1725-1805 French Jean Baptiste Greuze Galleries French painter and draughtsman. He was named an associate member of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, in 1755 on the strength of a group of paintings that included genre scenes, portraits and studies of expressive heads (t?tes d'expression). These remained the essential subjects of his art for the next 50 years, except for a brief, concentrated and unsuccessful experiment with history painting in the late 1760s, which was to affect his later genre painting deeply. Though his art has often been compared with that of Jean-Simeon Chardin in particular and interpreted within the context of NEO-CLASSICISM in general, it stands so strikingly apart from the currents of its time that Greuze's accomplishments are best described, as they often were by the artist's contemporaries, as unique. He was greatly admired by connoisseurs, critics and the general public throughout most of his life. His pictures were in the collections of such noted connoisseurs as Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, Claude-Henri Watelet and Etienne-Francois, Duc de Choiseul. For a long period he was in particular favour with the critic Denis Diderot, who wrote about him in the Salon reviews that he published in Melchior Grimm's privately circulated Correspondance litteraire. His reputation declined towards the end of his life and through the early part of the 19th century, to be revived after 1850, when 18th-century painting returned to favour, by such critics as Th?ophile Thore, Arsene Houssaye and, most notably, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their book L'Art du dix-huiti?me siecle. By the end of the century Greuze's work, especially his many variations on the Head of a Girl, fetched record prices, and his Broken Pitcher (Paris, Louvre) was one of the most popular paintings in the Louvre. The advent of modernism in the early decades of the 20th century totally obliterated Greuze's reputation. It was only in the 1970s, with Brookner's monograph, Munhall's first comprehensive exhibition of the artist's work, increased sale prices, important museum acquisitions and fresh analyses of his art by young historians, that Greuze began to regain the important place that he merits in the history of French art of the 18th century.  Related Paintings of Jean Baptiste Greuze :. | Tournus | The Verwohnte child | Portrait of Countess Ekaterina Shuvalova | l accordee de village | A Young Man in a Hat |
Related Artists:
Thomas Beach
British Painter, 1738-1806,English painter. He studied with Joshua Reynolds from 1760 until early in 1762, during which time he was also a student at the St Martin's Lane Academy, London. He probably settled in Bath; his recorded portraits of the 1760s are all of sitters from Dorset or Somerset, and he sent two portraits from an address in Bath to the Society of Artists exhibition of 1772. He exhibited with the Society until 1783, becoming its vice-president (1782) and president (1783) he also exhibited at the Royal Academy (1785-90, 1797). He probably divided his mature practice between London and Bath. His early reliance on Reynolds's ideas of propriety gave way to a more direct approach, seen at its best in such group portraits as The Stapleton Family (1789; U. Bath, Holburne of Menstrie Mus.). In this work, the four children are shown in costume, as a fortune-teller and her customers. The theatrical element in Beach's work, reflecting his interest in the stage, is seen most strikingly in Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble in 'Macbeth' Act 2, Scene ii (1786; London, Garrick Club). Beach's diary for 1798, the only one to have survived, chronicles what appears to have been an annual tour of the west country; that year he completed 31 portraits between June and December. Beach was able to capture a strong likeness and this, despite a certain naivety and awkwardness in composition, was enough to establish his reputation in moderately fashionable provincial circles. His last recorded work is a Self-portrait
Hildegard of Bingen
1098-1179,German composer, abbess and mystic. Her writings include much lyrical and dramatic poetry which has survived with monophonic music. The Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum contains musical settings of 77 poems arranged according to the liturgical calendar. The poetry is laden with imagery and the music, based on a few formulaic melodic patterns, is in some respects highly individual. Her morality play Ordo virtutum contains 82 melodies in a more syllabic style.
Cornelisz van Haarlem
1562-1638 Dutch Cornelisz van Haarlem Galleries Dutch painter and draughtsman. He came from a wealthy family. During the Spanish siege and occupation of Haarlem (1572-7), his parents moved elsewhere, leaving their son and large house in the protection of the painter Pieter Pietersz. (1540/41-1603), who became Cornelis's teacher. In 1579 Cornelis travelled to France by sea, but the journey terminated at Rouen because of an outbreak of plague. He then became a pupil of Gillis Congnet in Antwerp, with whom he stayed for one year. In 1580-81 he returned permanently to Haarlem, and in 1583 he received his first official commission from the city, a militia company portrait, the Banquet of the Haarlem Civic Guard (Haarlem, Frans Halsmus.). Around 1584 he befriended Hendrick Goltzius and Karel van Mander, with whom he is said to have established a kind of academy.