Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1697-1768 Italian painter, etcher and draughtsman. He was the most distinguished Italian view painter of the 18th century. Apart from ten years spent in England he lived in Venice, and his fame rests above all on his views (vedute) of that city; some of these are purely topographical, others include festivals or ceremonial events. He also painted imaginary views (capriccios), although the demarcation between the real and the invented is never quite clearcut: his imaginary views often include realistically depicted elements, though in unexpected surroundings, and in a sense even his Venetian vedute are imaginary. He never merely re-created reality. He was highly successful with the English, helped in this by the British connoisseur JOSEPH SMITH, whose own large collection of Canaletto works was sold to King George III in 1762. The British Royal Collection has the largest group of his paintings and drawings.  Related Paintings of Canaletto :. | View of the Grand Canal fg | The Grand Canal with the Rialto Bridge in the Background (detail) | Roofs and Chimneys in Venice ff | London: the Old Horse Guards from St James s Park d | Regatta on the Canale Grande (mk08) |
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Ambrosius Holbein
1494-1519 German Ambrosius Holbein Gallery Ambrosius Holbein (c. 1494 ?C c. 1519) was a German and Swiss artist in painting, drawing and printmaking. He was the elder brother, by about three years, of Hans Holbein the Younger and like his brother was born in Augsburg (which today is in Bavaria, but then was a free imperial city), a center of art, culture and trade at that time. His father Hans Holbein the Elder was a pioneer and leader in the transformation of German art from the Gothic to the Renaissance style. In his studio both his sons, Ambrosius and Hans, received their first painting lessons as well as the an introduction to the crafts of the goldsmith, jeweller and printmaker. Portrait of a Boy with Blond Hair, 1516, BaselIn 1515 Ambrosius lived in the Swiss town of Stein am Rhein, where he helped a Schaffhausen painter named Thomas Schmid with the murals in the main hall of the St George monastery. The next year saw Ambrosius, as well as his brother Hans, in Basel, where he initially worked as a journeyman in Hans Herbster??s studio. In 1517 he was enrolled in a register of the Basel painters' guild and in 1518 he was naturalized as a citizen there. The Portrait of a Boy with Blond Hair and its companion, the Portrait of a Boy with Brown Hair, are among Ambrosius?? best works of this period. Both are nowadays in the Basel Kunstmuseum. Ambrosius Holbein ranks among the most important of Basel??s illustrators and prominent „small formats?? artists.
Bill Traylor
African-American Folk Artist, ca.1856-1949 was a self-taught artist born an Alabama slave. Unable to read or write, he first began drawing in 1939 at the age of eighty-three. He worked full-time for the next four years to produce over eighteen hundred drawings. He used a straight edge to create geometric silhouettes of human and animal figures which he then filled in with crayon and tempera. He is known for his intriguing use of pattern versus flat color and a remarkably intuitive sense of space. He started hanging his works on a nearby fence to entertain the locals. One of his first fans was Charles Shannon, a painter who introduced Traylor to the New South regionalist artists and organized two shows of his work before his death. Since then, Traylor has become one of the most highly sought-after outsider artists.
Theodor Kittelsen
1857-1914,was a Norwegian artist born in the coastal town of Kragero in Norway. He is famous for his nature paintings on the one hand, and on the other hand for his illustrations of fairytales and legends, especially of trolls. For a time, Kittelsen studied painting and watchmaking. When his talent was discovered by Diderich Maria Aall, he attended classes at the School of Art in Christiania (the present Oslo). Because of generous financial support by Aall he was able to continue his study in Munich. However, in 1879 Diderich Aall could no longer manage to support him, so Kittelsen had to earn his money as a draughtsman for German papers and magazines. When back in Norway, he found nature to be a great inspiration. Kittelsen started to write texts to his drawings here. In 1881, Kittelsen was hired to illustrate Norwegian fairy-tales by the Norwegian folklore collector Peter Christen Asbjornsen. His style could be classified between (Neo-)Romantic and naive painting. As a national artist he is highly respected and well known in Norway, but does not receive much international attention, which is the reason that his name is hardly registered in registers of painters. Black metal bands such as Burzum have used nearly all of his pictures as album art, notably illustrations taken from Kittelsen book Svartedauen (The Black Death).