1629-1684 Dutch Pieter de Hooch Galleries De Hooch was born in Rotterdam to Hendrick Hendricksz de Hooch, a bricklayer, and Annetge Pieters, a midwife. He was the eldest of five children and outlived all of his siblings. He studied art in Haarlem under the landscape painter, Nicolaes Berchem. Beginning in 1650, he worked as a painter and servant for a linen-merchant and art collector named Justus de la Grange. His service for the merchant required him to accompany him on his travels to The Hague, Leiden, and Delft, to which he eventually moved. It is likely that de Hooch handed over most of his works to la Grange during this period in exchange for board and other benefits, as this was a common commercial arrangement for painters at the time, and a later inventory recorded that la Grange possessed eleven of his paintings. De Hooch was married in Delft in 1654 to Jannetje van der Burch, by whom he fathered seven children. While in Delft, de Hooch is also believed to have learned from the painters Carel Fabritius and Nicolaes Maes, who were both early members of the Delft School. He became a member of the painters' guild of Saint Luke in 1655, and had moved to Amsterdam by 1661. The early work of de Hooch, like most young painters of his time, was mostly composed of scenes of soldiers in stables and taverns, though he used these to develop great skill in light, color, and perspective rather than to explore an interest in the subject matter. After beginning his family in the mid-1650s, he switched his focus to domestic scenes and family portraits. His work showed astute observation of the mundane details of everyday life while also functioning as well-ordered morality tales. These paintings often exhibited a sophisticated and delicate treatment of light similar to those of Vermeer, who lived in Delft at the same time as de Hooch. 19th century art historians had assumed that Vermeer had been influenced by de Hooch's work, but the opposite is now believed.   Related Paintings of Pieter de Hooch :. | The Card-Players (mk08) | The linen cupboard | Woman Drinking with Soldiers | Hollandische Familie | Mirstress and Maid |
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fredrika bremer
was a Swedish writer and a feminist activist. Fredrika Bremer was born in Åbo (Turku) in Finland but moved with her family to Stockholm when she was three years old. She grew up in Stockholm and in the manor Årsta outside Stockholm. Her father was described as somewhat of a house tyrant, and her mother was a socialite, and she and her sisters where brought up to marry in to the aristocracy; a trip on the continent 1821-1822 was the finishing touch of her upbringing before her debute. Bremer was not comfortable with this role, and was inflicted by a crisis, which she overcame by charitable work in the country around Årsta. In 1828, she debuted as a writer, anonomously, with a series of novels published until 1831, and was soon followed by others. Her novels were romantic stories of the time and concentrates on women in the marriage market; either beautiful and superficial, or unattractive with no hope of joining it, and the person telling the story and watching them is often an independent woman. She wanted a new kind of family life, not focused only on the men of the family, that would allow for women to develop their own talents and personality. By the 1840s, she was an acknowledged part of the culture life in Sweden and was translated to many languages. Politically, she was a liberal, but also felt symphaty for the socialism of the English working class movement
Bartolomeo Suardi
c. 1465?C1530,was an Italian painter and architect, mainly active in his native Milan. He was born in Milan, the son of Alberto Suardi, but his biography remains unclear, and was long complicated by two "Pseudo-Bramantinos". He was trained by Donato Bramante, adopting a diminutive form of his master's name. This training gave him influences from by the Urbino quattrocento tradition of immobile realism, and later he assimilated some elements of the style of Leonardo, after he arrived in Milan, although in other respects he remained faithful to his training in the style of Central Italy. He is documented in late 1508 as helping in the decoration of the Vatican Stanze though nothing remains of his work there, and by 1509 he was back in Milan. His style changed considerably during his career, and also shows strongly individual traits. His main influences were the serene and sometimes unnatural quietist classicism of Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, and Ercole de' Roberti
John warwick smith
English Painter, 1749-1831 English painter. The son of a gardener to the Gilpin family, he studied under the animal painter Sawrey Gilpin. During a trip to Derbyshire with Gilpin he met George Greville, 2nd Earl of Warwick, who gave him financial support to go to Italy between 1776 and 1781. Smith spent 1778-9 in Naples and was otherwise based in Rome, where he explored the Campagna and made sketches with William Pars and Francis Towne. The strong greens and purples and crisp pen outlines of some of Smith's watercolours are strongly influenced by Towne's style. Smith and Towne travelled together across the Alps on their way back to England in 1781, after which Smith settled in Warwick. He contributed six views to Samuel Middiman's Select Views in Great Britain (1784-5) and between 1784 and 1806 toured Wales 13 times in search of Picturesque and Sublime scenery. He also visited the Lake District between 1789 and 1792, which resulted in the publication of Twenty Views of the Lake District (1791-5); he appears to have been in Devon and Worcestershire as well. Aquatints after Smith were used to illustrate William Sotheby's Tour through Parts of Wales (1794),