1728-1779 Dutch Anton Raphael Mengs Gallery Mengs was born in 1728 at Usti nad Labem (German: Aussig) in Bohemia on 12 March 1728; he died in Rome 29 June 1779. His father, Ismael Mengs, a Danish painter, established himself finally at Dresden, whence in 1741 he took his son to Rome. In Rome, his fresco painting of Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter. The appointment of Mengs in 1749 as first painter to Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony did not prevent his spending much time in Rome, where he had married Margarita Quazzi who had sat for him as a model in 1748, and abjured the Protestant faith, and where he became in 1754 director of the Vatican school of painting, nor did this hinder him on two occasions from obeying the call of Charles III of Spain to Madrid. There Mengs produced some of his best work, and specially the ceiling of the banqueting-hall of the Royal Palace of Madrid, the subject of which was the Triumph of Trajan and the Temple of Glory. Among his pupils there was Agust??n Esteve. After the completion of this work in 1777, Mengs returned to Rome, and there he died, two years later, in poor circumstances, leaving twenty children, seven of whom were pensioned by the king of Spain. His portraits and autoportraits recall an attention to detail and insight, often lost from the grand manner paintings. Besides numerous paintings in the Madrid gallery, the Ascension and St Joseph at Dresden, Perseus and Andromeda at Saint Petersburg, and the ceiling of the Villa Albani must be mentioned among his chief works. In 1911, Henry George Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland, possessed a Holy Family, and the colleges of All Souls and Magdalen, at Oxford, possessed altar-pieces by Mengs's hand. In his writings, in Spanish, Italian and German, Mengs has put forth his eclectic theory of art, which treats of perfection as attainable by a well-schemed combination of diverse excellences Greek design, with the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colour of Titian. He would have fancied himself the first neoclassicist, while in fact he may be the last flicker of Baroque art. Or in the words of Wittkower, In the last analysis, he is as much an end as a beginning. His intimacy with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who constantly wrote at his dictation, has enhanced his historical importance, for he formed no scholars, and the critic must now concur in Goethe's judgment of Mengs in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert; he must deplore that so much learning should have been allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism. Mengs was famous for his rivalry with the contemporary Italian painter Pompeo Batoni.  Related Paintings of Anton Raphael Mengs :. | Maria Luisa von Parma Prinzessin von Asturien | Self-portrait | Night by Anton Raphael Mengs | Evening | British painter |
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James Holland
1799-1870 British English painter. As a boy he was employed for seven years to paint flowers on pottery in the factory of John Davenport ( fl 1793; d 1848) of Longport. In 1819 Holland moved to London, where he continued at first to work as a pottery painter but also undertook watercolours of flowers and natural history subjects, exhibiting his works at the Royal Academy from 1824. After 1828 oil paintings predominated over watercolours in the many pictures that he exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Society of Painters in Water-Colours (of which he was made an associate in 1835), the British Institution and the Society of British Artists. He travelled to Paris in 1831 and subsequently made repeated tours of the Continent. Buildings in European cities now became his favourite subject, and above all, scenes of Venice, which he first visited in 1835; his Venetian views have sometimes been confused with those by Richard Parkes Bonington. In 1837 he was commissioned by the Landscape Annual to make drawings in Portugal, which were engraved in the issue for 1839. He travelled again to Venice in 1845, 1851 and 1857, making sketches en route of the Low Countries, France, Switzerland and Austria. Other subjects favoured by Holland were Blackheath and Greenwich (both London), where he lived from 1830 to 1845. He was renowned for his fluent draughtsmanship and for his brilliant colouring in both oils and watercolours, making liberal use of gouache in the latter. The contents of his studio were auctioned at Christie's, London, on 26 May 1870.