Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1625-1679 Daily life was Jan Steen's main pictorial theme. Many of the genre scenes he portrayed are lively to the point of chaos and lustfulness, even so much that a Jan Steen household, meaning a messy scene, became a Dutch proverb (een huishouden van Jan Steen). Subtle hints in his paintings seem to suggest that Steen meant to warn the viewer rather than invite him to copy this behaviour. Many of Steen's paintings bear references to old Dutch proverbs or literature. He often used members of his family as models. Jan Steen painted also quite a few self-portraits, in which he showed no tendency of vanity. Steen did not shy from other themes: he painted historical, mythological and religious scenes, portraits, still lifes and natural scenes. His portraits of children are famous. He is also well known for his mastery of light and attention to detail, most notably in textiles. Steen was prolific, producing about 800 paintings, of which roughly 350 survive. Steen's work was valued much by contemporaries and as a result he was reasonably well paid for his work. He did not have any students, but his work proved a source of inspiration for many painters.  Related Paintings of Jan Steen :. | Self-Portrait as a lutenist | The Picnic | The way you hear it is the way you sing it | Doctor's Visit | Girl offering oysters |
Related Artists:
Valtat Louis
Dieppe 1869-Choisel 1952 French painter, printmaker and stage designer. He spent much of his youth in Versailles, moving in 1887 to Paris, where he studied under Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and under Jules Dupre at the Acad?mie Julian. There he met Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Albert Andre. With a keen interest in both artistic precedents and contemporary trends, he absorbed in the mid-1890s the chief tenets of Impressionism, van Gogh's work and Pointillism before slowly developing his own style.
Maris, Jacob
Dutch, 1837-1899 was a Dutch painter, who with his brothers Willem and Matthijs belonged to what has come to be known as the Hague School of painters. Maris studied at the Antwerp Academy, and subsequently in Hubertus van Hove's studio during a stay in Paris from 1865 till 1871. He returned to Holland when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and died there in August 1899. Though he painted, especially in early life, domestic scenes and interiors invested with deeply sympathetic feeling, it is as a landscape painter that Maris excelled. He was the painter of bridges and windmills, of old quays, massive towers, and level banks; even more was he the painter of water, and misty skies, and chasing clouds. In all his works, whether in water or oil color, and in his etchings, the subject is always subordinate to the effect. His art is suggestive rather than decorative, and his force does not seem to depend on any preconceived method, such as a synthetical treatment of form or gradations of tone. And yet, though his means appear so simple, the artist's mind seems to communicate with the spectator's by directness of pictorial instinct, and we have only to observe the admirable balance of composition and truthful perspective to understand the sure knowledge of his business that underlies such purely impressionist handling. Maris has shown all that is gravest or brightest in the landscape of Holland, all that is heaviest or clearest in its atmosphere for instance, in the " Grey Tower, Old Amsterdam," in the " Landscape near Dordrecht," in the " Sea-weed Carts, Scheven-ingen," in " A Village Scene," and in the numerous other pictures which have been exhibited in the Royal Academy, London, in Edinburgh (1885), Paris, Brussels
william shakespeare
Born: 23 April 1564 Birthplace: Stratford-upon-Avon, England Died: 23 April 1616 Best Known As: The famed author of Romeo and Juliet