1865-1925was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He was born into a conservative middle class family in Lausanne, and there he attended College Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882. In that year he moved to Paris to study art under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Academie Julian. He spent many hours in the Louvre, where he greatly admired the works of Holbein, Derer and Ingres; these artists would remain exemplars for Vallotton throughout his life.[1] His earliest paintings, such as the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach (1885), are firmly rooted in the academic tradition, and his self portrait of 1885 (seen at right) received an honorable mention at the Salon des artistes français in 1886. During the following decade Vallotton painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and were recognized as radically innovative in printmaking. They established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium; in the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been mainly utilized unimaginatively as a medium for the reproduction of drawn or painted images and, latterly, photographs. Vallotton's starkly reductive woodcut style features large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. While emphasizing outline and flat patterns, Vallotton generally made no use of the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. The influences of post-Impressionism, symbolism and the Japanese woodcut are apparent; a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints had been presented at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and Vallotton, like many artists of his era an enthusiast of Japonism, collected these prints. He depicted street crowds and demonstrations including several scenes of police attacking anarchists bathing women, portrait heads, and other subjects which he treated with a sardonic humor. His graphic art reached its highest development in Intimit's (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women. Vallotton's prints have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner .By 1892 he was affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail.  Related Paintings of Felix Vallotton :. | The Corpse | Portrait decoratif of Paul Verlaine | Sandbanks on the Lore | Gabrielle Vallotton | Dinner,Light Effect |
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Hendrick Danckerts
(c.1625 - 1680) was a Dutch Golden Age landscape painter and engraver. Danckerts was born in The Hague, where he learned his trade and remained until 1653.He visited England for the first time in 1650.In 1653 he went to Italy, where he stayed for five years. He then moved to England where he entered the service of Charles II and the Duke of York. He painted Italianate landscapes, especially views of harbors and royal residences. He also produced portraits and devotional pictures and made engravings after the Italian old masters in the Royal Collection. He left England in 1679due to the public hostility towards Roman Catholics after the Popish Plot controversy. He died soon after in Amsterdam.
LONGHI, Alessandro
Italian painter, Venetian school (b. 1733, Venezia, d. 1813, Venezia). Painter, engraver and writer, son of (1) Pietro Longhi. He must have received his first artistic training from his father, although the only evidence of this is the similarity of their styles. He was apprenticed to Giuseppe Nogari, one of the better Venetian portrait painters of the first half of the eighteenth century, and his earliest works are bust-length, mostly life-size portraits in Nogari's style. He first exhibited in 1757 and by 1758 must have been considered a reasonably established artist,
Johan Vilhelm Gertner
(10 March 1818 - 28 March 1871) was a Danish painter, best known for his portraiture. One of the last students of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, who was known as the father of the Golden Age of Danish Painting, Gertner belonged to the tail end of the Golden Age, a period during which Danish art moved towards a more realistic style, relying on inspiration both from French Realism and emerging photographic techniques. Gertner was born on 10 March 1818 to a craftsman at the Holmen naval base. He attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1831 to 1837 where he was one of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, known as the farther of Goldn Age of Danish Painting. Eckersberg taught him a naturalistic approach to painting, but Gertner went much further with inspiration from French art and the emerging techniques of photography. His virtuosity in producing almost photographically precise portraits impressed many; in particular, his ability to reproduce textures and materials e crisp silk dresses, lustrous medals and jewellery, dark mahogany furniture, silky wallpapers, and soft carpets e won him much acclaim. Others, such as the influential art historian and critic Niels Lauritz Høyen, who opposed any foreign influence on Danish painting, disapproved of his style, preferring more sincere and sensitive portrayals. He was a professor at the Academy from 1858.