1831-1910 Swiss Albert Anker Galleries During his studies, Anker produced a series of works with historical and biblical themes, including paintings of Luther and Calvin. Soon after returning to Ins, though, he turned to what would become his signature theme: the everyday life of people in rural communities. His paintings depict his fellow citizens in an unpretentious and plain manner, without idealising country life, but also without the critical examination of social conditions that can be found in the works of contemporaries such as Daumier, Courbet or Millet. Although Anker did paint occasional scenes with a social significance, such as visits by usurers or charlatans to the village, his affirmative and idealistic Christian world-view did not include an inclination to issue any sort of overt challenge. Also prominent in Anker's work are the more than 30 still lifes he created. They depict both rural and urban table settings in the tradition of Chardin, their realist solidity reflecting Anker's vision of a harmonic and stable world order. In addition, Anker created hundreds of commissioned watercolours and drawings, mostly portraits and illustrations, including for an edition of Jeremias Gotthelf's collected works. To provide for a steady income, Anker also decorated more than 500 faience plates for the Alsatian producer Theodore Deck. Anker was quick to reach his artistic objectives and never strayed from his chosen path. His works, though, exude a sense of conciliation and understanding as well as a calm trust in Swiss democracy; they are executed with great skill, providing brilliance to everyday scenes through subtle choices in colouring and lighting. Their parochial motives belie the open-mindedness towards contemporary European art and events that Anker's correspondence reflects.  Related Paintings of Albert Anker :. | The Little Knitters | The Artist's Daughter Louise | Die Kartenlgerin | Market in Murten (nn02) | The Creche |
Related Artists:
CRESPI, Giuseppe Maria
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1665-1747 Painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His religious and mythological works are distinguished by a free brushstroke and a painterly manner. He also painted spirited genre scenes, which by their quality, content and quantity distinguish him as one of the first Italian painters of high standing to devote serious attention to the depiction of contemporary life. Such paintings as Woman Laundering (1700-05; St Petersburg, Hermitage) or Woman Washing Dishes (1720-25; Florence, Uffizi) offer straightforward glimpses of domestic chores in images that are startlingly novel for the period and look forward to the art of Jean-Simeon Chardin, Jean-Francois Millet and Honore Daumier.
Hippolyte-Lucas
French, 1854-1925
Wolfgang Heimbach
c.1600/1615-after 1678, German painter. The son of a bookkeeper at the corn exchange, he was known because of a disability as 'the Ovelg?nne mute'. An aristocratic sponsor, probably Graf Anton G?nther (1603-67) of Oldenburg, sent him to train in the Netherlands: stylistic considerations would suggest that this was in the 1630s. The Evening Scene (1637; ex-art market, Berlin; G?ttsche, no. 8) shows him adapting the style of Caravaggio as practised in Utrecht to the kind of social gathering depicted by Dirck Hals or Anthonie Palamedesz. He uses an artificial light source to exaggerate the modelling of the figures and the space. This characteristic of his art also shows in the Evening Banquet of 1640