(October 5, 1848 - December 23, 1912), was a French Academic painter and military artist noted for his precision and realistic detail. Detaille was a student of Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier. He served in the French Army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and became the official painter of the battles. He is famous for his portraits of soldiers and depictions of military manoeuvres, military uniforms and general military life.  Related Paintings of Edouard Detaille :. | The Orientation, | La Charge | Chorus Of The Fourth Infantry Battalion At Tsarskoe Selo | Cossacks Attacking a squad of the Gardes d'honneur from the Jeune Garde Imperiale | Charge of the 4th Hussars at the battle of Friedland, 14 June 1807 |
Related Artists:
Bartolomeo Spranger
Belgium 1546-1611
Otto Mueller
German Painter, 1874-1930 Otto Mueller was born on October 16, 1874, in Liebau, German Silesia. His mother had been adopted as a young girl, giving rise to the story that he was the son of a gypsy - a story he never denied. He was a cousin to the famous German writers and dramatists Gerhart and Carl Hauptmann (the latter's novel "Einhart der Lächler" is an imaginary portrait of the painter). After four years of apprenticeship with a lithographer, Mueller entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden in 1894. He was dissatisfied with the conservative instructions and left after two years. The next several years he lived close to his influential cousins, and for a short while he went to Munich to study with the famous painter Franz von Stuck. Information about his life and work until 1908 - when he settled in Berlin - is sketchy, especially since the artist destroyed many of his earlier works. In Berlin Mueller met the expressionist sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, whose concept of the human form had a decisive influence on his own perception. When in 1910 his entries to the exhibition of the Berlin Secession were rejected he joined the members of the artist group "Die Brecke" (The Bridge) and exhibited with the New Secession and thus met Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ernst Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. He became their lifelong friend, and, while only slightly influenced by their woodcut techniques, he contributed in return his experience in lithography and especially his techniques of distemper painting (colors bound by glue or size). This technique permits the quick coverage of large areas of the very rough canvas (burlap) which he preferred and adds a subdued luminosity. Since overpainting in distemper is not possible, the artist has to have a clear conception of his work before he begins. The technical devices strengthened the Brecke painters' desire to "flatten" the image on the canvas - following the examples of Paul Gauguin and even Edvard Munch and rejecting the academic preference for an emphasis on three-dimensionality of the subject. In his graphic works Mueller experimented with mixtures of woodcut and lithography, the rubbing of the printer's ink, frequently adding color in the form of watercolor or colored chalk, until he had the technical means of the Breslau Academy available to make true color lithographs. His "Gypsy-Portfolio" (nine color lithographs in a portfolio of 1927), which used as many as five stones, is one of his great achievements as a graphic artist. From 1916 to 1918 he served as a soldier in World War I, an experience which left no impact on his work. Shortly after his return he was appointed professor at the Breslau Academy of Art, where he taught until his death. Mueller's work shows only three motifs: landscapes, gypsies, and primarily nudes in landscapes. The last motif dominated his work. The earthen color of his mostly young, subtle but angular nude girls forms with the subdued and delicate greens of the landscape backgrounds a vision of a lost past. There is a frequently melancholic nostalgia in his works, presenting a harmony between nature and the human form which is not only opposite to the academic approach but also to that of the other Expressionists.
Henry Dawson
a landscape painter, was born in Hull in 1811, but came with his parents to Nottingham when an infant, so that he always regarded the latter as his native town. His parents were poor, and he began life in a Nottingham lace factory. But even while engaged in lace-making he continued to find time for art, and used to paint small pictures, which he sold at first for about half-a-crown each. In 1835 he gave up the lace trade and set up as an artist, his earliest patron being a hairdresser in Nottingham, who possessed a taste for art. In 1844 he removed to Liverpool, where after a time he got into greater repute, and received higher prices for his works. In 1849 he came with his family to London, and settled at Croydon, where some of his best pictures were painted. Among these may be reckoned 'The Wooden Walls of Old England,' exhibited at the British Institution in 1853, 'The Rainbow,' 'The Rainbow at Sea,' 'London Bridge,' and ' London at Sunrise.' With the exception of six lessons from Pyne received in 1838, Henry Dawson was entirely a self-taught artist, and his art shows much originality and careful realism. He studied nature for himself, but he seems in later life to have been moved by Turner's influence to try more brilliant effects than he had before dared. Many of his works indeed are very Turneresque in treatment, though he can scarcely be called an imitator of Turner, for he had a distinct style of his own. Henry Dawson, though painting much, and selling his pictures for high prices in his later life, remained, strange to say, very little known except to artists and connoisseurs until the large and very interesting collection of his works that was made for the Nottingham Exhibition in 1878 brought him wider fame. This exhibition showed him to be a genuine English landscape painter, of no great imaginative or intellectual power, but who delighted in nature, and represented her faithfully to the best of his ability. He died in December 1878, at Chiswick, where he had for some time resided.