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 :. | Christ in the House of Martha and Mary | The Wine Glass | A Young Woman Seated at the Virginal with a painting of Dirck van Baburen in the background | The Art of Painting | Young Woman with a Water Pitcher |
Related Artists:
Jarvis John Wesley
English-born American Painter, ca.1780-1840
Hans Makart
(May 28, 1840 - October 3, 1884) was a 19th century Austrian academic history painter, designer, and decorator; most well known for his influence on Gustav Klimt and other Austrian artists, but in his own era considered an important artist himself and was a celebrity figure in the high culture of Vienna, attended with almost cult-like adulation. Makart was the son of a chamberlain at the Mirabell Palace, born in the former residence of the prince-archbishops of Salzburg. Initially, he received his training in painting at the Vienna Academy between 1850 and 1851 from Johann Fischbach. While in the Academy, German art was under the rule of a classicism, which was entirely intellectual and academice clear and precise drawing, sculpturesque modelling, and pictorial erudition were esteemed above all. Makart, who was a poor draughtsman, but who had a passionate and sensual love of color, was impatient to escape the routine of art school drawing. For his fortune, he was found by his instructors to be devoid of all talent and forced to leave the Vienna Academy. He went to Munich, and after two years of independent study attracted the attention of Karl Theodor von Piloty, under whose guidance, between 1861 and 1865 he developed his painting style. During these years, Makart also travelled to London, Paris and Rome to further his studies. The first picture he painted under Piloty, Lavoisier in Prison, though it was considered timid and conventional, attracted attention by its sense of color. In his next work, The Knight and the Water Nymphs, he first displayed the decorative qualities to which he afterwards sacrificed everything else in his work. His fame became established in the next year, with two works, Modern Amoretti and The Plague in Florence. His painting Romeo and Juliet was soon after bought by the Austrian emperor for the Vienna Museum, and Makart was invited to come to Vienna by the aristocracy. The prince Von Hohenlohe provided Makart with an old foundry at the Gusshausstraße 25 to use as a studio. He gradually turned it into an impressive place full of sculptures, flowers, musical instruments, requisites and jewellery that he used to create classical settings for his portraits, mainly of women. Eventually his studio looked like a salon and became a social meeting point in Vienna. Cosima Wagner described it as a "wonder of decorative beauty, a sublime lumber-room". His luxurious studio served as a model for a great many upper middle-class living rooms. The opulent, semi-public spaces of the Makart atelier were the scene of a recurring rendezvous between the artist and his public. The artist became the mediator between different levels of society: he created a socially ambiguous sphere in which nobility and bourgeoisie could encounter one another in mutual veneration of the master, and aestheticized the burgeoning self-awareness of the bourgeoisie by means of historical models drawn from the world of the aristocracy. In this way, an artist like Makart lived out the image that high society had created of him. Makart is considered by many as being the first art star, referred to by contemporaries an "artist prince" (Malerferst) in the tradition of Rubens. Makart became the acknowledged leader of the artistic life of the Vienna, which in the 1870s passed through a period of feverish activity, the chief results of which are the sumptuously decorated public buildings of the Ringstraße. He not only practised painting, but was also an interior designer, costume designer, furniture designer, and decorator, and his work decorated most of the public spaces of the era. His work engendered the term "Makartstil", or "Makart style", which completely characterized the era. In 1879, Makart had designed a pageant organised to celebrate the Silver Wedding Anniversary of the Imperial couple, emperor Franz Josef and his wife Elisabeth of Bavaria he designed, single-handed, the costumes, scenic setting, and triumphal cars. This became known as the "Makart-parade", and had given the people of Vienna the chance to dress up in historical costumes and be transported back into the past for a few hours. At the head of the parade was a float for artists, led by Makart on a white horse. His festivals became an institution in Vienna which lasted up until the 1960s. In the same year as the first parade he became a Professor at the Vienna Academy. Makart's painting The Entry of Charles V into Antwerp caused some controversy, because Charles V was depicted arriving in a procession surrounded by nude virgins; the offense was the mistaken idea that the nudes had no place in the modern scene. In the United States, the painting fell under the proscription of Anthony Comstock, which secured Makart's fame there. The American public desired at once to see what Comstock was persecuting, so they could tell whether he was acting correctly or in error. Salzburg's Makart Square, or Makartplatz, was named after the painter.
Isaac Israels
Dutch, 1865-1934 Son of Jozef Israëls. He was largely self-taught, showing precocious talent and attending the Academie in The Hague in 1878-80. His first paintings date from 1880-84 and include a self-portrait, portraits of women and military subjects such as Bugle Practice. They were composed in the studio in a precise style, soft grey and brown tones predominating, showing the influence of the Hague school. In 1887 Israels moved to Amsterdam, where he was at the centre of the Tachtigers of writers and painters. Among his friends were George Hendrik Breitner, Lodewijk van Dyssel, Frans Erens, Max Liebermann, Jan Pieter Veth and Jan Voerman. In Amsterdam, after a brief and abortive period at the Rijksacademie, he sought a more fluent technique with which to record contemporary life. His drawings and watercolours are predominantly of cafes, cabarets, dance halls and the street life of Amsterdam. In 1889 he visited Paris, where he met St phane Mallarm, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon and Emile Zola. In 1894 he painted Three Servant Girls, the first of his plein-air pictures. From then on he applied transparent colours to capture the fleeting effects of light in oil, watercolour and pastel. His oils were painted in flat broad strokes. For the rest of his life he employed his very personal Impressionist style, which emphasized the interplay of light, colour, line and movement. His favourite subjects were beach, street and park scenes