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 Feast of Venus (mk01) | Girl with fan | The Straw Hat | Helen and her children | Sitting old man |
Related Artists:
Walter Langley.RI
1852-1922
Berckhyde, Job
Dutch, 1630-1693
CAVALLINO, Bernardo
Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1616-1656 Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the most individual and most poetic painter active in Naples during the first half of the 17th century. He painted mainly small cabinet pictures, on canvas or on copper, for dealers and for highly cultivated private patrons; he had few public commissions and apparently never painted any large-scale decorations for private or ecclesiastical patrons. His subject-matter is largely derived from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, Tasso and from Roman history and mythology. Documentary evidence for his life and work is almost non-existent, and he remains enigmatic and elusive as a historical figure. Yet as a painter he is strikingly distinctive, uniting a refinement and virtuosity of brushwork with an intensely naturalistic observation of surfaces, and complex and dramatic compositions with an extraordinary brilliance of palette. Only eight pictures are signed, initialled or inscribed with Cavallino's name. No works are documented and only five may be tentatively identified with pictures in mid-18th-century Neapolitan collections described by Bernardo de Dominici.