Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings. Yet he died insolvent, perhaps because of losses in his various business ventures, and soon after his death on April 27, 1656,   Related Paintings of GOYEN, Jan van :. | Haymaking dg | Winter dgh | Marine Landscape with Fishermen fu | Village at the River sg | Windmill by a River fg |
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American Tonalist Painter and Printmaker, 1834-1903, He was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail.
FOPPA, Vincenzo
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1515 was a Northern-Italian Renaissance painter. He was an elderly contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci. Born at Bagnolo Mella, near Brescia in the Republic of Venice, he settled in Pavia around 1456, serving the dukes of Milan and emerging as one of the most prominent Lombard painters. Foppa returned to Brescia in 1489. His style shows affinities to Andrea del Castagno and Carlo Crivelli. Vasari claimed he had trained in Padua, where he may have been strongly influenced by Mantegna. During his lifetime, he was highly acclaimed, especially for his skill in perspective and foreshortening. His important works include a fresco in the Brera Gallery of Milan, the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, and a Crucifixion (1435) in the Accademia Carrara of Bergamo. Many of his works have been lost. He was influential in the styles of Vincenzo Civerchio and Girolamo Romanino.
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