German Romantic, 1798-1840 sometimes given as Karl Blechen, was a German painter, specializing in fantastic landscapes, sometimes with demons and grotesque figures. Born in Cottbus, he drew the attention of prominent architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who cast him as a decorative painter. Blechen however aimed for higher work and began producing landscape paintings. In 1827 he went to Italy  Related Paintings of Karl Blechen :. | Building the Devil-s Bridge | Monks at the Gulf of Naples | Grotto in the Gulf of Naples | Monks at the Gulf of Naples (mk09) | Building the Devil's Bridge |
Related Artists:
Constantijn Netscher
painted Portrait de la princesse Palatine in 1700
MENGS, Anton Raphael
German Neoclassical Painter, 1728-1779 Painter and writer, brother of Theresia Concordia Mengs. His early career was at the Dresden court; thereafter he worked principally in Rome and Madrid, notably on the frescoes at the Villa Albani and the Palacio Real respectively. As an early exponent of Neo-classicism he produced some impressive classical and religious scenes, though he was most accomplished as a portrait painter. Under the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann he also wrote some theoretical works, of which the most important is the Gedanken ber die Schenheit und ber den Geschmack in der Malerey (1762). Although acclaimed during his lifetime
Joseph Siffred Duplessis
French Painter, 1725-1802 was a French painter, known for the clarity and immediacy of his portraits. He was born into a family with an artistic bent and received his first training from his father, a surgeon and talented amateur, then with Joseph-Gabriel Imbert (1666?C1749), who had been a pupil of Charles Le Brun. From 1744-47 or later he worked in Rome, in the atelier of Pierre Subleyras, who was also from the south of France, who died in 1749. In Italy Duplessis became fast friends with Joseph Vernet, another Occitan. He returned to Carpentras, spent a brief time in Lyon then arrived about 1752 in Paris, where he was accepted into the Academie de Saint-Luc and exhibited some portraits, which were now his specialty, in 1764, but did not achieve much notice until his exhibition of ten paintings at the Paris salon of 1769, very well received and selected for special notice by Denis Diderot; the Academie de peinture et de sculpture accepted him in the category of portraitist, considered a lesser category at the time. He continued to exhibit at the Paris salons, both finished paintings and sketches, until 1791, and once more, in 1801. His portrait of the Dauphine in 1771 and his appointment as a peintre du Roi assured his success: most of his surviving portraits date from the 1770s and 1780s. He received privileged lodgings in the Galeries du Louvre. In the Revolution, he withdrew to safe obscurity at Carpentras during the Reign of terror. Afterwards, from 1796, he served as curator at the newly-founded museum formed at Versaillles, so recently emptied of its furnishings at the Revolutionary sales. His uncompromising self-portrait at this time of his life is at Versailles. His adjusted his style to the social condition of his sitter: his portrait of Charles-Claude, comte d'Angiviller, director of the Batiments du Roi, is as distant and conventional as his state portrait of Louis XVI in coronation robes (1776), while his realistic and intimate portrait of the opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) catches the composer at the keyboard in a moment of inspiration and his penetrating portrait of the sculptor Christophe Gabriel Allegrain (Louvre Museum, illustration) shows him having just laid down his chisel: this was the morceau de reception that gained him admittance to the Academie. Duplessis' Benjamin Franklin on the U.S. hundred dollar billHis portrait of Benjamin Franklin (1778),