Spanish 1618-1682 Bartolome Esteban Murillo Galleries Murillo began his art studies under Juan del Castillo in Seville. Murillo became familiar with Flemish painting; the great commercial importance of Seville at the time ensured that he was also subject to influences from other regions. His first works were influenced by Zurbaran, Jusepe de Ribera and Alonso Cano, and he shared their strongly realist approach. As his painting developed, his more important works evolved towards the polished style that suited the bourgeois and aristocratic tastes of the time, demonstrated especially in his Roman Catholic religious works. In 1642, at the age of 26 he moved to Madrid, where he most likely became familiar with the work of Velazquez, and would have seen the work of Venetian and Flemish masters in the royal collections; the rich colors and softly modeled forms of his subsequent work suggest these influences. He returned to Seville in 1645. In that year, he painted thirteen canvases for the monastery of St. Francisco el Grande in Seville which gave his reputation a well-deserved boost. Following the completion of a pair of pictures for the Seville Cathedral, he began to specialise in the themes that brought him his greatest successes, the Virgin and Child, and the Immaculate Conception. After another period in Madrid, from 1658 to 1660, he returned to Seville. Here he was one of the founders of the Academia de Bellas Artes (Academy of Art), sharing its direction, in 1660, with the architect, Francisco Herrera the Younger. This was his period of greatest activity, and he received numerous important commissions, among them the altarpieces for the Augustinian monastery, the paintings for Santa Mar??a la Blanca (completed in 1665), and others.  Related Paintings of Bartolome Esteban Murillo :. | The Anunciacion | The Baptism of Christ | The Toilette | San Francisco and the Virgin and Child | Passion |
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Marten Rijckaert
Belgium (1587-1631 ) - Painter
Henry William Pickersgill
English Painter, 1782-1875 was an English painter specialising in portraits. He was a Royal Academician for almost fifty years, and painted many of the most notable figures of his time. Born in London, Pickersgill was adopted in his youth by a Mr Hall, a silk manufacturer in Spitalfields, who financed his schooling and then took him into the family business. However, when war caused difficult trading conditions, Pickersgill opted to develop his talent for painting into a career, and was a pupil of landscape artist George Arnald between 1802 - 1805 before entering the Royal Academy Schools as a student in November 1805.His early subjects were varied and included landscapes and classical and historical themes, but he eventually settled to portraiture as his speciality. His first exhibit at the Royal Academy was a portrait of his benefactor Mr Hall, and during his lifetime he showed a total of 384 paintings there. He was elected to associate membership of the Academy in November 1822 and full membership in February 1826. Pickersgill was one of the pre-eminent portrait painters of his day. William Wordsworth, George Stephenson, Jeremy Bentham, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Faraday were among the many notable people who sat for him. He famously painted author James Silk Buckingham and his wife Elizabeth in Arab costume in 1816, reflecting Buckingham's own travels in the East as well as the fashion of the times for the Orient. The National Portrait Gallery, London has over 50 of his portraits in its collection, including 16 original oils and 35 engravings after him, along with a small number of portraits of Pickersgill himself by others. From 1856?C64 he was librarian of the Royal Academy. He retired from the institution in December 1872, and died at his home in Blandford Square, London at the age of 93. Pickersgill's brother Richard, son Henry Hall and nephew Frederick Richard were also painters.
John Ballantyne
British Portrait painter , (1815-1897) was an English ornithologist. The Gould League in Australia was named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" was pivotal in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, though they are barely mentioned in Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species.Gould was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset, the son of a gardener, and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy and in 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist