(born Niko Pirosmanashvili; May 5, 1862-1918) was a Georgian primitivist painter. Pirosmani was born in the Georgian village of Mirzaani to a pleasant family in the Kakheti province. His family owned a small vineyard. He was later orphaned and put in the care of his two elder sisters. He moved with them to Tbilisi in 1870. In 1872 he worked as a servant for wealthy families and learned to read and write Russian and Georgian. In 1876 he returned to Mirzaani and worked as a herdsman. Pirosmani gradually taught himself to paint. One of his specialties was painting directly into black oilcloth. In 1882 he opened a workshop in Tbilisi which was unsuccessful. In 1890 he worked as a railroad conductor, and in 1895 worked creating signboards. In 1893 he co-founded a dairy farm in Tbilisi which he left in 1901. Throughout his life Pirosmani, who was always poor, was willing to take up ordinary jobs including housepainting and whitewashing buildings. Although his paintings had some local popularity (about 200 survive) his relationship with professional artists remained uneasy; making a living was always more important to him than abstract aesthetics.  Related Paintings of Niko Pirosmanashvili :. | The Russian-Japanese War | A Black Wild Boar | Nanny Goat | A Doe Walking | Shepherd in a Sheepskin Cloak on a Red Background |
Related Artists:
Thomas Birch
1779-1851 Thomas Birch Gallery American painter of English birth. He was one of the most important American landscape and marine painters of the early 19th century. He moved to America in 1794 with his father William Birch (1755-1834), a painter and engraver from whom he received his artistic training. The family settled in Philadelphia, where William, armed with letters of introduction from Benjamin West to leading citizens of that city, became a drawing-master. Early in their American careers both Birches executed cityscapes, several of which were engraved. Thomas contributed a number of compositions to The City of Philadelphia in the State of Pennsylvania, North America, as it Appeared in the Year 1800 (1800), a series of views conceived by the elder Birch in obvious imitation of comparable British productions. An English sensibility is also apparent in the many paintings of country estates executed by father and son in the early 19th century (e.g. Eaglesfield, 1808; priv. col.). These compositions, along with such portrayals of important public edifices in and near Philadelphia as Fairmount Waterworks (1821; Philadelphia, PA Acad. F.A.), emphasize the cultural progress and commercial prosperity of the young United States as well as its almost Edenic natural beauty. Birch is also known for his representations of winter landscapes.
Antonio Joli
1700-1777 Italian Antonio Joli Gallery Born in Modena, he first apprenticed with Rafaello Rinaldi. He then worked in Rome with Panini and the Galli-Bibiena studio. He became a painter of stage sets for the theater in Modena and Perugia. By 1735, he had moved to Venice and stayed till 1746, when he traveled to Germany, London (1744-48), and Madrid (1750-54). In London, he decorated the Richmond mansion of the director of the King's Theater at Haymarket, John James Heidegger. He returned to Venice in 1754, where he became on of the founding members of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. He traveled to Naples in 1762, and stayed there until he died.
LELY, Sir Peter
Dutch/English painter (b. 1616, Soest, d. 1680, London Dutch painter, draughtsman and collector, active in England. By a combination of ability and good fortune, he rapidly established himself in mid-17th-century London as the natural successor in portrait painting to Anthony van Dyck. Between van Dyck's death in 1641 and the emergence of William Hogarth in the 1730s, Lely and his successor, Godfrey Kneller, were the leading portrait painters in England. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Lely dominated the artistic scene, and his evocation of the court of Charles II is as potent and enduring as was van Dyck's of the halcyon days before the English Civil War. Although Lely's reputation was seriously damaged by portraits that came from his studio under his name but without much of his participation, his development of an efficient studio practice is of great importance in the history of British portrait painting. The collection of pictures, drawings, prints and sculpture