LASTMAN, Pieter Pietersz.
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1583-1633
Dutch painter and draughtsman. He was the son of the goldsmith Pieter Segersz. His older brother Seeger Pietersz. [Coninck] became a goldsmith like his father, while his younger brother Claes Lastman became an engraver and painter. Pieter trained as a painter under the Mannerist artist Gerrit Pietersz., brother of the composer Jan Pietersz. Sweelinck. In June 1602 Lastman travelled to Rome, like so many of his contemporaries. Van Mander, in his biography of Gerrit Pietersz., mentioned his pupil 'Pieter Lasman [sic] who shows great promise, being presently in Italy'. While there, Lastman made two drawings of an Oriental in a Landscape (both 1603; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.), which betray his continuing stylistic dependence on his master (as can also be seen in three drawings made before his trip to Italy). Related to the drawings made in Italy is a series of 12 prints after designs by Lastman of figures in Italian costumes (Hollstein, nos 11-22). Lastman also visited Venice, as is documented by a drawing (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam) after Veronese's Adoration of the Shepherds in the church of SS Giovanni e Paolo. Lastman was apparently in Italy until March 1607 but thereafter spent the rest of his life in Amsterdam. Related Paintings of LASTMAN, Pieter Pietersz. :. | Detail of Abraham on the Way to Canaan | Orestes and Pylades Disputing at the Altar s | The Sacrifice of Abraham (mk05) | Abraham s Journey to Canaan | The Angel and Tobias with the Fish g | Related Artists: LIEVENS, JanDutch painter (b. 1607, Leiden, d. 1674, Amsterdam)
Dutch painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His work has often suffered by comparison with that of Rembrandt, with whom he was closely associated from 1625 to 1631. Yet Lievens's early work is equal to that of Rembrandt, although in later years he turned more towards a somewhat facile rendering of the international Baroque style favoured by his noble patrons, thus never fully realizing his early promise. Nonetheless, he became a renowned portrait painter and draughtsman, and his drawings Pierre Puvis de Chavannes1824-1898
French
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Art Galleries
Born in Lyons on Dec. 14, 1824, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes belonged to the generation of Gustave Courbet and ??douard Manet, and he was fully aware of their revolutionary achievements. Nevertheless, he was drawn to a more traditional and conservative style. From his first involvement with art, which began after a trip to Italy and which interrupted his intention to follow the engineering profession that his father practiced, Puvis pursued his career within the scope of academic classicism and the Salon. Even in this chosen arena, however, he was rejected, particularly during the 1850s. But he gradually won acceptance. By the 1880s he was an established figure in the Salons, and by the 1890s he was their acknowledged master.
In both personal and artistic ways Puvis career was closely linked with the avant-grade. In the years of his growing public recognition, when he began to serve on Salon juries, he was consistently sympathetic to the work of younger, more radical artists. Later, as president of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts - the new Salon, as it was called - he was able to exert even more of a liberalizing influence on the important annual exhibitions.
Puvis sympathy to new and radical artistic directions was reflected in his own painting. Superficially he was a classicist, but his personal interpretation of that style was unconventional. His subject matter - religious themes, allegories, mythologies, and historical events - was clearly in keeping with the academic tradition. But his style eclipsed his outdated subjects: he characteristically worked with broad, simple compositions, and he resisted the dry photographic realism which had begun to typify academic painting about the end of the century. In addition, the space and figures in his paintings inclined toward flatness, calling attention to the surface on which the images were depicted. These qualities gave his work a modern, abstract look and distinguished it from the sterile tradition to which it might otherwise have been linked.
Along with their modern, formal properties, Puvis paintings exhibited a serene and poetic range of feeling. His figures frequently seem to be wrapped in an aura of ritualistic mystery, as though they belong in a private world of dreams or visions. Yet these feelings invariably seem fresh and sincere. This combination of form and feeling deeply appealed to certain avant-garde artists of the 1880s and 1890s. Although Puvis claimed he was neither radical nor revolutionary, he was admired by the symbolist poets, writers, and painters - including Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis - and he influenced the neoimpressionist painter Georges Seurat.
During his mature career Puvis executed many mural paintings. In Paris he did the Life of St. Genevieve (1874-1878) in the Panth??on and Science, Art, and Letters (1880s) in the Sorbonne. In Lyons he executed the Sacred Grove, the Antique Vision, and Christian Inspiration (1880s) in the Mus??e des Beaux-Arts. He painted Pastoral Poetry (1895-1898) in the Boston Public Library. These commissions reflect the high esteem with which Puvis was regarded during his own lifetime. Among his most celebrated oil paintings are Hope (1872) and the Poor Fisherman (1881). He died in Paris on Oct. 10, 1898. John Macallan SwanBritish Academic Painter, 1847-1910
was an English painter and sculptor. John Macallan Swan was born in Brentford, Middlesex in 1847. He received his art training first in England at the Worcester and Lambeth schools of art and the Royal Academy schools, and subsequently in Paris, in the studios of Jean-L??on G??rôme and Emmanuel Fr??miet. He began to exhibit at the Academy in 1878, and was elected associate in 1894 and academician in 1905. He was appointed a member of the Dutch Water-Colour Society in 1885; and associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1896 and full member in 1899. A master of the oil, water-colour and pastel mediums, an accomplished painter and a skilful draughtsman, he ranks also as a sculptor of distinguished ability. He has treated the human figure with notable power, but it is by his representations of the larger wild animals, mainly the felidae, that he chiefly established his reputation; in this branch of practice he has scarcely a rival. His picture "The Prodigal Son," bought for the Chantrey collection in 1889, is in the National Gallery of British Art.
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