One of the most talented painters in the Dutch Golden Age , 1632-1675
was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of ordinary life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death. Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours, sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work. What strikes in most of his paintings is a certain love, which easily could be called a love sickness, for the people and the objects in his paintings. He created a world more perfect than any he had witnessed. After having been virtually forgotten for nearly one hundred years, Related Paintings of Johannes Vermeer :. | Youg woman playing a guitar | Milkmaid | A Young Woman Seated at the Virginal with a painting of Dirck van Baburen in the background | Mistress and maid | A Lady Seated at a Virginal | Related Artists:
Artemisia GentileschiItalian
1593-1652
Artemisia Gentileschi Gallery
Gentileschi was born on July 8, 1593 in Rome. She was the daughter of the painter Orazio Gentileschi and was trained by him. Our perception of Gentileschi has been colored by the legend surrounding her. Her alleged rape by her father colleague, the quadratura painter Agostino Tassi, when she was 17, was the subject of a protracted legal action brought by Orazio in 1611. Although she was subsequently married off to Pietro Antonio di Vicenzo Stiattesi in 1612 and gave birth to at least one daughter, she soon separated from her husband and led a strikingly independent life for a woman of her time - even if there is no firm evidence for the reputation she enjoyed in the 18th century as a sexual libertine. After her marriage, Gentileschi lived in Florence until about 1620. She then worked in Genoa and settled in Naples in 1630. Gentileschi traveled to England in 1638-40, where she collaborated with her father on a series of canvasses for the Queen House, Greenwich (now Marlborough House, London). Gentileschi died in Naples in 1652.
It is tempting to adduce the established biographical data in partial explanation of the context of her art: the sympathy and vigor with which she evokes her heroines and their predicaments, and her obsession with that tale of female triumph, Judith and Holofernes. But such possibilities should not distract attention from the high professional standards that Gentileschi brought to her art. In a letter, dated July 3, 1612, to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Orazio claimed that "Artemisia, having turned herself to the profession of painting, has in three years so reached the point that I can venture to say that today she has no peer. Despite the obvious exaggeration, one can agree that Gentileschi art was of a consistently high quality virtually from the beginning.
Pierre Edouard Frere(1819-1886), French painter, studied under Hippolyte Delaroche, entered the cole des Beaux-Arts in 1836 and exhibited first at the Salon in 1843. The marked sentimental tendency of his art makes us wonder at John Ruskin's enthusiastic eulogy which finds in Frere's work the depth of William Wordsworth, the grace of Joshua Reynolds, and the holiness of Fra Angelico. What we can admire in his work is his accomplished craftsmanship and the intimacy and tender homeliness of his conception. Among his chief works are the two paintings, Going to School and Coming from School, The Little Glutton (his first exhibited picture) and L'Exercice (in the 19th century this work was in John Jacob Astor's collection). A journey to Egypt in 1860 resulted in a small series of Orientalist subjects, but the majority of Frere's paintings deal with the life of the kitchen, the workshop, the dwellings of the humble, and mainly with the pleasures and little troubles of the young, which the artist brings before us with humor and sympathy. He was one of the most popular painters of domestic genre in the middle of the 19th century.
CONGNET, GillisFlemish painter (b. ca. 1538, Antwerpen, d. 1599, Hamburg)
Flemish painter. The son of a goldsmith of the same name, he trained as a painter with Lambert Wenselyns ( fl 1553) and possibly also with Antoon van Palermo (1503 or 1513-c. 1589), an Antwerp art dealer in whose house he lived (van Mander). In 1561 he became a free master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke. Shortly afterwards he travelled to Italy, going first to Naples and Sicily and then to Terni, where he made frescoes with a painter named Stello. In 1568 he was registered as a member of the Accademia in Florence. He must have returned to Antwerp in 1570, for between that year and 1585 his name appears in the register of the city's Guild of St Luke, of which he became Dean in 1585. A year later, on the arrival of Alessandro Farnese,