French 1600-1682 Claude Lorrain Galleries In Rome, not until the mid-17th century were landscapes deemed fit for serious painting. Northern Europeans, such as the Germans Elsheimer and Brill, had made such views pre-eminent in some of their paintings (as well as Da Vinci in his private drawings or Baldassarre Peruzzi in his decorative frescoes of vedute); but not until Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino do we see landscape become the focus of a canvas by a major Italian artist. Even with the latter two, as with Lorrain, the stated themes of the paintings were mythic or religious. Landscape as a subject was distinctly unclassical and secular. The former quality was not consonant with Renaissance art, which boasted its rivalry with the work of the ancients. The second quality had less public patronage in Counter-Reformation Rome, which prized subjects worthy of "high painting," typically religious or mythic scenes. Pure landscape, like pure still-life or genre painting, reflected an aesthetic viewpoint regarded as lacking in moral seriousness. Rome, the theological and philosophical center of 17th century Italian art, was not quite ready for such a break with tradition. In this matter of the importance of landscape, Lorrain was prescient. Living in a pre-Romantic era, he did not depict those uninhabited panoramas that were to be esteemed in later centuries, such as with Salvatore Rosa. He painted a pastoral world of fields and valleys not distant from castles and towns. If the ocean horizon is represented, it is from the setting of a busy port. Perhaps to feed the public need for paintings with noble themes, his pictures include demigods, heroes and saints, even though his abundant drawings and sketchbooks prove that he was more interested in scenography. Lorrain was described as kind to his pupils and hard-working; keenly observant, but an unlettered man until his death. The painter Joachim von Sandrart is an authority for Claude's life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Baldinucci, who obtained information from some of Claude's immediate survivors, relates various incidents to a different effect (Notizie dei professoni del disegno). John Constable described Claude Lorrain as "the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw", and declared that in Claude??s landscape "all is lovely ?C all amiable ?C all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart"  Related Paintings of Claude Lorrain :. | The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba | Morning in the Harbor | Seehafen beim Aufgang der Sonne | Vedute von Delphi mit einer Opferprozession | Seaport : The Embarkation of St.Ursula |
Related Artists:
Agnolo Gaddi
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1345-1396 Son of Taddeo Gaddi. Through both his brother Giovanni and his father, Agnolo was heir to the Giottesque tradition and to a successful family enterprise, which he directed with enormous success up to the turn of the 15th century. He is first mentioned as a painter in 1369, when he assisted his brother Giovanni and Giovanni da Milano in decorations for Urban V (reg 1362-70) in the Vatican. Although he probably did not assume full responsibility for the workshop until his brother Giovanni death, he must have begun accepting his own commissions as early as the 1370s. The nature of his early work and whether it included an altarpiece dated 1375 (Parma, G.N., 435), however, remains a matter of debate. Logical or likely though it may be, the notion that this early activity developed out of his brother Giovanni still little-known art is hypothetical. Whereas the works grouped around Giovanni name are all small panels, Agnolo was an artist who, like his father, excelled in wall painting. Indeed, three monumental fresco cycles (see below), in the Castellani Chapel (painted c. 1384) and the choir (painted c. 1388-93) of Santa Croce, Florence, and the chapel of the Sacra Cintola (doc. 1393-5) in Prato Cathedral, constitute the artist most notable surviving works and offer a basis for reconstructing the content and chronology of his oeuvre.
HEMESSEN, Jan Sanders van
Netherlandish Mannerist Painter, ca.1500-1566 was a Flemish Northern Renaissance painter. He was born in Hemiksem, then called Hemessen or Heymissen. Following studies in Italy, in 1524 he settled in Antwerp. A mannerist, his images focused on human failings such as greed and vanity. Like his daughter, Catarina van Hemessen, he also painted portraits. Jan Sanders van Hemessen was a Flemish Northern Renaissance painter. Jan Sanders van Hemessen was from Netherlands. The type of movement he did was mannerism Jan Sanders was born in Hemessen but settled in Antwerp in 1524 after studying in Italy. Hemessen specialized in scenes of human character flaws such as vanity and greed. His pictures are also normally religious and his style helped found the Flemish traditions of genre painting. Hemessen was also a portrait painter, which influenced his daughter to become a Flemish Northern Renaissance painter as well. The Surgeon was painted by Jan Sanders Van Hemessen, in 1555. The oil painting is in a museum called Museo Del Prado, which is in Madrid, Spain. I think the scene painted by Jan Sanders van Hemessen shows a stone cutter at a fair. The surgeon, who is clearly happy that his operations have been successful, painstakingly moves his knife towards the stone, which is already visible. Behind him hang stones which have been successfully cut out of the head of other patients as a sign of his skill.
Lambdin, George Cochran
American Painter, 1830-1896 American painter. He was a son of the portrait and landscape painter James R. Lambdin (1807-89), who had founded a museum in Pittsburgh in 1828 and directed the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1845 to 1864. George Lambdin studied with his father and began exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1848 and at the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1856. In the mid-1850s he travelled, probably to Munich, Paris and Rome. His early works were sentimental genre paintings, the best known of which are Our Sweetest Songs (1857; New York, N. Acad. Des.) and the Dead Wife (The Last Sleep) (exh. 1858; Raleigh, NC Mus. A.). The latter was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 together with one of his depictions of a Civil War subject, Consecration, 1861 (1865; Indianapolis, IN, Mus. A.). In 1868-9 he was at the Tenth Street Studio Building, New York, where he continued to exhibit anecdotal genre, especially childhood subjects, as in The Pruner (1868; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.). He was elected an Academician by the Pennsylvania Academy in 1863 and by the National Academy of Design in 1868. In Germantown, after a short trip abroad in 1870, Lambdin turned to floral studies, especially of roses from his own garden. Some of his floral still-life subjects were conventional table-top arrangements in glass or ceramic vases, but most were paintings of blooming plants and shrubs as they grow in nature or in garden pots, their foliage and blossoms silhouetted against blue sky or a neutral wall, as in Autumn Sunshine