Russian Rococo Era Painter , 1727/1729-1802 Russian painter and teacher. He came from a family of serfs, belonging to the Counts Sheremetev, that produced several painters and architects. In about 1746-7 he was a pupil of Georg Christoph Grooth (1716-49), who painted portraits of the Sheremetev family. With Grooth, Argunov worked on the decoration of the court church at Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin). A full-length icon of St John of Damascus (1749; Pushkin, Pal.-Mus.), in Rococo style, is distinguished by its secular, decorative character. The Dying Cleopatra (1750; Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.) is typical of Rococo decorative painting of the mid-18th century, with its striking combination of light, soft tones. Argunov subsequently painted in a quite different style, mainly producing portraits, of which about 60 are known. Among the first of these are pendant portraits of Ivan Lobanov-Rostovsky and his wife (1750 and 1754; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.), in which the sitters are idealized, as in ceremonial court portraits.   Related Paintings of Ivan Argunov :. | Self-portrait | Portrait of an Unknown Woman in Russian Costume | Portrait of P.B. Sheremetev | Portrait of Peasant Woman in Russian Costume | Portrait of Alexander Dmitriev |
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Louis Michel van Loo
Louis-Michel van Loo (2 March 1707-20 March 1771) was a French painter. He studied under his father, the painter Jean-Baptiste van Loo, at Turin and Rome, and he won a prize at the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris in 1725. With his uncle, the painter Charles-Andre van Loo, he went to Rome in 1727 - 1732, and in 1736 he became court painter to Philip V of Spain at Madrid, where he was a founder-member of the Academy in 1752. He returned to Paris in 1753, and painted many portraits of Louis XV of France. In 1765 he succeeded Charles-Andre as director of the special school of the French academy known as the Ecole Royale des Eleves Proteges. In 1766 he made the portrait of the Portuguese statesman Sebastiao de Melo, Marquis of Pombal. Among his brothers were the painters Francois van Loo (1708 - 1732) and Charles-Amedee-Philippe van Loo (1719 - 1795).
Edwin Douglas
1848-1914
Cecilia Beaux
American figure and portrait painter , 1855-1942 American painter. She began her career painting on porcelain and producing lithographs and portrait drawings. She studied with Catharine Ann Drinker (1871), Francis Adolf van der Wielen (1872-3) and Camille Piton (1879), at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (1877-8), and privately with William Sartain (1881-3). Under Sartain's guidance, she learnt to paint, producing her first major portrait, the Last Days of Infancy