French Academic Painter, 1833-1922,was a French painter. He was born in Bayonne, but from 1846 to 1853 he lived in Madrid, Spain, where his father owned a bookshop. In Madrid he received his artistic training under Madrazo. He later worked in Paris, where he became known as a leading portraitist. His many portraits show the influence of Velazquez and the Spanish realists. He won a medal of honor at Paris in 1869, where he became one of the leading artists of his day. Bonnat went on to become a professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1882. In May 1905 he succeeded Paul Dubois as director. His vivid portrait-painting is his most characteristic work, but his subject pictures, such as the Martyrdom of St Denis in the Pantheon, are also famous. Some of Bonnat's more notable students include: Gustave Caillebotte, Suzor-Cote, Georges Braque,Raoul Dufy, Marius Vasselon, Fred Barnard,  Related Paintings of Leon Bonnat :. | Madame Bonnat | Peasant woman and her Child | madame pasca | Arab Removing a Thorn from his Foot | Interior of the Sistine Chapel |
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Willem Kalf
1619-1693 Dutch Willem Kalf Galleries Willem Kalf was born in Rotterdam, in 1619. He was previously thought to have been born in 1622, but H. E. van Gelder??s important archival research has established the painter??s correct place and date of birth. Kalf was born into a prosperous patrician family in Rotterdam, where his father, a cloth merchant, held municipal posts as well. In the late 1630s, Willem Kalf travelled to Paris and spent time in the circle of the Flemish artists in Saint-Germain-des-Pr??s, Paris. In Paris he painted mainly small-scale rustic interiors and still-lifes. Kalf??s rustic interiors are typically dominated by groups of vegetables, buckets, pots and pans, which he arranged as a still-life in the foreground (e.g. Kitchen Still-life, Dresden, Gemäldegal; Alte Meister). Figures usually appeared only in the blurred obscurity of the background. Though painted in Paris, those pictures belong to a pictorial tradition practised primarily in Flanders in the early 17th century, by such artists as David Teniers the Younger. The only indication of the French origin of the paintings are a few objects that Flemish exponents of the same genre would not have pictured in their works. Kalf??s rustic interiors had a large influence on French art in the circle of the Le Nain brothers. The semi-monochrome still-lifes which Kalf created in Paris form a link to the banketjes or 'little banquet pieces' painted by such Dutch artists as Pieter Claesz, Willem Claeszoon Heda and others in the 1630s. During the 1640s, Kalf further developed the banketje into a novel form of sumptuous and ornate still-life (known as pronkstilleven), depicting rich groupings of gold and silver vessels. Like other still-lifes of this period, these paintings were usually expressing vanitas allegories.
Merle, Hugues
French, 1823-1881
Master of ST Ildefonso
Castile,end of the fifteenth century Spanish painter. He is named from St Ildefonso's Reception of a Chasuble from the Virgin Mary (Paris, Louvre), which is traditionally held to come from Valladolid; it may even have come from the chapel of S Ildefonso in the Colegiata there. The style, characterized by harmony of colour and intense expressions, resembles that of four panels of St Athanasius, St Louis of Toulouse, both enthroned, SS Peter and Paul and SS Andrew and James the Great, which probably came from the convent of La Merced, Valladolid. They have been attributed to the Master of vila, but Post considered them to be the work of the Master of St Ildefonso, a more sophisticated painter, although both artists modified the harshness of their Netherlandish models. There are also similarities with Jacomart's triptych of St Anne in the Colegiata, Jetiva, but these may be coincidental. Other works attributed to the Master include St Anne and St Anthony of Padua,