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 :. | Workshop Jupiter and Merkur in Philemon | Landscape with Rainbow | Perseus and Andromeda | Christ at the House of Martha and mary | An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Earyl Morning |
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Enoch Seeman
Enoch Seeman the Younger was born in Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland, around 1694. His father, also Enoch was born around 1661, and the Seeman family were painters. Having been brought to London from his home of Flanders by his father in 1704, the younger Seeman's painting career as we know it began with a group portrait of the Bisset family in the style of the portraitist Godfrey Kneller, now held at Castle Forbes in Grampian, Scotland, and dated by an inscription 1708. As a painter to the British royal court Seeman the Younger completed portraits of George I, in 1730, in the robes of his coronation and of George II some years later. The first of these pictures is held at the Middle Temple in London, England, and the second is at Windsor Castle in Berkshire, England, part of the royal collection. In 1734, Seeman painted a portrait of Jane Pratt Taylor, daughter of Lord Chief Justice John Pratt. The portrait was sent to William Byrd, II of Westover, in Virginia, where it became part of the largest colonial portrait collection of the early eighteenth-century. The painting is now part of the collection of the Virginia Historical Society. The Yale University Art Gallery owns a portrait of Elihu Yale in 1717 by Seeman and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, USA owns his rendering of Sir James Dashwood, described by the Grove Dictionary of Art as 'Exceptionally lively'. Also by Seeman the younger, Abraham Tucker in 1739 at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England, and various copies of sixteenth and seventeenth century portraits. The National Trust owns two examples of this set of his work - at Dunham Massey in Cheshire, England, a copy of a portrait of Lady Diana Cecil, and at Belton House in Lincolnshire, England, of Lady Cust and her Nine Children.
Modeste Carlier
Belgian 1820-1878