English Romantic Painter, 1775-1851 Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 ?C 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321) Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840). Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321) One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.  Related Paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner :. | Angel-s judge | Castle | Mistiness | No title | Castle |
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Jan van Huysum
1682-1749 Dutch Jan Van Huysum Galleries He was the brother of Jacob van Huysum, and the son of Justus van Huysum, who is said to have been expeditious in decorating doorways, screens and vases. A picture by Justus is preserved in the gallery of Brunswick, representing "Orpheus and the Beasts in a wooded landscape", and here we have some explanation of his son's fondness for landscapes of a conventional and Arcadian kind; for Jan van Huysum, though skilled as a painter of still life, believed himself to possess the genius of a landscape painter. Half his pictures in public galleries are landscapes, views of imaginary lakes and harbours with impossible ruins and classic edifices, and woods of tall and motionless trees-the whole very glossy and smooth, and entirely lifeless. The earliest dated work of this kind is that of 1717, in the Louvre, a grove with maidens culling flowers near a tomb, ruins of a portico, and a distant palace on the shores of a lake bounded by mountains. Some of the finest of van Huysum's fruit and flower pieces have been in English private collections: those of 1723 in the earl of Ellesmere's gallery, others of 1730-1732 in the collections of Hope and Ashburton. One of the best examples is now in the National Gallery, London (1736-1737). No public museum has finer and more numerous specimens than the Louvre, which boasts of four landscapes and six panels with still life; then come Berlin and Amsterdam with four fruit and flower pieces; then St Petersburg, Munich, Hanover, Dresden, the Hague, Brunswick, Vienna, Carlsruhe, Boston and Copenhagen.
Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen
(also Cornelius Jonson van Ceulen, Cornelius Johnson, Cornelis Jansz. van Ceulen and many other variants)(bapt. October 14, 1593, London - bur. August 5, 1661, Utrecht) was an English painter of portraits of Dutch or Flemish parentage. He has been described as "one of the most gifted and prolific portrait painters practising in England during the 1620s and 1630s". Janssens van Ceulen was born to Dutch or Flemish parents in London - his father had been a refugee from Antwerp, and the family had originated in Cologne. He was baptised at the Dutch church at Austin Friars, the son of Johanna le Grand and Cornelius Johnson. He may have been trained in the Netherlands, and was certainly influenced by other artists from the Netherlands, but he was active in England, at least from 1618 to 1643. In the 1620s, he lived and had his studio in Blackfriars, London, as did Anthony van Dyck; it was just outside the boundaries of the City of London, and so avoided the monopoly in the City of members of the London painters' Guild. He married Elizabeth Beke of Colchester in 1622. Janssens' son (Cornelius Janssens, junior) was born in 1634. He was also a painter. Janssens' daughter was married to Nicholas Russell of Bruges. Janssens moved to Canterbury in the mid 1630s, living with Sir Arnold Braems, a Flemish merchant. Janssens continued to live in England until after the outbreak of the English Civil War, but in October 1643, apparently at the insistence of his wife, he moved to Middelburg, and between 1646 and 1652 he lived in Amsterdam, before settling in Utrecht, where he was buried.
Filippo Napoletano
(c. 1587 - November 1629) was an Italian artist, with a peculiar output, mainly landscape and genre scenes and also drawings or etchings of diverse, often particular, items such as exotic soldiers, skeletons of animals, or cityscapes. He began his career in his native city, Naples (1600-1613) and moved to Rome in 1614-1617), where he appears to have encountered and felt influenced by the successful Flemish landscape painters such as Paul Bril, Goffredo Wals, and Adam Elsheimer. In 1617 Cosimo II dee Medici summoned him to Florence, where he worked closely with Jacques Callot. From notebooks, Filippo is known to have made hundreds of sketches of Tuscan landscapes and towns. Starting in 1620 he reproduced in etchings part of his collection of animal skeletons owned by Johann Faber, a Bavarian physician-naturalist residing in Rome and a member of the scientific Accademia dei Lincei. In 1622, Napoletano published twelve etchings of caprices (capprici) and military uniforms (which he signed as signed Teodor Filippo de Liagno). He is described by Giovanni Baglione as possessing a collection, a Wunderkammer of bellissime bizzarrie ("beautiful bizarre objects"), including among the objects exotic weaponry; fossilized plants; tiger, lion, and turtle skulls; oriental porcelain and sculpted crockery; a vest made of human skin; a harness for dragging whales on ice; a three-legged flea, Persian uniforms, and antiquities such as Roman coins, bronze lamps, and a few statuettes. After Napoletano death at Rome in 1628, bidding for such material was made by collectors such as Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini (future Clement VIII) and Cassiano dal Pozzo.