b Pontormo, nr Empoli, 26 May 1494; d Florence, 31 Dec 1556). Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the leading painter in mid-16th-century Florence and one of the most original and extraordinary of Mannerist artists. His eccentric personality, solitary and slow working habits and capricious attitude towards his patrons are described by Vasari; his own diary, which covers the years 1554-6, further reveals a character with neurotic and secretive aspects. Pontormo enjoyed the protection of the Medici family throughout his career but, unlike Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari, did not become court painter. His subjective portrait style did not lend itself to the state portrait. He produced few mythological works and after 1540 devoted himself almost exclusively to religious subjects. His drawings, mainly figure studies in red and black chalk, are among the highest expressions of the great Florentine tradition of draughtsmanship; close to 400 survive, forming arguably the most important body of drawings by a Mannerist painter. His highly personal style was much influenced by Michelangelo  Related Paintings of Pontormo, Jacopo :. | Halberdier | Visitation | Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and Saint John the Baptist | Madonna and Child with Two Saints | Christ before Pilate |
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Jan van Goyen
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings.
Corrado Giaquinto
1703-1766 Italian Corrado Giaquinto Galleries He was born in Molfetta. As a boy he apprenticed with a modest local painter Saverio Porta, (c1667-1725), escaping the religious career his parents had intended for him. By October 1724, he left Molfetta, and along with his contemporaries Francesco de Mura (1696-1784) and Giuseppe Bonito (1707-1789), he trained from 1719-23 in the prolific Neapolitan studio of Francesco Solimena, either with Solimena or his pupil, Nicola Maria Rossi. Throughout his life, Giaquinto was a peripatetic painter, with long sojourns in Naples, Rome (between 1723-53), Turin (1733 and 1735-9), and Madrid (1753-1761). In 1723, he moved to Rome to work in the studio of Sebastiano Conca. He painted in San Lorenzo in Damaso, San Giovanni Calibita, and the ceiling at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. In March 1727, with Giuseppe Rossi as an assistant, Giaquinto opened an independent studio near the Ponte Sisto, in the parish of Saint Giovanni of the Malva in Rome. In 1734, he married Caterina Silvestri Agate. The first documented work by his hand is Christ crucified with the Madonna, Saint John Evangelist, and Magdalene commissioned in 1730 by king John V of Portugal for the cathedral of the Mafra. In 1731, he received a prestigious commission, to execute frescoes in the church of San Nicola dei Lorenesi: Saint Nicholas water gush from cliff, three theologic and cardinal Virtues, and in the cupola Paradise. The latest restoration confirms Giaquinto stylistic independence from Solimena, and reveals his stylistic dependence on Luca Giordano.
Johan Barthold Jongkind
Dutch Impressionist Painter, 1819-1891 was a Dutch painter and printmaker regarded as a forerunner of Impressionism who influenced Claude Monet. Jongkind was born in the town of Lattrop in the Overijssel province of the Netherlands near the border with Germany. Trained at the art academy in The Hague, in 1846 he moved to the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France where he studied under Eugene Isabey and Francois-Edouard Picot. Two years later, the Paris Salon accepted his work for its exhibition, and he received acclaim from critic Charles Baudelaire and later on from Emile Zola. Jongkind was to experience little success, however, and he suffered bouts of depression complicated by alcoholism. Jongkind returned to live in Rotterdam in 1855, and remained there until 1860. Back in Paris, in 1861 he rented a studio on the rue de Chevreuse in Montparnasse where some of his paintings began to show glimpses of the Impressionist style to come. In 1862 he befriended the young Claude Monet who later referred to Jongkind as the "master." The following year Jongkind exhibited at the first Salon des Refus's. Despite several successes, in another of his down periods the Impressionist group did not accept his work for their first exhibition in 1874.