One of the most talented painters in the Dutch Golden Age , 1632-1675
was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of ordinary life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death. Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours, sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work. What strikes in most of his paintings is a certain love, which easily could be called a love sickness, for the people and the objects in his paintings. He created a world more perfect than any he had witnessed. After having been virtually forgotten for nearly one hundred years, Related Paintings of Johannes Vermeer :. | Frauenportrat | Details of Mistress and maid | Study of a young woman | Girl reading a letter by an open window | Brieflesendes Madchen am offenen Fenster | Related Artists:
Walter Gay1856-1937. He was an American painter born at Hingham, Massachusetts. He married heiress Matilda E. Travers, the daughter of prominent New York City investor and co-founder of Saratoga Race Course, William R. Travers. In 1876 the couple moved to Paris, France where Walter Gay became a pupil of Leon Bonnat. They lived in an apartment on the Left Bank and in 1907 purchased Chateau Le Breau on a three-hundred-acre walled park near the Forest of Fontainebleau. Walter Gay received an honorable mention in the Paris Salon of 1885; a gold medal in 1888, and similar awards at Vienna (1894), Antwerp (1895), Berlin (1896) and Munich (1897). He became an Officer of the Legion of Honor and a member of the Society of Secession, Munich.
Simon Ushakov1626 - 1686) was a leading Russian graphic artist of the late 17th-century. Together with Fyodor Zubov and Fyodor Rozhnov, he is associated with the comprehensive reform of the Russian Orthodox Church undertaken by Patriarch Nikon.
We know almost nothing about the early years of Simon Ushakov. His birth date is deduced from his inscription on one of the icons: In the year 7166 painted this icon Simon Ushakov son, being 32 years of age.
At 22 he became a paid artist of the Silver Chamber, affiliated with the Armory Prikaz. The bright, fresh colours and exquisite, curving lines of his proto-baroque icons caught the eye of Patriarch Nikon, who introduced Simon to the tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. He became a great favourite with the royal family and was eventually (1664) assigned to the Kremlin Armoury, run by an educated boyar Bogdan Khitrovo.
Basilius Besler1561-1629,was a respected Nuremberg apothecary and botanist, best known for his monumental Hortus Eystettensis. He was curator of the garden of Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, prince bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria. The bishop was an enthusiastic botanist who derived great pleasure from his garden, which was the only important European botanical garden outside Italy. The gardens surrounded the bishop's palace, Willibaldsburg, which was built on a hill overlooking the town. These gardens had been started in 1596 and designed by Besler's colleague, Joachim Camerarius, the Younger (1534-1598), a physician and botanist. Upon Camerarius' death in 1598, Besler had the remainder of Camerarius' plants moved to Eichstätt and carried on the work of planting and supervision. The bishop commissioned Besler to compile a codex of the plants growing in his garden, a task which Besler took sixteen years to complete, the bishop dying shortly before the work was published. Besler had the assistance of his brother and a group of skilled German draughtsmen and engravers, including Sebastian Schedel, an accomplished painter, and Wolfgang Kilian, a skilled engraver from Augsburg. Kilian and his team engraved the initial copper plates, but after the bishop??s death, the operations moved to N??rnberg and a new team of engravers, among whom were Johannes Leypold, Georg Gärtner, Levin and Friedrich van Hulsen, Peter Isselburg, Heinrich Ulrich, Dominicus Custos and Servatius Raeven. Camerarius' nephew, Ludwig Jungermann (1572-1653), was a botanist and wrote the lion's share of the descriptive text. The work was named Hortus Eystettensis (Garden at Eichstätt). The emphasis in botanicals of previous centuries had been on medicinal and culinary herbs, and these had usually been depicted in a crude manner. The images were often inadequate for identification, and had little claim to being aesthetic. The Hortus Eystettensis changed botanical art overnight. The plates were of garden flowers, herbs and vegetables, exotic plants such as castor-oil and arum lilies.
