1824- 1879 William Morris Hunt Gallery Hunt's father's family were among Vermont's founders and largest landowners; his mother's a family of wealth and prominence in Connecticut. Hunt attended Harvard but withdrew in his junior year. Following the untimely death of his Congressman father from cholera, Hunt's mother Jane took him and his brothers to Switzerland, the South of France and to Rome, where Hunt studied with Couture in Paris and then came under the influence of Jean-François Millet, from whom he learned the principles of the Barbizon school. The Hunt family remained in Europe for a dozen years. Afterwards, leaving Paris, he painted and established art schools at Newport, Rhode Island, where he had relatives, Brattleboro, Vermont, Faial Island in the Azores, where he had family connections and finally at Boston, where he painted, taught art and became a popular portrait painter. The companionship of Millet had a lasting influence on Hunt's character and style, and his work grew in strength, in beauty and in seriousness. He was among the biggest proponents of the Barbizon school in America, and he more than any other turned the rising generation of American painters towards Paris. On his return in 1855 he painted some of his most handsome canvases, all reminiscent of his life in France and of Millet's influence. Such are The Belated Kid, Girl at the Fountain, Hurdy-Gurdy Boy, and others ?C but the public called for portraits, and it became the fashion to sit for Hunt; among his best paintings of this genre are those of William M. Evarts, Mrs Charles Francis Adams, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, William H. Gardner, Chief Justice Shaw and Judge Horace Gray. Sadly, many of Hunt's paintings and sketches, together with five large Millets and other art treasures collected by him in Europe, were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.  Related Paintings of William Morris Hunt :. | Peasant Girl (mk06) | Portrait of Hamlet | Portrait of Charles Sumner | Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz | The Drummer Boy |
Related Artists:
Nikolai Kuznetsov
(1850- 1930 ) - Painter
Albert Weisgerber
German, 1878-1915 German painter and printmaker. He studied decoration at the Kreisbaugewerksschule in Kaiserlautern (1891-3) and began work in a decorator studio in Frankfurt am Main. However, in 1894 he moved to Munich to resume his studies, first at the Kunstgewerbeschule and later under Franz von Stuck at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste (1897-1901). For some years he concentrated on poster design and book illustration, contributing a total of 500 drawings to Jungend: Illustrierte Wochenschrift for Kunst und Leben from 1899. His early paintings such as the portrait of Ludwig Scharf II (c. 1905; Munich, Staatsgal. Mod. Kst) were executed in dark-toned academic style, but an exhibition of French Impressionism in Berlin in 1905 so impressed him that he went to Paris for nearly a year (until May 1906). Despite his association with the circle of artists around Matisse, he was more influenced by the work of Cezanne. In 1907 he made a second visit to Paris and joined Phalanx in 1909. In the latter year he was visited by Hans Purrmann and Matisse. By 1911 with a third visit to Paris and travels to Rome and Naples, he had established himself as one of the foremost German Impressionists. As well as such lyrical scenes as Munich Hofgarten (1911; Munich, Lenbachhaus), in common with many of his German contemporaries, Weisgerber reconceived classical scenes in an energetic style, for example in Amazon Camp (1910; Stuttgart, Staatsgal.). In 1912 he had a one-man show in the Kunsthaus, Zurich, and a year later participated in the annual Kunstausstellung in Munich. Although using an Impressionist style, he was equally at home in Expressionist circles, and this undoubtedly influenced his election to the presidency of the Neuen Menchner Sezession (1913). In the last four years of his career he was obsessed with sacrificial subject-matter from the Old and New Testaments, which he had originated in the theme of St Sebastian (e.g. St Sebastian Felled by Arrows, 1910; Munich, Staatsgal. Mod. Kst). While not exclusively tragic (e.g. David and Goliath, 1914; Saarbrecken, Saarland-Mus.), these final works strip away historical references to concentrate upon the fate of the isolated individual, as in Absalom (1914; Hamburg, Ksthalle).
Pedro Figari
(June 29, 1861-July 24, 1938) was a Uruguayan painter, lawyer, writer, and politician. Although he did not begin the practice until his later years, he is best known as an early modernist painter who emphasized capturing the every-day aspects of life in his work. In most of his pieces, he attempts to capture the essence of his home by painting local customs that he had observed in his childhood. Figari painted primarily from memory, a technique that gives his work a far more personal feeling. With his unique style, which involved painting without the intention to create an illusion, he, along with other prominent Latin-American artists such as Diego Rivera and Tarsila do Amaral, sparked a revolution of identity in the art world of Latin America.