Norwegian Painter, 1845-1932
Norwegian painter. In the 1860s and early 1870s she took lessons in drawing and painting in Christiania (now Oslo) and also travelled extensively in Europe with her sister Agathe, a composer and pianist. She copied works in major museums and took occasional art lessons; she later considered this experience to have been of fundamental importance to her artistic development. Little Red Riding Hood (1872; Oslo, N.G.) is impressive in technique, and the early portrait of her sister, Agathe Backer-Grendahl (1874; Holmestrand, Komm.), shows a refined colour scheme. At the age of nearly 30 Backer decided to train professionally as a painter and in 1874 went to Munich. She was never attached to a particular institution, but the influence of her friend the artist Eilif Peterssen was crucial to her development. In Munich she made a thorough study of perspective, which formed a secure basis for her later work. Related Paintings of Harriet Backer :. | Portrait of Nenna Jahnson | Storebror spiller | Alteret i Tanum kirke | Pa blekevollen | Barnedap i Tanum kirke | Related Artists:
Anne Baptiste NivelonPortrait de Louis de France, dauphin (1729 - 1765) represente tenant des plans militaires
Levitsky, DmitryRussian Painter, 1735-1822
.Russian painter of Ukrainian birth. Together with Fyodor Rokotov and Vladimir Borovikovsky, he ranks foremost among 18th-century Russian portrait painters. He received his first lessons in painting from his father, Grigory Levitsky-Nos (1697-1769), a priest, engraver and painter. He also studied under Aleksey Antropov, who had come to Kiev to decorate St Andrew's church (1752-5). In the late 1750s Levitsky went with Antropov to St Petersburg, where he stayed until 1764; he continued with lessons from Antropov to whom, it appears, he owed the objectivity that was to characterize his work. It is probable that he also studied at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, attending classes under Louis Lagren?e. Levitsky worked with Antropov on the decoration of triumphal arches in Moscow for Catherine II's coronation in 1762. His first known portraits are rather formal, for example that of the architect Aleksandr Kokorinov (1769; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.), which won Levitsky the title of Academician in 1770. In such works he made successful use of a compositional structure typical of formal European portrait painting, intended to emphasize the importance of the sitter.
William Rimmer1816-1879
William Rimmer Gallery
William Rimmer (20 February 1816?C20 August 1879) was an American artist born in Liverpool, England. He was the son of a French refugee, who emigrated to Nova Scotia, where he was joined by his wife and child in 1818, and who in 1826 moved to Boston, where he earned a living as a shoemaker. The son learned the father's trade; at fifteen became a draughtsman and sign-painter; then worked for a lithographer; opened a studio and painted some ecclesiastical pictures.
In 1840 Rimmer made a tour of New England painting portraits, he lived in Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1845-1855 as a shoemaker, for the last years of the decade practising medicine; practised in East Chelsea, Massachusetts and received a diploma from the Suffolk County Medical Society and in 1855 removed to East Milton, Massachusetts where he supplemented his income by carving busts from blocks of granite.
In 1860 Rimmer made his head of St. Stephen and in 1861 his Falling Gladiator. Rimmer's sculptures, except those mentioned and The Fighting Lions, A Dying Centaur, and a statue of Alexander Hamilton (made in 1865 for the city of Boston), were soon destroyed. He worked in clay, not modelling but building up and chiselling; almost always without models or preliminary sketches; and always under technical disadvantages and in great haste; but his sculpture is anatomically remarkable and has an early Greek simplicity and strength.
Rimmer published Elements of Design (1864) and Art Anatomy (1877), but his great work was in the classroom, where his lectures were illustrated with blackboard sketches.
Rimmer's most famous work, though not normally associated with him, is Evening: Fall of Day. This paint-on-canvas portrays Apollo, and a modified version was used by Swan Song Records, the recording label founded in 1974 by English rock group Led Zeppelin, in their label art. It is often mistaken to be a picture of Icarus, Lucifer, Satan, or Daedalus