English Romantic Painter, 1775-1851 Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 ?C 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321) Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840). Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321) One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.  Related Paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner :. | Church | Calais Pier | Roman | Landscape with Juntion of the Severn and the Wye | Meeting |
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Dufy Raoul
Le Havre 1877-Forcalquier 1953 was a French Fauvist painter. He developed a colourful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs for ceramics, textiles and decorative schemes for public buildings. He is noted for scenes of open-air social events. Raoul Dufy was born at Le Havre, in Normandy, one of a family of nine members. He left school at the age of 14 to work in a coffee importing company. In 1895 when he was 18, he started evening classes in art at Le Havre Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He and Othon Friesz, a school friend, studied the works of Eug??ne Boudin in the museum in Le Havre. Raoul Dufy, Regatta at Cowes, (1934), Washington D.C. National Gallery of Art.In 1900, after a year of military service, Raoul won a scholarship enabling him to attend the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was a fellow student with Georges Braque. The impressionist landscapists, such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, influenced him. Introduced to Berthe Weill in 1902, she showed his work in her gallery. Henri Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupte, which Dufy saw at the Salon des Independants in 1905, was a revelation to the young artist and directed his interest towards Fauvism. Les Fauves (wild beasts) emphasised bright colour and rich bold contours in their work, and Dufy's painting reflects this approach until about 1909, when contact with the work of Paul Cezanne led him to adopt a somewhat subtler technique.
johan zacharias blackstadiusblackstadius
seated female model december1842. royal academy of fine arts
Maurice quentin de la tour
1704-88 French pastellist. He was one of the greatest pastellists of the 18th century, an equal of Jean-Sim?on Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. Unlike them, however, he painted no works in oils. Reacting against the stately portraits of preceding generations and against the mythological portraits of many of his contemporaries, La Tour returned to a more realistic and sober style of work. The fundamental quality of his art lies in his ability to suggest the temperament and psychology of his subjects by means of their facial expression, and thereby to translate their fugitive emotions on to paper: 'I penetrate into the depths of my subjects without their knowing it, and capture them whole', as he himself put it. His considerable success led to commissions from the royal family, the court, the rich bourgeoisie and from literary, artistic and theatrical circles.