Greek-born Spanish Mannerist Painter, 1541-1614 Considered a representative of late Renaissance Spanish art, El Greco was actually born in Greece, on the island of Crete. After studying in Venice under Titian, El Greco settled in Toledo, Spain in 1577. At the time he was wildly popular, his emotionally religious paintings being just the ticket for the hometown of the Spanish Inquisition. After his death his work was largely ignored until the beginning of the 20th century; now he considered one of the inspired geniuses of Western art. His distinctive style features bold shapes and colors, with elongated and slightly distorted figures. In Toledo El Greco was in constant demand and liked living large: he maintained a private orchestra to accompany his meals.  Related Paintings of El Greco :. | Begrabnis des Grafen von Orgaz | view and plan of toledo | The Adoratin of the Shepherds | Hl. Lukas als Maler | The Saviour |
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IBBETSON, Julius Caesar
English Painter, 1759-1817 English painter, printmaker and writer. The son of a clothier, he was apprenticed to John Fletcher, a ship painter in Hull; in 1775 Ibbetson became a scene-painter there. In 1777 he moved to London, where he worked as a scene-painter and picture restorer. He married about three years later. From 1785 he exhibited landscapes, genre scenes and portraits at the Royal Academy. In 1787-8 Ibbetson was personal draughtsman to Col. Charles Cathcart on the first British Mission to Beijing, a voyage that included visits to Madeira, the Cape of Good Hope and Java. His watercolour False Bay, Cape of Good Hope (London, V&A), made on this journey, shows a picturesque roughness of foliage and rustic staffage adapted from his English landscape style. Cathcart's death forced Ibbetson to return to England (he exhibited an oil painting, untraced, of the Burial of Col. Cathcart in Java at the Royal Academy in 1789); thereafter he lived by painting landscape oils and watercolours, the subjects culled from his frequent tours. He painted occasional portraits throughout his career (e.g. Young Man, 1790; Leeds, Temple Newsam House) and contributed to John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (e.g. Scene from 'The Taming of the Shrew', untraced, see Waterhouse, p. 192). In 1789 he stayed with John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, at Cardiff Castle and visited the Isle of Wight in 1790. In 1792 he toured Wales and the surrounding area with the painter John 'Warwick' Smith and his companion Robert Fulke Greville, resulting in the publication of his book of engravings, A Picturesque Guide (1793). His oil painting of Aberglasyn: The Flash of Lightning (Leeds, C.A.G.) evokes the sublimity of the mountainous Welsh terrain; the drama of the storm over Aberglasyn is conveyed by thick impasto and strong chiaroscuro, a way of handling paint that Ibbetson learnt from copying 17th-century Dutch masters while working for a London dealer named Clarke during the late 1770s and early 1780s.
Jan Vermeer
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1632-1675 Johannes (or Jan) Vermeer is now recognized as one of the great Dutch painters, but while he was alive he could barely make ends meet, and his artistic achievement was almost entirely ignored for 200 years after his death. Little is known about his personal life, other than he died poor and young and left behind a wife and eleven children. Vermeer is admired for his realistic style, his subtle use of color and light and his unusual and inventive brush technique, but fewer than forty of his paintings exist. His most famous works include domestic scenes such as Girl With a Peal Earring (1665) and The Music Lesson (1662-65), and tranquil landscapes such as The Little Street (1657-58) and View of Delft (1659-60). Although his actual birth and death dates are unknown, Vermeer was baptized 31 October 1632 and buried 15 December 1675... During his career he used the names Johannes van der Meer, Johannes Vermeer and Jan Vermeer
Nicolas de Stael
Russian Painter.1914-1955 was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles Nocolas de Stael was born in the family of a Russian Lieutenant General, Baron Vladimir Stael von Holstein, (a member of the Stael von Holstein family, and the last Commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress) and his wife, Olga Sakhanskaya. De Stael's family was forced to emigrate to Poland in 1919 because of the Russian Revolution; Both, his father and stepmother, would die in Poland and the orphaned Nicolas de Stael would be sent with his older sister Marina to Brussels to live with a Russian family (1922). He eventually studied art at the Brussels Acad??mie royale des beaux-arts (1932). In the 1930s, he travelled throughout Europe, lived in Paris (1934) and in Morocco (1936) (where he first met his companion Jeannine Guillou, also a painter and who would appear in some of his paintings from 1941-1942) and Algeria. In 1936 he had his first exhibition of Byzantine style icons and watercolors at the Galerie Dietrich et Cie, Brussels. He joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 and was demobilized in 1941.