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 :. | Calmness | The Burning of the Houses of Parliament | eldsvada till havs | Landscape | Fishing Boats Entering Calais Harbor |
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William Stanley Haseltine
(June 11, 1835-February 3, 1900) was an American painter and draftsman who was associated with the Hudson River School and Luminism. Born in Philadelphia to John Haseltine, a successful businessman, and Elizabeth Shinn Haseltine, an amateur landscape painter, Haseltine studied at the University of Pennsylvania and then at Harvard University, where he received a degree in 1854. He first exhibited his paintings the following year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, after which he sailed to Europe, first joining a colony of American painters who were studying in Dusseldorf, then traveling up the Rhine into Switzerland and Italy. In late 1857 he settled in Rome, and in the following months made numerous excursions to draw the landscape around Rome and on Capri. In 1858 Haseltine returned to Philadelphia, and by late 1859 was installed in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, then a central point for American landscape painters; also in the building were Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Worthington Whittredge, the latter two having befriended Haseltine in Europe. Though many of his paintings from this time derived from his European sketches, Haseltine also began to paint the oceanside of New England, especially favoring the rockbound coasts of Narragansett, Rhode Island, Nahant, Massachusetts, and Mount Desert Island, Maine. The precision with which he painted these landscapes won critical praise, and Haseltine was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1860, and a full Academician in 1861. In 1864 Haseltine's wife died in childbirth. He spent some time training his nephew, Howard Russell Butler, but he moved after he married Helen Marshall in 1866. Initially the family considered settling in Paris, but in 1867 they moved to Rome, which would for most of Haseltine's subsequent years serve as his home and point of departure from which to produce views of the European landscape. While his paintings of Capri and Sicily would prove popular with visiting American tourists, Haseltine also traveled and drew in France, Holland, Belgium, and the Netherlands, summering in Bavaria and the Tyrol in the 1880s and 1890s. In his later years he also returned periodically to the United States, making a final trip to the west in 1899. Haseltine died of pneumonia in Rome in 1900.
Adrian Vanson
Adrian Vanson (died c. 1602) was court portrait painter to James VI of Scotland. Adrian succeeded Arnold Bronckorst as court painter in Scotland in May 1584, and his appointment was subsequently confirmed by royal letter on 20 August 1584. Adrian Vanson was paid £8-10s in June 1581 for two pictures sent to Theodore Beza. A letter by James VI's former tutor Peter Young accompanied pictures of John Knox and George Buchanan sent to Geneva in November 1579 for the woodcuts in Beza's Icones (1580). The Scottish portraits arrived too late for the book, and the woodcuts of Knox and a James VI, thought to be by Vanson, were first published in Simon Goulart's edition of the Icones in 1581. The picture of George Buchanan, which was never published in Beza's Icones, but may have appeared in other later works, is attributed to Bronckorst. Knox from Beza's Icones, after Adrian VansonVanson also painted ceremonial spears and banners for the coronation of Anne of Denmark. When he was made a burgess of Edinburgh, it was hoped he would teach his craft to apprentices. He may have been 'Lord Seton's painter', who was recorded drawing portraits for coins at the mint in Edinburgh. There was a un-named Flemish painter working on the king's portrait at Stirling Castle in May 1579. This may have been Vanson or Bronckorst. According to the inventories of the Earl of Leicester, he had a portrait of the 'young king of Scots' in 1580, which may have been another copy of this picture. Leicester sent his own portrait to James VI, painted on canvas by Hubbard in 1583. Attributed portraits include James VI; Anne of Denmark; Patrick Lyon, Lord Glamis; Sir Thomas Kennedy of Culzean; Agnes Douglas, Countess of Argyll. Vanson's James VI of circa 1585 survives at Edinburgh castle. In May 1586 a French ambassador in Scotland, the Baron d'Esneval, promised to get Mary, Queen of Scots a copy of a recent portrait of James VI from the only painter in Edinburgh. There had been rumours of an embassy to Denmark to discuss the king's marriage in April 1586. It is thought the picture at Edinburgh Castle was made by Vanson for this embassy or a similar purpose.
Lorenzo Valles
Spanish , 1831-1910