Dutch 1599-1641 Anthony Van Dyck Locations Flemish painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and England. He was the leading Flemish painter after Rubens in the first half of the 17th century and in the 18th century was often considered no less than his match. A number of van Dyck studies in oil of characterful heads were included in Rubens estate inventory in 1640, where they were distinguished neither in quality nor in purpose from those stocked by the older master. Although frustrated as a designer of tapestry and, with an almost solitary exception, as a deviser of palatial decoration, van Dyck succeeded brilliantly as an etcher. He was also skilled at organizing reproductive engravers in Antwerp to publish his works, in particular The Iconography (c. 1632-44), comprising scores of contemporary etched and engraved portraits, eventually numbering 100, by which election he revived the Renaissance tradition of promoting images of uomini illustri. His fame as a portrait painter in the cities of the southern Netherlands, as well as in London, Genoa, Rome and Palermo, has never been outshone; and from at least the early 18th century his full-length portraits were especially prized in Genoese, British and Flemish houses, where they were appreciated as much for their own sake as for the identities and families of the sitters.  Related Paintings of Anthony Van Dyck :. | Venus Asking Vulcan for Arms for Aeneas (mk05) | james tissot | philip de laszlo | Self-Portrait | preceding pages |
Related Artists:
Johannes Bosboom
(born The Hague, February 18, 1817 - died there September 14, 1891) was a Dutch painter and watercolorist of the Hague School, known especially for his paintings of church interiors. At the age of 14 he became a student of Bartholomeus van Hove and painted in his studio along with Van Hove's son Hubertus van Hove. Together they worked on the pieces of scenery that Van Hove created for the Royal Theatre in The Hague. In addition, Bosboom took lessons from 1831 to 1835 and again from 1839 to 1840 in the Hague Academy of Art. Here he also made the acquaintance of Antonie Waldorp and Wijnand Nuyen. The young Bosboom traveled to Germany in 1835 to Dusseldorf, Cologne and Koblenz and painted the watercolor View of the Mosel Bridge at Koblenz. This painting was purchased by Andreas Schelfhout, who became his confidante and friend. In 1939 he traveled to Paris and Rouen and received a silver medal for View of the Paris Quay and the Cathedral at Rouen. He also painted a number of church interiors, a relatively traditional genre in which the seventeenth century artists Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de Witte served as important examples. Bosboom had a great deal of success with these pieces, and for the rest of his career he would repeatedly return to this theme, which was the one in which he would achieve his greatest fame. Bosboom's choice of subject matter may seem to isolate him from the rest of the Hague School, but his search for ways to reproduce the spatial atmosphere through light, shadow, and nuances of color places him in the very mainstream of this group. In 1873, during a stay in Scheveningen, he painted many watercolors of town views, the dunes, the beach and the sea. It is possible that these watercolors encouraged Hendrik Willem Mesdag and Jacob Maris to concentrate further on the sea and beach as subjects.
Ludwig Koch
Austrian, 1866-1934
ROMNEY, George
English Painter, 1734-1802 The son of a cabinetmaker, George Romney was born in Dalton, Lancashire. He was apprenticed in 1755 to Christopher Steele, a provincial portrait painter, but was largely self-taught. Romney's ambition was to become a history painter. In 1762 he moved to London, where he studied the Duke of Richmond's collection of casts of antique sculpture and established himself as a portraitist. He went to Italy in 1773, and after his return in 1775 he became the favorite painter of high society. Morbidly sensitive and retiring, Romney kept aloof from the social world of his sitters and from the Royal Academy. By 1782 he was under the spell of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton and the mistress of Nelson, who sat for him as Circe, a Bacchante, Cassandra, the Pythian Priestess, Joan of Arc, St. Cecilia, Mary Magdalene, and other impersonations he suggested. In the 1780s he executed a number of Eton leaving portraits, which established him as the supreme interpreter of aristocratic adolescence in his age. For much of his life in London, Romney was under the wing of the poet William Hayley, who encouraged him in the choice of subjects from Milton and Shakespeare as well as the Bible and Greek tragedy. Romney's history paintings are today chiefly known from engravings, like the dramatic Tempest (1787-1790) commissioned for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. A large number of drawings for these projects survive. Romney had married early in life an uneducated woman whom he did not bring to London but to whom he returned when his health finally gave way. Ill health and the facility with which he converted his early realistic style into a fashionable sketchlike formula for idealizing his sitters probably account for an unevenness of execution that has partially justified his critics. Unlike Joshua Reynolds, Romney did not enter into the character of his sitters, unless they possessed nervous traits like his own, for example, the moving portrait William Cowper. But he was psychologically involved with the generalized charms of youth, beauty, and breeding that he admired in his aristocratic sitters, and by combining a neoclassic purity of line with free but masterly brushwork he achieved a number of incomparable images which transcend the realism of portraiture.