French Baroque Era Painter, 1594-1665
French painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. His supreme achievement as a painter lies in his unrivalled but hard-won capacity to subordinate dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. The development of his art towards this end was focused on the search for a point of equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s. Poussin did not aspire to the classicism of Raphael's idealized human forms or Michelangelo's re-embodiment of the physical splendours of the antique world, nor did he attempt to vie with the bravura and energy of Annibale Carracci's treatment of Classical mythology in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Equally he was not concerned with the illusionistic effects and heightened emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco. He was concerned above all with interpreting his subject-matter, whether Classical or religious, and telling a story with the greatest possible concentration of emotional response, Related Paintings of POUSSIN, Nicolas :. | Rebecca at the Well st | The Triumph of Flora sg | The Triumph of Neptune (detail) af | Echo and Narcissus | Strormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe | Related Artists:
Samuel De WildeBritish 1748-1832,English painter and etcher of Dutch descent. He was the son of a Dutch joiner who had settled in London by 1748. On 19 November 1765 he was apprenticed for seven years to his godfather, Samuel Haworth, a joiner in London. However, he left after five years and enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools in 1769. He exhibited small portraits at the Society of Artists (1776-8) and at the Royal Academy (from 1778), where he also showed fancy pictures of banditti in the style of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. But the genre that he made very much his own was theatrical portraiture: he exhibited theatrical portraits at the Royal Academy almost every year from 1792 to 1821.
Hitchcock, GeorgeAmerican Painter, 1850-1913
American painter, active in the Netherlands. A descendant of Roger Williams (the founder of Rhode Island), he practised law for several years in New York before deciding in 1879 to become an artist. He studied in Paris with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre, in D?sseldorf, and in The Hague with H. W. Mesdag. He settled in Egmond-aan-Zee, near Alkmaar, in 1883, and was soon widely known for his paintings of religious subjects in contemporary settings and of sunlit views of tulip fields. He returned to the USA only occasionally in later years. Hitchcock's style, similar to Impressionism, has been appreciated more in Europe than in the USA. A good example of his style is the Blessed Mother (1892; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.). He received some recognition in the USA, such as election to associate membership in the National Academy of Design, New York,
SAFTLEVEN, CornelisDutch painter (b. 1607, Gorinchem, d. 1681, Rotterdam).Painter and draughtsman. After training as a painter in Rotterdam, he may have visited Antwerp c. 1632-4. From c. 1634 he was in Utrecht, where his brother (2) Herman the younger had settled, and they collaborated on a portrait of Godard van Reede and his Family (1634-5; Maarssen, Slot Zuylen). In 1637 Cornelis was back in Rotterdam, where in 1648 he married Catharina van der Heyden (d Rotterdam, 1654). The year after her death, he married Elisabeth van der Avondt. He became dean of the Guild of St Luke in Rotterdam in 1667.