Greek-born Spanish Mannerist Painter, 1541-1614 Considered a representative of late Renaissance Spanish art, El Greco was actually born in Greece, on the island of Crete. After studying in Venice under Titian, El Greco settled in Toledo, Spain in 1577. At the time he was wildly popular, his emotionally religious paintings being just the ticket for the hometown of the Spanish Inquisition. After his death his work was largely ignored until the beginning of the 20th century; now he considered one of the inspired geniuses of Western art. His distinctive style features bold shapes and colors, with elongated and slightly distorted figures. In Toledo El Greco was in constant demand and liked living large: he maintained a private orchestra to accompany his meals.  Related Paintings of El Greco :. | The Adoration of the Shepherds | The Burial of Count Orgaz | Details of The Burial of Count Orgaz | The Coronation of the Virgin | Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple |
Related Artists:
Edwaert Collier
Dutch 1640-1706 Evert Collier was born about 1640 in Breda, Noord-Brabant, and died in 1708. He is believed to have trained in Haarlem, as his earliest paintings show the influence of Pieter Claesz and Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne. By 1667, he had moved to Leiden, where he became a member of the Guild of St. Luke in 1673. He moved to Amsterdam by 1686 and to London in 1693. He was buried September 8, 1708 at St. James, Piccadilly. The Denver Art Museum, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom), the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) and the Tate (London) are among the public collections having paintings by Evert Collier.
Jacques-Emile Blanche
(1 January 1861 - 20 September 1942) was a French painter born in Paris. His father was a successful psychiatrist who ran a fashionable clinic, and Blanche was brought up in the rich Parisian neighborhood of Passy in a house that had belonged to the Princesse de Lamballe. Although he received some instruction in painting from Henri Gervex, he may be regarded as self-taught. He became a very successful portrait painter, with a style derived from 18th-century English painters such as Thomas Gainsborough as well as Edouard Manet and John Singer Sargent. He worked in London, where he spent time from 1870 on, as well as Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon and the Sociate Nationale des Beaux-Arts. One of his closest friends was Marcel Proust, who helped edit several of Blanche's publications. He also knew Henry James and is mentioned in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Among the painter's most famous works are portraits of his father, Marcel Proust (Private collection, Paris), the poet Pierre Louÿs, the Thaulow family (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), Aubrey Beardsley (National Portrait Gallery, London), and Yvette Guilbert. He was the author of the unreliable Portraits of a Lifetime: the late Victorian era: the Edwardian pageant: 1870-1914 (London: J.M. Dent, 1937) and More Portraits of a Lifetime, 1918-1938 (London: J.M. Dent, 1939).
Barend van Orley
Brussels ca 1488-1541