Bouguereau made more than seven hundred finished works. French painter. From 1838 to 1841 he took drawing lessons from Louis Sage, a pupil of Ingres, while attending the coll?ge at Pons. In 1841 the family moved to Bordeaux where in 1842 his father allowed him to attend the Ecole Municipale de Dessin et de Peinture part-time, under Jean-Paul Alaux. In 1844 he won the first prize for figure painting, which confirmed his desire to become a painter. As there were insufficient family funds to send him straight to Paris he painted portraits of the local gentry from 1845 to 1846 to earn money. In 1846 he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in the studio of Francois-Edouard Picot. This was the beginning of the standard academic training of which he became so ardent a defender later in life. Such early works as Equality reveal the technical proficiency he had attained even while still training. In 1850 he was awarded one of the two Premier Grand Prix de Rome for Zenobia Discovered by Shepherds on the Bank of the River Araxes (1850; Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). In December 1850 he left for Rome where he remained at the Villa Medici until 1854, working under Victor Schnetz and Jean Alaux (1786-1864). During this period he made an extensive study of Giotto's work at Assisi and Padua and was also impressed by the works of other Renaissance masters and by Classical art. On his return to France he exhibited the Triumph of the Martyr (1853; Luneville, Mus. Luneville; ) at the Salon of 1854. It depicted St Cecilia's body being carried to the catacombs, and its high finish, restrained colour and classical poses were to be constant features of his painting thereafter. All his works were executed in several stages involving an initial oil sketch followed by numerous pencil drawings taken from life. Though he generally restricted himself to classical, religious and genre subjects, he was commissioned by the state to paint Napoleon III Visiting the Flood Victims of Tarascon in 1856   Related Paintings of Adolphe William Bouguereau :. | The Annunciation (mk26) | Thirst | Portrait of Madame la Comtesse de Cambaceres (mk26) | Vierge consolatrice (mk26) | Evening Mood (mk26) |
Related Artists:
IBBETSON, Julius Caesar
English Painter, 1759-1817 English painter, printmaker and writer. The son of a clothier, he was apprenticed to John Fletcher, a ship painter in Hull; in 1775 Ibbetson became a scene-painter there. In 1777 he moved to London, where he worked as a scene-painter and picture restorer. He married about three years later. From 1785 he exhibited landscapes, genre scenes and portraits at the Royal Academy. In 1787-8 Ibbetson was personal draughtsman to Col. Charles Cathcart on the first British Mission to Beijing, a voyage that included visits to Madeira, the Cape of Good Hope and Java. His watercolour False Bay, Cape of Good Hope (London, V&A), made on this journey, shows a picturesque roughness of foliage and rustic staffage adapted from his English landscape style. Cathcart's death forced Ibbetson to return to England (he exhibited an oil painting, untraced, of the Burial of Col. Cathcart in Java at the Royal Academy in 1789); thereafter he lived by painting landscape oils and watercolours, the subjects culled from his frequent tours. He painted occasional portraits throughout his career (e.g. Young Man, 1790; Leeds, Temple Newsam House) and contributed to John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (e.g. Scene from 'The Taming of the Shrew', untraced, see Waterhouse, p. 192). In 1789 he stayed with John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, at Cardiff Castle and visited the Isle of Wight in 1790. In 1792 he toured Wales and the surrounding area with the painter John 'Warwick' Smith and his companion Robert Fulke Greville, resulting in the publication of his book of engravings, A Picturesque Guide (1793). His oil painting of Aberglasyn: The Flash of Lightning (Leeds, C.A.G.) evokes the sublimity of the mountainous Welsh terrain; the drama of the storm over Aberglasyn is conveyed by thick impasto and strong chiaroscuro, a way of handling paint that Ibbetson learnt from copying 17th-century Dutch masters while working for a London dealer named Clarke during the late 1770s and early 1780s.
Lemuel Francis Abbott
1760-1803 Lemuel Francis Abbott Locations English painter. He was the son of a clergyman and went to London to study with Francis Hayman shortly before the latter death in 1776; he may have completed his studies in Derby with Joseph Wright of Derby. By the early 1780s Abbott had established a busy portrait practice in London. The formula he adopted for most of his head-and-shoulder portraits can be seen in Sir William Herschel (1785; London, N. Mar. Mus.): the body is parallel to the picture plane, and the sitter head is moved into three-quarter profile, as if his attention has been suddenly distracted. In later portraits, such as those of fellow artists Francesco Bartolozzi (c. 1792; London, Tate) or Joseph Nollekens (c. 1797; London, N.P.G.), the sitter hand or some attribute balances the movement of the head. Only male portraits by Abbott are known, and his patrons were mostly drawn from the professional classes, particularly the Navy; there are several versions of Lord Nelson (e.g. 1798; London, N. Mar. Mus.). His style is crisp but scratchy in technique, and often the anatomy of his figures is inaccurate. Paint is handled in a manner comparable with that of Gainsborough Dupont, but Abbott sense of composition is superior. In 1798 he was certified insane, but he continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy in London for two further years. Several of his works were probably finished by another hand.
Matthias Withoos
(1627-1703), also known as Calzetta Bianca and Calzetti, was a Dutch painter of still lifes and city scenes, best-known for the details of insects, reptiles and undergrowth in the foreground of his pictures. Withoos was born in Amersfoort. He studied under Jacob van Campen, at his painters' school just outside the city at his country house, and then with Otto Marseus van Schrieck. When he was 21, Withoos made a trip to Rome with Van Schrieck, and Willem van Aelst. There they joined the group of northern artists known as the "Bentvueghels" ("Birds of a feather"), and Withoos went by the alias "Calzetta Bianca" ("White Hose") a translation of his name into Italian. Withoos' work caught the eye of the cardinal Leopoldo de Medici, who commissioned various paintings from him. In 1653, the artist returned to Amersfoort.When French troops occupied Amersfoort in the "Disastrous Year" of 1672, Withoos fled from Amersfoort to Hoorn, where he would remain until his death in 1703.