abroad and became aware of French Impressionism. He began to use bright colours in portraits of figures seen in dappled sunlight and shade, as in his portrait of Vera Mamontov, Girl with Peaches (1887) and a portrait of Mariya Simonovich, Girl in Sunlight (1888; both Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.).
Georg Flegel
1566-1638 Georg Flegel Location German painter. He was the son of a shoemaker, and not being a Roman Catholic, probably moved to Vienna after 1580, when the Counter-Reformation began to take effect in Olmetz. In Vienna he became the assistant of Lucas van Valckenborch I, whom he subsequently followed to Frankfurt, then an important centre for art dealing and publishing. He filled in staffage in van Valckenborch pictures of the seasons and portraits, inserting fruit, table utensils and flowers as still-life set pieces. His faithful reproduction of flowers and fruit drew on watercolours by Derer, still-life painters from the Netherlands living in Frankfurt, and botanical and zoological illustrations by Joris Hoefnagel, Pieter van der Borcht IV and Carolus Clusius (1525-1609) then being published in Frankfurt.
Peter Purves Smith
Peter Purves Smith (26 March 1912 - 23 July 1949), born Charles Roderick Purves Smith, was an Australian painter. Born in Melbourne, Purves Smith studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London and under progressive art teacher George Bell in Melbourne.