(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 :. | Lion | Sister of mercy | Kakhetian Epos - Alasan Valley | Village | Giraffe |
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Carl Rottmann
German,1797-1850 was a German landscape painter and the most famous member of the Rottmann family of painters. Rottmann belonged to the circle of artists around the Ludwig I of Bavaria, who commissioned large landscape paintings exclusively from him. He is best known for mythical and heroising landscapes. The landscape painter Karl Lindemann-Frommel belonged to his school. Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann was born in Handschuhsheim (today a part of Heidelberg) on January 11, 1797. There he received his first drawing lessons from his father, Friedrich Rottmann, who taught drawing at the university in Heidelberg. In his first artistic period he painted atmospheric phenomena. In 1821 he moved to Munich, where his second period began, and in 1824 he married Friedericke, the daughter of his uncle, Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, who served as an attendant at court. This connection cleared the way for an acquaintance with King Ludwig, who in 1826-27 sponsored his travels in Italy in order to widen his repertoire, which up to that point consisted solely of domestic, German, landscapes. Upon his return he received from King Ludwig I a commission for a monumental cycle of Italian landscapes in the arcade of the Munich Hofgarten. The cycle, completed in 1833 in fresco, gave visual expression to Ludwiges alliance with Italy, and raised the genre of landscape painting to the height of history painting, the preferred mode of the Kinges other great commissions for monumental painting.
Medardo Rosso
1858 Turin-1928 Milan,was an Italian sculptor. He is thought to have developed the Post Impressionism style in sculpture along with Auguste Rodin. Medardo Rosso was born in Turin, Italy, in 1858, the son of the city stationmaster. Later his family mover to Milano (Milan). As a child Rosso played hooky from school to visit a monument mason who taught him to handle a chisel and hammer. This distressed and angered his parents. At the age of 23, after a period of military service as unsatisfactory as his home life, he enrolled at the Berea Academy in Milano, where he learned to draw classical statues and copy them in gesso. But academic art appeared to him entirely artificial, unrelated to the world around him. Before long he helped to organize the Berea students into demanding life models for the drawing classes. As a result of his revolutionary behavior he was expelled from the school. He moved to Rome, where he lived in great poverty, sleeping among the ruins of the Colosseum. To the end of his life Rosso battled unremittingly against the academicians. What absorbed, even obsessed, him was the problem of interpreting life itself. In 1882, some time before he saw any Impressionist paintings, he produced his fully impressionistic sculptures, The Street Singer and Lovers under the Lamplight. In 1884 some friends arranged an exhibition for him in Paris, where he lived for a time in a cheap boarding-house.
Meulener, Pieter
Flemish painter b. 1602, Antwerpen, d. 1654, Moisset