French
Simon Vouet Gallery
1590-1649
French painter and draughtsman. Although at the time regarded as one of the leading French painters of the first half of the 17th century, he is now known more for his influence on French painting than for his actual oeuvre. He made his reputation in Italy, where he executed numerous portraits for aristocratic patrons and was commissioned for religious subjects. Although the early Italian works show the influence of Caravaggio, his work was subsequently modified by the Baroque style of such painters as Lanfranco and the influence of the Venetian use of light and colour. When he was summoned back to France by Louis XIII in 1627 he thus brought with him an Italian idiom hitherto unknown in France that revitalized French painting.
Related Paintings of Simon Vouet :. | Saturn,conquered byu Amor,Venus and Hope | Saint Cecilia | Crucifixion | The Toilet of Venus | Allegory of Wealth | Related Artists:
George WillisonPortrait painter who was born in Edinburgh in 1741 and returned there to spend his retirement.
He was a pupil of Mengs in Rome, before Mengs left for Madrid in 1761.
He painted "Boswell" in Rome in 1765 which is now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Willison was in London from 1767 and exhibited at the Scottish Academy between 1767 - 1770, and at the Royal Academy in 1771 and 1772.
He left London for an opulent retirement in Edinburgh around 1784.
Jacob de Backer (c. 1555 - c. 1585) was a Flemish Mannerist painter and draughtsman active in Antwerp between about 1571 and 1585.
According to the RKD he was born in Antwerp in c.1540/45 and died there c.1591-1600.De Backer was abandoned by his father as a young boy. Carel van Mander reports that the artist studied with Antonio van Palermo and Hendrik van Steenwijk I, but that Palermo worked him so hard that the young de Backer died in the arms of his master's daughter at the age of thirty.
Although the artist painted in the high mannerist style of Giorgio Vasari, he never appeared to travel to Italy. A series of the "Seven Deadly Sins", however, was bought in Antwerp by Alessandro Farnese's secretary Cosimo Masi in 1594 and taken to Italy.These paintings are now in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. Other attributable works include a Last Judgment triptych by him or his studio for Christophe Plantin's tomb in the Antwerp Cathedral (c. 1589; illustrated right), and an Allegory of the Three Ages of Man in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
He is not to be confused with the Dutch Golden Age painter Jacob Adriaensz Backer from
Arthur PondArthur Pond (1705?-1758) was an English painter and engraver.
Born about 1705, was educated in London, and stayed for a time in Rome studying art, in company with the sculptor Roubiliac. He became a successful portrait-painter.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1752, and died in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, 9 September 1758.
His numerous original portraits include Alexander Pope, William, Duke of Cumberland, and Peg Woffington. Pond was also a prolific etcher, and used various mixed processes of engraving by means of which he imitated or reproduced the works of masters such as Rembrandt, Raphael, Salvator Rosa, Parmigiano, Caravaggio, and the Poussins.
In 1734-5 he published a series of his plates under the title Imitations of the Italian Masters. He also collaborated with George Knapton in the publication of the Heads of Illustrious Persons, after Jacobus Houbraken and George Vertue, with lives by Thomas Birch (London, 1743-52); and engraved sixty-eight plates for a collection of ninety-five reproductions from drawings by famous masters, in which Knapton was again his colleague. Another of his productions was a series of twenty-five caricatures after Pier Leone Ghezzi, republished in 1823 and 1832 as Eccentric Characters.