(8 March 1826, in Vastemõisa near Suure-Jaani, Viljandi County, Estonia - 22 April 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia) was an Estonian painter. He is considered to have been the first professional Estonian painter. He distinguished himself primarily by his portraiture and to a lesser extent by his landscape paintings. Some of his most notable pictures depict the Estonian rural life in the second half of the 19th Century. Johann Köler was the seventh child born to a peasant family. Despite the poverty of the parents Köler managed to attend the elementary and the district schools in Viljandi. Then he attended a workshop of master painters in Cesis (then in Livonia). In 1846, Köler travelled to St. Petersburg to work as a sign writer, where his talent was soon discovered. From 1848 to 1855 Johan Köler studied drawing and painting at the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts. During 1857 Köler travelled to Paris via Berlin, later returned to Germany then travelled to the Netherlands and Belgium. In 1858, he travelled across the Alps to Milan, Geneva, Florence and Rome. There, he studied in a private academy and devoted his time to watercolor technique. In Rome during 1859 he presented his composition "Christ on the Cross". Answering the call of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, Köler returned to the city in 1861. From 1862 to 1874 he was a teacher of the Grand Duchess Maria Aleksandrovna, the daughter of Czar Alexander II of Russia. In 1869-1870, he worked as a lecturer at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. From 1886 to 1889 Johan Köler worked in Vienna, Nice and Paris.  Related Paintings of Johann Koler :. | Italian landscape | Portrait of Hugo Treffner | Portrait of Hugo Treffner | Portrait of the Daughter of Nikolai Petrovitsch Semjonov | Italian landscape |
Related Artists:
COXCIE, Raphael
Flemish painter (b. 1540, Mechelen, d. 1616, Brussels).
Francois Quesnel
(ca. 1543 - 1619) was a French painter of Scottish extraction. The son of the French painter Pierre Quesnel and his Scottish wife Madeleine Digby, born in Edinburgh while his father worked for Mary of Guise, Quesnel found patronage at the French court of Catherine de Medici and her son, Henri III (illustration). He married Charlotte Richandeau, with whom he had four children. A widower, he remarried in 1584 Marguerite Le Masson, who gave him ten more children, among whom were Nicolas and Augustin, painters, and Jacques, bookseller. Portrait, possibly of Catherine-Charlotte de la Tremoille, ca 1589, attributed to QuesnelIn Paris he worked as a decorator and a designer of cartoons for tapestry, but it is as a portrait painter, both in oils and in delicately tinted pencil or red and black chalk he is chiefly remembered. Some portraits were engraved by Thomas de Leu and Michel Lasne, and in 1609 he drew a map of Paris for engraving by Pierre Vallet. He died in Paris.
DROST, Willem
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1630-1680 Dutch painter, draughtsman and printmaker, possibly of German origin. According to Houbraken, he was a pupil of Rembrandt, possibly in or shortly before 1650. An early etching signed w drost 1652 is probably a self-portrait, in which Drost portrayed himself as a young man drawing. His earliest dated paintings are two pendants of 1653: the Portrait of a Man (New York, Met.) and the Portrait of a Woman (The Hague, Mus. Bredius). The man's portrait is signed Wilhelmus Drost F. Amsterdam 1653