English, 1792-1867
Painter and etcher, son of Robert Pollard. His early career was spent in the shadow of his father, for whom he worked as an etcher of miscellaneous sporting subjects before establishing himself c. 1820 as a sporting painter in his own right. A typical example is Doncaster Races: Horses Starting for the St Leger (1831; Paul Mellon priv. col.). Following a commission from the King's Printseller, Edward Orme, for an inn signboard showing a coach and horses, Pollard began to specialize in coaching scenes. Related Paintings of Pollard, James :. | A Street Scene with Two Omnibuses | A Meet Outside The Swan inn | Springing Them up to meet the Train and Just in time for the Coach to Hull | The Last Mail Leaving Newcastle, July 5, 1847 | The Royal Mail Coaches for the North Ieaving the Angel Islington | Related Artists:
Bernardino Mei (1612/15 - 1676) worked in a Baroque manner in his native Siena and in Rome, finding patronage above all in the Chigi family.
Briefly a pupil of the Sienese draughtsman and cartographer Giuliano Periccioli, where he learned the art of engraving, Bernardino passed to the studio of the painter Rutilio Manetti and probably also served in the workshop of Francesco Rustici.
He painted in and around Siena, where his work came to the attention of Cardinal Fabio Chigi, who, once elected pope as Alexander VII (1655), called Bernardino Mei to Rome in 1657. There Bernardino came under the influences of Mattia Preti, Andrea Sacchi and Pier Francesco Mola, and of Guercino, to the extent that until the 20th century Bernardino's fresco of Aurora in Palazzo Bianchi Bandinelli was attributed to Guercino himself. Through the fast friendship that bonded him to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose studio he frequented, he applied that sculptor's sense of theatrical action to his own mythological and allegorical subjects. He died in Rome in 1676.
Jean Baptiste Greuze1725-1805
French
Jean Baptiste Greuze Galleries
French painter and draughtsman. He was named an associate member of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, in 1755 on the strength of a group of paintings that included genre scenes, portraits and studies of expressive heads (t?tes d'expression). These remained the essential subjects of his art for the next 50 years, except for a brief, concentrated and unsuccessful experiment with history painting in the late 1760s, which was to affect his later genre painting deeply. Though his art has often been compared with that of Jean-Simeon Chardin in particular and interpreted within the context of NEO-CLASSICISM in general, it stands so strikingly apart from the currents of its time that Greuze's accomplishments are best described, as they often were by the artist's contemporaries, as unique. He was greatly admired by connoisseurs, critics and the general public throughout most of his life. His pictures were in the collections of such noted connoisseurs as Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, Claude-Henri Watelet and Etienne-Francois, Duc de Choiseul. For a long period he was in particular favour with the critic Denis Diderot, who wrote about him in the Salon reviews that he published in Melchior Grimm's privately circulated Correspondance litteraire. His reputation declined towards the end of his life and through the early part of the 19th century, to be revived after 1850, when 18th-century painting returned to favour, by such critics as Th?ophile Thore, Arsene Houssaye and, most notably, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their book L'Art du dix-huiti?me siecle. By the end of the century Greuze's work, especially his many variations on the Head of a Girl, fetched record prices, and his Broken Pitcher (Paris, Louvre) was one of the most popular paintings in the Louvre. The advent of modernism in the early decades of the 20th century totally obliterated Greuze's reputation. It was only in the 1970s, with Brookner's monograph, Munhall's first comprehensive exhibition of the artist's work, increased sale prices, important museum acquisitions and fresh analyses of his art by young historians, that Greuze began to regain the important place that he merits in the history of French art of the 18th century.
Arturo Ferrari (Milan, 1861 - 1932) was an Italian painter.
Initiated into artistic studies by his father Cesare, an associate of Luigi Scrosati, and the painter Mose Bianchi from Lodi, Arturo Ferrari completed his training at the Brera Academy under the guidance of Giuseppe Bertini from 1877 to 1884 while working in the studio of Gerolamo Induno at the same time. He made his debut at the Esposizione di Belle Arti di Brera in 1879 with a view of the interior of Milan Cathedral, thus inaugurating the repertoire of Milanese perspective views that was to be a constant feature of his vast production of oil paintings and watercolours. He soon became the guiding spirit of a poetic and sentimental evocation of "Old Milan" during the phase of transition to the 20th century, when the face of the city changed radically through wholesale rebuilding. A regular participant in all the major exhibitions until 1932, the year of his death, he was the recipient of numerous marks of official recognition and enjoyed considerable success with the public as well as the esteem of conservative critics.