Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1577-1640 Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 ?C May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp which produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, king of Spain, and Charles I, king of England. Rubens was a prolific artist. His commissioned works were mostly religious subjects, "history" paintings, which included mythological subjects, and hunt scenes. He painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house. He also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the Joyous Entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not detailed; he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. He was one of the last major artists to make consistent use of wooden panels as a support medium, even for very large works, but he used canvas as well, especially when the work needed to be sent a long distance. For altarpieces he sometimes painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms 'Rubensian' or 'Rubenesque' for plus-sized women. The term 'Rubensiaans' is also commonly used in Dutch to denote such women.  Related Paintings of Peter Paul Rubens :. | The Destiny of Marie de Medici | The fight for the standard | Ildefonso altar | The Happiness of the Regency (mk05) | The Martyrdom of St Livinus. |
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Edward Mitchell Bannister
Born in Canada, Edward Mitchell Bannister moved to Boston in 1848 to work as a ship cook
Mortimer Menpes
British Painter, 1855-1939 was a war artist and engraver, author, printmaker and illustrator. Menpes was born at Port Adelaide on 22 February 1855, the second son of property developer James Menpes, who with his wife, Ann, had settled in Australia in 1839. Educated at a private school, he attended classes at the Adelaide school of design, but his formal art training began at the South Kensington School of Art in 1878, after his family had moved back to England in 1875. Edward Poynter was a fellow student at the school. Menpes first exhibited at a Royal Academy exhibition in 1880. Over the following 20 years 35 of his paintings and etchings appeared at the Academy. He set off on a sketching tour of Brittany in 1880 and thereby met James McNeill Whistler, becoming his pupil and at one stage sharing a flat with him at Cheyne Walk on the Embankment in London. Here he was taught etching by Whistler, whose influence, together with that of Japanese design, is evident in his later work. His 1887 trip to Japan led to his first one-man exhibition at Dowdeswell's Gallery (1878-1912) in London. Menpes bought a property at 25 Cadogan Gardens in Sloane Square in 1888 and decorated it in the Japanese style. Whistler and Menpes quarreled in 1888 over the interior design of the house, which Whistler felt was a brazen copying of his own ideas. The house was sold in 1900, and Menpes retired to Kent. In 1900, after the outbreak of the Boer War, Menpes was sent to South Africa as a war artist for the weekly Black and White. With the war's end in 1902 he travelled widely, visiting Burma, Egypt, France, India, Italy, Japan, Kashmir, Mexico, Morocco, and Spain and producing illustrated books of those countries. His book on the Delhi Darbar of illustrated Curzon's grand spectacle of 1903. He married Rosa Mary Grosse in London in 1875. She too, was from Australia and died 23 August 1936. They produced a son, Mortimer James (b. 1879) and two daughters, Rose Maud Goodwin and Dorothy Whistler. Dorothy, Whistler's godchild, married a Mr. Flower and died in Minehead in July 1973 aged 89.
Miranda, Juan Carreno de
Spanish, 1614-1685 was a Spanish painter of the Baroque period. Born in Avil's in Asturias, son of a painter with the same name, Juan Carreño de Miranda. His family moved to Madrid in 1623, and he trained in Madrid during the late 1620s as an apprentice to Pedro de Las Cuevas and Bartolom Roman. He came to the notice of Velezquez for his work in the cloister of Doña Maria de Aragen and in the church of El Rosario. In 1658 Carreño was hired as an assistant on a royal commission to paint frescoes in the Alcezar palace, now the Royal Palace of Madrid. In 1671, upon the death of Sebastian de Herrera, he was appointed court painter to the queen (pintor de cemara) and began to paint primarily portraits. He refused to be knighted in the order of Santiago, saying Painting needs no honors, it can give them to the whole world. He is mainly recalled as a painter of portraits. His main pupils were Mateo Cerezo, Cabezalero, Donoso, Ledesma y Sotomayor. He died in Madrid. Noble by descent, he had an understanding of the workings and psychology of the royal court as no painter before him making, his portraits of the Spanish royal family in an unprecedented documentary fashion