English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1849-1917
English painter. His father was a minor English painter working in Rome. Waterhouse entered the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1870. He exhibited at the Society of British Artists from 1872 and at the Royal Academy from 1874. From 1877 to the 1880s he regularly travelled abroad, particularly to Italy. In the early 1870s he had produced a few uncharacteristic Orientalist keepsake paintings, but most of his works in this period are scenes from ancient history or classical genre subjects, similar to the work of Lawrence Alma-Tadema (e.g. Consulting the Oracle, c. 1882; London, Tate). However, Waterhouse consistently painted on a larger scale than Alma-Tadema. His brushwork is bolder, his sunlight casts harsher shadows and his history paintings are more dramatic. Related Paintings of John William Waterhouse :. | Ophelia | Sweet Summer | Marianne Leaving the Judgment Seat of Herod | The Unwelcome Companion-A Street Scene in Cairo | The Bouquet | Related Artists:
Luis Melendez1716-80
He assisted his father, artist Francisco Melendez, until 1737, when he began studying with Lewis-Michel Vanloo, the court painter to Philip V of France. Although accepted (1745) into the Spanish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, he was expelled after his father denounced the academy in a dispute over a royal competition. After traveling throughout Italy, he returned to work for his father as an illustrator of choirbooks.
Janos Donat1744-1830
Hungarian
Janos Donat Location
Donat was born in Klosterneuzell in 1744 and learned painting at M. Meytens, V. Fischer and Sambach in Vienna where he lived for some time and later Prague. In Vienna he became interested in painting portraits. After moving to Pest in 1810 he painted some of his most noted classicist portraits such as Ferenc Kazinczy in 1812 and Benedek Virag in 1815.
He was also noted for his compositions such as Resting Venus, Orfeus and Euridike, and Proserpina which were paintings of mythological creatures.
Pierre etienne theodore rousseauParis 1812-Barbizon 1867
French painter of the Barbizon school, was born in Paris, of a bourgeois family which included one or two artists.At first he received a business training, but soon displayed aptitude for painting. Although his father regretted the decision at first, he became reconciled to his son leaving business, and throughout the artist's career (for he survived his son) was a sympathizer with him in all his conflicts with the Paris Salon authorities. Theodore Rousseau shared the difficulties of the romantic painters of 1830 in securing for their pictures a place in the annual Paris exhibition. The whole influence of the classically trained artists was against them, and not until 1848 was Rousseau adequately presented to the public. He had exhibited one or two unimportant works in the Salon of 1831 and 1834, but in 1836 his great work "La descente des vaches" was rejected by the vote of the classic painters; and from then until after the revolution of 1848 he was persistently refused. He was not without champions in the press, and under the title of "le grand refus" he became known through the writings of Thor, the critic who afterwards resided in England and wrote under the name of Burger. During these years of artistic exile Rousseau produced some of his finest pictures: "The Chestnut Avenue", "The Marsh in the Landes" (now in the Louvre), "Hoar-Frost" (now in America); and in 1851, after the reorganization of the Salon in 1848, he exhibited his masterpiece, "The Edge of the Forest" (also in the Louvre), a picture similar in treatment to, but slightly varied in subject from, the composition called "A Glade in the Forest of Fontainebleau", in the Wallace Collection at Hertford House, London. Up to this period Rousseau had lived only occasionally at Barbizon, but in 1848 he took up his residence in the forest village, and spent most of his remaining days in the vicinity. He was now at the height of his artistic power, and was able to obtain fair sums for his pictures (but only about one-tenth of their value thirty years after his death), and his circle of admirers increased. He was still ignored by the authorities, for while Narcisse Virgilio Diaz was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1851, Rousseau was left undecorated at this time, but was nominated shortly afterwards. At the Exposition Universelle of 1853, where all Rousseau's rejected pictures of the previous twenty years were gathered together, his works were acknowledged to form one of the finest of the many splendid groups there exhibited. But during his lifetime Rousseau never really conquered French taste, and after an unsuccessful sale of his works by auction in 1861,