English painter (b. 1769, Bristol, d. 1830, London). Thomas Lawrence was born in Bristol on May 4, 1769. At Devizes, where his father was landlord of the Black Bear Inn, Thomas's talents first became known. Fanny Burney, a prodigy herself, reports that in 1780 Sir Joshua Reynolds had already pronounced Lawrence the most promising genius he had ever met. When Thomas was 10, his father moved the family to Oxford and then to Bath to take advantage of the portrait skill of his son. At the age of 17 Lawrence began to paint in oil, all his previous work having been in pastel. In 1787 the family moved to London, and by 1789 he was challenging Reynolds. When Reynolds died in 1792, Lawrence was appointed to the lucrative post of painter in ordinary to the king. He soon became the foremost portrait painter in England, a position he maintained until his death. His portraits of women are models of beauty and elegance, whether the sitter be a tragic actress like Mrs. Siddons, a social figure like the Princess de Lieven, or a personal friend. At the close of the Napoleonic Wars, Lawrence was knighted and commissioned to paint the leading sovereigns and statesmen of Europe. When he returned to England in 1820, he was elected president of the Royal Academy; he handled the affairs of his office with tact and urbanity. He died on Jan. 7, 1830. Following the English masters of the 18th century, Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and George Romney, Lawrence carried on the great tradition of society portraiture and raised it to new heights of dash and elegance, though not of psychological penetration. He was by no means an artist of the astonishing insight of Gainsborough, and he did not have the occasionally disconcerting originality of Reynolds. Lawrence had their faults: all were affected by the distorting demands of their fashionable clientele, and all succumbed to them. He had the least to say, and he reflected his sitters' own best views of themselves, yet even they must sometimes have been surprised at their own magnificence. Handsome his portraits undoubtedly are; all the women are strikingly beautiful, the men brave and distinguished. Lawrence enjoyed his great success. He lived for his work, never married, and was a prodigious worker. He was of an exceptionally generous nature, as an artist and as a man, with a rare talent for appreciating and encouraging the talents of others. He was an ardent collector of Old Master drawings; his collection, which was dispersed after his death,  Related Paintings of LAWRENCE, Sir Thomas :. | Mr and Mrs John Julius Angerstein | Duke of Wellington on Copenhagen | Portrait of Princess Sophia | Miss Martha Carry dh | Queen Charlotte sg |
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Joseph Stieler
German Painter, 1781-1858,German painter. In 1798 he studied under Christoph Fesel (1737-1805) in Werzburg and in 1800 with Heinrich Feger in Vienna, where his style was strongly influenced by English portraiture. After he studied in Paris (1807-8) with Fran?ois G?rard the influence of Neo-classicism became apparent in his work. He visited Italy in 1809, 1810 and 1812 to do commissioned portraits for various patrons, among them Prince Eugene de Beauharnais (1809; Munich, Bayer. Nmus.) and Joachim Murat, King of Naples (reg 1808-15). In 1812 he went to Munich where he did work for middle-class clients, the nobility and the royal family of Bavaria (e.g. the portrait of Maximilian I Joseph, 1816; Ellingen, Schloss). In 1820 he was appointed court painter to Ludwig I, King of Bavaria (reg 1825-48), and painted several portraits of him. In 1823 he helped co-found the Kunstverein in Munich. He was one of the most important portrait painters in the Neo-classical style, specializing particularly in studies of women, as seen in the 36 portraits commissioned by Ludwig I for the Schenheitsgalerie (1827-42; Munich, Schloss Nymphenburg). In his portraits for the middle classes and for the court he devised certain peculiarities of form. He painted various members of the royal houses of Austria, Prussia and Sweden, as well as members of the nobility in the duchies of Saxe-Altenberg, Saxe-Coburg and Hesse. His sitters also included some of the most important figures in the political and intellectual life of Germany in the first half of the 19th century. He painted the pendant portraits of Franz Brentano and Antonie Brentano (both 1808; Winkel, Brentanohaus), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1828; Munich, Neue Pin.) and Ludwig Tieck (1838; Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg), the geographer and botanist Alexander von Humboldt (1843; Potsdam, Schloss Charlottenhof) and the musician Ludwig van Beethoven (Bonn, Beethoven-Haus). After 1845 the classical elements in his paintings were sometimes combined with an application of colour typical of plein-air studies. He also painted genre pictures and religious scenes.
W.H.D. Koerner
1878-1938
Francesco Monti
Italian Painter, 1685-1768 Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the son of a tailor who served the Este court in Modena during the 1690s. Monti studied with the foremost painter in Modena, Sigismondo Caula (b 1637), for three years from c. 1700. In 1703 he moved to Bologna and entered the studio of Giovanni Gioseffo dal Sole. Roli (1962) defined the formative influences on Monti's art as dal Sole and Donato Creti on the one hand, and Giuseppe Maria Crespi and Antonio Gionima on the other. Monti evolved a distinctive personal idiom, characterized by graceful figures reminiscent of the style of Parmigianino, but perhaps more directly inspired by the more extravagant late Mannerist idiom of such painters as Bartholomeus Spranger and Josef Heintz I of the court of Rudolf II at Prague. Monti may have known their work through prints by Aegidius Sadeler II, Jan Muller and others. This exotic figure style, with fluent, swaying forms and faces suggestively muted by half-shadow was accompanied by unusual shades of colour that glow richly in darkened settings. Monti's art contributed to a neo-Mannerist strain in 18th-century Emilian painting