French Baroque Era Painter, 1594-1665
French painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. His supreme achievement as a painter lies in his unrivalled but hard-won capacity to subordinate dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. The development of his art towards this end was focused on the search for a point of equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s. Poussin did not aspire to the classicism of Raphael's idealized human forms or Michelangelo's re-embodiment of the physical splendours of the antique world, nor did he attempt to vie with the bravura and energy of Annibale Carracci's treatment of Classical mythology in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Equally he was not concerned with the illusionistic effects and heightened emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco. He was concerned above all with interpreting his subject-matter, whether Classical or religious, and telling a story with the greatest possible concentration of emotional response, Related Paintings of POUSSIN, Nicolas :. | Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion af | Midas and Bacchus (detail) ag | The Triumph of Neptune (detail) af | The Judgment of Solomon ag | L.Hiver ou Le deluge | Related Artists:
John sloanAmerican Ashcan School Painter, 1871-1951
American painter and etcher, b. Lock Haven, Pa. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked for 12 years as an illustrator on the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Press. In 1905 he went to New York City, where he worked as an illustrator. A member of the Eight, he was active in organizing the Society of Independent Artists and was its president from 1918. Long a popular teacher at the Art Students League of New York City, he was elected president in 1930. His scenes of city life and his nude studies are in leading museums throughout the United States. Characteristic are McSorley's Bar (Detroit Inst. of Arts); Renganeschi's, Saturday Night (Art Inst., Chicago); Wake of the Ferry (Phillips Memorial Gall., Washington, D.C.); and Nude with Nine Apples (Whitney Mus., New York City).
Franz Christoph Janneckpainted Jupiter and Juno in
william henry hunt,o.w.s1790-1864
was an English watercolour painter. He was born near Long Acre, London, and was apprenticed in about 1805 to John Varley, the landscape-painter, with whom he remained five or six years. He exhibited three oil pictures at the Royal Academy in 1807. He became connected with the Society of Painters in Water Colours at its beginning, and was elected an associate in 1824 and a full member in 1827. Until the year of his death, he was one of the most prolific contributors to the Society's exhibitions. Many years of Hunt's uneventful but industrious life were spent at Hastings. He died of apoplexy. Hunt was one of the creators of the English school of water-color painting. His subjects, especially those of his later life, are extremely simple; but, by the delicacy, humor and fine power of their treatment, they rank second to works of the highest art only. Considered technically, his works exhibit all the resources of the water-color painter's craft, from the purest transparent tinting to the boldest use of gouache, rough paper and scraping for texture. His sense of color is perhaps as true as that of any English artist. He was, says John Ruskin, all in all, the finest ever painter of still life. Several characteristic examples of Hunt's work, as the "Boy and Goat," "Brown Study and Plums," "Primroses and Birds' Nests" are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.